You

by Phil Whitaker

  Let’s away, that’s all I wanted to show you. The casting of a line. There’s nothing more to see here. Perhaps you’re fascinated, seeing your parents as young lovers at the very start of things. But I can’t dwell, it’s too raw. Let’s get ourselves back to bustling George Street, for me to continue my journey through this city that was once my home.

  As we leave this past moment behind, I cast a glance back to the me of then. Willow beneath willow. Young and naïve. Regarding Mummy so attentively, with such concern. If I could be heard, would the me of now speak? What would I say to myself? I shrug off the thought. It doesn’t get me anywhere. Round and round in circles. Only by living and learning do we gain the wisdom we wish we’d had, so that we would never have had to have lived and learned.

  ❦

  The pavements are crowded, even though the height of the summer tourism is long gone. A troop of Chinese school kids marches past like a Roman phalanx, their face masks modern-day shields against invisible enemies. I have to stand in against a café window to give them room to pass. Behind me, a guy is incensed. He must be in a tearing hurry. Take up the whole pavement, he shouts, I mean, why not? I hope none of them has the English to comprehend.

  Across the street, there’s the neoclassical façade of the history faculty. Niche-dwelling statues. Signs stating it is not open to the public. Gold-leafed above the portico, the mottos of both university and city: Dominus Illuminatio Mea; Fortis Est Veritas. Rev would like the former, Prof the latter. Zambo could certainly translate: The Lord is my light; The truth is strong.

  The last of the Chinese kids goes past. Pavement passable again, I cross the entrance to Gloucester Green. That shop Rowan, where once you bought that most exquisitely soft brown rabbit cuddly toy – that, too, now vends fast food. The things that stick in the mind. Those years with you as a young child, you and your sister, your sweet innocence and wonder at the world. Such times. This is the hard part, the brutally tough bit, the parenting that really counts. The digging in for you, with precious little to guide me as to what it is best to do and not to do. Thank God for Prof, Rev, Zambo, too.

  I come out at the bottom of St Giles. Waterstones, groaning with the weight of a billion words clamouring for attention. Boswells, old-school department store, still going strong. The church of St Mary Magdalen castaway on its island, ranks of bikes like boats moored along its railings. Everywhere I look there are reminders and memories.

  The Eagle and Child, where Mummy confided in me about the disturbing things that had happened during some ­twenty-somethings’ summer trip to southern Spain.

  Browns, where over a meal she told me some of the harrowing unhappiness of her childhood. The Lamb and Flag, where I was regaled with the betrayals of a former fiancé. Again and again, the world meting out cruel, bewildering blows.

  I was crushed for her, all that she had endured. Full of tender admiration for how she had turned out, how she had wrested this perfect self despite all she had been through. She was determined to overcome it, she said, to live a life that was beautiful and good. I responded to her rallying cry. I would join forces with her, partner her in creating a love-filled life. I would be her trustworthy ally.

  She told me once: I have never in my entire life been truly happy.

  I can make you so, I thought. If you would let me.

  She finished our relationship on two occasions during those first six months. Offered tearful explanations when I called round to ask why. It was nothing I’d done. I was perfectly lovely. Everything she’d so long dreamed of, in fact. But her past experiences had shattered any capacity for trust. How frightened she was of inevitable hurt. How scared she was to get involved with me.

  You can trust me, I thought. I said: You can trust me.

  Pull, push, pull, push, pull. I was like a fish, hook barbing the flesh of its mouth, being reeled in.

  We’re on Pen-y-ghent, walking to the summit, that same trip to Yorkshire, a few days after that cine film private show with Ted and Gloria. It’s uncharacteristically warm, the mid-June sun beating down from a cloudless sky. A solitary man passes us on his way down, dressed only in walking boots and Y-fronts, the rest of his clothing stashed in his backpack, calling a cheery ‘Fine day!’ as we stand aside to let him by on the path.

  Your mother’s voice choking as she explains how that home movie has made her feel. How utterly heartbreaking it was to have watched her five-year-old innocence, and to think what eventually became of it. How she had never, not once, known true love.I thought: I can show you true love.

  At another point on our ascent: how she still had her dead grandmother’s old ring, and wanted to use the diamond in it, have it remounted in a modern platinum setting, if ever she were lucky enough to meet a decent man and get engaged.

  I thought: you have, you have met a decent man.

  Snow persisting up near the summit. Lying on our backs in it, turning the camera round and taking a pre-smartphone picture, long before the word selfie was coined.

  At the peak. Deep inside myself, misgivings about the depths of her sorrow, what I might be getting myself into. But I had such faith in a story in which good prevails. And I had no doubt about my ability to author my part of that.

  I knew what I had to do.

  Proposal.

  Accepted.

  How I have rued – yet cannot, because of you, and your sister, rue – that day.

  ❦

  I’m lodging in a room at Somerville, found through a website that lets out vacant university accommodation to visitors to the city. I can’t think they’re too hard up, these Oxford institutions, but I guess every little helps. It occurred to me that this might be your own college. How I might just run into you at the lodge, or in the refectory. But as Rev would say: if it happens, it was meant to be.

  The porter checks me in, gives me my keys and a map of the college, and points me in the right direction. Through the wisteria-lined front quad. Up the staircase to the Darbishire attic. The room is along an eaves corridor; I have to use a keycard to gain access from the stairwell. How these days we try to do everything to keep our young secure. Wall lights, sensing my movement, glow more brightly as I make my way. The room door has a memorial plaque on it, some former student who’s made some cash and donated to the college for posterity. I turn the key and let myself in: basic, studenty single-bedded, but it’s cheap and it’s somewhere to stay.

  I think: is this a way of being closer to you, booking myself into a place that must be like your own digs? Later on, when the sun is starting to set, and I’m still sat there on that watching-the-world-go-by wall, you never having shown, will I regret even thinking I should stay overnight? Waving from this distant shore. But what if? What if you came, what if you did make our rendezvous? I don’t know how it would go. Would you be spitting with anger, furious at the myriad ways you feel I let you down? Or grieving and guilt-stricken, light bulbs having already switched on about what happened to you? Either way, I would need to absorb and acknowledge your emotions. I wouldn’t want to be under a timetable, I wouldn’t want to be constrained. I’d want to be able to offer whatever you needed – take you out for a meal, get repeated rounds of drinks in, talk together walking round and round Christ Church Meadow for as long as it might take.

  ❦

  I think I know when it might have started for you. When the line was cast over your own waters, plopping lightly on to the surface, floating its bait.

  February. I’d finally accepted the marriage couldn’t be saved. Should we have spent thousands upon thousands on therapy, attending weekly, in hope of a way forward? I tried to persuade her, and maybe it wouldn’t have helped. I think it would have proved too painful, too overwhelming for Mummy. What if a therapist had begun to probe beneath the surface, to get to the reasons she repeatedly experienced the world as she did – when that started to happen, would she have pulled out? Before long we
’d have been back where we started. Ticker tape chuntering, dust motes in the projector beam. Images of the past playing over me. Rings coming off her finger. That’s how it played out anyway, with late-night, pages-long rants scrawled in an unraveling hand, detailing the traumas I’d wreaked on her, you, your sister. Threatening social services if I didn’t get out this instant and leave. The morning she came into the room where I slept, and told me her brother-in-law and a mate of his were on their way down from Yorkshire, coming to throw me out. Of my home. In front of my kids. The truths she’d told them they’d completely believed.

  February. We agreed a date on which to tell you and your sister. Before we got anywhere near that day, I found the card you’d made, displayed on the chest of drawers in the room where Mummy slept. Do you have any recollection? Your neat twelve-year-old writing, line after line telling her she is a wonderful Mummy, and that you, your sister, your aunty and uncle, this friend, that friend, the other friend, the cat, the dog, even various favourite soft toys ALL LOVE HER.

  Uncle Tom Cobbly and all.

  Everyone except me.

  This is what I ask myself: did she come to find you, slump herself down on the bed in your room? Or was it more accidental: perhaps you happened across her when you got back from school. Tearful, inconsolable, wracked by shuddering sobs. Managing, somehow, to get out the awful news that your daddy no longer loves her.

  I can picture you, your fingers twisting together, butterflies fluttering frantically, the heart thumping wildly in your chest. Mummy dissolving in front of you. My God, how that must have made you feel. What does a child do to try to make things better? What can a child do to soothe such grief? You go to the craft cupboard, your fingers still trembling, take scissors and colouring pens, and make a card – just like the cards that have brought such delight at birthdays and Christmases and other special days down the years of your life. WE ALL LOVE YOU! It’s all you can possibly do.

  How do you deal with your feelings towards your father, one of the two people in the world you love the most? The one who has visited such grief upon your mother? Ages and ages you spend in your room, lying on your back on your bed, tossing your netball in the air, patting it back up with your feet, catching it again. Hands, feet, hands. Hands, feet, hands. Repetitive action. Soothing you. Allowing you to concentrate, focus, on anything other than the intolerable war raging in your heart.

  March. The weekend we’d planned to tell you and your sister about the divorce. Both of you were ill. Mummy, desperate to get it out in the open, pressing for the next weekend. It’s Mothering Sunday, I say. No matter, she says. She wants to tell you the day before Mothering Sunday.

  It’s important to tell you together, present a united front over the matter of our disuniting. I suggest we talk immediately before, make sure we’re both signed up to what will be said. She is tremulous at our meeting, comes across pathetically bewildered, says she doesn’t know if she will be able to speak; asks if I will be the one to say what we have to say.

  Ever the chivalrous. One more tug on the barbs, even as I’m tearing myself free. Only in retrospect did I see what I had allowed to happen, how I’d let myself become the mouthpiece.

  The worst day of my life, giving you, your sister that news. The terror I have for you, terror of my own, too.

  You come to find me in the kitchen a few days later. Your vulnerable twelve-year-old body sheathed in that floral print dress. Hands twisting together in front of you. Eyes imploring. Daddy, is there any hope?

  A different memory: we’re at Disneyland Paris, you, Mummy, your sister, and me. You’re seven. All through the stay you’ve been eyeing that rollercoaster, Big Thunder Mountain, trying to summon the courage to ride it. It’s way more scary than anything else in the park; way more scary than anything you’ve ever done, you who hates heights and steep slopes. And that’s precisely why you so want to do it. But every day you baulk at it, and taste the flat ignominy of defeat. The last hour on the last day – that’s it, you’ve got to try it. You can’t contemplate returning home without conquering your fear. We race round, you and I, leaving your mother and sister to catch one last go on It’s A Small World, which your sister so loves. And we find Big Thunder Mountain temporarily closed, some technical hitch that’s got to be fixed. The clock ticks. Ten minutes, shut. Twenty minutes, still shut. Thirty minutes and it’s re-opened. Massive queues have built up. We join, inching forwards through chicanes of barriers, hordes of thrill-seekers snaking back and forwards on themselves. The hands of my watch creep ever closer to the time we must leave. You’re so desperate to do it. I cannot bear that you’ll be crushed, disappointed. I pray to a god I don’t know is even out there, still less is bothered with a young child’s dream.

  Daddy, is there any hope?

  I look at you standing there. Entwined fingers; floral sheath. Feel the full impossibility of what we are facing. I don’t want to give you false hope. But even now I myself am holding the gossamer thin thread that links me still to this family I helped create. Even now I believe she might just pull back. Two years, maybe three. That’s what it might take for a therapist to help her sort out the stuff inside her head. I told her I would stick by her for the duration, not expect anything from the relationship, and when she was healed we could see. But she wouldn’t entertain it. Even then, though, you standing there with your twisting fingers, your pretty print dress, I still hoped she might have a change of heart, see if she could finally deal with the traumas, gain control of the projector.

  Almost certainly not, I tell you. But just maybe there is a chance.

  You think it’s down to me. You think it’s in my gift.

  We made it to Big Thunder Mountain, you and I. A couple more minutes and we’d have had to have called it a day, but we reached the front of the line in the nick of time. You rode it. You actually rode it. You crested the peaks, plummeted down sheer tracks, getting flung side to side by switchback bends, soaked by a water spray; raced towards a bridge that looked certain to take your head off, the carriages dropping down in a last-minute dip that brought us safely underneath. You were so full of it when we exited. You had mastered your fear. Your Disneyland trip was complete.

  ❦

  I have a quick wash in my Somerville room, sluicing the grime of the journey from my face. My hands are big like spades, cupping the water. There are creases in my palms that a fortune-teller could read. I dry myself, get a couple of things from my holdall, then take my canvas roll bag and prepare to leave.

  Crossing the main quad, a figure snags my attention on the other side. An academic, searching his pocket for the keycard to let himself into another staircase. Somehow he becomes aware of my gaze and looks back over his shoulder. Close-cropped hair, brown suede jacket over jeans, round-framed glasses, papers tucked under his arm. He meets my eye. It’s a strange moment, over in an instant. It’s as though I am looking at a different, younger me. Zambo reads a lot of cosmology – multiverses and parallel realities, quantum uncertainties, our lives branching an infinity of times with every decision point. I wonder if somewhere else, in some other version of this world, I have followed a different path, and am now a lecturer in fine art letting myself into my rooms in an alt.college just like this college appears to be.

  I pass through the main gates, out on the street again, and my feet find their rhythm. I skirt round a smashed Dolmio jar, its sauce splattered like a red Rorschach blot on the pavement. Bells peal from a distant tower, announcing the impending hour mark. Two tolls. Sixty minutes till our rendezvous.

  As I walk, I think about hooks and lines. Do you even know you were caught? The world is as the world is, and the world is normal for you. It took me years to see it, understand it for myself – even now I’m still sounding the full depths. What hope you?

  Maybe this will help. Karpman triangle, courtesy of Prof; some call it the drama triangle. Or, as Rev would have it, that which Jesus could
so presciently see. Let me draw it for you on the sketch pad of your imagination:

  No sooner have I finished the diagram than I’m suddenly knocked out of myself, winded – like a gale-blown leaf. I tumble upwards, uncontrollably acrobatic. Half a dozen heads over heels and then somehow it stops. I hang motionless for a moment, trying to get my bearings. I catch sight of myself on the pavement below, a walking automaton, hands thrust in jacket pockets, feet landing rhythmically on the cracks between the paving slabs. It’s one hell of a surprise: flight comes only when I am stationary. I’m still trying to work out what’s gone on when I catch sight of you, a furious shimmering further along St Giles, your energy refracting and wildly scattering the light that passes through you.

  You. Careering into me. Anger and frustration and grief and abandonment boiling and broiling in a seething brew. I set off in pursuit, swiftly overflying my plodding, earth-bound form. I wonder how long I’ve got; how long till my body reaches the end of St Giles and steps sightlessly into the traffic on Broad Street. Impossible to be sure, but I’ll have to be quick.

  You’re surging ahead now, weaving between the spires that loom into your path – St John’s, Balliol, All Souls, Oriel. I slalom through them on your tail, twisting and turning at break-neck speed. It looks for all the world as though you’re fleeing and I am chasing – but I know differently. That stunning impact, enucleating me from myself; then your headlong rush above the city streets: hit me, hug me – you want to do both simultaneously. I soar over Christ Church and follow you along Speedwell Street. Not for the first time, I’m struck forcibly by how you’ll have grown and changed. Adult you, stranger to me. Charting your own course – a reversal of roles – me, the parent, now trailing behind. Yet for all your independence, your sturdy self-confidence, in the matter of what happened to you, you have no map, no guide to the unfamiliar terrain.