You

by Phil Whitaker

  Those happy skirt-dancing days of your childhood, an utter sham. You broke off all contact with him. A two-line email. You never saw him again.

  When you think of him now, on the occasions you are forced to, you feel nothing but cold fury. Fury and disgust. When you think of Mummy, nothing but admiration, and a love so visceral it hurts. You have surmounted those traumatic years, the both of you. Mummy has scaled enormous heights to carve some semblance of a career for herself. Cut off from all but token financial support, she somehow managed to feed and clothe you, and give you a home. As for you, you kept your head down, studied hard, achieved a clutch of As and A*s in your GCSEs at the local comp, and did a repeat performance in sixth form. It paid off: A-levels good enough to satisfy an offer from Oxford, where now you are training to be a doctor.

  That is what I know of you. The story of your life thus far.

  ❦

  The bus, when finally one arrives, is comfortingly warm after the morning chill. It takes me down the valley, deciduous leaves piled in huge mounds at the feet of the densely wooded slopes rising to our right. Opposite, I catch glimpses of Wellow Brook winding between thickly overgrown banks, a venerable waterway, unchanged over the centuries except by imperceptible degrees. At Midford, we pass the remnants of the old railway bridge, lopped off at either side of the road, the line severed, a victim of Beeching’s brutal disconnection of this community two generations ago. There’s the old mill house, home now to a family with a trampoline, it would appear. The mill race shows evidence of children’s epic dam-building, great mounds of sticks and branches and other debris heaped up and impeding the flow.

  A quarter of an hour and I will be at the station. The train I’d booked a seat on has long since departed, but there will be another. I allowed myself leeway; I still have time to keep my side of our rendezvous.

  We climb out of the valley, and I take in the views across this landscape that I have come to love. Up through Combe Down and into the city outskirts, past the Cross Keys, the Esso garage with its ever-escalating price of fuel. Scaffolding around a derelict house. A Union Jack fluttering from the flagpole at the old St Martin’s Hospital. Dropping down to Bear Flat, the Devonshire Arms clad in glorious russet Virginia creeper. The polar bear atop the porch of the Bear Hotel. Round the corner now, and views out over Bath itself, the perfect symmetry of the Royal Crescent in the far distance; a crane looming above the old quays, where new construction is underway. Down past the disused wharf houses on the banks of the Avon, the neo-Georgian SouthGate centre, and on to where I will catch my train.

  Who am I? That depends, I have come to learn, on who is doing the looking. We can start with my name. Steven James Buchanan, that’s what I was baptised. Steve to Ma and Pa; Stevie to everyone else. Everyone else except you and your sister. To you, I was once known as Daddy. For now, let us just say, I am your father. I am your father, and I am on my way to seeing you.

  Tacoma Narrows Bridge

  If you are to come on this journey with me, you will have to trust. We will not be going anywhere together, not in a physical sense – that would be impossible, in any way, shape or form. We will dissolve ourselves instead into pure imagination, ranging over both topography and time, our consciousnesses scorching through the ether like twin spangled streams, unbounded by the laws of nature. Some of the places we alight you may recognise or remember. Others will be new – beyond the start of your memory, even of your life. Some, neither of us can know. These I will build from scraps and conjecture; extrapolations from what I was told.

  How on earth can you trust me?

  Come, let me show you something. Come with me to a sitting room. You’re immediately struck by the dated decor – those broad-striped curtains, the footstool made to look like a Rubik’s cube, the fatness of the TV set in the corner. It’s OK, don’t be alarmed. We have simply spanned time, materialising ourselves some twenty years ago. The room is one of those large spaces created from two separate receptions, the partition wall long ago demolished, the ceiling now supported by a hidden steel beam, the scars made good by plaster, paint, and skirting. It doesn’t matter much, but you should know that we’re in Oxford, in a Victorian terrace on Chatsworth Road. We’re looking on a man, turned partially away from us. He’s standing between a shabby blue sofa and an unlit gas fire across the other side of the room, jeans-clad as ever, cotton shirt under crew-neck sweater, leather moccasins on his feet. You feel a shock of recognition. At the same time, you’re taken aback by my appearance, how much younger I look. What am I? About thirty, at a guess; you’re too stunned even to begin to try to calculate. My hair is thick and dark brown – no hints of grey; no thinning, not even at the crown. Even at this angle, you can tell that my glasses are round-framed and tortoiseshell, as was the fashion of the time.

  I turn towards us. What’s that I’m holding? Forgive me; perhaps this is too soon. What I am holding – one forearm beneath, one hand wrapped round its front – is a baby, eight, maybe nine months old. Terry towelling bodysuit, yellow duck on its front. Round faced, pudgy armed, wispy haired. You.

  A sudden tightening inside. I’ve flipped the baby round to face me, then hefted her in the air. High above my head. You watch, horrified, as infant-you soars towards the ceiling. Christ, what would a social worker say? Inevitably, gravity asserts itself. You hang motionless for an instant, then begin to fall. What the hell am I doing? The very next moment, my hands gather you, slotting in against your sides, tight into your underarms. I lower you gently to my chest.

  You watch, spellbound. This tiny, younger you starts to giggle. Hysterically. Peals of delight issue in a continuous cascade from your infant lips. I am laughing, too, the skin round my eyes crinkling with love. It dawns on you that this must be a favourite game. Again and again it happens. Up, down, catch. Up, down, catch. You see how my eyes never waver, always tracking the path of my precious child, arms outstretched in readiness. It’s the most wondrous feeling, whooshing up, your tummy caving inside as you crest the parabola. For that brief moment you are flying, absolutely free, nothing holding on to you at all. And every time, as you begin your descent, my pigment-stained hands clasp you and arrest your fall. Do you worry? Do you even know there’s the possibility of disaster? In the world you know then, is there even the chance you will be allowed to crash, bruising and breaking yourself on the floor beneath?

  Perhaps you have questions. Perhaps there are already things twenty-one-year-old you would like to ask the me of then, throwing and catching baby-you like a human ball. You can speak, but you will not be heard. You can touch, but your hand will slip through me as though I were made of air. We are in that room, but we are not of it. We are two future selves who have yet to come to be.

  Away, let us leave us to our game. It was just a little thing. Something to give you confidence – hope, even. Something to help kindle the embers of your trust.

  As we travel, you will constantly ask yourself a question: what is truth? In this post-truth world – in which professions are corrupt, politicians lie with impunity, once-major religions contract – there is nothing left in which to believe, there is no such thing as truth. All we have are the myriad truths that bumble around, one inside each one of us on this benighted planet. Those truths collide continually, sometimes bonding to form complementary wholes, just as often bumping and bashing and repelling each other like particles of identical charge, or multiple north poles. What, if anything, is there left for us to cling on to?

  Yet there is such a thing as truth. I have to believe that. That which exists outside our heads, independent of our minds and all that they can do. That which actually happens. Recognising it, knowing it – that is the difficulty.

  How will you do it? How can you discern truth in what I show? Always, nagging at you, the stalking doubt: am I merely giving you my version, painting myself in flattering colours, brushing over imperfections and blemishes, drawing you into a web of justif
ication and jaundiced sight?

  I cannot answer that – that is a question for you alone. All I can promise is to apply no varnish, nothing to dull the colour, or protect the picture that my brushes will describe. One thing may help, though. Take my hand. I know: it feels strange, acutely uncomfortable – it will for a long while yet, perhaps forever. But take it. Let me whisk you to one other place, show you one more thing before you decide whether or not you will come along.

  Do you recognise it? A cavernous modern hall, huge panes of glass forming one entire wall, pillars of white-painted metal, each as thick as a sequoia trunk, rising at rakish angles to support the roof. We’re light as air, you and I, hovering above hundreds of people, who are milling between the display stands below. Families, in the main: this is a place for children, for education, for eyes to be opened to the world. A cacophony of chatter assails our ears: kids exclaiming, parents explaining, everyone vocalising the wonder of it all.

  I was never much into science, but it was something you loved. There you are, down there, purple sparkly jumper with the silver love-heart stitched to its chest. The way we wear things as seven-year-olds without a trace of self-consciousness. We’re walking briskly, we two, away from the exhibition about human embryology, over towards the adjoining section. Hand in hand. We live in the West Country now, Oxford long behind, left when you were just four, your sister two. This place is @Bristol, its name a fitting herald of the online world that is evolving around us as we breathe.

  Mummy and your sister are elsewhere in the vast hall, your sister’s interest snared by the interactive stands demonstrating trompe l’oeil and all manner of other perceptual tricks. You and I are heading for engineering, though, returning to see once again the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

  Do you have any recollection? It made such an impression at the time. Look at you, a little girl with her dad, rapt in front of the screen, waiting till the video starts its inevitable next loop. Let’s descend, softly as sycamore seeds, so we, too, can catch the show.

  You peer over your own seven-year-old shoulder, watching what your child’s eyes see. On the monitor, a film of a huge, girded structure, fabricated in steel and concrete, its fairway tarmacked like any regular road. A river torrenting below. It looks so solid, so substantial; the bridge should be indestruc­tible to any but the most explosive force. But now, look at it: it starts to twist, buckling around its longitudinal axis. Rapidly, the amplitude picks up, it’s warping now, great swingeing torques, oscillating wildly like a manic fairground ride, whole swathes of concrete and metal seesawing like they’re made of naught but the flimsiest card. In spite of ourselves, we’re laughing, child-you and I: it looks so comic, so counter-­intuitive, it doesn’t look possible. Bridges just should not do that. It’s like something out of a black and white Laurel and Hardy.

  Look. Panicked people have abandoned their cars mid-crossing – they’re old fashioned ones, Fords mainly, this was the 1940s after all. Empty, the vehicles pitch side-to-side like sea-sick passengers in an Atlantic storm. The Tarmac starts cracking, disintegrating like a global-warmed ice floe. This is the bit you love the most. That guy, in his long greatcoat and trilby, running forward, barely able to keep to his feet, thinking nothing of his own safety. He was a professor or something. At last he makes it to the nearest car, grapples with the door, opens it. Allows the dog trapped inside to leap free. Then the pair of them scarper, unsteady as drunken lords, back to the safety of solid ground. Finally, the shearing forces overwhelm. The whole central section of the bridge collapses, plunging into the water below, displacing an almighty plume of spray.

  The wind, the wind. That awe-full destruction caused by nothing more than the wind. Yes it was strong, gale-force if I recall, but nothing that would have qualified for even a mention on the news. Nothing that should have troubled that man-made colossus. Do you remember the explanation, intoned in voiceover as we watched it all unfold? How, unanticipated by the hapless engineers, a wind of a certain, very particular speed established a fatal resonance with the bridge’s structure, setting it vibrating like an instrument string. Untrammelled energy was channelled into its fabric, bringing about its eventual demise.

  Come, let us leave @Bristol, leave your seven-year-old self to enjoy the rest of her day, all the marvellous sights she has yet to behold. You cast a glance behind as we ascend, up past the arboreal pillars, each of us starting once more to dematerialise. Below us, you and your dad have moved on, are lost now back in the crowd. Impossible to pick them out; Mummy and your sister, likewise.

  My words; this story – you will have your stalking doubt. And for all I will strive for honesty in my brushwork, which of us can be unflinching in telling our account? But truth. Truth will be like that wind. Truth you will know by its resonance. Be under no illusion. It will set things within you vibrating, sometimes violently so. Like for those folk on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, it will feel scary. It will feel as though the ground under your feet is swaying, yawing, buckling, disintegrating. It will feel as though everything on which you have so long stood is about to come crashing down. Do not be afraid. For this is how you will recognise truth. And this is how truth will bring you, if you are brave enough to allow it – like that professor and that poor bewildered pooch – safe back to solid ground.

  ONE

  Origins

  Arriving in the station foyer, I look to see when the next train is due before going to grab a coffee. A quick glance at the screen shows one is just about to depart. Suddenly I’m fumbling at the barrier, trying to get my wallet out, trying to get my ticket out, my roll bag sliding off my shoulder in the midst of it all, tangling my arm, everything conspiring to slow me. She’s so kind, the woman there – she buzzes the gate open and lets me through on trust.

  I run full pelt along the underpass, taking the stairs at the other end three at a time, and emerge to find the train standing at an eerily deserted platform, diesel thrumming, everyone else on board, the guard with his hand on the door. Shrill whistle. I run towards him, breathing heavily from the exertion, managing a few nonsensical words: Is this Didcot? He looks momentarily nonplussed, then seems to get what I’m asking. He gives me a nod and a grin and ushers me past, shutting the door behind me with a heavy clunk.

  I find a seat without a reservation and slump in next to the window. I have to get my breath back; things are slowing down, time is catching up. This is such a short life. It won’t seem that way to you, not the age you are now. Twenty-one. I remember how I was then, nearing the end of art school: nothing seems vital when you’re that age, there’ll always be a chance to change tack if you set off in the wrong direction. But believe me, it picks up pace, that clock, its hands turning more quickly with every revolution. Jobs and travel and dates and relationships, a decade chewed. Then maybe a career and a mortgage and maybe kids and then – whoosh – that’s another fifteen, twenty years. And suddenly you’re further from the start than the finish. And you begin to see it, that chequered flag in the middle-distance, in the niggles and the aches, and the changes in your body and face, and the evidence of what you can no longer quite so easily do.

  We think there’ll always be time to make things right. But there won’t. There can’t be.

  I’m sitting facing back. It’s easier somehow, looking out of the window; things unfold gently, none of the frenetic rushing-towards of a forward gaze.

  The train gathers momentum, leaving Bath behind, heading for Wiltshire, and Oxfordshire beyond. Chimney stacks peek above a high embankment. A whiff of tobacco smoke as a guy goes past along the aisle. The guard comes on the loudspeaker but there’s something wrong with the sound; I can’t make out the first thing he’s saying. Then suddenly we’re out of the city, into open country, a long stand of tall trees beside the line, all grown at an identical slant, leaning like worshipful monks, evidence of the wind that has so long prevailed.

  I check my phone. Nothing from you. There never has
been, not in seven years. Every email I send, every text – chatty updates, interested enquiries, assurances of love – unacknowledged. Like coins down a wishing well.

  I understand, though. I know what you have gone through. So I keep going, communicating every week or two. A marathon of waving from this distant shore.

  What would you think to see me now, iPhone in hand? I’ve kept pace with technology, to a certain degree, anyhow. Do you remember that old Nokia, how you used to laugh at its push-button Ludditeness, its inert screen, its jiggling space-invader-style icons? We went together to that shop. You – tech-savvy twelve-year-old that you were – enjoying showing off your knowledge of smart phones, helping your dad take his first step into the new era. I’d been thinking of getting one for a while. Then when I moved out, into that rented place on Drake Avenue, BT taking untold weeks to get the broadband connected – it pushed me to take the plunge, to get a phone I could do emails and internet with. Something to keep in touch with family and friends, those who were rooting for me in this strange new life I was embarking on. Something I could use to keep in touch with you and your sister when you weren’t around. Bonus by-product: something you loved to play on – Temple Run, Flappy Bird, Candy Crush, all the faddy games so important to the young.