Graham Swift - Tomorrow

And, needless to say, he’d steal back home after these vain quests, a little like a cat himself, hoping, every time, that Otis would have beaten him to it and slipped in, in his old way, by the back door. That when he returned to the bedroom, unzipping his tracksuit, I’d be awake and smiling and saying: “Look who’s here.”

That was my wish too, believe me. But the truth is that when he crept back I’d be awake, but still rigorously pretending to sleep, as if unaware he’d ever gone. He’d take off the tracksuit and get back in beside me, I’d sense his cool skin appreciating the warmth, and I’d almost hear him contemplating the wisdom or total folly of sidling up to me and whispering in my ear some sweet lie: It’s okay, I saw him, in Winterbourne Road. I couldn’t catch him, but I saw him, he’s okay. He’ll be back in his own good time.

I still see him out there — your poor dad, I mean. In my vision the streets are mockingly peaceful, as they would be at that time. The houses are still slumbering, their curtains drawn. The sky is a rosy grey. Not such a bad time of day to be up and about in, once in a while. And it was spring. A green haze on the trees, a tingle in the air, even in Herne Hill. The birds would have been chirping. Not so peaceful in fact, and only more mocking: it was the mating season. Quite. And among the many, groping theories for Otis’s decampment was precisely that. That he’d been searching for — he’d found — a mate. Though, in his sad anatomical condition, how could that have possibly worked?

Picture us both lying in bed again, back to back, like two curled-away-from-each-other foetuses, as if no strange expedition had just occurred.

But the truth is your dad used to do that little disappearing act anyway. He even still does it now and then. You may have noticed and you may have wondered — I hope not too much — what exactly is going on. On the other hand, both of you are usually far beyond consciousness in the early hours of the morning. I hope you are now.

Your dad would get up, I mean, and leave the bed — not to roam the streets, just to leave it and come back. Just for twenty minutes or so. He’d slip on his dressing gown. He’d pad around the house or sit quietly somewhere communing with it, listening to the little creaks and clicks and murmurs houses make when everything else is hushed. I suppose you’d have said, Kate, a few years back, that he was communing with Edward. At Davenport Road, who would it have been? Dave?

These days, of course, he has that expensively kitted-out study to retreat to — almost, I sometimes think, a kind of house within a house. He often goes there in the early hours (but not this morning, I fancy) to do a dawn stint of Living-World work, which you may think is as odd as his roaming the streets. It’s the pressure of success, it’s valuable time that has to be found. Except he still finds time (I’m glad to say) to come back a while to bed.

But this habit of your father’s began long ago, before there was any pressure of success, when we first moved to Herne Hill and first acquired that novel but slightly sobering possession, a house. A habit or a game? He’d get up anyway, very early, just for “the sheer pleasure,” he’d say, of coming back. Married life, how grown-up people behave. The game involved, if I was awake, my pretending to sleep while he tiptoed away. On the other hand, if I was asleep, his very absence, soundlessly accomplished though it was, would often be the cause of waking me, as if I knew something was wrong. I’d reach out a hand and find an empty space. I was alone! And if I wanted to, I could indulge the frisson of a panic, a terror, a desolation I knew wasn’t real.

Easy enough in those days, not so easy now. A game, or not such a game? There are all those apparent “games” of animals which, as Professor Mike will tell you, look like play but are really serious training and preparation underneath. Was Otis playing a game with us?

A little benign dissembling, like the joy of finding a bad dream was only a dream. A little delicious feigned absence and desertion. It became our favourite time anyway, even before Otis was there to egg things along. Your dad would simply return from his bogus disappearance, somewhere in the far reaches of the house. I’d pretend sometimes to be just waking up. Or I’d be staring at that indentation in the sheet.

He’d get in and nuzzle up. Here I am after all, I hadn’t vanished, I hadn’t gone. Here I am, it’s me, all present and correct.

And it still happens, in the first light, to the first sound of birds. How wonderful life is.

IT’S GONE THREE A.M. It’s getting closer. Not “tomorrow,” I can’t play that trick on myself for much longer. Today, today: the soft drumming of the rain seems to be saying it over and over.

Whatever else you’re about to discover, I hope there’s one thing you don’t need to be told: that you came from happiness. Wherever else you came from, that’s surely the main thing. I’m telling you about one of our worst times, but that’s only to throw up the other thing, the truer thing. So — we had our patch of rough weather. Who doesn’t? And in the grand scale, how does it rate? Our cat went missing. Hardly an earthquake.

And in the grand scale, how will this impending day rate, if you know that, underneath, you came from happiness? Happiness breeds happiness: it’s as simple as that? It’s not biology, but it’s the best and the soundest system of reproduction. It’s the best beginning and the best upbringing, all other circumstances aside, that anyone could ask for.

Though arguably, of course, it’s also the worst, the very worst, and parents can never win, nor children. It only leaves you unprepared and unarmed for all the knocks and frights. Like tomorrow. Let’s still call it that.

Look at Mike dreaming away here, as innocent as you are, right now, of what’s to come. Don’t wake yet, Mikey, sleep on. I swore to myself last night that I wouldn’t let him wake up first, alone. He can still play that waking-first game — but he’s here now already, and if I wasn’t afraid of waking him, I’d be holding him tight. I have the shivery feeling that he won’t be here any more, not after tomorrow.

There used to be a game, I suppose there still is though I don’t think there’s so much call for it now, called Happy Families. A simple, popular and platitudinous card game. Shuffle the pack, then put the families together: the smiling Mr. Baker with the smiling Mrs. Baker, and the two of them with the smiling little Bakers, so they all match up and beam. Not a popular game any more, and “happy families” these days, maybe, is a glaring misnomer, a contradiction in terms. Perhaps it always has been. Happiness, yes, families, yes — but the two together, forget it. The very idea is a fantasy from which we all have to wake up sooner or later. Would this Hook family, with its crooked name, have been a happy family anyway ?

You got the one thing and not the other, and the rarer and the more important by far. Is that how you’ll take it? A minor point, what we do with the fantasy. Family-shamilies, what do they really matter?

I’ve never had the Edward-fantasy, Kate. I’ve never thought any house I’ve lived in was like a person. Though I’m intrigued. Was this Edward (is he still?) like a friend? A father? A live-in lover? But I’ve often thought about the houses I’ve lived in, including this one, and wondered if the people who lived in it before were happy. Is there happiness in the fabric, in the bricks and walls, or is there still unevaporated sadness, a mildew of sorrow? That’s just as daft, I’m sure, as dreaming up an Edward. How many here, before us — since this house was built? The people we bought Davenport Road from were called the Mallinsons, the people who sold us this place were called the Sutcliffes. Were they happy?