A Long Island Story
Page 29
Anyway, couples who loved each other made her feel ill. Think of her brother and his soppy wife. All that schmaltzy cuddling. Yuck! Surely there was something better than love, something different, something grown-up? Love was for girl Addie and boy Ira, for children who didn’t know anything. Wasn’t it? Love was something you grew out of.
‘Never mind about your stupid jokes,’ said Becca. ‘How are we going to get home now?’
She didn’t look worried, just hungry.
‘Yeah,’ said her brother, ‘we’re totally lost. Becca is going to start to cry!’
‘No, I’m not! I don’t even care. No lion is going to eat me!’
Ben turned and gave an unnecessarily reassuring smile. ‘We’re not lost,’ he said, ‘we just don’t know where we are yet. We will soon.’
He came to a crossroads and looked at Addie.
‘Up to you,’ he said fondly.
‘Whichever way!’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? We’ll get there sometime.’
Also by Rick Gekoski
Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist
William Golding: A Bibliography (with P.A. Grogan)
Staying Up: A Fan Behind the Scenes in the Premiership
Tolkien’s Gown and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books
Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir
Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature
Darke
Acknowledgements
Novels are often prefaced by an assertion that any resemblances between their characters and living persons is unintended. This is rarely true, but it helps prevent law suits.
A Long Island Story has many such resemblances, to both the dead and the living, because this novel is based on my childhood, and a great deal of what is done and said in it actually took place, or so it seems to me now. But 1953 is a long time ago, and though childhood memories have an unusual tenacity, I can’t vouch for the literal accuracy of what is recorded here, nor does it matter very much. In the end, we make up our facts almost as comprehensively as our fictions.
In 1953, of course, I would have had no idea of what the inner lives and backstories of the adults in my life consisted of. Where they came from, what they yearned for, what regrets they harboured, what frustrations, what dreams. As one gets older some of these blanks are filled in, but never fully of course, nor would one want them to be.
I have wanted to write an account of this period in my childhood for almost fifty years but didn’t know how to do it, quite. I tried it as a memoir, but it felt lifeless, and I twice abandoned the project. It was only when I realised – God knows why it took so long – that the best way to recover the truth of that time was in a work of fiction that I was able to get on with it.
I believe that the dead have rights, and am anxious that my fictional ‘portrayals’ of my parents and grandparents are fair and sympathetic in spirit. But this is not a memoir, and I have taken the liberties that all novelists take (for most novels have something drawn from ‘real’ life in them): where the demands of the facts and the needs of the story are in conflict, go with the story.
So I have made some things up. My father did not have the affair recorded here. And my grandfather was not a (loveable) shyster of the sort I have described. I don’t think either of them would have minded much, if I explained. Novelists make things up.
There is the further possibility that this story may cause offence to the people, both inside my family and without, who are still with us. I am sorry about this, but not very. I have my own way of seeing and reconstructing the past, trying – both as a person and as a writer, if this distinction is makeable – to get my story whole, and compelling, and memorable: worth telling and worth reading. Other people would tell theirs in other ways.
As ever, I am grateful to so many people who help me to write. To my wife Belinda, for her exacting, loving counsel and support; to my sister Ruthie (Becca in this story), for wise advice about the development of the text, excellent memory, and acute proofreading; and as ever to my friend and literary agent Peter Straus. I am also indebted, again, to Rosalind Porter, for encouragement with an early draft, and to my nephew Matthew Greenberg, for his usual acuity and enthusiasm.
Once again I have had the pleasure and the privilege to work with the people at Canongate, whose belief in my work, and capacity to improve and to promote it, have meant everything to me in my late incarnation as a novelist: to Jamie Byng, of course, and to Francis Bickmore, but especially to my editor Jo Dingley, who sees things so clearly and helps me to improve them when it is necessary, and to copy editor Debs Warner, who has done an exemplary job helping me to tighten and to clarify.
I wrote most of this novel in our house in New Zealand, during the painful time when my beloved mother-in-law, Alison Kitchin, was dying. She was the first reader of this book, and looked forward to updates as soon as I could write them. I would print them out a few pages at a time, as they emerged. She was declining quickly, and I had to hurry. The last hundred pages of the first draft were written in about ten days, while she could still concentrate. We got it done, just, and at the end she laid it on the table next to her green reclining chair, Emma the one-eared cat on her lap, and pronounced it ‘very enjoyable’.
This book is dedicated, too, to her memory.
‘Makes for dark, thrilling reading . . . In James Darke, Gekoski has created a powerful, raging voice’
Spectator
‘Packed with emotional intensity’
Sunday Times
‘Page-turning and absorbing’
Daily Mail