Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

  *

  Ginny’s parents divorced when she was sixteen. The family home was sold, and Ginny’s mother used her share of the money to buy a small terraced cottage in a village at the foot of the Sussex Downs. There was a delay in the exchange of contracts, and Ginny and her mother and brother were temporarily left with nowhere to live. It was decided that the best thing would be for them all to move in with her grandmother.

  They stayed there six weeks, a period of time that looked short when it was written down on paper but while it was being lived through seemed to encompass a significant and difficult period of Ginny’s life. Her brother was bored and sullen away from his friends, and her mother and grandmother squabbled constantly, mostly about Ginny’s father, whom they both seemed determined to hate but in differing ways.

  Her grandmother’s house was not used to so much activity and an unreasonable number of things seemed to get broken: a blue-and-white Chinese rice bowl, the back window of her grandmother’s Ford Anglia, the television plug socket immediately below the cuckoo clock. There was a splintering crunch as the brass weight plummeted down on to it from above. Ginny stared at the splinters of white plastic on the olive green carpet, barely overcoming the urge to laugh.

  “Plug flew up to the cuckoo weight,” quipped her brother, riffing on the title of a film they had seen recently about the inhabitants of a mental asylum.

  “It’s downright carelessness,” said her grandmother. “You can see how he takes after his father.”

  Ginny bit her lip. Before that summer she had never even known her grandmother to raise her voice. The accident with the plug socket had been just as much her fault as her brother’s, but it was her brother who got the blame for it, as he seemed to get the blame for all the other petty things that kept going wrong. Ginny knew her grandmother favoured her and for this she often felt guilty but secretly glad. It was not that she resented her brother; it was simply that she felt a need for love and sympathy that was sometimes so intense she felt cold to the bone.

  She escaped into books. It was the summer of Wuthering Heights and Roadside Picnic and Jude the Obscure.

  One afternoon, when her mother had driven her brother into Worthing to buy some new trainers, Ginny’s grandmother suggested they go for a walk along the beach.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

  Ginny smiled in a way she hoped would inspire confidence. She was tense with excitement inside, wondering what was about to be revealed to her. She considered the possibilities, her imagination fuelled by scenes from her favourite books: her mother was a murderess, her grandfather was not dead but in prison, she had been left a fortune by some almost-forgotten aunt. But for a long time her grandmother walked along without saying anything, her face turned into the wind, her thin grey hair fluttering about her face like streamers of lint. Ginny walked silently beside her. She looked out over the shingle, the tamarisk, the ridged pinkish concrete of the promenade, the sea that was never blue but that sometimes, at the height of summer, was a shimmering translucent green, the colour of jade. She felt an ache inside her, as if something were beginning or ending, but she did not know what.

  “I was adopted,” said her grandmother at last. “I’ve never told anyone apart from your granddad, not even your mother.”

  Ginny felt disappointed. It didn’t seem like much of a secret. She knew other people who had been adopted and none of them made a big thing of it. Her friend Naomi had lived in a council care home until she was three.

  “That must have been strange,” she said.

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” said her grandmother. “Everything is different now, I know that. But when I was a child people judged these things much more harshly, and being born outside of marriage was a reason for shame. Some people were very cruel. It’s made me feel like a second class citizen the whole of my life.”

  “I think that’s terrible,” said Ginny, and she meant it. She felt an upsurge of righteous indignation on behalf of her grandmother, and a stirring of kinship that had nothing to do with their blood relationship, but with the growing sense that in their own way they were both outsiders.

  “None of that matters now,” said her grandmother. “I had your granddad, and my two daughters, and then you. That was all the family I needed. But I wanted to tell you because I think it might be important, not for me any more, but for you. I never knew my real parents, but when I was the same age you are now Ada and Raymond gave me a photograph of a woman they said was my mother. She had been a domestic servant at one of the London clubs. They said they didn’t have any pictures of my father, but that he had been a journalist of some kind and had written articles for the Scotsman and the Manchester Guardian. They told me his name, but I’ve forgotten it. I think at the time I wanted to forget it, I wanted to forget everything that reminded me of where I had really come from. I know now that I was stupid. Ada and Raymond hoped I would be clever, you see, they hoped I might take after my father. I turned out to be very ordinary, but there must have been something in what they said, because whatever gift my father had has been passed on to you. I feel certain of it every time I look at you. I wanted you to know this. I wanted you to know that you were born to write.”

  “But you are clever, Gran.” It was the first thing Ginny could think of to say, and she could see almost at once there was some truth in it. Much as she loved her, she had always felt rather scornful of her grandmother’s taste in historical romances, her carefully formed, schoolgirl’s handwriting, her hesitations over where to put an apostrophe. But when it came to telling stories her grandmother had always been a natural. She had an instinct for it, like the grandmothers in the Russian folk tales, like the mediaeval bards. She had always encouraged Ginny to make up stories of her own.

  Ginny remembered the odd little tale she had invented about the people who lived inside watches, the microscopic engineers who kept time flowing smoothly and who were able to decide if it went forward or back. Her grandmother had loved this story. She was always embellishing it, adding new details. It was a game they had continued for years.

  “Gran, do you remember Nicky?” Ginny asked suddenly.

  “Nicky the little watch boy? Of course I do.”

  Ginny had imagined Nicky as a bit of a tearaway. As a teenager he had caused a lot of trouble by letting clocks run down and creating time anomalies, but as he grew older his rebellious instincts began to be channelled elsewhere. He became obsessed with the silver half-hunter, which he was convinced was really a time machine. He had been in the process of trying to mend it, but then Ginny had stopped playing the game. Now she began to wonder how it would have come out.

  She supposed she had been a little in love with Nicky; that a part of her still wanted to believe in him. It excited her now to think that the impulse to create him had not been just chance, but a part of her, something she had inherited, like her small feet and upturned nose and blonde hair.

  She wondered what her great-grandfather had looked like, what kind of man he had been. She thought she might give anything to read the articles he had written, to know which books had been his favourites. It struck her that when he had been writing, Thomas Hardy would have still been alive.

  “Thank you for telling me about my great-granddad,” she said to her grandmother. “I think it’s an amazing story.” She felt proud that her grandmother had trusted her. She wanted to say that she hoped she might one day do something that would make her worthy of the gift she had been given, but she thought it might sound big-headed. She took her grandmother’s hand instead, twisting her rings about her bony fingers, the way she used to when she was small.

  They turned and walked back to the house. Three days later the contracts were exchanged on the cottage. Ginny’s mother organised the packing, her dark mood transformed overnight into a bright stream of energy. They seemed to have more luggage than they had arrived with and she could barely get it all in the car. Ginny sat on the back seat, jam
med in between a rolled up duvet and a box full of wellington boots. She waved through the window to her grandmother, thinking of Jude turning his back on the village of Marygreen and heading for Christminster.

  *

  “I found it in one of those junk shops down by the market,” Kit said. “It was in a cardboard box with a load of old cutlery. I thought it might be your kind of thing.”

  The watch was an inch-and-a-half across with a cream-coloured dial. Its maker’s name was Smith. It was missing its strap.

  “Let’s go and get a strap for it now,” Kit said. “I’d like to see you wearing it.”

  “It’s gone six already,” said Ginny. “Most of the shops will be closed.”

  They hunted around the Lanes for a while, trying to find a jeweller’s that was still open, but without success.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ginny. “I’ll buy a strap for it tomorrow, in town. I really love old watches. How did you know?”

  “I knew you would like it, because I do,” said Kit. “We like the same things.” He laughed then pulled her towards him and kissed her hair.

  “I should go,” he said. “But I’ll see you soon.”

  She caught the train with just a minute to spare. She found a window seat and sat down with her legs curled under her and her cheek resting against the glass. She had her book with her, a collection of stories by Carson McCullers, but she felt too tired and too distracted to read. She held the watch tightly in the palm of her hand. Its mechanical pulse was faint yet steady, like an echo of Kit’s own heartbeat, and for this reason it comforted her. The watch made her feel safe, somehow. She was afraid to move in case she broke its spell.

  It was almost midnight by the time she got home. As she made her way across the station car park she witnessed an altercation between an elderly man in an ugly red rain slicker and a taxi driver who had just run over his bicycle.

  “You can’t leave bikes there,” the cabbie was saying. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

  “I leave my bike there every night of the week,” the man replied. “You should have been watching where you were going.” His voice was high and querulous, the voice of a grumpy granddad in a radio sitcom. Ginny hurried away, feeling sick with irritation and pity. The surface of the world felt brittle as ice.

  It was October, and in a couple of days the clocks would go back. Ginny hated the long dark evenings in the run-up to Christmas. She thought of them as dead days, the old year sloughing its skin. Although it was often colder she found the first weeks of January infinitely preferable.

  Her bed sheets were clammy and cold. She turned to face the wall, bunching her limbs together to try and get warm. She was still holding the watch. She had known as soon as Kit gave it to her that she would write about it. The sight of the watch brought back memories, ideas and images that she supposed had lain dormant in her since her grandmother had died.

  She had missed her grandmother’s funeral because it coincided with a reading she was giving in Kentish Town. The reading had been a big deal at the time, but looking back it seemed like nothing, a dozen or so people gathered in a poky room in the basement of a cafe to hear a story she now considered derivative and clumsy. She had not looked at the story since for fear that it might be even worse than she remembered. She often wished she had cancelled the reading and gone to the funeral instead. She had tried to get these feelings down on paper but each time she read the work back it seemed shallow and fey.

  “You’re confusing the facts with the truth,” Kit had said to her. “The facts are nothing but a bunch of components, springs and gears and linchpins, stuff like that. The writer’s job is to construct something from them, a beautiful machine, a story that is the sum of those facts but also greater than them. When the machine begins to run by itself—that’s when you’ll know you’ve managed to tell the truth.”

  Her mother had told her she should stop seeing Kit because he had been homeless for a while and had three children all by different women. But Ginny felt that to see these things as negative was just another way of confusing the facts with the truth. The truth contained these things, as it also contained his greatness as a writer and the soft greyish light in his eyes each time they met.

  She missed him when they were apart but she had learned to accept this, to see his physical absence as a flimsy and inconsequential barrier that could easily be traversed by the act of writing.

  The story about the watch had begun to take shape in her mind almost at once. Now, as she drifted closer to sleep, she found herself thinking not about Kit, but about Nick, the story’s protagonist. She knew already that he was a postgraduate student of physics at Imperial College, that he had almost drowned as a child, that he had very fair hair and blue eyes. At the start of the story he was walking back to his flat in Clerkenwell with his girlfriend, Sallie. She could hear their voices as they talked together, muffled, like voices heard through a wall.

  *

  The watch had belonged to Nick’s grandfather. It was a Smith watch, not one of the rarer models, just one of the many thousands that the London firm had manufactured for the army in the years leading up to World War Two. Recently it had begun to lose time. It wasn’t much, just half a minute or so each day and nothing that might not be fixed by an experienced repairman, but for some reason Nick was reluctant to have the watch interfered with. The watch, like the old man who had owned it, simply wanted to slow down a little.

  For some reason this infuriated Sallie.

  “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “A theoretical physicist who doesn’t even know what time of day it is.”

  Nick loved Sallie’s rages, and saw them as a subset of her enthusiasms. Everything she expressed, she expressed with conviction and forthrightness. Nick envied her a little, although occasionally he wished she would express her opinions a little less loudly.

  “Look at this,” he said. “This used to be a watchmaker’s studio.” He pointed to a warped wooden signboard hanging outside what was now an upmarket tapas bar. The shabby industrial sprawl north of Farringdon station had become a fashionable neighbourhood, glittering with steel and glass and the brash displays of wealth that inevitably characterised the financial districts of the city. But in the narrow closes and disused yards, the cobbled backstreets and converted warehouse buildings, he had never had any difficulty in glimpsing the old Clerkenwell, the watchmakers’ quarter as it had used to be, where entire streets were once occupied by engine turners and fusée cutters, finishers and escapement makers and pinchbeck welders, the out-workers and parts engineers who had once constituted the life-blood of the time trade.

  The watches these men made were still running. The truth was, thought Nick, that excellence was always an anachronism, yet somehow it always survives.

  Sallie glanced at the sign then tugged at his arm.

  “Hurry up,” she said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  They had been out all evening, starting with a glass of champagne at the bar at St Pancras station and then moving on to a bistro-cum-jazz club that Sallie had recently become keen on, celebrating Nick’s appointment as a junior research fellow at Princeton University. Nick had applied for the post on the off chance. Sallie had been ecstatic when he landed it. She had always wanted to live in America.

  When they got back to the flat Sallie dashed away into the bedroom and came back holding a small leather-covered box. Inside was a watch, a stainless steel chronograph with numerous complications and his initials and the date engraved on the back.

  “Now you can finally get rid of that useless old thing of your granddad’s,” she said.

  Nick felt regret well up inside him, as if something were beginning or ending, only he wasn’t sure which. He thought the new watch was quite possibly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, but the thought of having to part with his grandfather’s watch made him feel very sad. He could not think why Sallie felt so hostile towards it, unless it was simply that it had been in his life for longer
than she had. He had never heard of anyone being jealous of a watch before, although he supposed it might be possible. He knew Sallie often felt insecure.

  They went to bed and made love. The next morning he put his grandfather’s watch inside an old spectacles’ case and slipped it into the drawer of the kitchen table, where it lay hidden beneath a litter of safety pins, old takeaway menus and broken pens. He hoped that Sallie would not notice it there, and as the days went by and he got used to wearing his new watch he gradually forgot about it.

  The weeks that followed were mostly taken up with packing and preparing for the move. For practical reasons they had decided to get rid of all the furniture in the flat. Most of it they donated to friends, but none of them had room for the kitchen table. Sallie called a house clearance firm and told them they could have it for free if they would take it away.

  It is in Princeton that Nick will make the discovery that will change his life. It is only on the plane over that he realises what has happened to his grandfather’s watch. He thinks of it, miles below him somewhere, beginning the next chapter of its story and no longer any part of his. For a moment he feels like crying. Then he takes Sallie’s hand and begins stroking her fingers. He knows Sallie is nervous of flying, though she would never admit it to him.

  Jimmy Breaks Up with His Imaginary Girlfriend

  Jimmy Grist

  (( with bubble-thanks to Colette ))

  The surface of the moon shines serenely. A boy and a girl rove across its boney sands. The boy is dressed irremarkably. The girl is wearing a Chozo Power Suit with an upgradeable arm-cannon and morph ball capabilities. The treads on their rover are kicking up dust that stays there. The radio is off. The resulting silence is overbearing but not uncomfortable.