Us (7 page)

‘Photographer!' said Connie. ‘He's going to be a photographer.'

We were pacing around the kitchen, furiously tidying up, by which I mean tidying up, furious. Wine had been drunk and it was late, the end of a long, fraught argument that, as was his way, Albie had provoked then fled from. ‘Don't you see?' said Connie, hurling cutlery at the drawer. ‘Even if it's hard, he has to try! If he loves it, we have to let him try. Why must you always have to stomp on his dreams?'

‘I've got nothing against his dreams as long as they're attainable.'

‘But if they're attainable then they're not dreams!'

‘And that's why it's a waste of time!' I said. ‘The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.'

‘He doesn't want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.'

‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough – it just isn't. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he'll be!'

Well, that's what I said. I believed I had my son's best interests at heart. That was why I was so vocal, because I wanted him to have a secure professional life, a good life. Listening up in his bedroom, no doubt he had caught all of my words and none of my intention.

Still, the argument was not my finest moment. I had become shrill and dogmatic but even so I was surprised to discover that Connie was now standing still, wrist pressed to her forehead.

‘When did it start, Douglas?' she said, her voice low. ‘When did you start to drain the
passion
out of everything?'

‘So why did you become a scientist?'

‘Because I never really wanted to do anything else.'

‘But why … I'm sorry, I've forgotten the subject …?'

‘Biochemistry, that's my PhD. Literally the chemistry of life. I wanted to know how we work; not just us, all living things.'

‘When was this?'

‘Eleven, twelve.'

Connie laughed. ‘I wanted to be a hairdresser.'

‘Well, my mum was a biology teacher, dad was a GP, so it was in the air.'

‘But you didn't want to be a doctor?'

‘I thought about it, but I wasn't sure about my bedside manner, and the great thing about biochemistry over medicine, my dad said, was that no one ever asked you to look up their bum.'

She laughed, which I found intensely gratifying. Clapham High Street late at night is not the most scenic of routes, and at a little after one in the morning it has its own perils, but I was enjoying talking to her – or talking at her because she was, she said, ‘too off her face' to do much but listen. It was a bitterly cold night, and she clung to my arm, for warmth I supposed. She had swapped her high heels for clumpy trainers, and wore a wonderful old black coat with some kind of feathery collar, and I felt intensely proud and protective, and strangely invulnerable too, as we strode past the drunks and muggers, the hens and stags.

‘Am I being very boring?'

‘Not at all,' she said, her eyelids heavy. ‘Keep talking.'

‘They used to buy me this magazine,
World of Wonder
or something it was called – my parents wouldn't allow the other ones, the silly ones,
Dandy
or
Whizzer and Chips
or whatever, in the house. So I used to read this terribly dry, old-fashioned magazine and it was full of projects and diagrams and jolly things to do with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, how to turn a lemon into a battery—'

‘You can do that?'

‘I have that power.'

‘You
are
a genius!'

‘Thanks to
World of Wonder
. Fun facts! Did you know caesium has atomic number 55? That sort of thing. Of course at that age you're just like this big sponge, so it all went in, but the bit I loved the best was this cartoon strip, “Lives of the Great Scientists”. There was one about Archimedes, I could draw it for you now: Archimedes in his bath, making the connection between volume and density, dancing naked down the street. Or Newton and his apple, or Marie Curie … I loved this idea of the sudden beautiful realisation. A light bulb going on, literally for Edison. One individual experiences this flash of insight and suddenly the world is altered fundamentally.'

I hadn't spoken this much for years. I hoped, from Connie's silence, that she was finding me fantastically interesting, but when I looked her eyes were rolled far back into her head.

‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm sorry. I'm just rushing my tits off.'

‘Oh. Okay. Should I stop talking?'

‘No, I love it. You're bringing me down, but in a good way. Wow. Your eyes look massive, Douglas. They're taking up your whole face.'

‘Okay. So … should I keep talking, then?'

‘Yes, please. I like listening to your voice. It's like listening to the Shipping Forecast.'

‘Boring.'

‘Reassuring. Let's keep walking. Tell me more.'

‘Anyway, these stories were nonsense for the most part, or hugely over-simplified. Most scientific progress is a slog, and more often than not it stems from a dialogue within a community, lots of people thinking along the same lines and inching forward, rather than these great bolts of lightning. Newton did see the apple fall, but he'd been thinking about gravity well before that. The same with Darwin, he didn't wake up one day and think: natural selection! There'd been years and years of observation, discussion and debate. Good science is slow-moving, methodical, evidence-based. Method. Results. Conclusion. Like my old tutor used to say, “To
assume
makes an
ass
of
u
and
me
!''' Here, rather optimistically, I had hoped she might laugh, but she was staring open-mouthed at her wiggling fingertips. ‘Still, I was hooked. It seemed heroic, or at least the kind of heroism I might have access to. Normal boys aspired to be footballers or pop stars or soldiers, and I wanted to be a scientist, because wouldn't it be incredible to have a moment like that? An entirely original idea. A cure, an insight into space and time, a water engine.'

‘Anything occurred to you?'

‘Not as yet.'

‘Well it's still early days!'

‘Of course it was all a lot easier in the past. Much easier to make your mark when people still thought the sun revolved around the earth and there were four bodily humours. Not much chance of me making that kind of breakthrough now.'

‘Oh no!' she said with real feeling. ‘That's not true!'

‘'Fraid so. Science is a race, you've got to get there first. There's no second prize. Look at Darwin – those ideas were in the air, but he was the first to get his paper published. The only way I could really make a mark now is to be transported back to, say, 1820. I'd jot down some pointers on evolutionary theory. I'd explain to the Royal College of Surgeons exactly why washing your hands is a good idea. I'd invent the combustion engine, the light bulb, the aeroplane, photography, penicillin. If I could get back to 1820, I'd be the greatest scientist the world has ever known, greater than Archimedes or Newton or Pasteur or Einstein. The only obstacle is being a hundred and seventy years too late.'

‘Clearly, what you need to do,' she said, ‘is invent a time machine.'

‘Which is theoretically impossible.'

‘There you go again, being negative. If you can make a battery out of a lemon, how hard can it be? I'm sure you could do it.'

‘You hardly know me.'

‘But I can
tell
. I have a sense. Douglas, some day you are going to do something quite amazing.'

She was very far from sober, of course, but, if only for a moment, I thought she really did believe this of me. Even that it might be true.

And so we journeyed on, three of us now, in what I chose to take as a companionable silence, sneaking out of London through the back door and surfacing in dreary countryside, all pylons and motorways, a sudden glimpse of a river – the Medway? – crammed with holiday cruisers sulking in the overcast English summer, then more scrappy woodland then the motorway again. Soon enough the guard announced that we were about to enter the Channel Tunnel and the passengers looked obediently to their windows in the hope of seeing – what? Shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming past aquarium glass? A tunnel under the sea is never quite as visually splendid as one hopes, but it is no less an achievement for that. Who designed the Channel Tunnel? No one knows the name. There are no more Brunels or Stephensons, and tunnels, by their very nature, never get the attention of great bridges, but still this was a great feat. I voiced the thought aloud; how tunnels were underrated and it was miraculous, really, to imagine that great mass of rock and water over our heads and yet to feel safe.

‘I don't feel safe,' said Albie.

I sat back in my seat. Engineering – why hadn't engineering interested my son?

Out into daylight, a militarised landscape of fences, concrete bunkers and escarpments, then the pleasant, uniform agricultural plain that stretches all the way to Paris. It is, of course, an illusion to imagine that the crossing of arbitrary boundaries on a map should correspond to variations in mood and temperament. A field is a field and a tree is a tree, but nevertheless this could only be France, and the air on the train took on a different quality, or seemed to, as French passengers emanated the satisfaction of returning home, and the rest of us the excitement of being officially ‘abroad'.

‘Here we are then! France!'

And even Albie couldn't find anything to disagree with there.

I fell asleep, neck cricked, jaw clenched, skull vibrating against glass, then awoke in the early afternoon as we entered the suburbs of Paris, Albie visibly perking up at the sight of graffiti and urban grime. I handed out A4 polypropylene wallets containing itineraries for the North European leg of our trip; hotel addresses, phone numbers and train times; and a loose breakdown of events and activities. ‘A guideline, rather than a strict schedule.'

Albie turned the pages back and forth. ‘Why isn't this laminated, Dad?'

‘Yes, why isn't it laminated?' said Connie.

‘Dad's getting sloppy.' My wife and son enjoyed heckling me. It gave them pleasure, so I smiled and played along, confident that they'd be grateful in the end.

Once off the train we felt revived, and I didn't even mind the guitar case clunking against my knees, the coffee corrosion in my stomach and the edginess of that particular station. ‘Keep a close eye on your bags,' I warned.

‘Any railway station, anywhere in the world,' said Connie to Albie, ‘you can guarantee your father will tell you to keep a close eye on your bags.'

Then the sky outside the Gare du Nord opening up, bright and blue, to greet us.

‘Are you excited?' I asked my son as he climbed into the taxi.

‘I've been to Paris before,' he shrugged. Across the back of the seat, Connie caught my eye and winked and we set off, stopping and starting through the hard, unlovely kernel of the city towards the Seine, Connie and I sandwiching our son, hips pressed closer than we were used to, waiting for the commerce of the Grands Boulevards to give way to the dusty elegance of the Jardin des Tuileries, the lovely and ridiculous Louvre, the bridges across the Seine. Pont de la Concorde? Pont Royal? Unlike London, which has only two or perhaps three decent bridges, every crossing point of the Seine seems wonderful to me, clear views preserved on either side, and Connie and I peered greedily this way and that, following each other's eyes while Albie looked down at his phone.

We crossed London Bridge a little after two forty-five in the morning. The City was rather different in those years, squatter and less brazen than today, a model village Wall Street and very much alien territory to someone who rarely travelled further east than Tottenham Court Road. Now the place was deserted as if in advance of some impending disaster, and we walked past Monument, down Fenchurch Street, voices clear in the night air, and told the stories that we choose to tell when people are new.

Connie had recovered her powers of speech and told me more about her large, messy family, her mother an ex-hippy, skittish and boozy and emotional, her biological father long absent now, leaving her nothing but his surname. Which was? Moore. Connie Moore –
a terrific name
, I thought,
like a village in Ireland
. Her step-father could not have been more different, a Cypriot businessman who ran a number of questionable kebab shops in Wood Green and Walthamstow, and she was now an anomaly in her family: the arty, smart one. ‘I have three half-Cypriot brothers, little bulldogs they are; they all work in the business, and they have no idea what I do. Same as my dad – he'll be watching telly and he'll see a view of the Dales, or we'll be on holiday and he'll see a sunset or an olive tree and he'll say – she slipped into an accent, she has always been very good at accents – ‘“Connie, you see that? Draw that! Draw it, quick!” Or he tries to commission me. “Draw your mother, she's a beautiful lady, do a painting. I'll pay.” To Kemal, that's the supreme achievement of the artist, to draw eyes that look in the same direction.'

‘Or hands.'

‘Exactly. Hands. If you can fit all the fingers on, you're Titian.'

‘Can you draw hands?'

‘Nope. I love him, though – Kemal – and my brothers, too. They dote on my mum and she sucks it all up. But I don't see me in any of them, or in her either.'

‘What about your father? Your biological—'

She shuddered. ‘He left home when I was nine. I'm not really allowed to mention him because it sets my mum off. He was very handsome, I know that. Very charming, a musician. Ran off to Europe. He's … out there … somewhere.' She gestured towards the east. ‘Don't really care,' she said, and shrugged. ‘Change the subject. Ask me something else.'