So Many Ways to Begin

by Jon McGregor

  There was no need for her to have brought that up. She didn't know. She didn't need to have mentioned it. He thought she'd just be pleased with what he'd done, pleased that he was taking an interest in something again. He didn't need to have bothered. She didn't need to have said that.

  She came out to see him later, after telling Kate it was time she went to bed. Kate moaned, and said do I have to I'm not a baby any more, but she stood up all the same. Eleanor noticed her glancing out at David before she went upstairs.

  She doesn't like it you know, she told him as she sat down. It unsettles her, when you're like this. You're supposed to be the steady one out of us two. He shrugged and scratched his head and said nothing.

  He said there's nothing wrong with me, I'm just sitting out in the garden having a drink. There's nothing wrong with that is there?

  No, she said, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's just— She stopped. She said, I'm sorry about what I said before, for bringing it up, I mean. He shrugged again.

  That's okay, he said. Doesn't matter. He looked up, and saw Kate standing at her bedroom window, looking down at them both for a moment before pulling the curtains closed. He dragged his fingers through his hair and said but you don't honestly think it's something I forget about, do you?

  No, she said, quietly, following his gaze up to Kate's window and turning back to him, reaching out and touching his cheek; of course I don't. But sometimes you forget to talk about it, she said. He pulled his face away from her hand, sharply.

  What am I supposed to say? he said. What is there to talk about? What do you want me to say, Eleanor? His voice was tense and defensive, raised against her intrusion. She sat back in her chair, leaning away from him.

  No, she said, nothing really, you're right. Nothing.

  I mean, do you want me to tell you about it all over again? he asked. You want to be my counsellor or something? I'm supposed to unburden myself, am I? Like, oh Eleanor I can't stop thinking about it I feel rejected and cut adrift, oh Eleanor I need some answers oh please help me - something like that?

  She said nothing, waiting for his blurred sarcasm to wear itself out.

  You want me to have a weep about it or something, you think I should stop bottling it up? he said. Or maybe you think I should take up painting and learn to express my inner feelings? He reached under his chair and opened another beer. Eleanor stood up.

  No David, she said. Don't be stupid. I just don't think you should give up, that's all.

  He watched her walk back into the house, slam the door and tug the curtains across the back-room window. He saw the side-light going on, and the blue-white flicker of the television. He hung his head over the back of the chair and looked up at the darkening glow of the sky. He hadn't even been thinking about that when she came out. He patted the folded family tree in his pocket, checking it was still there. He noticed the faint white lights of an aeroplane overhead, the first of the evening's stars, the last of the daylight draining down to the horizon. He folded his arms across his chest. He hadn't even been thinking about that. She'd got that wrong. No. He'd been thinking about Kate asking if she could go on the school skiing trip, and having to say no, and that no matter how much Eleanor insisted that plenty of other parents would have to refuse it had still made him feel like a failure again. He'd been thinking about his father, working his hands raw each day until a few weeks before his death, and what he would have thought of a son who'd only worked half a life in cramped basement offices and dust-free store-rooms and now sat around feeling sorry for himself. He'd been thinking, again, that the loss of the job he'd been so proud of was his own fault for what he'd allowed to happen with Anna, and that he was failing his family by no longer being a working man. He'd been thinking, as he did again and again and again, that the failure to tell Eleanor about what had happened was the lowest failure of all.

  He finished his beer. He tried to stand up. He sat down again. He rubbed at his face and tried to remember what Eleanor had said. He patted his pocket again. She was wrong. He hadn't been thinking about that. She thought she knew him so well, but she didn't.

  He noticed that the television wasn't on any more, and then he heard the back door open again, and then he realised that Eleanor had sat down beside him. It's dark now, she said. Are you coming inside?

  53 Home videos featuring Kate Carter, 1991-1994

  The gravelled surface of a car park, the rush of traffic in the background, the flap and flutter of wind across the microphone. David's voice saying is it working? Is it on?

  A blur of camera movement, a streak of blue sky and green hills, a painfully slow pan from right to left: a copse of trees by the side of the road, a low stone wall, a long stretch of meadow leading up to a hill, a noticeboard, and then Kate, turning her back as she appeared on the screen. And from behind the camera, his voice distorted and thick, David saying so here we are in deepest Warwickshire on this fine summer's day, here for a walk in one of Kate's favourite spots. Can you tell us a little bit about it Kate? The camera circling round her, trying to persuade her to show her face, while she let her long thick hair fall across her eyes, her head lowered, her hands pulled up into the loose tattered sleeves of her jumper, her legs vanishing into boots two sizes too big. Kate saying Dad, stop it will you you're so embarrassing, and David laughing, clumsily, trying to make it seem like a game, trying to make it seem as though she was still young enough to play these games. She walked away from the camera, dragging her feet, and the camera followed, David's footsteps grinding across the gravel, David saying come on love, not even a smile for us now? Her back turned, the camera no longer circling around to face her, an awkward pause. Kate's voice, drowsy with sulkiness, saying I can't believe you Dad, you're a nightmare. David, a little quieter, a little hurt-sounding, saying Kate love, just a quick smile for the camera? Kate turning, quickly, lifting her dyed-black hair away from her face, a brief grimacing smile. Is that okay? she said sarcastically, already beginning to walk away. David's voice, chuckling as if it was still a game, saying end of take one, the camera fixed on Kate's back for a moment more, waiting to see if she would turn round, and then a blur of colour and a shot of gravel as he looked for the button to turn the bloody thing off.

  Kate at her cousin's birthday party, standing in Susan's elegant garden with a glass of wine and a paper plate of food, talking to some of Mark's friends and turning her back as soon as she saw the camera, the camera drifting instead across the rhododendrons and fuchsias which Susan spent so much time on.

  Kate on a day out in London, standing on a bridge over the Thames, watching a barge churn upstream, smiling, saying hello Mum.

  Kate on her sixteenth birthday, getting ready to go out and meet her friends, unwrapping presents from her parents, her auntie, her gran. Relaxed about being filmed now, partly because she was used to it, partly because she'd been sipping from a quarter bottle of vodka in her room - David had known about this, had been able to see it in the happy excited glaze of her eyes, and had chosen not to say anything - and partly because she was just beginning to grow out of her acute embarrassment at being seen in the world. Kate with her hair away from her face, still dyed black but knotted and piled up on to her head, frayed strands sticking out in all directions. Still wearing the ragged blacks and purples of a year before, but no longer hiding behind them, her clothes a little less shapeless and baggy, her make up less smudged. She unwrapped a large square present, saying what could it be? to the camera, and she looked genuinely pleased and surprised when she saw which band the record was by, holding it up to the lens and saying hey wow, thanks Dad, thanks Mum, leaping up in a clatter of jewellery to kiss Eleanor wetly on the cheek. Eleanor, slightly uncomfortable, embracing her in turn, saying we asked your friend Becky and she said this was one you'd like. Kate nodding and saying I do, the camera focusing on Eleanor for a moment, her happy smile and the anxious twisting of her hands, then moving back to Kate as she ripped open her next present.

  Eleanor did
n't like the way Kate dressed or wore her hair, the music she listened to, the places she thought she might be going to, but she was careful never to say anything. You tell her, she whispered urgently, when they got back from a restaurant one night to find the washbasin stained an inky-blue and Kate sitting up in bed with her hair wrapped in a ruined towel. She's not going out like that, she muttered, another evening, when Kate came downstairs with stockings torn from her ankles to the hem of a very short skirt; you tell her. I don't want to get involved. Kate ignored what David said, of course, saying he was so unfair and slamming the front door as she left, and Eleanor watched her walking down the street from the upstairs window, turning to David as he came upstairs and saying my God David, what does she think she looks like? But she still said nothing; not when Kate came home with her ears bloody and studded with piercings, not when the school sent them a letter about her absences, not when she stayed out at a party until five in the morning. She faded into the background, telling David what she thought but withholding comment from Kate for fear of speaking the way her mother had once done. Sometimes, David thought, she was so busy trying not to repeat Ivy's mistakes that she was unable to see how uneventful her relationship with Kate had become. In many of the scenes on the tape, Eleanor wasn't there at all, and when she was she seemed to be pressing herself into the background, waiting for David to say something from behind the camera, waiting for the focus to move away from her.

  Kate in the garden, in the summer, doing a guided tour of the borders, laughing and joking, welcoming the attention of the camera now, saying Dad planted these raspberries when I was a kid and most of them get eaten by the birds but we always get a few at least.

  Kate in the garden in the winter, putting the head on a snowman with her friend Becky, throwing a snowball towards her dad, the sudden jerk and jolt of the picture as he ducks. Her hair back to something like its original colour, still tangled and long but a familiar mousey-blonde again.

  This was why he'd bought the camera, using up some more of the redundancy money, so he could pin her down on tape before she'd gone. Because even when she was still thirteen, fourteen, he could imagine all too easily sitting in a quiet and empty house after she'd left, wondering what she was doing at that very moment, wishing he could picture more clearly the times they'd spent together when she'd still been at home.

  Kate in her room with her hair tied neatly back, looking serious, a pile of textbooks on the desk beside her and a chewed-up pen in her hand. Saying this is my revision timetable, pointing at a sheet of paper on the wall, patchworked with highlighter squares. And how long did it take you to do that? David's voice asked, squashed against the microphone. Two days, she said, smiling and glaring at the same time. And when do your exams start? he said. Next month, she replied, standing, pushing her hand against the lens; so get out now and let me work, go on, get out! The door closing against the camera, and the sound of her happy gentle laugh.

  This was his favourite scene, and the one he could hardly bear to watch; Kate on the very brink of being an adult, her purposeful seriousness reminding him of his own adolescent self when he first started work; Kate with her smile and her bursts of energy, leaping up from the desk to usher him out of the room in the same way she once threw herself at him in games of football at the park; Kate, closing the door, shutting him out, moving on, her laugh still reaching him from behind the closing door.

  54 Examination results; University prospectus, 1994

  It seemed effortless, the way Kate passed her exams and got into university. She seemed to take it for granted, just as she seemed to assume there was no reason why she wouldn't leave home and begin again in some other town she knew nothing about, with people she had to hope would become her friends. She belonged to a generation which took these things for granted, which saw staying at home as something unnatural, and education as something which could be continued on a whim, and so she barely noticed the daunted and tentative way Eleanor moved around her while she was studying for her exams.

  I don't want her to think I'm worrying, Eleanor would whisper when they were lying in bed at night and wondering if she was doing okay. I don't want her to think I'll be cross if she doesn't do well. She will do well though, won't she? she said urgently.

  She kept a copy of Kate's exam timetable by the bedside, hidden under some books, and slipped a packet of multivitamins into her room, and watched for some clue in her face or her voice as they ate tea together after each exam. She asked Becky's mother how she thought the exams had gone, but she didn't dare say anything to Kate herself.

  And when the end of August came, after a long summer of waiting and worrying and pretending that she didn't mind, she was up and awake with the first thought of morning, much earlier than Kate was; standing at the bedroom window, looking out for the postman, waiting breathlessly for Kate to wander downstairs and find the envelope lying behind the front door. Listening to the rip of paper in the front room, leaving it a few minutes before going downstairs to see what news had finally come.

  And when Kate left home the house seemed to change, doubling in size and sinking into silence. They found themselves meeting each other on the stairs like strangers, lost in their own house. It took a long time to adjust. When he got back from driving her to the university it even took David a while to find Eleanor; he called out to her as he came in through the door, and as he went into the kitchen and up the stairs, but there was no answer. She wasn't in their room, or in the bathroom, or out in the garden, and it was only when he went back upstairs that he found her in Kate's room, sitting on the end of the bed, with a pile of clothes Kate had left behind on her lap. She was folding them into neat squares, picking off long stray hairs and bobbles of lint, stacking them into a pile on the floor beside her. She barely seemed to notice him coming into the room. He kissed her on the forehead, and she smiled softly up at him.

  That didn't take very long, did it? she said.

  No, it was fine, he said, traffic was clear all the way back to the ring road. She smiled again, holding up a long blonde hair and twisting it round her finger.

  That's not what I meant, she said.

  55 Illustrated Book of Knots, 7th Edition, c.1947

  When Eleanor's oldest brother Hamish left home, before she was even born, his uncle gave him a knot-tying book as a leaving gift, saying it's not much but it'll see you well. Hamish was seventeen years old and ready to go; his bags were packed and the first ship of his apprentice life was set to leave in the morning, carrying timber to London. His parents brought the neighbours round to see him off, pushing the furniture back against the walls, hoisting open the windows to let the warm spring air in and the tobacco smoke out, baking up cakes and scones and sending young Donald round to the store for another bottle of whisky while Hamish stood awkwardly in the middle of the floor saying hello and thank you and aye I'm looking forward to it as the guests arrived and found a seat or leant against the wall or stood wherever they could find a space. Stewart made his way around the crowded room, filling glasses and saying hello, while Tessa, ten years old and forced uncomfortably into a dress, followed her father round with an overburdened plate of cakes. Will you have another piece? she said to each guest in turn, her voice quiet but confident, her gaze steady and solemn; and each of the guests, with a glass of whisky in one hand and a keen appetite in the other, said please Tessa, thank you, lifting a slab of ginger cake from the pile.

  From the doorway Ivy watched her son standing stiffly in the centre of the small room, his shoulders forced back and the stubborn tuft of hair already springing up where she'd just licked her fingers and pressed it down. She knew, really, that he'd be fine when he was gone, that he'd been carrying his share of the household's weight for long enough, that he would manage on his own. But still, it was a hard thing to look at her own son, with the same snubbed features he'd had as a three-year-old, with the bumps and scars of childhood still mapped out across his skin beneath that proud new suit, and to see him a
s a man ready to head out into the world on his own. She watched the way he spoke to the friends and neighbours in turn, smiling and nodding at their jokes and suggestions, saying thanks for the gifts of warm socks, accepting firm handshakes and leaning forward to place brisk kisses on beaming wrinkled cheeks. Her hands twitched with the memory of holding his tiny warm body up against her face. Her hips shifted with the ghost weight of him, of bearing him or of propping his clinging body up with one arm while she busied around the house with the other. Cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, ironing. Her bones ached with the seeping tiredness of those many long years, the guilty resentment of it all, and she leant back against the door frame, still watching. She saw the way young Rosalind was looking at him, her warm eyes flicking up to his face and his chest when she thought no one was looking.

  Rosalind's mother, Ellie, saw where Ivy was looking, met her eye, and smiled. Will I help you with that last lot of scones Ivy? she said, sweeping her friend into the kitchen at the back of the house, the room bursting into laughter as Stewart made some joke behind them. Aye she's a thing or two to learn about discretion that girl of mine, she muttered, as Ivy opened the oven door to a blast of hot air, sweet and damp with the smell of fresh scones.

  Ivy laughed. The way she's staring, you'd think she'd never seen a good-looking boy in a suit before, she said. But I don't think you need to worry about our Hamish noticing any, he's not so quick that way just yet. Ellie fetched a cooling rack down from the shelf above the oven, put it on the kitchen table, and passed Ivy a palette knife.

  Well, some are quicker than others she said, glancing down at Ivy's almost un-noticeably swollen belly. Ivy stopped sliding the scones on to the cooling rack and looked up at her. Looks like it's not just scones you've got in the oven there, Ellie added, her eyebrows raised a little and her mouth breaking into a smile. Or Ivy said, there's something I've to tell you and Ellie said, there's no need I can see for myself. Ivy looked at her, put the baking tray down beside the sink, and rested her oven-gloved hands across her stomach.