Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Trying to put himself in his father’s shoes (and he was not so good at putting himself in anyone’s shoes), Jack felt that the way his dad had brought about Luke’s death must have had to do with the death of his wife. As if the sudden swift killing of an animal that was only getting sicker and sicker might have cured Michael of all the grief, anger and abandonment gnawing away inside him. But it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked for any of them. It just caused more sickness. On top of the cow disease.

When Tom and Dad got back from Barton Field, Luke’s old basket, with the rumpled tartan blanket — still bearing Luke’s scattered hairs, his smell and the dent of his body — remained in its corner in the kitchen. It remained there, untouched, for days, like a judgement on them all. Michael, who’d been able to blow Luke’s brains out, seemed barely able to look at it. No one knew what to do. There was, perhaps, the shared, unspoken thought that Luke should have been buried with his blanket. It would have been the right thing to do. Or at least Luke should have been carried down in comfort to Barton Field in his basket and blanket, instead of being snatched up from them and plonked down in the pick-up like a calf for the abattoir.

But in any case, Jack had thought, Luke would have had a pretty shrewd idea. And with his blanket under him, he’d have had an even shrewder idea. Dad had done the right thing, maybe. There was no nice way of doing some things. There’d been no nice way, when they’d finally got round to it, of carrying out a culling order.

And, anyway, Luke’s basket and blanket, still sitting there, were like a buffer, blurring and softening the difference between Luke’s presence and his absence. A judgement and a comfort, like Vera’s apron.

And it was Tom, again, who finally made the move, with a suddenness, Jack thought, that was just like his father’s when he’d bundled Luke out to the pick-up. No one dared stop or challenge Tom on this occasion either. He was still laundry chief, and, so far as it went, the housekeeper and the mum of the family. And maybe Dad had never been able to abide it.

Tom gathered up Luke’s blanket, carried it out into the yard and shook it and slapped it. Then he proceeded to wash it, very thoroughly. There was an old zinc tub that suited the purpose. Hand-washing a dog blanket is quite a big and stinky job, but Tom did it very carefully. The stink was Luke’s stink. Only after several washings, rinsings and wringings did he hang the blanket — as he’d hang the bed sheets — on the line in the yard, where it began to dry soon enough in the August warmth. There was no odour of Luke left, just the soapy, airy smell of something that’s been well washed.

But Tom hadn’t finished. When the blanket was still just-damp, he unpegged it and actually took the iron to it, a wet tea towel spread on top, to smooth out the wrinkles. Then he folded it very neatly into a small oblong and, when it was dry, carried it upstairs on the tray of his arms to the Big Bedroom. It was in the Big Bedroom that Mum had made sure that all sorts of things were kept — like that wooden cradle — though they no longer had any use. And Dad couldn’t say, now, ‘I don’t want that, I don’t want that thing up there.’ And he didn’t. Tom put the blanket on the top shelf of the wardrobe, with other old spare blankets, where he knew Vera would have put it.

Then he carried Luke’s basket to the bonfire that regularly smouldered near the muckheap, and set light to it.

Whatever Dad thought about Tom’s actions, he certainly never removed the blanket from the bedroom. He would even have had the option, on cold nights, of taking it from the wardrobe and spreading it over him. It was only a blanket, after all. In fact, Jack knows that there was one night, a cold, frosty one, when his father did do just this — the only instance that Jack was aware of. But he’s never told anyone.

What would people have thought if he’d tried to point out that he’d never seen it spread on that bed before and that, really, it was a dog’s blanket? If he’d come up with the whole dog story? Someone might even have thought he was only pointing it out because he’d put the blanket there himself. So he’d done the right thing at the time — which in most cases, in Jack’s experience, was to shut up or say very little.

It should be there right now, Jack thinks, on that bed behind him, under that gun. It would only be appropriate. But it was among all the other stuff (from farm machinery to teaspoons) that Ellie had ‘sorted out’—for auction, for sale, for ditching, for sending to charity (charity!), as part of what she called her clean sweep.

‘A clean sweep, Jacko, a clean sweep is what we need.’

Well, it hadn’t included that gun.

When Tom had finally let Jack in on his plan of making off from Jebb — only a few weeks before it was carried out — he’d said that it was on the day that he’d washed and ironed Luke’s blanket that he’d really made up his mind. It was the army for him — if he’d have to be patient for a while yet. The army could take him in. No more Jebb. By the time he told Jack, he’d long since found out all about it and got the forms that would take effect when he was eighteen. One day, a couple of months after Luke was shot — November and Remembrance Day were coming up — Dad had given him time off and a handful of grudging twenties (it was meant to square things between them perhaps) and told him to go to Barnstaple and get himself a suit. He couldn’t turn up in his school blazer any more. But Tom had actually got the bus to Exeter, bought a suit in an Oxfam shop, kept the cash left over, and walked into a recruitment office.

So now he knew what he’d need to do.

Maybe the army likes a man who not only knows how to shoot, but who knows the value of a blanket, who takes good care of a blanket. Blankets go with the army. Whenever Jack remembered Tom ironing that blanket and folding it up so carefully and holding it, as if it might have been Luke himself, across his arms, there was something about it he could never place. But now he can. It was as if he was handling a flag.

IT WASN’T LIKE Gatwick Airport. It was like Gatwick Airport. It was even a little like a city — approached through its own ancillary town.

Lodged in Jack’s mind for some days had been the almost calming notion ‘airfield’, suggesting something grassy and forgotten, but this place, he realised at once, was anything but peripheral. This place in the centre of England was a hub, and — clearly — seriously and constantly busy. It had, he soon saw, its own terminal, check-in areas and car-rental facilities and the air had the blast and tang about it of ceaselessly refuelled, long-range activity. So that, though he’d never been anywhere like it before, he was reminded of nothing so much as that first passage, with Ellie, through Gatwick Airport.

He felt, all over again, as if he might be about to enter for the first time that ominous opening called ‘Departures’ and then (after much nerve-wracking queuing and waiting) find himself strapped in the long, imprisoning tube of an aircraft, about to be hurled into the sky. Ellie had gripped his hand with sheer, brimming excitement — it was a bit like when she’d first yanked him up the stairs at Westcott Farmhouse — but he’d gripped hers, though trying not to show it, like some great big boy holding on to his mum. He’d been suddenly, acutely aware of the immense desirability of taking a holiday in a caravan.

But the big, obvious difference about this place was that none of its manifest and elaborate purposefulness had to do with the taking of holidays.

He found the Main Gate, then found Control of Entry — this was where he had to show his passport and other documents. He was spoken to at this point, so he thought, with a marked deference and ushered on as if he might have been a VIP. At the same time he had the feeling that his own reason for being here was just one, unusual reason in a general ungentle pressing of reasons. The place hadn’t shut down because of why he was here.