1982 Janine (11 page)

Helga flees from the clearing but Janine does not. She is more dazed by astonishment than terror. Her hands automatically push back her hair and smooth her blouse and skirt as we hear the truck engine stop and see Hugo push through the branches. He is fat bald muscular, naked to the waist and wearing corduroys tucked into combat boots. He has a thick black beard, dark glasses and a revolver in his belt. Two silent Alsations stalk by his side and four yapping terriers. Janine stares up at him, apprehensive. He smiles kindly down at her then reaches forward with both hands and tears the blouse down to her hips exposing enough. Enough enough enough. Cut to:

Helga sprinting across open ground, distant barking of dogs. Then Helga wading through waistdeep weeds, hair and shirt dishevelled, face and breasts shiny with sweat, the only sound is distant birdsong and her loud gasps for breath. She comes to a big coil of barbed wire extending left and right as far as she can see. It is the sort I remember from old war films, higher than a man and supported at intervals by cross-shaped girders. I think they were a sort of tanktrap. This wire is very old and rusty, brambles and convolvulus entwine the lower parts. On the other side is a line of trees and behind the trees the top of an embanked motorway with traffic whizzing along. So Helga, no longer gasping quite so violently for breath, tucks her shirt back into her jeans, quickly rolls the torn ends of them up to her knees, pulls with her hands two strands of wire as far apart as possible, and cautiously inserts one leg. And here control will certainly be lost unless I think other things for a while.

But I am glad to be enjoying myself in the open air, I've had too little of that. My happiest memories are swinging over a puddle full of sunlight in a sunlit wood and being carried over fields in a kingly way on my father's shoulders. “It is inhuman not to love people of your own sex,” said Sontag. I certainly loved my father the timekeeper. He took me walks that were sheer delight, perhaps because my mother was with us. Then the walks became dull, perhaps because she stayed at home. Dad developed a bad habit of stopping beside every flower or tree which caught my eye,
producing a pocket botany book and laboriously looking up the name. This made walks very boring so I insisted on staying at home with my mother, and after that Dad went walks by himself or with his friend, Old Red.

Dad spoiled several good things with his serious helpfulness. One day, long before I was old enough for school, I was playing on the kitchen floor when I found some discarded envelopes in the wastepaper basket. My eye was caught by the brightness of the stamps which suddenly looked like windows into clearer, more exciting worlds. One of them, it must have come from my mother's cousin in New Zealand, showed a longbeaked wingless bird poking the grass of a field on the far side of the world, and on the British stamps the crimson behind the king's elegant profile seemed the best red I had ever seen. I wanted these magic little windows which nobody else wanted. With a pair of nailscissors I cut the stamps off the envelopes and trimmed away the perforated edges which I thought an unimportant frill. I then glued the stamps to a page in a discarded pocket diary. My mother must have given me the scissors, tube of glue and diary but they came so exactly when I needed them that I don't remember her giving them at all. There was no interval between wanting the stamps, cutting them free from the dull torn crumpled envelopes and putting them safely in my own little book. It was all one pure action, one pure thought. That night I showed Dad what I had made. He examined it with nods of the head, then explained that I should not have used glue. Real stamp collectors used a special kind of paper hinge. Also, real collectors did not cut off the perforated edge, for this destroyed the value of the stamp. All the same, he was pleased with me, I had made a beginning and that (he said) was the important thing. On the following Saturday he went by train into Glasgow, we thought to see a football match, but he returned in the early afternoon carrying a parcel and looking excited. He said, “This is all for you, jock. I got them from Ferris's stamp shop. I know Bill Ferris.”

He unpacked a huge new stamp album with a blank page in it for every country in the world. And an envelope full of as
sorted stamps of all nations. And a fat green Stanley Gibbons catalogue to help identify them. And a packet of hinges, pair of tweezers, neatly folding magnifying glass and tiny porcelain bath in which stamps could be detached from envelopes without damaging the perforations. My mother said something about expense. Dad said the money spent was an investment in my future: when I got to school my stamp collection would help my geography. He spread his big and intricate adult toys all over the kitchen table and tried to teach me how to play with them but it was too much, too difficult, too bloody boring. He was not discouraged. He said, “We'll take it in easy stages. We'll do ten minutes' work on it every evening after tea, you'll soon master it.”

I never mastered it. I probably complained too loudly. I cannot remember what became of the album, the multinational stamps, the fat green catalogue. A couple of days after he died I found the folding magnifying glass in a small bureau drawer beside his First World War medals.

Poor Dad. I suspect he was a lonely man. He did not mean to crush my delight in my little book of magic windows and he certainly prepared me for LIFE – which is a spark of delight buried under routines disciplines possessions plans and compromises which are meant to protect it, help it grow, make it useful to other people, and which eventually smother and kill it. But I'm not dead yet. Helga wades waistdeep through weeds, hair and shirt deliciously dishevelled, face and breasts shiny with sweat, and comes to the coil of barbed wire. She stops, gasping for breath, then quickly tucks her shirt back into her jeans, rolls the torn legs of the jeans up to mid-thigh and carefully with her hands pulls apart two strands of the wire and of course my Dad was a lonely man. One week I had three letters from him which I never read.

He usually sent me one letter every month, but several years after my mother left him this spate of three arrived with a day between each. Since I had not answered a previous letter (though I had certainly read it) I was afraid these letters were accusing me of neglect. He had never accused me of neglecting him, never made a self-pitying
remark in his life, but I did neglect him and did pity him, so three envelopes marked with my name in his firm bookkeeper's hand lay on the mantelpiece like unanswerable accusations. Helen said, “You are being very stupid, very inconsiderate.”

I said, “I agree.”

She said, “Your father may not like me but he is a thoroughly nice man.”

I said, “My father likes you a lot and yes, he is a thoroughly nice man.”

She said, “So open these letters
now
, he may be in trouble.”

I said coldly, “I know I am being irrational, but I will not open these letters till I have replied to the one before them. I may do that tonight.”

And I went off to work. When I returned that evening Helen was looking distressed. She said, “I've read his letters – please give him a phonecall, he's very unhappy.”

“Oh?”

“He finds it difficult to sleep – he's having nightmares about your mother. He keeps dreaming that she comes to him in a terrible state, all bleeding and accusing him of hurting her – killing her.”

The roots of my hair tingled. My scalp tightened so much that for a moment I felt my heart beating in it. We had not heard that my mother was dead. For all I know she still is alive. I went to the phone and dialled my father's nearest neighbour. He could easily have afforded a telephone, I had offered to pay for that myself, but he said only invalids and businessmen needed telephones. The neighbour brought him to the phone and in a very cheerful ordinary voice Dad said, “Hullo son.”

I said, “Hullo Dad, I'm coming down to see you tomorrow.”

He said, “Tomorrow? We're both working men. Come down on Saturday, we can spend more time together.”

My heart sank at that but I said, “Right, I'll be down early on Saturday morning.”

“Good. How's Helen?”

“Fine.”

“Good. Give her my best regards.”

“I'll do that. Good night Dad.”

“Good night son.”

I put down the telephone, went to the mantelpiece, picked up three letters in their opened envelopes, tore them across and flung them in the fire. I had never encountered my father when he was in an inferior position and I refused to do so. Was this cowardice? I think it was respect. I went down to see him on Saturday by bus (the railway line had been closed, uprooted by then) and enjoyed a really good day.

We walked by Uplaw farm on to a track over the moor. Dad, for once, talked cheerfully about the state of Britain. After years of Conservative rule we now had a Labour administration. Harold Wilson had to be cautious just now (said my father) and play the game with his cards very close to his chest, but when he finally recognised his true partners he would show his hand and British socialism might very well enter a new constructive phase. I don't know if Dad had picked up that metaphor from the
Daily Worker
, the
Tribune
or the
New Statesman
because he took all three. I made noncommittal grunting noises. My business acquaintances, some of them in the Labour Party, had told me that the new administration would be as conservative as it dared to be without provoking a trade union revolt. They were wrong. It became so conservative that it eventually provoked a trade union revolt. But although Dad had fought in the first and worst world war, and been through a general strike, a major lock-out and a depression, he had not faced the fact that it does not matter how the British manual worker votes at an election, because the leaders of the big parties only disagree about small things, things which do not disturb their investments. This perfectly frank and open conspiracy ensures whatever stability our Great and United Britannic Kingdom possesses and I approve of it – except when I get into my Scottish Nationalist phase and think, Fuck the lot of you. But I never argued with Dad about politics and he died without knowing I was a Tory. On this brisk afternoon with its cool breeze and alternating spells of rain and sunshine I heard his hopeful speculations with one ear and the skylarks with the other. We never spoke of the letters and this made me so happy that at last I said, with perfect honesty, words I had been rehearsing all the way
down in the bus: “Dad, we've a spare room in our house, why not come and live with us? Helen likes you.”

He grinned with pleasure and said, “Thanks son but my affairs are not quite as desperate as that. I might even surprise you. What would you say if I got married again?”

“I'd say it was a very good thing. Have you someone in mind?”

He looked shy for a moment and murmured that, in a way, yes, he had, but in another way, no, he had not. Then his arm rose, he stabbed at the horizon with a finger crying, “Look! The peaks of Arran.”

I saw a low dark smudge against a pale patch of clear sky but was not much impressed. On a clear day in central Scotland you can see Arran from any high place west of Tinto. I said, “Anyway, Helen likes you so come and stay with us whenever you want.”

This was the closest we came to mentioning his nightmares and his loneliness after my mother left him. He never wrote to me about bad dreams again, so I like to think he stopped having them. And he never remarried and never came to live with us, though when Helen left me he suggested that, since he was now retired, I might “find it handy” if he “looked after the house” for me. It was a practical plan. At sixty-five he was healthy, brisk and a good housekeeper. He kept his rooms as clean and tidy as Mum had done, and cooked for himself exactly the meals she had made. We would have been comfortable together. But I ignored the suggestion. Sharing a house with him would have been too much like another marriage.

On this last walk together I started noticing the flowering turf edging the track. I saw daisies and buttercups, two colours of clover, and bright, delicate little flowers I felt I knew very well though I could not remember having seen them before. I plucked a few. The head of one, smaller than a small fingernail and with a very frail stalk, looked like a yellow and scarlet ladies' sandal made of impossibly fine silk. I said, “What is this one called? Is it a member of the orchid family?”

“I don't know,” said Dad.

The head of another was the size and shape of a bumblebee
with brownish-purple fur and several purple-pink wings stuck on at random. I said, “What is this one called?”

“I don't know,” said Dad.

I said, “That's strange. You used to be keen on botany.”

“Me? Oh no. I like flowers but I don't give a damn for botany.”

I reminded him of the book he kept bringing out when I was a child and we went walks together. He said, “I bought that book because you kept asking me the names of the flowers you saw and I didn't know them. My father discouraged me from asking questions when I was small, I'm sure it impaired my education.”

So I had made Dad's walks dull by asking him questions, he made mine dull by answering them. Real people are inexplicable. Since I cannot understand myself, how can I understand others? We are mysteries, every one of us. No wonder we turn from ordinary facts of life to religions, philosophies, stories, films and fantasies. These can be completely understood because people have made them for people. I know exactly why Helga, face and breasts shiny with sweat, pauses waistdeep in weeds to tuck her open shirt into her jeans, rolls her jeans above her knees then, stooping low, steps carefully between two strands of wire and gradually gets her whole body inside this irregular cage of barbs with only one foot on the ground outside. Do strands of her blonde hair catch on the wires? Yes, I see her head tugged suddenly back, her face winces but she has time to free the hair with her hands until. The only noise is her sobs of effort until