Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  “In the beginning there were no words because everything was together, all in one piece.”

  Mary’s in the grass, dibbling with her fingers and a stick: making ant roads, or patterns, or simply a change in the status quo. She does this all the time now—sets about things: noises, actions, laughters only she can understand. I am beginning to find my own daughter mysterious.

  “There was no Africa, no America, no Scotland: there was only one great big island with everything in. All very cosy. It was wonderful. Then things broke apart.”

  She possibly nods, but this may not be for me. Lying on her stomach, her weight leant on her elbows, back arched from the hips, she kicks up her feet and wriggles her unencumbered toes which are—of course—miraculously filthy.There is a rhythm to her: a kind of undulating confidence which moves her, even when she sleeps. And I can’t help thinking this means that at—God willing—extremely distant dates I’ll have to make whole shoals of hopeless suitors appreciate how lucky they’ve been to find her. Or else I’ll break their arms and chase them—I am, I’d say, at present undecided.

  “You listening? Lamb?”

  “Mm.”

  “Fibs.”

  “Mm.”The shimmer of a giggle trembles her length.

  “On this island . . . before it split . . .” I notice a familiar tone in my voice: a tiny, parental sliver of despair. “Well, there weren’t any people yet, but there were creatures who were going to be people—hairy, scaly, skinny types of creatures—all together and all touching—they all understood each other, how they were and what they meant. It was lovely. Come here.”

  She’s shaking her head to make me persuade her.

  “Come here.” The usual solar plexus crush of wanting to hold her, of wanting to squeeze away something quite clearly approaching jealousy.

  Leave that alone now and come and please your poor old dad. Come on.

  “Come here.”

  Her feet are ticking past each other in the happy air—her whole body is, meanwhile, preoccupied with glad badness. She loves ignoring me, teasing the edge of permissibility.

  “If you don’t come here quickly the enormous, incredibly slimy, dribbly, hooky-toed crocodile in the bushes will snaffle out and get you for his tea.”

  Mary squeals in the way that only a person quite unacquainted with proper horror can: a person of fewer than four years but more than three. She scrambles above the reach of carnivorous reptiles and on to my lap. I am, meanwhile, aware of every actual risk she runs across: the dangers of tripping and piercing her skull on an unlikely stone; of stepping on insects that bite or sting and receiving a dose of venom I could never have guessed would provoke a fatal allergy; or of trapping her toes and fingers in the multiplicity of nipping joints my deckchair offers and then succumbing to poisoned blood some sad time later.

  Both our imaginations palpitate around us, wild with inaccuracies, while we work rather hard to discover that we are safe, that she is safe. She rummages around me adhesively, cooing, lightly moist with sun and grass, and fixes to my torso in a quickly breathing hug. She’ll hear me now.

  “Hello, you.”

  “Hello, you.” Businesslike voice she has sometimes, almost stern.

  “Were you listening to me at all?” I, naturally, can’t be stern back. I always fail to find myself convincing.

  “Yes.A bit. Not really.Was it intreresting?”

  “It was going to be useful ...”

  “Oh.” She is already well aware that intreresting is seldom useful and vice versa.

  “But it was good, too. I was saying—because we’re all par ted . . . the words . . . I mean, now we’re separate, we need something to speak and something to write and read ... and it’s ...”

  “Oh, that...” My daughter, the possessor of all knowledge.“We’ve already got that.”

  “Well, I know.” I love touching her hair. People in shops hover near her and stop to pat her head and I understand exactly why: they are not necessarily perverts, they have simply guessed, correctly, that she feels remarkable. “I do know we’ve already got that, yes, but we have to take care of it, we have to remember why we’ve ... it’s ... important.”When I smell her skin, the whole progress and defence of Enlightenment seem quite superfluous. I no onger believe or entirely remember what I’m saying—so why should she? One last sentence and then I’ll surrender, “It was called Pangaea.”

  “That’s nice. What was?”

  “The island with everything in it. Pangaea—the land of all lands.”

  She doesn’t try saying this out loud but is, I can tell, tasting it in her head ike chocolate. In a day or two, it will be out again: hers. She does adore her vocabulary: having it properly fed. Her personal dictionary grows daily, almost visibly, and is at the moment attractively gangling like a healthy calf.

  Maura thinks I am trying to engineer an infant prodigy—this in the midst of my many other sins. She thinks I am conducting experiments with my daughter, a personality graft from my overstuffed head to her milkily empty one. But really, on most days, I simply hope my daughter will be someone I can talk to, for heaven’s sake. I also like to think that she may wish to talk to me. Unlike my wife.

  And I don’t force her, not Mary, I don’t ever push. Even at this age, she does what she does, not what I want her to. She reads because she likes it, she learns—eccentrically, it must be said—because learning is one of her things, as much as disliking gravy, or running away from the toilet flush at night, are her things.

  I’m saying we both happen to like reading and the feel, the weight, the promises of books. I’m saying our tastes—here and there—do correspond. ’m saying I love this, although it has nothing whatever to do with me. I’m sayng I wish that Maura understood the way we are. But I can’t force her, either—obviously.

  “I brought this.” Mary fishes out a plastic something from the pocket of her shorts. I see it, briefly, being held towards me: a badly moulded monster/animal/troll in alarming pink. It will have both a name and a history, neither of which I know. I believe this is the first time that we’ve met. She waves the thing for me slowly—as if seeing it from other angles will help me to find it as lovely as she does.“Look.”

  I turn fractionally. Mary lifts the figure to my face and I feel an odd, electric pressure at my lip when a point of plastic catches it. I am mildly confused by this sensation while, in my daughter’s eyes, I watch a new emotion opening. A small heat tickles from my mouth down to my chin.

  I have seen Mary like this before. I have.This is not remotely new: the silence, the look of amazement, of horrified wonder, and then the pause, the blush. She’s going to cry. She’s been hurt before, shocked before—now and then—and I have seen her, quite appropriately, crying as a result and I have felt my usual coronary wince. But this today, this here, this right here is my daughter, weeping only because she’s looked at me. She is still staring at me, petrified. Braced against my arms and chest, she’s whimpering, she’s slipping towards a more solid, relentless noise, and she is unpicking me, unbalancing how I think. I feel sick.

  “Lamb, Lamb? What’s the—?” She rocks between trying to touch me and attempting to slip down, away. Her toy is tight in the heart of one fist. “No, Lamb. Sssh.What? What? What have I done?”

  I rub my face, reach for her and, for a swooping moment, see blood.

  Not hers. Not hers. Not hers, it can’t be, that would make no sense.

  In a pinkish trace on her forehead, where I’ve brushed her, I can see what has to be my blood. I am bleeding. My understanding flutters, snatches hold. When the model caught my lip, it pricked me, broke the skin. I can feel now, I am definitely bleeding, it’s all right.

  When I bleed, she cries.

  She’s howling now and I’m trying to hug her and lick at my mouth so it doesn’t look frightening. I am trying to love her as clearly as I currently need to do.

  When I bleed, she cries.

  Maura will hear this, she will come out and see
and then I’ll be the villain again, the purloiner of other lives again, and dinner will be silent again and bed will be don’t you dare again—as if I would—but I don’t care, because I am now crying myself and also smiling and kissing and smiling again and holding her in: my daughter, mine.

  When I bleed, she cries.

  Please, God, nevertake me from this.

  “What is it?” Mary was watching a butterfly, a neat fold of fawn and silver, thin and still as paper in the leafy heat. She was trying to think of a good way to describe it, how to make the tilt of its tiny sail come in handy for something, narratively speaking.

  Who the hell writes adult prose about butterflies, though? Not that I couldn’t be the first.

  Or they could just be in a background . . .

  I think that Nathan wouldn’t like them. I think he’d be looking for something else—more human. More animal, possibly. Less flimsy. Not that I’d be writing to please him. I want to please me. But even so—butterflies—not promising.

  “What is it—that one? Joe?”

  Joe stabbed his hoe between the hollyhock spikes and glanced back. In his shirtsleeves and moleskins, white hair blazing against an almost mahogany skin, he looked startlingly horticultural, slightly too good to be true. “What’s . . . ?” He also seemed luminously content. “Oh, that’s a grayling. We get a few of them. I let the nettles grow up round the compost heap to encourage the prettier ones—not that there are ugly butterflies, in my opinion.” He waggled his fingers towards a pair of ornate creatures, jigging nervously through the air above the carnations.

  “Red admirals.”

  “You’re as bad as Nathan.” He blinked away briefly, sighted down his hoe shaft to his dark and lively earth, thinking, but perhaps not of butterflies. “No, those are painted ladies. Red admirals are redder, less fussy pattern, more chocolatey kind of brown. You’ll know one when you see one.”

  Oh well.

  Mary was beginning to suppose she’d been wrong about Joe. He was undoubtedly peculiar, but what was unsettling about him wasn’t madness, it was only his weird, continual goodness—the intensity and consistency of his personal atmosphere.

  Always too good to be true.

  If she reminded herself that this was only unusual and not harmful, then she could enjoy his company. He was gentle to be with and unworried by long silences.

  Or mistakes.

  In fact, with Joe, being wrong could be oddly pleasant—or at least as satisfying as being right. Mistakes and inaccuracies seemed to give him a kind of access to her thinking. She could almost feel him, tinkering under her scalp, setting things right—not as he might prefer them, but unnervingly close to the way that she might have chosen them to be, if she’d thought about it. Of course she rarely did think about it—but Joe, he was always thinking, always there.

  “Anyway, knowing the name isn’t knowing the thing. Is it?” He stroked at the mad tower of blossom next to him, it wagged in reply. Mary had never been able to take hollyhocks seriously: the crumpled tissue flowers, the overbearing height: they put her in mind of floral Brussels sprouts.

  “Red admiral or Vanessa atalanta—which tells you more?” He grinned at her, almost teasing, waiting to see.

  And she decided she might as well take her cue—make Bryn proud of her classical training. “Atalanta was the huntress, the woman who ran everywhere. No man could beat her in a race and if they couldn’t beat her, they couldn’t marry her.” She could feel Joe listening, his concentration a small disturbance round her forehead, like the movement of a moth. “Hippomenes tricked her. He set down golden apples in her way and she stopped to pick them up and lost the race. So he made her his wife.”

  Joe glistened with satisfaction. “And, knowing the woman, perhaps we guess that the butterfly’s a racer, barely rests. Or perhaps we remember that determined women can be vulnerable, too. Or that no one can run for ever. Unless, of course, they’re young.” He grinned through her, nudging out an aspiration or two, tweaking at a need. “You’re writing, Mary Lamb?”

  “I’m starting.”

  “Well, that’s the thing to do.” He set down his hoe and the garden relaxed, shivered back to its tight, lush perfection, defended from salt and gales by careful walls draped in honeysuckle, clematis, climbing roses, trained plums. Joe loved his garden and—generously, apprehensively—it loved him back. “Well now. Would you like me to prove how mad I am?”

  He idled away a moment in brushing nothing at all from the knees of his trousers and then went to sit on his bench. Crossing his legs at the ankle, he winked.

  He always does that, catches at what you didn’t intend he should know you’d been thinking. Like Mr. Kingston at school—going on and on about the educated guess.

  “I never thought you were mad. Not really.” Joe coughed politely, giving her time to prepare a proper admission of guilt.

  Oh, all right, then.

  “How did you know?”

  “I guessed.” He came very close to a smirk. “And, to be honest, most people think I’m mad, these days. Do join me.” He patted the bench and she couldn’t help but stroll towards him, rose scent coiling apart and then closing round her. “So.” His eyes were Bunsen burner blue. “We’re in my oasis, you know that?”

  “I suppose . . .”

  “I am terribly fond of it here—all this green and fertility and . . . gloss— but I do enjoy imagining that over the wall there’s a desert, that I can walk to the front of the house and feel sand slipping underfoot, furnacy dust on my skin and biting light—that kind of thing. Desert places, they tease— they tell you terribly firmly that you have no business being there and meanwhile they freely show you paradise annealed and hungry for trespassers. They are completely, complacently welcoming, like death. Ever been?”

  He knows I haven’t.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “But you may yet. My first time was in the Sinai when I was younger than your Nathan.”

  He’s not mine.

  “In fact, I was just thirty—newly turned another decade and wasn’t liking it a bit. Which is why I’d gone, as biblically as I could manage, out of Egypt, towards Jordan, which took a while and was, I suppose, very, very faintly hazardous. There were three of us initially, in a jeep: all linguists, all sadly keen to trot out our Arabic. We drove down through mountains apparently formed from boiling milk, congealed blood and flows and curves of tawny rock that were unmistakably corporal, almost erotic, hypnotising. I’m not a good driver at the best of times and, on that journey, my concentration wandered considerably.”

  Mary’s mind struggled away from contemplating Joseph Christopher and the erotic in the same breath. The conjunction bordered on the blasphemous.

  “And, of course, we had to cross a desert, my first. I even got us moderately lost in it because I wanted us to stay there just a little longer than we should. Then my friends and I went our ways—they travelled on to Amman, they had some Nabatean tablets to translate.

  “They had their plan and I had mine.”

  Joe stopped, leant his head back to catch the sun and closed his eyes. He sighed into a smile while Mary listened to a boat engine moving somewhere which sounded close, but could have been beyond the island’s sight. On days like this noises could travel and twist surprisingly. She examined Joe, not sure if he’d finished, or only paused. He twitched his nose, began again, eyes remaining shut.

  “Yes, I had a plan. This always makes Nathan laugh, by the way. He says he can’t imagine my ever contemplating something so devious. But I did.” He reached and stroked Mary’s hand, made her jump, just a touch. “It was dark when I got to the mountain. I’d taken out most of my clothes from my pack and put them on, but I was still freezing. The stars had that almost painful blue edge they only get in high, chill air and the moon was bright enough to light whole turns of the path. I laughed for a while, on and off—nerves—and I was finding the mountain silhouettes around me ridiculous—they were straight out of the Children
’s Illustrated Bible. But, naturally, they preceded anyone’s Bible, anyone’s account of local incidents. They were the facts—massive, solemnly crested like lizards and distinctly unforgiving.” He brought his head forward again, still voluntarily blinded. “I climbed much faster than was prudent—but I just couldn’t stop myself. I trotted and gasped past camels, skeins of pilgrims, solitaries like myself, what seemed to be a terribly old woman supporting herself with a gentleman’s black umbrella.

  “Mount Sinai, I was on Mount Sinai, I’d begun the first step. After an hour’s walking the ascent took off up a vicious slope chicaning away across a sheer scree that ended with a drop on to rocks. It was the perfect place to take a tumble, so I did.”

  “What?”

  Joe laughed and sent a blackbird ringing out of the fuchsias in alarm. “I took a dive. A calculated risk. If I didn’t break my neck, I might get what I wanted and I did want what I wanted very much. You’ll understand that.” He gave her a small grin—one writer to another.

  “Well . . .”

  “Sssh. You gave up a great deal to come here.” He squinted at her for an instant with one bright eye, then muffled himself away again. “And you imagine you have a great desire to write . . .”

  “Yes.” Mary wished her affirmation hadn’t sounded quite so tentative, but—allowed their head—her hopes in this area seemed at least as confusing and embarrassing as they were intense.

  “And, with respect, I will say that you don’t know the half of it. You are willing and—if you think about it—volunteering yourself to take charge of the medium that governs and lies, that defines and dreams and prays, that witnesses truth and condemns to death. And, naturally, such a large thing will take charge of you. It will give you appetites you’ve never known.” His voice thinned, hardened, made her glance at him, his face showing a tiny jerk of something like discomfort, before he smoothed himself calm again. “Which is only indirectly a part of this story. As I say, I decided where I’d take my fall, leapt off into the necessary tumble, and managed things rather better than I’d hoped—broken arm, dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs and one magnificent dent in the skull. I only recall the first bounce or two and watching the light from my torch spin down in a blade ahead of me and then snuff out.