Читать книгу So Many Ways to Begin - Jon McGregor - Страница 15

It was still in good condition, kept clean and dry in a plastic wrapper, and when he slid it out to look through the pages the only marks of age were in the stilted language of the text and the starched formality of the photographs; the mayor, the director, the city treasurer, the benefactor’s wife, sitting on the platform with their hands folded into their laps, their hair waxed neatly into place, listening attentively to one another’s opening speeches, applauding.

He remembered their applause carrying out into the street, to the long crowd of people pressing and shifting back down the steps and away round the corner, five or six abreast, chatting and smoking and bending stiff legs, their hands stuffed into their pockets and their collars turned up against the last of the winter winds. One or two policemen were there, keeping order, walking up and down the line, asking people to keep out of the road and leave space for passers-by, keeping an eye out for light fingers and lost children. A pair of journalists were hanging around at the front of the queue, squiggling comments into a notebook, lifting a camera and encouraging people to smile, catching a shot where all the bleached white faces managed to look into the lens at once, a long stretch of them fading back into the dark evening; David near the front, waiting, unsmiling, half hidden by the heavy black coat of the man ahead of him.

The inky picture ended up on the front page of the Evening Telegraph, and the front page landed on the kitchen table for a while before being neatly clipped out and filed away into the box under his bed.

Didn’t it occur to you to smile? his father asked, standing and leaning over the paper, still dressed in his dust-plastered work clothes. Didn’t the photographer say cheese or something? David shrugged, embarrassed.

Wasn’t bothered, he said. Susan, who’d come through from watching television when Albert called, pulled the paper across the table and said let me see, where is he? She searched through the faces and found her brother, smiling in spite of herself, reluctantly impressed.

Fame at last, she said. You’ll have all the girls after you now. David ignored her, his face colouring, and leant over to try to read the article. Dorothy, standing at the oven to stir the gravy and check the chops and the potatoes, turned to Albert and said it’s almost ready now if you want to get changed. Albert waved his hand at her in passing acknowledgement.

Listen, he said, taking the paper back from Susan. Crowds gathered last night to be among the first visitors to another of our city’s proud buildings, the long-awaited Municipal Art Gallery and Museum. Guests were especially honoured to have in their midst the future director of the museum, one Mr David Carter Esquire, pictured here with a dirty great sulk on his face. David tried to pull the paper away, but his father whisked it up from the table and stood back, raising his voice above Susan’s laughter. The city treasurer, he continued, a tight-fisted bugger if ever we saw one, said it’s a shocking waste of money of course, but I was out-voted at the committee stage. It doesn’t say that does it? Dorothy asked, lifting her hand to her mouth as she realised her mistake. They all laughed, and she joined in, embarrassed, and they kept on laughing until Albert began to cough and splutter and double over in an attempt to haul in some breath.

You really should go to the doctor’s, Dorothy said when he’d recovered, handing him a glass of water. Albert didn’t reply.

And there was nothing now to show for this, in the archives he had kept. No medical records, no photographs of his father’s face turning a violent red as he fought for breath, no prescriptions or bottles of pills. Just the memory of that cough, the angry defiant bark of it, dry and choked, as though his lungs were full of tangled steel wool. There should have been something, at least. Something to hold up to the light, or to pin to the wall.

If he was asked, he was going to say that he remembered his father as a strong man; as someone who could balance two dozen bricks on his broad shoulders while he climbed a ladder, who could swing both him and his sister up in the air at the same time, and dig the whole vegetable patch over in the hour or two of light that was left after supper. He was going to say that he remembered his father as a busy man; as someone who always seemed to be in a hurry to be somewhere else: home from work, out to the garden, away from the supper table and out to join his friends in the pub. And he was going to say that he remembered his father as a loving man; someone who could hold his wife in his arms without shame and kiss her as if nobody else was in the room, someone who could find the time now and again to tuck his son into bed, with broad strong hands that smelt of soil and dust and cigarette smoke.

No one was much surprised when he died, and Albert was probably the least surprised of all. It had been coming on quickly for months and he seemed to have given up and started waiting for it. It feels like I’m breathing in tiny splinters of metal every time I open my mouth, he told David once. It feels like there’s a barrow-load of bricks weighing down on my chest. Dorothy found him when she got back from the shops one afternoon, his head tipped back over the arm of the sofa, a blanket wrapped around him like a shroud. She called out, and by the time David had run downstairs she was kneeling beside the sofa, holding Albert’s hand and stroking the side of his face. The shopping bags were on the floor, split open, tins and packets and loose wrapped meats spilt halfway across the room, and it was only when the doctor arrived that she pushed herself back to her feet again.

My father wasn’t one for talking much, he wanted to tell someone, and if he did it was never really about the past, about his family, or where he grew up, or what happened in the war. I know he was in the Navy and that’s about all, I don’t know where he went, or what he did when he got there, I don’t know what my mother went through at home when the bombing was going on, if she saw anyone killed or injured at all. I only know that they were apart for a long time, and they couldn’t even write, and that when they were together again there were things they didn’t feel the need to talk about; not even, I suppose, to each other. I think that’s how I got so interested in history, he would say, since there was so little of it at home. There weren’t even any photos on the wall until after my father had died.

I suppose I didn’t really know him all that well in the end, he thought he might say. Well, isn’t that the oldest story, someone might murmur in response, he thought, or, who among us ever did?