‘Don’t you say that to me! No buttons!’
What was so objectionable about buttons was unclear. She hated them on a blouse, on pyjamas, on a coat. We eventually capitulated, for Lucy was amenable to zippers, which she liked to play with, and (particularly) to Velcro.
‘Velcro! For fuck’s sake. I have a daughter who loves Velcro . . . Kill me,’ said Suzy, initiating a lifetime’s disappointment with her daughter’s tastes. She even disapproved of Lucy’s Laura Ashley phase: ‘all those cutesified anodyne patterns, the awful pastel colours, the sheer drab mediocrity of it. She’s Welsh, you know.’
‘Who is?’
‘Laura Ashley. All you need to know.’
Call me a damn fool, but I loved it, at least on Lucy. Her mother would have looked soppy swanning about in all those flowery garments, but on a three-year-old they looked peachy.
I want to remember Lucy’s dress as it was, that summerised day walking to the newsagent’s. I scrunch my eyes up to replay it, to see us walking so slowly and happily up the street, hand in hand. Some sort of little girly dress, wispy and delicious. I can make one up if I want to. I try a variety of colours and patterns, of the kind that she loved. Pink? For sure. Polka dots against a cream background? Or perhaps white? I try them on her. She looks – we’re in the present tense all of a sudden – she looks gorgeous in it – cream is better! So delighted and free, aware of herself.
That was the past, then: not immutable, oddly biddable, malleable. There was no one to object, and it no longer mattered. The past is something we make and remake, remember or disremember – same thing, almost. You can polka-dot it, change times and seasons, rewrite the dialogue, rearrange the cast of characters. There is no dissembling in this. Most is lost, the vast percentage of what we have been. This is what it is to be a person, and it gets worse as you get older.
‘Worse?’ Not that, not quite. As we age, our stories are reduced until the constituent flavours are enhanced and concentrated. And sometimes, as in this story of little Lucy, too great a concentration gives not pleasure but something closer to pain, as a reduction of the essence of sensual pleasure, say, would produce something unendurable. As my recollection of my little daughter causes me to smile and to wince.
I am reduced to this. I live in reduced circumstances, left with the unendurable intensity of wormwood and gall (whatever they are), with fading hints of honey. There is something both inevitable in this, as we move towards the final telling of our final stories, the last version of ourselves, and something moving.
This journal? A coming-of-old-age book, dispirited, hopelessly knowing. For what happens, faced squarely, is loss. Loss of what we have been, loss of the history of our dear loved ones, loss of the incidents and narratives that have defined us.
I cannot locate much by way of gain in this process, save that most of what I have forgotten wasn’t worth remembering. Good riddance really, like clearing the attics before the house is sold.
So what? I can’t even remember the plot of the novel I read last week. Or its title. I struggle sometimes to remember what the names of common objects are, I keep losing things. A fork, a sofa, the Prime Minister. I am still a master of adjectives and verbs, and pretty damn good at summoning adverbs, but I am losing my nouns at an alarming rate.
I would worry about early onset Alzheimer’s, only I’m not young enough for it. But you can get away with a lot when there is no one to talk to but yourself, and you know you are ‘misty-fying’, like one of those fade-out images in a film, but you are watching it by yourself, and can turn your head at the scary bits, whine a little and put your paws over your eyes.
How do I remember myself? Or Lucy? Or Suzy? Why should I?
I cannot bear dogs, they disgust me. Why would a civilised person welcome such a creature into an otherwise orderly home? No matter how cunningly disguised by fluff and fealty, all I see is a shameless slobbering arse-sniffing leg-humping scrotum-toting arsehole-flaunting filth-spreader: as profligate a shitslinger as Kahlil Gibran, only closer to the ground. If I presented myself like that I’d be hauled away, no matter how much I licked your face or howled on your grave. No dogs in heaven.
I particularly detest my neighbour’s dog, whose hideous noises are sufficient to awaken the dead, or at least the dying. I gather it is called Spike, and it looks the part, with a face composed of overlapping layers of fat mysteriously transformed into muscle. Hard blubber, hideously prophylactic: not even his proud owner could have stroked that face tenderly.
I don’t know what sort he is. Are they called breeds? I can’t tell one from another. I’m not even very good with people. When I taught, I would make up a class physical appearance list on the first day, correlating physical characteristics to names in my desk diary. It was ever so helpful, and within a couple of weeks I wouldn’t need it any more. But for the first days, it gave me a sense of intimacy with my new charges that I could recognise them so easily, as long as I could take a peek at my list and their faces.
One day, leaving the teaching room with a surprisingly pressing need for the loo, I left my (closed) diary on my desk, rather than putting it in the top drawer as usual. On my return, five minutes later, Fatboy Linus was crying at the back of the room, Cross-eyed Charley had exacerbated his disability so radically that he can have seen nothing but his own nose, and Acne Andy – I was told – had run out of the room, scratching himself madly. I didn’t see him again for a week.
The next morning I received a brusque note from the Head:
Dear Darke,
I have had one or two parents on the phone, regarding an unfortunate incident in your classroom. Could we have a word about this? I will be free between 4.15 and 4.40.
Best,
Anthony
He was a pacific fellow, liked but mildly mocked by his staff, and he hated confrontation. The very word ‘parent’ made him anxious, and if you attached ‘concerned’, or even worse, ‘irate’, he reached for the Panadol and drew the curtains.
I entered his study at 4.15 on the dot, to find him pacing in front of the fire. His room was over-heated, as if some objective correlative of his state of mind, and he had never been known to open the window. He smoked a pipe of some noxious Balkan mixture (not Sobranie) to add to the fug. It was hard to see, and harder yet to breathe. The idea, I presume, was to make the place uncongenial to visitors, while he himself was inured to it, smoked as a kipper.
‘See here, James, we have something of a to-do about some damn book of yours . . .’
‘Book, Tony, what book?’ I called him ‘Tony’ when I wanted to irritate him, for he much preferred ‘Anthony’ or, better yet, ‘Headmaster’.
‘Apparently you have a book that you use to write insults about the boys, and you left it for them to see. I must say – ’
‘You are referring, I presume, to my desk diary, and to the unpleasant incident in which the boys opened it in my absence?’
‘And uncovered the most appalling descriptions of themselves! I have two sets of parents threatening not merely to remove their boys, but to sue for damages. For trauma, humiliation in front of their peers. It’s just dreadful.’ He pulled at one of the few strands of what was left of his hair, which resides largely on the lower left side of his bald pate, somewhat further down than anatomically plausible.
‘Guilty, Tony. And innocent.’
‘How is that?’
‘I do keep such a diary, and at the start of term it helps me to remember which new boy is which. To do this, you fasten on the single defining characteristic: curly hair, very tall, that sort of thing.’