You

by Phil Whitaker

  That wasn’t so bad, was it? None of the blood and gore of that Derbyshire farm. But that was a different kind of violence we witnessed: subtle, deniable, incremental, bamboozling. But violence all the same. It was just one instance, just an example; I could have shown you ten thousand more.

  I narrow myself, streamlining what shape I have to maximise my speed. The buffeting is intense. Somewhere over the south of England I shoot straight through a huge flock of starlings, my incursion sending them murmurating in all directions. I check behind – see you, too, punch a hole through the shape-shifting black cloud. A moment later it closes behind you like a self-healing wound, as though you had never been.

  We scorch along, catapulted into rarefied air. Our speed is incredible. We are speed incarnate, our existence weighed solely in kilometres per second. Below us, land gives way to sea gives way to land gives way to sea again. The Mediterranean, glinting like crinkled blue foil. Here and there, ships inscribe languorous Vs. Then a khaki island. Malta. Looking like it’s floating. The shade-shift of the shallower waters that skirt its shores hinting at the sand sloping away beneath the surface of the sea.

  Down to the harbour, cornering tight around the bridge tower of a Royal Navy destroyer berthed among the fishing vessels and cruise ships. Along the promenade, flitting just feet above the heads of the evening walkers. Gentlemen in hats; ladies with wasp waists and full skirts. The air is balmy; the hotel is whitewashed; the views over the Med superb. From the ballroom yonder, music – big band stuff. This is the fag-end of the fifties; Bill Haley and Elvis are blasting convention elsewhere, but their rebellious rhythms have yet to break through for the genteel classes. You feel exhausted, wrung out, all this ricocheting about in space and time. This is the last one, I promise, the last thing for now that I need you to see.

  We enter through wide-flung French doors, and find ourselves a vantage among the glittering glass of a chandelier. The light is bright, it takes us a moment to adjust. Couples glide and spin below us, like molecules in liquid. Boy-girl, boy-girl. The dance floor is flowing. Dinner jackets and ball gowns, pearls and diamonds, Brylcreemed hair shining. It’s a live band, remarkably, up on the stage, brass and strings and drum kit and double bass. Glen Gray, VIP’s Boogie, if you want to know.

  There she is, Gloria, her mass of curls marking her out. She’s dancing with some sailor, his starched white uniform offsetting the shimmering blue of her taffeta gown. You can’t help yourself, the thought is instantaneous: she’s like a grown-up version of the Cluedo-playing child we’ve just visited. Ten years have passed, she’s put on a few more inches, and filled out in other ways. It’s a bit awkward, isn’t it, looking down from where we are. But décolletage is all the rage. Think of it as marketing.

  She’s gay, isn’t she, in the fifties’ sense of the word. Her creamy complexion fair radiates excitement, possibility, joie de vivre. All evening she’s been aware of the sly glances, the bobbing Adam’s apples, the marking of her card. The centre of so much attention. She’s not the best dancer – her moves are a little stiff, ungainly even – but with looks like that she’ll be forgiven plenty.

  Look at her partner, the sailor. He should be having a ball, shouldn’t he, dancing with this beauty? Instead, his eyes are a little wide, his expression almost fearful, as though he’s stolen some precious jewel and has just made out the distant wail of a siren. He’s out of his depth with this one and he knows it. They came ashore, dozens and dozens of them, full dress kit, caps under their arms, leaving HMS Decoy moored in the Grand Harbour. They fanned out through Valletta in groups, hunting for entertainment, seeking spoils in the nightlife. Many will have wound up in bars and clubs, but he and his three confederates struck gold. It had been ridiculously easy to infiltrate this ball – even though their uniforms marked them out as aliens. They just strolled through the hotel lobby, gave a nod to the doorman, and into the ballroom without so much as being asked for an invitation. Respect for the military. And what a night it has been. Delightful debutantes as far as the eye can see. Some declined dance requests disdainfully, but for every one of those stuck-up Susies there was another girl who thought a swing with a serviceman would be a delightful change of scene.

  And this one. Gloria. He can scarcely believe it. A mere look from her startled his stallion heart into a flat-out gallop. Petite, blonde, curvaceous, her soft Yorkshire accent mellifluous to his ears after the coarse masculinity of two months at sea. The bewildering blend of her perfume, a scent he feels he could quite happily drown in. There is something about her, he can’t put his finger on it. He wants her, yet she terrifies him to the exact and opposite degree. She is so poised, aloof even, her every remark – about her private education, and now this Maltese finishing school – seeming to stake out a picket fence between them. But the way she uses her body as they dance. He is acutely conscious of the brush of her breasts against his tunic, the warmth of her hand in the small of his back, the occasional contact of their thighs. It is as though she is talking in two languages, the verbal and the physical, and saying contradictory things.

  As for her, what does she see in sailor-boy? She’s danced with the heir to a tweed weaving dynasty, with a young surgeon, with a bright thing in publishing. What possible allure could an electrical rating from a Daring-class destroyer hold? He’s hardly good- looking, even less so in his discomfiture. But it’s the way she can tie his tongue, after all the suave chitchat of the confident dinner-jacketed bachelors, that is rather thrilling – a confirmation of her power. And she is hyper-aware of the resentful glances from her erstwhile suitors as she twirls around the hall. She has them on threads, the lot of them. She has only to twitch her fingers and they jerk to attention. She will decide who has what of her. She is in control.

  Do you know why we’re here? I admit, it isn’t easy – he looks so different now he’s grown to be a broad-boned young man. But just now Gloria makes some remark, throws her head back in a laugh (emphasising her décolletage), and he gives a grin to let her know he’s found it terrifically amusing, even though he hasn’t. You notice his front teeth, splayed and gappy. And those ears, sticking out as you recall. He made it somehow, did Ted, all the way through school and now to his national service years.

  Dance over, they go for some air, this odd couple. Gloria looks back over her shoulder from the verandah. For a moment you fear we’re discovered; she seems to be gazing directly at us. It’s OK, remember: we are not of this time, we cannot be seen. No, that backwards glance is to check, in the periphery of her vision, that eyes are following her, as she wants them to be.

  The chandelier tinkles as we exit its dewdrop cascades and glide out after them. It’s dark now; dusk descends that much more precipitously this far south. The extensive gardens behind the hotel seem to vanish into the blackness. The music – a Count Basie number strikes up – is a good deal quieter out here. Initially we can’t see them. They appear to have vanished, too, Ted and Gloria. Warm, humid air. Cicadas chirping insistently. The flickering silver of the leaves of a white poplar, as the half-moon appears briefly from behind cloud.

  Ted’s uniform gives them away, just a shadowy grey blur beneath the tree’s canopy. Slowly slowly we advance, fifteen, twenty feet in the air, and insinuate ourselves between the branches. Down below us we can just make them out, the happy couple, her back pressed against the tree trunk. I know, I know. It’s plain embarrassing. We don’t like to think of elderly relatives as ever having been sexual beings. And it’s hard to compute: you assumed people didn’t behave like this, all that time ago. Perhaps, like every generation, you believe that sex as recreation – rather than re-creation – was invented just for you. But this is how it’s been since the dawn of time, irrespective of the delicate fabrics with which we’ve tried to clothe it.

  She’s a tease, isn’t she, Gloria? – she who will become your grandmother. Big long smooches, hungry lips, tongue probing, hands roving. Then pushing him away, saying w
e mustn’t. Then a show of inward wrestling, for just the right length of time, before she’s back at him, for all the world like she can’t restrain herself, standing on tiptoes to reach him, pulling his head down with her hands behind his neck.

  As for him. Well, he’s intoxicated. That this unattainable beauty, this cultured creature, should want him. Then not want him. Then prove to want him so powerfully that it over-rides all the sense, breeding, and class that so securely scaffolds women like her in their station. That’s too heady a mix for any young man. He’s drunk on it, gorged on it. He has to do his seventeen times table in his head to stop himself ejaculating in his pants. I’m sorry, that’s indelicate, but that’s the sum of it.

  We’ve seen enough. There’s no need for us to dwell, it only gets more excruciating. No need for us to watch as she slides a hand to rest on the front of his hip, just inches from his fly. No need to listen to the rustling of silk as he hitches the skirts of her ball gown above her waist, nor the snap of elastic against skin as her French knickers come down. I will tell you that, once he’s hefted her aloft, once he feels her legs squeezing either side of his hips, and her slippery wetness enveloping him, there is nothing he can do to hold on. Yes, of course, they should have used a rubber. But never in even his wildest fantasies had Ted foreseen being in need of one. As for Gloria, she of the charmed existence. Nothing for her could ever possibly go wrong.

  Shooting stars in reverse, we streak up through the Maltese evening, leaving your grandparents to their fate. We pick up speed, a tremendous acceleration fuelled by intention alone. I have a train to rejoin. You – well, you have whatever you have to do. There is no need to watch this particular catastrophe unfold: the absence of menstruation, the shameful consultation, the pregnancy confirmed. Oh, the trembling fury of dear old Angie, her precious doll come back from Malta despoiled. Demanding that Archie do something to fix it, infuriated that there is nothing he seems able to do. The humiliation; they will have to move. Pack up, lock stock and barrel, take themselves to an entirely different neighbourhood – another town – where there is no one they know.

  The only consolation? Gloria – disgraced, sullied Gloria – does at least remember the name of the man concerned. Oh, had Angie ever imagined herself finding solace in such a thing! Archie always was a pathetic specimen, entirely unequal to action, and that is now revealed in glorious Technicolor. Angie takes it upon herself. Insistent enquiries of the Admiralty track first Ted’s ship, then Ted himself down. An interview in the presence of his commanding officer. There could be charges brought, Angie declares – he should be thoroughly ashamed, forcing himself on a defenceless young woman far away from her home. Infinitely better for all concerned would be a wedding, and if that is to be Ted’s preferred course then he’d better look sharp about it.

  The further we go, our twin tracks tracering the sky, the lighter it becomes, almost as though we are chasing and catching and refusing to allow the sun to dip below the horizon. White cliffs, the Kentish coast, on over London and the Home Counties. I can sense something in your flight, a heaviness, as though you are gaining mass. I hope you realise that was not the start of Mummy’s life you witnessed. Your aunt was the first born. But as children these kinds of family details seem unimportant, don’t they? If ever we’re told them, they’re quickly forgotten.

  Not the start of Mummy’s life, then, but the overtures to it, and eventually to you.

  But it’s not that. That’s not what’s troubling you. We’re back in full daylight; I catch sight of my train fast approaching Didcot below. Gradually, you veer away, our paths diverging. I think I get it: you came this far on a leap of faith. But all I’ve shown you are a few squalid scenes, and an unseemly interest in a sex life of long ago. Nothing, it seems, that’s anything to do with you.

  I am doing the underpainting. Marking the canvas with the shapes and tones that will inform what will soon become visible. That is all.

  We’ve time, if we’re quick about it; Oxford isn’t so very far. I scorch across your path, my slipstream sucking you along in my wake. Down to the golden limestone colleges, hurtling past spires that have probed the heavens for centuries. We screech round Carfax, cannon down St Aldate’s, Old Tom sounding sonorously from his tower. Flash over Folly Bridge and arrive at a house on Chatsworth Road.

  We peer through the bay window, our extra-­corporeality leaving no out-breaths to fog the glass. There you are, two-and-a-half, cute as a cute thing in your OshKoshB’Gosh dungarees. You’re sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of this Victorian terrace that is your home. It’s a Sunday, I can tell you that, because the Observer is open on my lap over there on the sofa. My tortoiseshell glasses are pushed up on my forehead. You’re busy stacking plastic cups, and playing at hiding a yellow foam ball.

  Noises from upstairs: your baby sister waking from her afternoon nap. Mummy hears them, too. She comes through from the kitchen, appearing in the doorway, and she starts to cross the room. You look up at her, your chubby face breaking out in a grin, and you lift your arms in that time-honoured gesture that says pick-me-up-and-give-me-a-carry. She pauses right in front of you, does Mummy, with her tumbling blonde curls, the face that you see as beyond beautiful. Except that her face just now is as a mask. She stares at you – your raised hands beseeching. How does her expression come across to you, a tiny child? Hostile? Withering? Then she turns and moves past, out of the doorway and into the hall, you sat there stranded on your bottom on the floor.

  From my place on the sofa, over the top of my paper, I watch it all. Your head swivels to track her exit. Your arms gradually fall.

  You can’t possibly remember this, it is from a time before your memory begins. But it is scored into you, a foundational part of you, a wick running through your flame. A hidden baton conducting the orchestra of you.

  Away we fly, sucked backwards as though by a vacuum, Grandpont receding beneath us. There’ll be hell to pay if I don’t rejoin myself before Didcot. That was it, your own start point, and for now all I have time to show. I’m worried for you, and try to gauge you in your flight. I recognise something in your energy, a repressed, high-amplitude vibration that is new. I have felt this in you before. Fury, though I doubt you understand it. A memory: you on the path up to the swings near that rented place on Drake Avenue. I’d brought you to see it, before I moved in, so you and your sister could choose your rooms. You were quivering with feeling, didn’t know how to name it, could barely speak. When you finally managed it, all you could say were some puny words: It’s not exactly a family home.

  Suddenly, you swerve away, hitting warp speed, and vanish to a single point of light like a daytime star. I’m alone in the sky. Once upon a time that would have eaten at me, but now I can let you go. I’m heartened that you came, hopeful you will rejoin, but these are matters for you alone.

  I course off in the opposite direction, and follow the tracks till I catch sight of my train. A shallow dive till I’m alongside my carriage. I edge forwards, examining each window. Eventually, I find myself: sightless eyes, wooden limbs. The iPhone in my hand is the perfect cover for my lack of engagement with the world around. I flip through the air vent, pull off a neat somersault, then I’m back inside myself, animated once again.

  Them

  This is the story of you, her, me, and them. You’ll never meet them. But they are people you should know.

  We’re at the Half Moon. A figurative name if ever there was one, speaking of the watches of the night, of the eternal battle being waged between darkness and the light. They’re evenly poised, those opposing forces, straining and vying to best each other, neither apparently managing to wrest the upper hand. The Half Moon, then, but the crucial question, the thing on which everything depends, is whether it will prove to be in wax or in wane.

  Prof is leading the meeting. Prof – the nickname is meant to be ironic. It conjures up ideas of crazy white hair, pince-nez spectacles, eccentr
ic intelligence. Nothing like Jet actually is. That’s her real name: Jet. She’s Swiss, or Swedish, or Dutch, I never remember which: ice blonde bob, Bombay Sapphire eyes, a cool measured voice that delivers depthless wisdom with a delightful lilt that somehow makes you feel you must definitely be one of the most special people she knows.

  Jet, I love.

  I love Rev, too. Tamsin. A Northerner like me, who exudes warmth and positivity. She was a nurse, once upon a time, back home near the Tyne. She showed me a picture of her wedding day at the end of a meeting one time: my god, what a beauty, her face the embodiment of a tenderness and innocent love for the world that near broke my heart to behold. Now she’s a vicar. Not a vicar, in fact; a curate or something. But that kind of thing. She wears big beady necklaces, and has about twenty bangles around each wrist.

  I think: how could anything like this have happened to people like them? Back in the day, before I knew such things were even possible, I used to see occasional items on the news: Superman waving from the Queen’s balcony; Spiderman scaling Westminster Abbey. Purple banners unfurled. Like everyone, I used to think: must be something dodgy about them. British justice: fair, impartial, the envy of the world. Judges don’t make mistakes, not over and over. If you happened to be in the room at the time, I would kill the telly with the remote control. I would hug you, hug your sister if she was there too, though neither of you would have known why. You didn’t want to be seeing things like that. If the courts had decided those guys mustn’t see their kids, well, there must be something very far wrong with them. Methinks they doth protest too much. #dodgydads, #dangerousdads. We all know how cruel men can be.

  And it was only ever dads. You never saw Wonderwoman atop the dome of St Paul’s.

  But Prof. And Rev.

  The Zambian you would believe, I’ll grant you. He’s across the table from me, hand wrapped round his pint, quiet as ever, brooding. Six foot four, built like the proverbial outhouse: bull neck, close-cropped hair, broad nose. His cheeks are ruddy with sun-damaged vessels, a legacy of his sub-Saharan childhood. Toby, his real name is. He runs a bottling plant out near Portishead. Thick Afrikaans accent, making him – inaccurately but inevitably – sound every inch the white supremacist. We know how they talk, don’t we? We saw so many on the news, spouting their vile propaganda during the anti-apartheid years. The Zambian is every inch the dodgy dad – just to look at him you’d think he oughtn’t be allowed anywhere near a child, his or anyone else’s. Until you get to know him, that is.