Your Father Sends His Love (15 page)

Ross as father. Drunk drivers, a kidnapping, whooping cough, leukaemia, meningitis, cot death, railway electrocution, fireworks, a fall from a tree.

‘I mean it,' Ross says. ‘I mean every word.'

She pauses before standing up.

‘It's time to go,' she says.

‘No,' he says. ‘No it isn't.'

She doesn't say anything. She gets up and leaves and does not look back. She does not want to see the baby in his arms; she does not want to see her blonde hair. She does not want to see her mouth calling mama.

Outside, her car and his. Side by side. She gets inside
hers, puts the key in the ignition. Later he will do the same.

There will be no accident on the way home. They will neither die nor be injured, lose a limb or eye. They will no longer talk of bombs or unborn children. They will, the two of them, disappear into family life, wander into it, fall into it, fade slowly into it. They will, the two of them, never be seen again.

YOUR FATHER SENDS HIS LOVE

1

He can remember everything. A whole life, all of it. Every moment, every detail; every breath, every beat. Everything, all the way back to the moment of his birth. Sitting in the annexe, under lamplight, of this he is momentarily certain. Certain he can relive every last second; certain he can live his life over. A whole life in a straight line from birth to death; from childhood to old age. No digressions. No jokes. No anecdotes. Just truth following truth, fact following fact. How simple, how easy it seems, sitting in the annexe, under the lamplight. How simple and clear.

A video recorder begins to pull and wind; another stops spooling. There are three more in the annexe, all silent, all programmed. He looks down at the rug, up at the blank television screen. He does not remember everything. He cannot remember everything; the very idea is ridiculous. He cannot recall the moment of his birth any more than he can his first breath. He cannot even remember his mother's face.

Instead of breath and cry, he recalls a line in one of his notebooks. Second volume, fifth page, sixteenth section. He wrote it in a hotel room in Great Yarmouth: shabby dresser, wrinkled sheets.
This is a true story; I know, I made it up myself.
It was written in pencil, the only thing he had to hand, beneath a series of jokes about Red Indians and above the outline for a barbershop routine.

He can remember everything in the notebooks. Every joke, every idea; every sketch, every pun. He knows this is true. Turn seven pages and the third line is in blue ink, written while on a flight to Barbados.
I came home to find my son taking drugs – all my best ones, too.

The two books are locked in the wall safe. They once had their own bag, once toured and travelled along with Bob. They no longer leave the annexe. They were once stolen. His whole life, from first to last. When they stole them, they took everything from him. He still says that. He still says they stole the books. They stole his life. They.

In London, in its white heat and cold winters, four dead sons. Four stillbirths, four long silences, four coffinless mournings. He remembers the taxi rides, but not the hospitals. The taxi rides.

One in winter: the taking off and on of gloves, the wrapping of scarves, the look on his wife's face, on her
raided face. Do not speak. Do not make light. Do not joke.

One in summer: the cabbie picking him up alone, back to the Golders Green house. The cabbie's feminine eyelashes, his vinegary body odour. A joke told and Bob's laugh. Bob's second dead son and him laughing.

‘You can have that one for free,' the cabbie said.

‘You'll never make it as a cabbie if you give passengers tips,' Bob said and the cabbie laughed and Bob laughed. Bob caught his own reflection in the rear-view mirror, pale as bone, hair quick-laced with grey.

Another in wind-blown October, alone again. A silent cabbie aside from his metronomic sniffing. Asking the cabbie to stop at the off-licence and buying a bottle of Scotch, looking at the cigars. The single ones in tins, packs of three and five. A moment braced with emotion and then nothing. A packet of Player's, too. Make it two packs of Player's. Outside, the taxi idling, two old Jews walking past. His mother's voice. The way she said
Jew
. If she'd known about the dead boys, she'd have said she'd warned him. She'd warned him but he'd not listened.

What did I say? What did I say at the outset? You never listen. You never learn. You may as well have married a Jew. At least the Jews have all the money. The Irish just have chippy shoulders and thieving hands. No wonder the children keep dying. No wonder there's no son and heir.
You should . . . a nice girl. A nice English girl. Nice manners. A sherry drinker. Clean limbed and well-spoken. Robert, dear, I love you, which is why I say—

Oh that face! The mole with the plucked hairs, her skin the same pallor as his; her wrinkled, clawing hands. Her arrival at his wedding, the service she said she would not attend, dressed – as in a joke – in black. Crown to toenail in black, a veil too. Such impeccable comic timing. He wished his was as natural.

The last death in the heart of May's confusion. A different hospital, the same outcome. He left his wife to rest and took a taxi to a woman's apartment in Maida Vale. He drank her wine, went to her bed, and afterwards looked out of her window, looked out over stands of trees and parkland, not thinking of his wife's fitful sleep, not thinking of his four dead sons. Or thinking of them all. He cannot now be sure.

Nineteen-fifty-two, and the fifth boy arrived three months early. So small, so early and so small, three months prem. But breathing, yes; alive, yes. Incubated, a wriggle of a boy, sharing the white sheets with a girl more runtish kitten than human child. Bob named her Victoria. A queen in waiting. His son he named Gary. Nothing so royal, just a name they both liked. Victoria soon lost her sight. He prayed for his son to keep his sight. The son was unblind; a small, almost cruel, mercy.

Days and the specialist called them in, days of watching and waiting, the blind child queen taken to her parents; Gary alone on the white sheet. In the hospital there were no pretty nurses or battle-axe matrons. There was carbolic and bleach, uncomfortable chairs, corridors that ran like slick highways. Bob and his wife held hands as they entered the pipe-smoked room the consultants shared. The specialist was a woman, neat and tidy, twin-set and pearls. Best in her field, best anywhere. Sitting behind her desk, uncapping a fountain pen.

The specialist invited them to sit. Bob and his wife held hands over the chair arms. The specialist looked down at the file – thin lips, no make-up, hood-eyes, a wiggish hairdo – then up at them.

‘There is no easy way to say this,' she said. ‘But the tests are clear and they are irrefutable. Your son has cerebral palsy.'

They must have looked. Looked blank perhaps.

‘Gary is a spastic,' she said.

She went on. She told them she was sorry, but Gary would never speak, would never hear, would never walk, would never sit himself at a dinner table. She explained in her measured, careful way the ramifications, but all Bob heard was spastic. Her thin lips moving: spastic. Her bobbing head as she looked to her notes: spastic. The look of professional sympathy as she took off her spectacles:
spastic. She had used the word without affect, without thought, and Bob had never heard it spoken before, and could never now unhear it. Spastic. That boy and the word. That beautiful boy. That heart-breaking boy.

The annexe is broadly cruciform, the western end longer than planned, extended to accommodate a series of tall octagonal spinners arranged in two banks, heading down to a small round window. On each wall is a unit, in each unit nine shelves, each shelf the height of a VHS cassette plus a quarter inch. Stacks of tapes, some still in cellophane, on the floor and on the desk. The used tapes are labelled and sorted, dated and shelved. An assistant is employed on Wednesdays and Thursdays. He is to tidy up, to label and sort. Bob is never present. He has seen him only twice since he was hired: a pudgy fellow, beetle-browed, the sort who wishes to solve a joke rather than laugh at it.

Bob pours Scotch and gets up from the sofa, crack in the knees, ache in the neck. He walks to the first spinner. As a collection it is kitsch. Every casing, screwhead and stretch of tape documents something in which only he is interested. A library of himself. Thirty-minute memories. Bob pulls out a tape at random. A drama called
The Flip Side
. In it he plays a DJ, a right-wing DJ, plays him with
a fire and zeal and a sense of menace; his best work, some of his best work, taut and polished and the director afterwards saying that he should do more serious work, tread the boards, Pinter, Osborne, those kinds of people. He holds the tape, Maxell 180, more programmes on the tape, but the only one worth considering is
The Flip Side
. There is no other example in the world. It exists only in the memory of those who watched it and, thirty-five years later, are still alive and still recall a television drama that was shown only once. It is a plastic legacy, this junk he has collected.

The last time he'd seen
The Flip Side
was twelve years ago. An old friend disputing that Bob had ever done anything aside from making money presenting game shows.

‘
The Flip Side
,' Bob said, ‘1966,
The Flip Side
. The
Radio Times
called it one of the boldest and most chilling performances they'd ever seen.
The Flip Side
. They said I should go on the stage. They said they'd not seen anything like it. Pinter, Osborne, those kind of people. I won a fucking award for that.'

And Bob made the friend put on his shoes and carry his glass to the annexe and they settled down to watch
The Flip Side
. The tape began. Bob was some twenty years younger. He was using an American accent, shaky but not without skill. Bob watched himself,
Bob's eyes only for the screen, only for himself. The friend took the remote control and pressed pause.

‘Go on, then,' the friend said. ‘Do it. You want to do it, you know you want to.'

Bob looked at himself as a young man; a young man paused on the television screen. He smiled at the friend and stood.

‘And do you think, listeners,' he said, ‘that this is acceptable? That this is the way we are to raise our children these days? With these kinds of morals? With these kinds of codes? We need to think of the children. We need to protect them, we need to nurture them, not pervert them. Not indulge them with such poison and fallen idols . . .'

Standing, Bob delivered line after line, the accent better, more mature than on the videotape. Bob acted and Bob paced, acted and paced as he had decades before, as though life were contingent on his performance. Behind the revival, Bob's younger face was paused, a telephone to his ear. Before Bob could finish, the younger man disappeared, the video recorder automatically releasing the tape. Bob delivered his last line in front of the blank screen. He paused, then bowed, wiped away the sweat from his brow with a pocket square.

Bob remembers his friend's face: soft and sallow,
framed with tight white hair, tobacco teeth, long nose. The way the friend scratched the stubble of his cheek, put down his glass and gave quiet applause. He remembers that but not asking him to talk to Simon for him.

‘Shall I do another?' Bob said, standing up, moving to the spinners. ‘Pick one. Pick any tape and give me the first line. First line and I'll do the lot. All the parts, all the lines.'

The friend smiled and shook his head.

‘Don't think I can't,' Bob said. ‘Don't think I can't, because you know I can.'