Graham Swift - Tomorrow

A “happy home”: that’s another inherent misnomer perhaps, another fantasy out of which we all have to be shaken, but in which, though you’re sixteen, you’re still carefully blanketed and cradled. Though you’ll be woken abruptly enough soon.

For what it’s worth, while you sleep on these last few hours of your sixteen-year sleep, let me tell you how I woke up long ago and came out of a dream (in more senses than one, you’ll have to agree) when I was even younger than you. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about poor Otis, or your poor dad, out there in the streets looking for him, I’ll get back to them. And oh yes, your mother really was, once, if it’s hard to picture, even younger than you.

Let me tell you the story which I once told your father, and never, till now, anyone else. As a matter of fact, I told him that time we went to Craiginish, the year we met: pillow-talking in the “croft,” our skins all salty, that very first night, after he’d “proposed” to me and I’d said yes. You came from happiness, my darlings.

And this story can really be called a fairy tale, since your mother was not only younger than you at the time, but (unlike your Grandma Fiona) she was actually a fairy.

I was thirteen, though this was still, just, the nineteen-fifties when thirteen was younger than thirteen is now. But I didn’t want to be a little fairy.

My all-girls boarding school was a posh sort of place in the Thames valley, as befitted the daughter of a judge. Every year in the summer they’d put on a Shakespeare play, outdoors, in a little natural grassy arena between the hockey field and the music rooms, in front of a clump of trees. And every other year, it seemed, it would be A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Such a good play for the time of year and that setting and, of course, for girls. All those fairies.

I wanted to be Puck. Not a fairy, not Hermia or Helena (fairly soppy parts, in my view), not even Titania. When it comes to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck, if a girl may say so, is your only man: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” (the word “girdle” producing a titter in a pack of schoolgirls, for reasons that, thankfully, you don’t have to bother with). But my acting skills, I’ll be honest, were rudimentary and Puck was a part for older girls. So I got Mustardseed: one of the fairies, number two or number three, it doesn’t really matter. A couple of half-baked lines and a little flapping costume the colour of Colman’s best.

It invariably turned grey and chilly, or it blew a gale. The arc lights, evoking moonlight, in among the trees, usually failed or crashed down. It was traditional, painful fun. But that year the weather was perfect: a serene and golden June evening turning to dusky purple even as the show progressed. The scent of newly mown grass. Not even a troupe of squeaking schoolgirls murdering Shakespeare could quite spoil the effect. Even the most long-suffering among the audience of stoical parents couldn’t fail to be charmed.

As my father, I hope, was charmed. I hope it was at least some small, diverting consolation.

He was there, of course, to see me, his Mustardseed, to judge my performance. Just, as it happens, a little later that same year I’d go to see him, to judge his performance or at least just to witness it, from that secret but public gallery. He was there in the audience. I’d seen him secretly then too, from an off-stage spy-point, his bobbing, unostentatious panama visible among some fairly attention-seeking motherly hats. But the person I couldn’t see (and her hat would have made its mark) was Fiona. Beside my father there was an empty space, an unoccupied brown-canvas and tubular-steel chair. It remained unoccupied, as the twilight gathered, throughout the evening.

This wasn’t a matter of some temporary mishap or misunderstanding. My father wasn’t looking at his watch, or appearing merely incidentally worried or annoyed. He kept looking at the “stage,” at the magic transformations being enacted before him, including his daughter’s temporary fairyhood, a vague but fixed smile on his face. I understood that something serious, not minor, had occurred, or perhaps had been occurring for some time, and this was my first, world-rearranging indication of it. My knees felt weak, though the show, of course, must go on. It was just as well I had that mere wisp of a role.

Afterwards, I could have simply asked him. I was thirteen. But thirteen was a still hesitant age. And best not to ask was my instinct. And not the best of times, patches of jaundice-like make-up still on my cheeks. Best just to listen to his obvious brave fib, and nod.

“Mummy’s very sorry. She’s feeling under the weather. Such lovely weather too, such a lovely evening…But you were wonderful, Paulie. A star! They really should have given you a bigger part.”

That summer was the first year we didn’t go to Craiginish. And that confirmed it. By then I knew there was a “situation,” an ongoing situation. Ours was not any longer a happy home or a happy family, though it had been. And from now on I’d have to play a part and quite a big one, I’d have to polish and refine my acting skills, since the situation, if not carefully contained and managed, might be damaging to a judge’s reputation.

Meanwhile, a former yellow fairy, I took a bus to the law courts to see a man in red robes.

There you are, I was a fairy once, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Picture that. I had little wings. It’s midsummer now, though it’s raining, but all of you are dreaming. Your dad, when I told him, certainly tried to picture it. He said he wished he’d been there. He said he was jealous of my dad, even though my dad can’t have been so happy that night. He said he wished he could have seen your mum when she was Mustardseed.

OTIS CAME BACK, he simply came back. That’s the plain fact, and the mystery of the matter — as mysterious as his sudden departure.

It’s easy to scoff at the pet-owners of this world, at the cooing Mrs. Lamberts, until you become one yourself. Sometimes you see, even in these hard-edged times, those poignant scatterings of notices, on trees, on lamp-posts, pleading for information, exuding despair. You never seem to see them being put up, as if that has to be done furtively in the dead of night. Nowadays they’re run off on computers and copiers, there may even be an unhelpful inset photo, but once they always seemed to be hand-copied, a labour of love, in agonised blue biro.

“Have You Seen Our Budgie Archie?”

We scoffed once. Mike scoffed, with the full force of his biological schooling (but I think those snails of his had become his sort-of pets). He called it the anthropomorphic fallacy. An escaped budgerigar in Herne Hill, now which way would it fly — south, to Tulse Hill and Australia? And as if “Archie” would be written all over it, as if even a budgerigar was going to say, “Yes, I’m Archie.”

“I don’t rate Archie’s chances,” your dad said. In those very streets which one day he’d comb at first light, in his cat-suit.

And we came preciously, repentingly close to preparing such a batch of plaintive notices ourselves, restrained only by the thought that it might already be too late. The mockery of all those “Missing”s if Otis was actually dead. And then what do you do? Go out again and solemnly, scrupulously take each little notice down?

But Otis came back. After nearly three weeks, he simply came back. We’ll never know the story, we could hardly ask him. But then the story is perfect anyway in its barest summary: he disappeared, he came back. Has any better story ever been invented? But yes there has, since this is where your story really begins.