Us

by Nicholls, David

  Despite my resolutions, we had argued the night before, in this instance about the acoustic guitar that Albie insisted on dragging across Europe – an absurd and impractical affectation, I thought – and there was the usual stomping up the stairs, Connie’s familiar sigh, her famous slow head-shake.

  ‘I’m worried he’s going to busk,’ I said.

  ‘So let him busk! There are worse things a seventeen-year-old can do.’

  ‘I’m worried that he’s going to do those, too.’

  But it seemed the guitar was as essential as his passport. Needless to say it was I who bundled the case through the turnstiles at the Eurostar terminal, lugged it through security, crammed it into inadequate luggage space on the train as we took our seats where I began swabbing with napkins at the hot coffee now dripping from my wrist. There’s a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in before you’ve even cleared security; grime on your collar and cuffs, coffee breath, perspiration running down your back, the luggage too heavy, the distances too far, muddled currency in your pocket, the conversation self-conscious and abrupt, no stillness, no peace.

  ‘So – goodbye England!’ I said to fill the gap. ‘See you in four weeks!’

  ‘We’ve not left yet,’ said Albie, his first words to me for twelve hours, then produced his Nikon and started taking close-up photographs of the bottom of his shoe.

  26. albert samuel petersen

  Albie is dark, like his mother; his hair black, tangled and long, dangling into his eyes and scratching at the corneas so that I constantly want to lean across to brush it out of the way. Eyes large and brown and wet – ‘soulful’ is a word that gets bandied about – the dark skin around them the colour of a bruise. He has a long nose, a full, dark mouth and is, by all accounts, an attractive young man. One of Connie’s female friends said that he looked like a murderous ruffian in a Caravaggio, a comparison that meant nothing to me until I looked it up. But clearly there is a demand out there for late-Renaissance muggers with scrappy facial hair and consumption, because girls seem drawn to him, feel they can ‘really talk’ to him, and I’ve long since given up keeping track of the Rinas and Ninas and Sophies and Sitas for whom surliness, irresponsibility and poor personal hygiene are such irresistible traits.

  But he is cool, they say, he is deep; people are drawn to him and in this respect, as in all others, he is his mother’s son. He is ‘not a natural academic’, according to his college tutor, ‘but he has wonderful emotional intelligence’, a phrase that made my teeth snap together. Emotional intelligence, the perfect oxymoron! ‘How do they test emotional intelligence? What qualification does that lead to?’ I asked Connie as we drove home. ‘Perhaps there’s a multiple-choice element. They put you in a room with six people and you have to work out who to hug.’

  ‘It means he has empathy,’ she replied dryly. ‘It means he has some awareness of and interest in other people’s feelings.’

  And so it seems the only thing that Albie has taken from my side of the family is my father’s skinny height, yet he seems embarrassed and resentful even of this, with his round shoulders and stooped, loping walk, arms dangling, as if unable to manage the weight of his hands. Oh, and smoking, he’s taken that from my father, too. In consideration of my views on the subject, he smokes in secret, though it’s not a secret that he holds precious, given the number of lighters and Rizla packets he leaves lying around, given the smell of it on his clothing and the burn marks on the window ledge of his filthy bedroom. ‘How did they get there, Albie?’ I said. ‘The swallows? Smoking swallows, with their Duty Free?’ at which point he laughed and kicked the door closed. Oh, and as well as the emphysema, cancer and heart disease that he is presumably nurturing in that narrow chest, he suffers from a malaise that requires at least twelve hours of sleep, and yet is singularly incapable of commencing these twelve hours before two a.m.

  What else? He is fond of T-shirts with absurdly low-cut v-necks so that his sternum is constantly on display, and he has a habit of withdrawing his arms through the sleeves and jamming his hands into his armpits. He refuses to wear a coat, an absurd affectation, as if coats were somehow ‘square’ or un-cool, as if there were something ‘hip’ about hypothermia. What is he rebelling against? Warmth? Comfort? ‘Let it go’, says Connie, as he strides out into some gale with his rib-cage showing, ‘it won’t kill him’ – but it might, and if it doesn’t then the sheer frustration of it all will kill me. Take, for example, the state of his bedroom, a room so filthy that it is effectively a no-go zone, an immense Petri dish of furry toast crusts and lager tins and unthinkable socks that will one day have to be sealed off in concrete like Chernobyl, and this is not just laziness on his part – no, real effort has gone into a situation designed to cause the maximum upset. To me! Not to his mother, but to me, to me, so that it is no longer simply a bedroom, it is a massive act of spite.

  And he’s a mumbler, a swallower of words. Despite spending the last six years in a perfectly nice part of Berkshire, he speaks in a bored cockney drawl because God forbid anyone should think his father has done well or worked hard, God forbid anyone should think that he’s comfortable and cared for and loved, loved equally by both of his parents even if he only seems to desire and require the attentions of one.

  In short, my son makes me feel like his step-father.

  I have had some experience of unrequited love in the past and that was no picnic, I can tell you. But the unrequited love of one’s only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn.

  27. helmut newton

  But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.

  ‘I hope you’re going to take lots of pictures of the Eiffel Tower, Egg,’ I said, in an affectionate, teasing tone. ‘Me and your mother standing in front with our thumbs up?’ We demonstrated. ‘Or – another tip – I can put my hand out flat like this, so it looks like I’m holding it …’

  ‘That’s not photography, that’s holiday snaps.’ It seemed the tendency to wilfully misinterpret jokes was contagious. Connie winked at me and squeezed my knee beneath the table.

  My son was soon to study photography on a three-year course which we were financing and although my wife, who knew about these things, insisted that he had talent, an ‘eye’, the fact of it filled me with an anxiety that I fought daily to suppress. At one point he had been intending to study theatre – theatre! – and at least I had managed to nip that in the bud, but now it was photography, the latest of a long series of temporary passions – ‘street art’, skateboarding, DJ-ing, drumming – the abandoned detritus of which cluttered cellar, attic and garage, alongside the optimistic chemistry set that I had bought and he had tossed aside, the hopeful microscope that had never been unpacked, the dusty box that offered an opportunity to ‘Grow Your Own Crystals!’

  But there was no denying his enthusiasm. Albie with a camera was something to see, crouching and contorting his long body into a question mark as if playing the role of ‘photographer’. Sometimes he fired off frames at arm’s length, in what I believe is called ‘gangster style’, sometimes on tiptoe, back arched like a toreador. Initially I made the mistake of standing and grinning when the camera was produced, but soon realised that he wouldn’t actually press the shutter until I’d stepped out of the frame. In fact, in all the thousands of shots that he had taken, many of them loving portraits of his mother – her eyes, her smile – alongside his usual repertoire of wet cardboard boxes and badgers hit by cars, etc., there was not a single photograph of me. Not of my face, anyway, just an extreme close-up of the back of my hand,
black and white in heavy contrast, part of a college project that I later discovered was called ‘Waste/Decay’.

  Albie’s passion for photography had been the cause of tension in other ways. I had a printer in my office, a top-of-the-range colour model whose features included glacial speed and shocking running costs. Consequently, I was more than a little annoyed to return from work one day and hear the printer grinding away. Irritably, I examined the top print of a sizeable pile of 8x10s. It seemed to be a high-contrast, minutely detailed black-and-white print of some kind of dark moss and only when I peered more closely did I realise that this was in fact a photograph of a naked female form, shot in profile so to speak. I dropped the photograph, then gingerly examined the shot beneath. In washed-out black and white, it might have passed for some sort of snowy mountain range, were it not for the pale dimpled nipple that crowned the peak. Meanwhile, a third image was rumbling its way out of the machine and from the section that was visible, there seemed every chance that buttocks were emerging.

  I called Connie in. ‘Have you seen Albie?’

  ‘He’s in his room. Why?’

  I held up the photographs and predictably, her response was to clasp her hand to her mouth and laugh. ‘Oh, Egg. What have you been up to?’

  ‘Why can’t he just photograph someone’s face for once?’

  ‘Because he’s a seventeen-year-old boy, Douglas. This is what they do.’

  ‘I didn’t. I photographed wildlife. Birds and squirrels and iron-age forts.’

  ‘Which is why you’re a biochemist and he’s a photographer.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind so much, but does he have any idea how much the cartridges cost for this thing?’

  Connie, meanwhile, was peering closely at the buttocks. ‘My money’s on Roxanne Sweet.’ She held the photograph to the light. ‘I think they’re rather good. Of course he’s pinched it all off Bill Brandt, but they’re not bad.’

  ‘Our son, the pornographer.’

  ‘It’s not pornography, it’s a nude study. If he was painting nudes at a life-drawing class you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.’ She pinned the print to my office wall. ‘Or at least I’d hope you wouldn’t. Who knows any more?’

  28. passion

  Soon after, Albie announced his intention to devote his life to a hobby. Why, I asked Connie, could he not study a more practical subject and do the things he enjoyed at weekends and in the evenings, like the rest of us? Because that’s not how an arts-based course works, said Connie; he needs to be challenged, to develop his famous ‘eye’, learn to use his tools. But wouldn’t it be cheaper and quicker to just read the manual? I could understand if people still used darkrooms as I had as a young man, but all of that know-how was obsolete, and how could Albie hope to excel in a field where anyone with a phone and a laptop could be broadly proficient? It wasn’t even as if he wanted to be a photojournalist or a commercial photographer, taking pictures for newspapers or advertisements or catalogues. He didn’t want to photograph models or weddings, athletes, or lions chasing gazelles, photographs that people might pay for, he wanted to be an artist, to photograph burnt-out cars and bark, taking pictures at such angles that they didn’t look like anything at all. What would he actually do for three years, apart from smoke and sleep? And what professional job could he hope for at the end of it?

  ‘Photographer!’ said Connie. ‘He’s going to be a photographer.’

  We were pacing around the kitchen, furiously tidying up, by which I mean tidying up, furious. Wine had been drunk and it was late, the end of a long, fraught argument that, as was his way, Albie had provoked then fled from. ‘Don’t you see?’ said Connie, hurling cutlery at the drawer. ‘Even if it’s hard, he has to try! If he loves it, we have to let him try. Why must you always have to stomp on his dreams?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing against his dreams as long as they’re attainable.’

  ‘But if they’re attainable then they’re not dreams!’

  ‘And that’s why it’s a waste of time!’ I said. ‘The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’

  ‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough – it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be!’

  Well, that’s what I said. I believed I had my son’s best interests at heart. That was why I was so vocal, because I wanted him to have a secure professional life, a good life. Listening up in his bedroom, no doubt he had caught all of my words and none of my intention.

  Still, the argument was not my finest moment. I had become shrill and dogmatic but even so I was surprised to discover that Connie was now standing still, wrist pressed to her forehead.

  ‘When did it start, Douglas?’ she said, her voice low. ‘When did you start to drain the passion out of everything?’

  29. world of wonder

  ‘So why did you become a scientist?’

  ‘Because I never really wanted to do anything else.’

  ‘But why … I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten the subject …?’

  ‘Biochemistry, that’s my PhD. Literally the chemistry of life. I wanted to know how we work; not just us, all living things.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Eleven, twelve.’

  Connie laughed. ‘I wanted to be a hairdresser.’

  ‘Well, my mum was a biology teacher, dad was a GP, so it was in the air.’

  ‘But you didn’t want to be a doctor?’

  ‘I thought about it, but I wasn’t sure about my bedside manner, and the great thing about biochemistry over medicine, my dad said, was that no one ever asked you to look up their bum.’

  She laughed, which I found intensely gratifying. Clapham High Street late at night is not the most scenic of routes, and at a little after one in the morning it has its own perils, but I was enjoying talking to her – or talking at her because she was, she said, ‘too off her face’ to do much but listen. It was a bitterly cold night, and she clung to my arm, for warmth I supposed. She had swapped her high heels for clumpy trainers, and wore a wonderful old black coat with some kind of feathery collar, and I felt intensely proud and protective, and strangely invulnerable too, as we strode past the drunks and muggers, the hens and stags.

  ‘Am I being very boring?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, her eyelids heavy. ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘They used to buy me this magazine, World of Wonder or something it was called – my parents wouldn’t allow the other ones, the silly ones, Dandy or Whizzer and Chips or whatever, in the house. So I used to read this terribly dry, old-fashioned magazine and it was full of projects and diagrams and jolly things to do with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, how to turn a lemon into a battery—’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘I have that power.’

  ‘You are a genius!’

  ‘Thanks to World of Wonder. Fun facts! Did you know caesium has atomic number 55? That sort of thing. Of course at that age you’re just like this big sponge, so it all went in, but the bit I loved the best was this cartoon strip, “Lives of the Great Scientists”. There was one about Archimedes, I could draw it for you now: Archimedes in his bath, making the connection between volume and density, dancing naked down the street. Or Newton and his apple, or Marie Curie … I loved this idea of the sudden beautiful realisation. A light bulb going on, literally for Edison. One individual experiences this flash of insight and suddenly the world is altered fundamentally.’

  I hadn’t spoken this much for years. I hoped, from Connie’s silence, that she was finding me fantastically interesting, but when I looked her eyes were rolled far back into her head.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just rushing my tits off.’
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br />   ‘Oh. Okay. Should I stop talking?’

  ‘No, I love it. You’re bringing me down, but in a good way. Wow. Your eyes look massive, Douglas. They’re taking up your whole face.’

  ‘Okay. So … should I keep talking, then?’

  ‘Yes, please. I like listening to your voice. It’s like listening to the Shipping Forecast.’

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘Reassuring. Let’s keep walking. Tell me more.’

  ‘Anyway, these stories were nonsense for the most part, or hugely over-simplified. Most scientific progress is a slog, and more often than not it stems from a dialogue within a community, lots of people thinking along the same lines and inching forward, rather than these great bolts of lightning. Newton did see the apple fall, but he’d been thinking about gravity well before that. The same with Darwin, he didn’t wake up one day and think: natural selection! There’d been years and years of observation, discussion and debate. Good science is slow-moving, methodical, evidence-based. Method. Results. Conclusion. Like my old tutor used to say, “To assume makes an ass of u and me!’’’ Here, rather optimistically, I had hoped she might laugh, but she was staring open-mouthed at her wiggling fingertips. ‘Still, I was hooked. It seemed heroic, or at least the kind of heroism I might have access to. Normal boys aspired to be footballers or pop stars or soldiers, and I wanted to be a scientist, because wouldn’t it be incredible to have a moment like that? An entirely original idea. A cure, an insight into space and time, a water engine.’

  ‘Anything occurred to you?’

  ‘Not as yet.’

  ‘Well it’s still early days!’

  ‘Of course it was all a lot easier in the past. Much easier to make your mark when people still thought the sun revolved around the earth and there were four bodily humours. Not much chance of me making that kind of breakthrough now.’