Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 32

I had arrived in Perpignan with Simone on New Year’s Eve, 1986. Simone had been back home for Christmas to visit her parents, and had scooped me up for the return leg. The coach journey from Victoria station took a gruelling twenty-four hours. We pulled into Perpignan’s central square just as the restaurants were closing and the floors being swept.

That first night, I had a dream in which I was the father of three daughters. There was little narrative, more a single tableau for me to behold: the three girls and me, as if I were being shown a photograph.

It was rare for me to dream, or at least to remember a dream. Maybe what provoked it was the combination of the travelling, the unfamiliar bed, the first night spent with Simone, and the apprehension induced by having taken this leap into the unknown of another country. More unusual, however, was the fact that the dream featured a family. Of all the fantasies regarding my future that I nurtured at the age of twenty-one, none included children. The very word ‘family’ freaked me out. It brought up visions of The Waltons and other cheesy Americana. The concept of the nuclear family rankled, as it diminished alternative ways of life. Family was so mammalian: whither had our human faculties disappeared in this guileless mimicry of the animal world? With a young man’s single-mindedness, I also thought that having a family would attenuate my heroic purpose in life. Not that I had one.

What was stoking all this aversion? That lack of tethering to my birth family, no doubt. It was as if, growing up, a centrifugal force had whirred in the house, like the drum in a washing machine, spinning my parents and sisters into different corners. Not to mention the central fact of my father’s decline. For me, belonging to a family meant living in a micro-culture that had failed to coalesce around anything much, save for that heart of darkness.

In short, dreaming about having a family should have made me anxious. In fact, it felt benign. By the time I dreamt the dream, on the first morning of 1987, Simone was pregnant.