England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  There was something particularly entrancing, he couldn’t say why, about this physical act of steering Lucy in her buggy, about having his hands on the handles and feeling through them the bumps and swerves that she felt through her whole body. These rides seemed to induce in her such a simple infallible delight, she became a kind of living cargo of happiness, and he could sometimes find himself, quite unselfconsciously, echoing out loud her burblings, as if infected (at last, at fifty-six!) with mindless joie de vivre.

  His father had spoken those disenchanted words. But these babblings! And of course he didn’t tell Julia that, while she put her feet up, he was only too keen to push Lucy to the park yet again.

  Lucy, of course, had no control. She had no power of decision, and she had no control literally. She relied on him entirely to steer her. The fact that she did so with such delirious trust made his own steps light, and right now he loved her absolutely because her helpless burblings matched, though entirely benignly, the fact that he’d lost all control of his life and that she was the product of that loss of control.

  It was a mild day in late February. Spring was in the air. A few innocuous white clouds hung in the sky. Crocuses were poking through by the entrance to the park.

  When had he lost control? He hadn’t lost control of the business of making money, he’d been a dab hand at that. He hadn’t even lost control of the money itself, though he’d handed over large chunks of it. But when had he lost control of himself, of his life, of who he was?

  When he was twenty-eight, say, he’d felt pretty much in control. At least he’d felt a good notch surer of himself than when he’d been eighteen or twenty-one—when all doors are supposed to open. He’d even say now—now he was exactly twice twenty-eight—that twenty-eight was actually the age he was inside. He was a twenty-eight-year-old in heavy disguise.

  But by the time he was thirty-eight, or certainly forty-five, the sense he’d once had long ago as a little kid—long before that bleak interview with his father—that life and growing up could only ever be about gaining more and more control, a steady upward graph, had deserted him. It wasn’t that he was losing control in some ways but gaining it in others, he was seriously and centrally losing control, and he knew it. And he knew that very probably this loss of control would only increase and accelerate for the rest of his life, he’d crossed some sort of dire threshold, till one day he’d be approaching his death in a state of utter and terrifying loss of control, never having—to put it mildly—put his affairs in order.

  When he understood this he did what most people do. He ignored it. He had another drink. Was putting your affairs in order the purpose of life anyway? Affairs! A poor joke of a word. It was his affairs, having them, that had got him into this mess. Once, when he was twenty-eight—or was it thirty-five?—he’d thought that having affairs and their rather thrilling disorder was actually the stuff of life, if not maybe its purpose. He was, he’d have to confess, quite good at it.

  Did anyone put their affairs (other sense) in order? People said, didn’t they—people not like his father—that you should seize life, grasp it while it was there? Which sounded like taking control, big-time. But it also sounded exactly like what he did when he toppled—dived—into another affair. It was taking control, but it was also like going full-tilt for the complete opposite.

  By his forties he’d started to do something he’d never done before. He looked at people. That is, he studied them and wondered about them, as if he might be the other side of a glass wall. Did they look out of control, did they look as if they all secretly felt like him? No. The amazing thing was that they didn’t. They looked as if they were pretty much holding it together, as if they were moving along paths they felt they should be moving along. How did they manage it?

  He’d never had this feeling of a glass wall before, he’d never felt he was an observer, not a doer. Though what he’d been doing, perhaps for some time now, had been losing control.

  And now here he was pushing a buggy along a park path—an act of control and calm purpose if ever there was—with a child in the buggy astonishingly remote from him in years yet to whom he felt closer than anything else in the world.

  It was a Sunday morning. The sun, with a real warmth to it, seemed to be seeing off the clouds and the park was doing good business. There were other people pushing buggies, like him, either towards or back from the little mecca of the play area, with its brightly coloured attractions, that had opened recently and been an instant success. On Sunday mornings it could heave. It was hard to tell if adults or small children dominated. There were buggy-parking issues. There were multiple-child buggies. You understood at once one of the principal local activities: it was to breed and to do so with a certain public self-congratulation.

  But there were also joggers, in Lycra, with headsets. There were people with dogs. There were also people—they were professionals—with lots of dogs, whole packs of them, because their owners were too busy, even on a Sunday, or too lazy to walk them, so they paid someone. Money, the things it could do. Even some of the buggy-pushers would be hired live-in nannies, speaking foreign languages. Nannies! He’d had a thing once—he’d lost control—with a nanny, called Consuelo. It hadn’t lasted long, not long enough even to call it an affair. Now, spotting the nannies, and even though Julia wasn’t around to catch him looking, he wasn’t even tempted.

  There were about as many dogs as buggies. And—setting aside the nannies—not a few of the buggy-pushers and dog-walkers had a similar appearance. They were men, otherwise unaccompanied. They weren’t young. They were often rather chubby, jowly or flushed of face and their hair was receding, if they weren’t in fact bald. If they’d had looks once, they’d lost them. Yet for all this, they didn’t appear out of control. Far from it. They were in charge of a buggy or a dog after all. Some of them even had a pretty lordly air and issued, to the dogs, bellowing commands.

  In other words (though he refused to acknowledge this outright) they looked like him. And sometimes, in the case of the buggy-pushers, the age of the child or even children they were pushing told the whole story. It was a bit like his story.

  But he was pushing Lucy. No one else was pushing Lucy. In a little while he’d unstrap her from the buggy and place her with a father’s tender care—a quite experienced father’s care—on one of the contraptions in the play area. She wasn’t old enough to be more than placed briefly in this way, but the mere contact with the colourful apparatus seemed enough for her. It gave the buggy ride its goal, but he felt that for her as well as for him it was the ride itself that was really the thing.

  All the time she was out of the buggy and just perched on one of the bits of equipment his hands would hover close to her, his whole body would want to shield her, as much from the roughness of other children and the intrusions of other parents as from any other form of harm. He’d keep guard of her and would think while he did so, as he would at other times of such close vigilance, of what would become of her in later life, of how her life would be when he was gone, of the possibility, which was not at all unreal, of his being gone before she was a woman with whom he might have a grown-up conversation. He’d feel a punishing stab. But he had her burblings.

  They approached the play area. But the whole park, with its tree-lined paths and expanses of grass, its peeping bulbs and its joggers, dog-walkers and buggies, was like a play area, and on this smiling Sunday morning was the very image of communal well-being. It was the serener broader version of the kids’ place, without the latter’s tendency (he could see that this morning it was thickly patronised) to teeter into stressful frenzy. In truth, he didn’t greatly like the play area, but Lucy wasn’t able to say to him, understandingly and exoneratingly, ‘It’s okay, we don’t really have to go there.’

  The dog came from nowhere. If it was one of the many dogs he’d been loosely holding in his view, it still seemed that it hurled itself from a different place, as if through some unperceived screen, and there it sud
denly and loudly was. And it was one of those breeds of dog that weren’t supposed to be let off leads, or even to be owned by people, or even, possibly, to exist at all. But there it was, and it was mauling—no, it was attacking—a child strapped in another buggy on the edge of the play area. Another little girl of less than two, with pale blonde curls, only yards away. With a father and mother who appeared to be momentarily paralysed.

  It seemed that he too was suddenly on the scene, like the dog—that to others looking on it would seem that he too had sprung without warning from nowhere. It seemed so even to himself. Who was this man? He was suddenly grasping, grappling with a vicious snarling dog (whatever its behaviour had been just seconds ago), a dog that, but for his action and the sturdiness of modern buggy accoutrements, might have had in its mouth, in its claws, a helpless defenceless child.

  The little girl was screaming and the dog must have been making a terrible row. People all around must have been yelling, but he didn’t hear them or care, and he didn’t even care, for some reason, if this dog was about to savage his own flesh or claw out an eye. He was going to stop it.

  For a moment it writhed in his weird embrace, he felt the uncontainable spasm of its muscles—yes, it was going to bite his face off—but he wrenched it somehow from the buggy, then, as it shot from his clutches, it lost its balance and he was able to kick it, kick it hard, in the ribs, in the head, in its skidding legs, he didn’t care. He’d won the battle, he knew, it had been a matter of seconds. Were people cheering? But he kicked it, and kicked it again.

  He knew too, even as he did this, that the outcome of this episode would be that the dog would be put down. A dog that attacks a child. No arguments. It was what would happen. He could already picture the child’s father—galvanised now into action—speaking righteously into a mobile phone, gathering a circle of witnesses round him. This is what would happen. And he would be a principal witness, and in some people’s eyes a hero. And the dog would be put down. Professionally.

  But he kicked it as if to save them the trouble. He kicked it even when it was beaten. He didn’t care about its owner, who must be somewhere. The owner of a dog like this wouldn’t, or couldn’t, entrust it to a dog-walker, and the owner of a dog like this would only own it in order to feel a vicarious power. Yes, that was why people had dogs (he’d never had one), in order to have the illusion of mastery and control.

  It was all split-second stuff, but he kicked it more than once, enough for him to imagine that when people later discussed his daring action they might add, ‘But did you see the way he kicked it?’ Enough for him to think (and this was perhaps what made him stop): What would Lucy think, of her father furiously kicking a dog? Would she grow up with this whole scene indelibly imprinted on her? Her first and enduringly scarring memory of her daddy.

  But of course it was for her that he’d done it, it was because the child in the buggy might so easily have been—

  Lucy in fact, he realised, was bawling, screaming. Some well-meaning bystander was seeking to comfort her. Other buggy-bound infants were also in a state of howling terror, or else of white-faced shock, at what had happened to another of their kind, and thus at what could happen—it was plainly possible—to them. Lucy wasn’t concerned with the gallant actions of her father, she was concerned with her own appalling vulnerability, and she was particularly concerned with the fact that her father had taken his hands off the buggy, thus abandoning her to such horror.

  He quickly went to her, to place his hands back on the handles, and almost at once, as if some electric current of safety and assurance, or of something deeper, had passed between them, she was calm again, she was almost her untroubled self again.

  ‘It’s okay, Lucy, everything’s okay. I’m here.’

  In a matter of moments she even began a subdued, speculative version of her customary burbling, as if this encounter with a dog, from which her father had come off visibly discomposed (he realised he was shaking a bit), was already moving out of her mental compass. She seemed, in mere seconds, almost to have forgotten it—never mind bearing the image of it for the rest of her life. Her father, wrestling with a dog! This rapid shift both relieved him and disappointed him.

  ‘It’s okay. Everything’s okay.’

  They had to hang around for some time while the matter was dealt with—while a parks policeman (so parks policemen had a purpose) arrived and notes were taken and calls made, and while he tried not to listen to comments being uttered about him. ‘He was amazing . . . Just think what might have happened, if he hadn’t . . . Just think what might have happened—you know—to that little kid . . .’

  He could have done without it all. He had never in all his fifty-six years heard himself being called amazing, but he could have done without it. All the while he kept his hands very tightly on the buggy handles, except when he stooped to pat and stroke Lucy’s head. His place was with Lucy. He wasn’t even interested, now, in the poor child he’d rescued—had he been told its name?—whose life he’d quite possibly saved. That wasn’t so far-fetched. It wasn’t every day that you, possibly, saved a child’s life.

  He wasn’t interested in the sudden paean he was getting—distress turning to relief and almost hysterical gratitude—from the child’s mother. ‘How can we ever thank you enough? How can we ever repay you?’ That sort of thing. He actually wanted to say, ‘Control yourself, woman.’ He said, ‘It was nothing.’ He wasn’t interested in his own patent prowess. He’d moved like lightning. Younger men around him—twenty-eight-year-olds!—had stood rooted to the spot. He didn’t have any of these feelings.

  And he wasn’t interested in the dog, least of all. He knew it was done for.

  He wanted to get away. He wanted just to be pushing Lucy again. There was no question now of spending any time with her in the play area, where all activity seemed suspended anyway. He knew that she wouldn’t feel let down by this. It was the buggy ride that mattered.

  Eventually, with anxious looks at his watch, he excused himself and edged away. He had his own child to look after—clearly. Her mother would be wondering. No one seemed surprised that he said ‘child’ not ‘grandchild’. It wasn’t a rare phenomenon. And anyway he’d just behaved with the speed and agility, not to say sheer ferocity, of someone half his age.

  He pushed Lucy back the way they’d come, alone with her again and totally in love with her, listening to her burblings resume their joyful commentary. It was as if nothing had happened. He very much wanted it to be as if nothing had happened. He envied his daughter’s eclipsing amnesia. He didn’t want to tell Julia about any of this. He looked at his watch again. Allowing for the time they might otherwise have spent at the play area, they wouldn’t be unduly late back, so he need say nothing.

  But of course word about the incident, in which he’d played such a central and dramatic role, was bound to get around to Julia, and pretty quickly, through the local grapevine. And there was the simple obvious fact that he himself bore the immediate evidence of something. Though his hands were firmly guiding the buggy he knew he was still shaking, he was shaking in fact quite a lot. He needed to grip the handles to stop it. There was a big streak of mud down one of his trouser legs, there was a tear at one knee, and if his face and hands seemed, remarkably, to have come away unscathed, his jacket was in several places snagged if not actually torn. That was all right. You could replace clothes, with some money. He hadn’t wanted any money from that child’s mother, though she’d offered it, she’d offered to replace his entire wardrobe. She was blonde and totally at his service. It seemed that she might offer him anything.

  You could replace a jacket. But the claw marks themselves—yes they were actually claw marks—and his general appearance of having been in some fight, of being a bit of a walking catastrophe, he hadn’t the slightest idea how he was going to explain away these things to Julia.

  FUSILLI

  HE PUSHED THE trolley round the end of the aisle, ignoring the stacks of boxed mince pies.
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  It would be Christmas Day in just over two weeks’ time, but he and Jenny had already agreed, without really talking about it, to abolish Christmas. They couldn’t go through with it. The calendar would be different this year. Remembrance Day had come and gone, but it would be Remembrance Day on Christmas Day. Even that was going to be terrible.

  On Remembrance Day itself they’d adopted, without ever talking about it either, a sort of double position, both to mark it and to ignore it, they couldn’t work out which way their superstition should go. But he remembered now—how could he forget?—coming here about a month ago. It was just days before Remembrance Day. The clocks had gone back, it was dark outside. He remembered pushing the trolley then.

  How he wished it was still then.

  There’d been little boxes of poppies, with plastic jars for coins, by the entrance. He’d wondered whether to buy one. Yet another one. Whether to tip in all his change. But the bigger thing, already, was Christmas. Christmas stuff, Christmas offers. It was Christmas before it was even Remembrance Day. A sudden wave of anger had hit him. It had been Halloween less than a fortnight before. The shops had been full of pumpkins and skeletons.

  No one saw his anger, it stayed inside. He wasn’t even sure if it was anger exactly. He’d pushed the trolley in the normal way, his list stuck in one hand, his mobile in his top pocket in case of problems.

  ‘Shop patrol to base. No fresh ginger, Jen. What do you reckon?’

  That sort of problem.

  He did the weekly supermarket run—his duty, or his regular volunteering—and for several months now not a time had passed when he didn’t think: And what are Doug’s little problems right now? His tricky two-for-one choices?

  He’d never forget how his mobile had rung—right here in the rice and pasta aisle—and it had been Doug. In Afghanistan, in Helmand. That sort of thing was possible now.

  He was talking to Doug. And Doug had phoned him. So he couldn’t say, ‘I’ll get your mum.’ (Why did he always say that anyway?) Doug had phoned his number.