Here I Am!
Page 24
Don’t think my life was — is — unpleasant. Far from it. Beyond the barbarity of the mid-teens and the social complexities of university, I enjoyed my student days. Until I did my doctorate, I lived with my Gran. She needed looking after. It was a good arrangement. The rent was rock bottom and Gran liked having me around to do jobs for her and — this is important — do them efficiently without a whole package of faux concern or useless sentiment. Reading was my thing. And numbers. After she died, she left the house to me and suddenly I belonged to one of those families that quarrel over money. Dad was hurt, offended, even though I offered it to him and Julie. He wouldn’t accept. I think you call it high dudgeon. Our relationship was never quite the same after that. He went out to see Julie in Australia and he never returned. I could have gone out there I suppose, at least for his funeral. The plain truth is it didn’t interest me. My work is everything. I became interested in memory after taking care of Gran, went into neurological research, and found myself a niche at Cambridge. Just in time for the rotting brains of the boomers a step ahead of me. I devise the tests. I analyze the data. I leave it to my grad students to actually deal with the “subjects” — the polite name for my demented old farts. I don’t have the patience, haha. I love my work.
I’m learning braille, too, twice a week. Gordon had volunteered his time to teach it to adults and that’s what I’ll be doing once I’ve mastered it. It’s not as difficult as they say. Kay says it’s all our relationship needs, another obsession. I’m pretty sure she means doesn’t need. I haven’t mentioned Kay, have I? I’m not really asking. I know I haven’t. She’s an embarrassment. No, she makes me feel like an embarrassment. She found me on the internet — like a new appliance — though, to be fair, she wasn’t looking for me. I blame Annichka the muttnik. It was in 2010, the fifty-year anniversary of the successful re-entry of Annichka, the first Russian space dog to return from orbit alive. Kay was googling for more information. She landed on the site of a space nerd who had posted photographs of the original front pages of the Daily Mail. That was where she came across the subheader: “More on Gloriana Boy.” (Yes, I’m afraid I’d been “the Gloriana Boy” that summer. You can see why school wasn’t such a hot idea when I came home…Probably one of the reasons Dad and I spent so many weekends in Gordon Knight’s field that autumn.)
Kay anyway was persistent, dogged, when she turned up this archived material. It took her a while, I understand, but eventually she tracked me down in Cambridge and located me through my faculty. Her marriage had just fallen apart though she didn’t tell me that right away.
We had a good time reminiscing on Skype. (Skype is good for someone like me. It’s safe behind a screen.) I could remember a lot more about the trip and she enjoyed that, being able to reconstruct it all again, the Mexican dinner, the burgers, and the ridiculous Goofy Golf. We talked about Gordon Knight, too. I told her he was my best friend. She said, “He’s still alive?” I said, “Yes, but Alec is long gone. His present dog is called Stephen. After Hawking. The one before that was Albert.”
She came over to see me the following year and I took her to visit Gordon. We camped in his field. That’s where — Oh but you don’t want to hear all the intimate details. If you want that sort of thing I’m sure you can find it online. More easily than information on Annichka or the Gloriana. Anyway the camping was very special and we did our fair share of whispering in the tent. So much so that I began to wonder if what I heard when I was four was voices from the future.
We stayed for a few days, getting up in the morning to join Gordon for a breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee and going for long walks on the moors, stopping on the way back at the pub. Of course.
Gordon had no trouble remembering Kay. He said his memory for voices was pitch perfect and he could still hear her even through that accent.
She came over again last year, visiting a sister who lives in Twickenham. She asked if I wanted to go to a rugby match. I declined. Told her crowds were never my thing.
She said, “I guess you won’t be taking me to U2 then, either.”
I said, “I’d rather not, thank you,” and she laughed.
I showed her what I do when I’m practicing my braille. I tie a scarf over my eyes so it forces me to make guesses and move on, instead of allowing myself to cheat. She was very interested in that. I showed her the first five words of the page I was tackling so that she could try it, but she wasn’t really serious. She put the scarf on and then put her hands on my face instead and said, “Let me read your lips. Your jaw. Your throat.” Actually I was quite interested in that. Maybe another time. I enjoy her company, I really do. Sometimes we laugh so hard it reminds me of Mum and Uncle Jack. Laughing’s important, isn’t it? I think sometimes that it’s a kind of life jacket, too. But I have learned not to fall down.
We went down again to see Gordon before she went back. More long walks, more pub lunches; for us, that is. He was pretty much confined to his house by then, you could tell. Stephen had grown quite fat. Gordon on the other hand was wasting. He seemed tremendously tired.
He gave me a whole set of his books before we left. On the way back, Kay said it was tremendously sad. I said I didn’t think so. It was life unfolding exactly as it should. She heaved a great sigh.
I’ve just finished reading through my book a second time. It’s still releasing minor revelations, like little fireflies illuminating the pages (my writing’s terrible by the way). I’ve only just realized it was likely Kay who gave my hiding place away. “Promise you won’t tell?” Of course she did. Of course. Neither of them ever mentioned it to me. Maybe they thought it was too obvious. Or maybe they were being loyal to each other. I’ll have to ask her. If she comes over again.
I must say it’s all taken me right back to that summer I turned six. I started writing it at home up in my room, birds noisy in the apple tree outside my window. But shortly after that conversation with Gran, Dad took time off again and we went down to see Gordon for the first time. Gordon — Mr Knight then — had extended an invitation and Dad took him up on it. I took some notebooks with me and Dad took his fishing rod. He was a bit nervous on the drive down. Kept asking me how much Gordon Knight could see. If he needed help and so on. I said he looks after himself and he looks after Smart Alec too.
Mr Knight had heard the car and was waiting for us at his gate, with Alec, of course. He let him greet me — a free lesson in unconditional love. The house was as all houses looked then, in picture books at least: stone walls, roses round the door. He offered us his spare room, but Dad said no. We’d come to camp. So after we’d had some tea he showed us the field. Not very big, gently sloping down to a stream. He said there were plenty of fish in it. Sticklebacks. You could hear them break the surface constantly if you were quiet enough. I started to cry then. Dad was astonished. He said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I’m thinking of my fish.” Neither of them said anything for a minute and then Dad said, “Well, it’s a start.”
The rest of our stay was, well…Have you any idea how wonderful it feels to lie in a yellow tent, a pungent, musty yellow tent — not cool, not warm, just right — smell the sun-warmed hay outside, hear a lark somewhere above an adjacent field, and pour your heart out onto the pages of an endless supply of notebooks, with no one to interrupt, and no one to say it isn’t true?
Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer and essayist, whose novel Beyond Measure was shortlisted for the both the Giller and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her most recent novel, The Hunter and the Wild Girl, winner of the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, was shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Award and listed by both the CBC and the National Post as one of the Best Books of 2015.
Copyright © Pauline Holdstock, 2019
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FIRST EDITION
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Here I am! / Pauline Holdstock.
Names: Holdstock, Pauline, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190116684 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190116730 | ISBN 9781771963091 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771963107 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8565.O622 H47 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Edited by John Metcalf
Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson
Text and cover designed by Ingrid Paulson
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.