You

by Phil Whitaker

  The things as parents we do.

  That favourite haunt, our place for Daddo car-spotting, the low brickwork bounding the garden of number 164. We would sit there for ages, you, me, and the Daddos. Our watching-the-world-go-by wall.

  I can’t delay another moment. I snick through the door behind an entering customer, slam back into myself. Suddenly I’m gathering my paper, abandoning my coffee, grabbing my luggage, and leaving the warm café room.

  Out on the platform I realise you’ve left me, but that feels right, it feels good. I board my connection and find the next seat in which I will draw still closer to you.

  Station Approach

  A little way outside Appleford, we cross the Thames. It’s just a stripling compared with what it will be by the time it reaches London, when it will have drained whole swathes of southern England on its way to the estuaries and the sea. The waters here appear pastoral, pre-industrial; supportive of life. I think: what contamination they will gather on their journey, what effluent and waste and agricultural pollution will sully them, what depletion of the oxygen that allows things to breathe. Oh, there are efforts aplenty further downstream: decontamination, biodegradation, tighter regulation. The fanfare that greeted the re-establishment of living fish. But at what cost? What cost to clean up the mess that should never have been allowed to be.

  The driver sounds his horn, a drawn-out two-tone blast. We shoot straight through Culham; there’s no one on the platform to have heeded the warning. Culham. Where Peter Lyle lived. Me, a BA in Fine Art to my name, no desire to spend my days flogging other people’s stuff in a gallery, wondering how to make enough to live on while I established myself in my own right. Yeah, sure. All the dreams I had. The shining shimmering copper that would eventually tarnish and dull, and become tainted by verdigris.

  Peter, my supervisor. The hours in his studio learning to apply my art to my new vocation.

  We halt at the next station, Radley, scene of summer fireworks concerts, where we’d go with blankets and picnic and booze-soaked trifle. Mummy and me. In later years, before moving south-west, we’d take you, then you and your sister, along. Do you have any memory? You loved the whole eating outdoors thing, the chance to gorge on crisps and ­mini-sausages and squares of fudge brownie. You didn’t care for the music, neither of you did – boringly classical. And you hated the pounding percussions of the exploding fireworks. The suddenness scared three- or four-year-old you. I would cover your ears with my palms. Reduce the noise to a tolerable level. Allow you to enjoy the spectacular blooms of colour in the darkening August sky in relative peace.

  There’s a sign on the Radley platform, advertising the village shop, all manner of goods and services to be had there, staffed, apparently, by friendly volunteers. A community enterprise. Not for profit. Fairly traded wherever practicable. All the things we know we want, and fail to support when tempted by the cheapness and convenience of mass market home delivery.

  The nearer I get to Oxford, the more places are laced with memory. It wouldn’t have taken a genius. It rattles me; I begin to doubt the wisdom of this enterprise. I think of you, somewhere in that city, knowing I am on my way. What are you thinking? What do you think, every time you get a message like that from me? Does it generate anxiety that, no matter how careful you are, I might contrive to bump into you? Do you change your plans, cancel going out, bunk off lectures, stay in your room in college or in a rented house – wherever it is you live nowadays – minimising the chance of an accidental encounter? Do you fear I may have discovered your address, wheedled it off the internet somehow, or tapped your sister for news?

  If Prof’s to be believed, and her myriad YouTube testifiers, that’s only half your story. Internal conflict. Cognitive dissonance. Deep within you, in your sills and dykes and magma chambers, molten lava shifts and seethes. The pressure of inexpressible love. The craving for acceptance from one half of who you are. A memory: post-separation, back when you were faltering, during your time of wavering, before I fully lost you. You outside in the garden at Mummy’s, me turning up unexpectedly, dropping something off for your sister. How you came for a hug. We hadn’t seen each other in two weeks. We held each other for a moment, and it must have felt so good. Something in you gave: you called a delighted ‘Da-ddy!’, did a little jump up, and latched your legs around my waist, like a koala. Twelve, thirteen. On the cusp. Just like when you were younger, and you would leap up like that, hang on tight with your thighs, and let yourself fall backwards, dangling so your long blonde hair spooled on the ground. Looking at the world upside down. I always had hold of you. You never came to grief.

  That’s what I have clung to these seven years, every bit as tightly. That somewhere beneath the unbroken silence, the unacknowledgement, the cold rejection, there remains that other girl, the one allowed to show her love, the one with the need to be loved by her daddy.

  An earthquake comes, buildings collapse, burying inhabitants under mountains of rubble, immovable concrete, lung-choking plaster dust. For days and weeks the rescue workers keep at it, digging and excavating, their hands and clothes filthy, their fingers scuffed and grazed, pausing and hushing every now and then to listen for the faintest sound, never losing hope for that moment when they might pull a survivor from some miraculous air pocket. We rejoice in any life saved – what great good news stories – but none more so than when the resurrection is of a child.

  Have pennies finally started to drop? Is your apprehension giving way, little by little, to curiosity? Has the alt.narrative of your sister’s life at last begun to speak? I don’t know if I dare, but I allow myself the thought that even now you may be contemplating to rendezvous with me.

  ❦

  I skim through my Guardian, the train rattling on towards Oxford and you. I hardly ever read a paper nowadays; the news is invariably grim. In among the politics and foreign affairs, items leap out at me. An academic has killed herself by jumping off a balcony, in despair after her ex abducted their daughter abroad. #deadmum. A fourteen-year-old cancer victim has been cryogenically frozen – in its excitement with the ghoulish idea of her far-future resumed life, the paper hardly bothers to comment on the more disturbing fact that her dad hadn’t been able to see her for years. The mum barred him from visiting even as she was dying. He was refused permission to view her body after death. #deadkid. This stuff is everywhere. You don’t see it till you’re aware of it. Once you’re in the clan, it comes at you from all sides.

  I hardly drank any coffee, but all the same. I leave my bags on my seat and sway along the aisle. At the end of the carriage, the door whooshes open like it’s startled to see me. I find red jacket man there, down on his hands and knees outside the WC, sweeping random debris from the lino floor with a piece of tissue.

  I step round him and shut myself inside. Relieve myself. I feel indescribably weary. I lower the loo seat, and rest myself down.

  I sit back, and close my eyes.

  The rush of air outside the slid-open window.

  I’m gone, like untethered possessions sucked through a sudden breach in an aircraft cabin.

  Out in the blue again, but something is wrong. I feel different. My progress is sluggish, I don’t seem able to pick up speed. I lumber aloft like a laden Hercules.

  I know where I have to go, and the thought of it daunts me. Drains me. I half hope for there to be no sign of you. That is paradoxical, I know it is, but you are not the only one to be riven by that with which we have to contend. I’m barely at tree-top level, no faster than a microlite, my train pulling away from me somewhere beneath.

  Suddenly I’m set spinning, a vortex catching me and twirling me like a drill bit along its axis. You. Vigorous, energyful, buzzing around like a late summer wasp furious at the dying of the heat. My mood has been reticent, adrift of my moorings, and for a few moments I feel utterly incapable of responding to your presence, the power of your emotions. But then I think
of Prof’s YouTubers, how anger, pure molten anger, can be the first sign that an eruption is about to take place.

  Somehow, I shake off my torpor and set off after you, already miles ahead. And that old sense of duty soon fuels me, and builds my momentum. This I have started and, for your sake, this I must complete. Ahead, you are flickering, like silk in a wind tunnel, and I fix my gaze on you and will myself more speed. Soon I am powering, approaching your slipstream, and soon I have caught you, keeping pace at your wing.

  You are single-minded. Determined. You always have been. You always were capable of the most persuasive writing. Over the years: Publisher trifolds, rolled off the inkjet, arguing the case for a wolf-dog as a pet, or for keeping a captive leopard. Never mind the utter impracticality. The outlandishness of the idea. You were drawn to those fierce creatures. You would brook no argument as to their impossibility.

  I learned that the thing to do was to go along with it. Set you to researching the implications, the regulations, the experiences of those who had done such things, till in the end you could see for yourself how, for a little girl, it simply couldn’t be.

  We’re here again. Our journey seems to have passed in a few blinks. The North Yorks farmhouse that was Mummy’s childhood home, though some years earlier than when we were here before. I hang, motionless, looking down on it, the rain-darkened tiles of its roof. Postponing the moment, now that the moment is here. Fields all around are dotted with livestock. The farm is small in its landscape, dwarfed by the moors rising from the folds in the earth near Cropton and Spaunton to the north.

  I tuck into myself and drop like a stone. You follow suit. We tumble like sagebrush across the deserted yard – Gloria has the car in nearby Pickering, where her older daughter, your child-aunty, needs fitting out with new uniform for school in a month’s time. The bitter symmetry.

  In through an open window, the pair of us dusting ourselves down inside the parlour. The polished surfaces, pristine antimacassars, crystal decanters, silver-framed photos. This is a dress room, a space kept immaculate. Woe betide the child who makes the slightest mess in here.

  From somewhere else in the house, a piano. The haunting notes pierce me, cause my heart to grow faint. A point-of-no-return. I have an overwhelming urge to leave. So many conflicting considerations: this is something no parent would want to expose their child to, and it is not even mine to show. But against all that, all those ethical conundrums, it is surely something you will have to know.

  Decided, resolved, I float noiselessly towards the parlour door, you like my shadow. We follow the music, slipping silently through the downstairs hall to another reception towards the rear. And pause in the doorway. There, her back towards us, is your ten-year-old child-mother, seated on an upholstered stool at the Challen baby grand. Her hands move back and forth, fingers depressing patterns of keys. It’s beautiful, a Beethoven piece: Moonlight Sonata, first movement, familiar to every grade 5 pianist there has ever been. You are enchanted. You never knew Mummy could play. And play so wonderfully as well.

  You listen for a while, the dreamy arpeggios in the right hand – dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah – the counterpoint descent of the bass in the left. Your child-mother’s back, clothed in paisley print blouse, swaying sinuously – she’s really immersed in it; she’s mastering the piece. You feel such tenderness for her; at the same time, puzzlement – faint hurt, even – that there was never any music from her as you were growing up. Not even when you, too, were learning to play. That was always down to me, sitting with you, your sister, at that Yamaha keyboard, dredging up my rusty musical memories.

  A profound chill passes right through you. Rapt in the music, we didn’t hear him approach. Ted came from behind and walked straight through us, filling the threshold as we are. He stands in front of us. There’s a streak of engine oil at the nape of his neck, where he’s been fending off midges. He’s had a recent haircut. Blue overalls. We can see his breathing.

  He, too, is listening to his younger daughter play. The daughter who loves him so demonstrably at the end of each farming day. He stays there an age. Is she aware of him, your child-mother? Or has she, like us, failed to hear?

  Misgiving rises like a well stream. I want us to turn round, back out the parlour window, up and away into air that is clean. But despite my qualms, I glide, noiseless as a panning camera, over towards the antique dresser, and perch on the cast iron columns of the radiator beside. The metal is cold; this is summer. You have come over with me. We look on, an oblique view, as Ted approaches his daughter, that fluid music from the baby grand an unbearable soundtrack to the scene.

  Dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah.

  He halts behind her. Places farm-calloused hands on her shoulders.

  There’s a pause in the sonata. Just a few missed beats. Your child-mother looks up at him and smiles from beneath her blonde curls. Her daddy’s come to watch her. He grins back, his gapped teeth. Moonlight resumes, repeating its notes, the mournful minors resolving sometimes into hopeful majors, the purity of the high tone melody riding on the darkening swell beneath.

  No. Enough. My faint heart falters, finally and fatally. I twist, turn, spinning like a cyclone, dragging you into my furious whirlwind, a storm-tossed leaf. Like a sudden squall we’re out down the hall, hurtling pell-mell through that immaculate parlour, funnelling through the window and once more we are free. As we rise steadily heavenwards, I can feel your shock, your disbelief. What the hell am I playing at? Bringing you here, then fleeing the scene. What trust has been growing has been dashed to smithereens.

  We’re thundering south, your vapour trail dark as a storm cloud. There’s a fearsome roar, such is our speed. You are walled-off, I can’t reach you; I have to content myself with keeping alongside. You are unbridled confusion – all I can do is send thoughts across the divide: I’m sorry, please try to understand. They feel puny, ineffectual – shrivelling and vaporising as soon as they near your white-hot heat. Bravely, if not fearlessly, you have come on this journey with me, and now I have let you down. Those ethical conundrums: some stories are not mine to show. And after everything I have lived and learned, I am not even sure what kind of truth we might have seen.

  A Chinook scythes low across the sky below us. The noise of its twin rotors startles a small herd of horses, which scatter at a canter. Their movements seem strangely slow, ponderous even, like loping giraffes, from this altitude. We streak along. How you loved everything equestrian as you grew. You could name every part of a horse, and all the items of tack, all by the age of three.

  Your speed gradually slows; your vapour trail now a woodsmoke grey. As Oxford heaves into sight, nestled in its charming Thames Valley, you peel away, back to your room, your college, I cannot say. Everything has unraveled, even before it has been weaved. My soul feels leaden; it is all I can do to remain airborne. Perhaps this story I will never be able to tell. Perhaps I just have to let you go.

  ❦

  I’m back in myself. My train is stationary. Outside the window I hear voices, doors slamming, tannoyed announcements. Oxford.

  I daren’t flush, not in a station. I slide back the latch and emerge into the gangway. There is no one to question my sudden reappearance; the carriage has long since disgorged its occupants. Even red jacket man has gone – leaving a ­swept-tidy floor behind him. I wonder at his destination, what’s drawn him on his journey.

  I get back to my seat in the nick of time, and set about allaying the fears of the train manager, who is spooked by my abandoned bags. Forgotten items, or bombs about to explode. He is cross that I’ve caused him anxiety. He makes a great show of demanding my ticket before he will allow me to leave.

  Them

  I’m tracking the clay, keeping my sights just ahead of its path. When I’ve had a good couple of seconds anticipating its trajectory, I pull the trigger. The noise is no more than the crack of a stick being snapped – I’m always amazed at the ear defe
nders. How they sanitise the explosive violence of the detonation. The stock kicks hard against my shoulder. With the eye of faith, I can make out the shot spreading in its pattern, a widening shoal of the faintest grey. It sails past just behind the clay.

  The natural instinct, when you come to fire, is to stop.

  The trick is to keep the gun moving.

  I swivel on my heels, tracking ahead again. Squeeze the trigger a second time, overriding instinct this time, keeping things fluid. Another crack. Another kick. This time the pattern clips the back of the clay, sending a few fragments splintering.

  I lower the shotgun, break it, and eject the spent cartridges together with wisps of smoke.

  Blaze’s turn. He squares his feet on the firing line and raises his weapon in readiness. The worked walls of the old stone quarry sweep around us like an amphitheatre. Over time, weathering and vegetation have softened what will once have been stark rock faces, jagged and fractured and scarred. It’s the perfect venue for shooting – no chance that misdirected shot will do anything other than slam against solid stone. I wonder about those Mendip miners of yesteryear, laboriously breaking the limestone and hauling it off to build dwellings and barns and drystone walls: could they have anticipated the use their workings would be put to at this far future time?

  Off to our left, Lewis, owner of the gun club, fires the trap once more, slinging another pigeon up into the sky. It arcs purposefully across in front of us. Blaze is too hasty. Crack, crack. Both barrels in rapid succession. The clay flies on, unperturbed.