The Illuminations
Page 25
The girls looked around. They didn’t know about Anne’s pictures taken here once upon a time. They just thought it was a treat to see the place in the daytime like this. ‘I could tell you a few stories,’ Sheila said with her give-all laugh. ‘We used to come here to raves in the 1980s and the building would be packed to the rafters. Don’t get me started.’ There were posters up for dance shows and comedians.
‘Palm trees,’ Anne said.
This is your home tonight.
She touched a pillar on their way along and was delighted with it and when her grandson leaned over and kissed her cheek she felt sure they’d spent years together. There was nothing left to be afraid of and the sky was blue as they came outside and put down their bags by a signpost. The arrow pointed to Cleveleys and Blackpool, the sand was dark brown and the sun took them by surprise. Sheila lifted Anne’s hand and then her sister took the other one and they led her all the way down to the water. Luke hung back by the wall and looked down at Anne and the women together in the wind. Their scarves were billowing around them and they shouted out when Anne’s came off and blew into the air, the scarf going higher, the girls laughing as it stretched up and a hand reached out for the sun.
Author’s Note
The author thanks Abdul Aziz Froutan and colleagues in Afghanistan, as well as members of the Royal Irish Regiment, who have been answering his questions since he began The Illuminations in 2010. Thanks also to Yaddo, and to Mary O’Connor and the keepers of the Joseph Mulholland Archive at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he studied the papers of the photographer Margaret Watkins.
About the Author
Andrew O’Hagan is one of his generation’s most exciting and most serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain and the part it plays in the world. He has twice been nominated for the Man Booker Prize. He was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is editor at large of the London Review of Books and he lives in London.
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Copyright
First published in the UK in 2015
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
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London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2015
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© Andrew O’Hagan, 2015
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ISBN 978–0–571–27367–6
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Author’s Note
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright