Graham Swift - Tomorrow

I think you’re still a virgin, Kate, and I think your brother won’t make a move before you do. What’s new in that? But then, for all I really know, each of you may already have had your string of episodes, you may even compare notes frankly with each other. I’m seldom around at what must be the witching hour, immediately after school, and perhaps you find it inconvenient these days that your dad sometimes is — working at home in his study. But then again, perhaps for each of you it’s the other one’s presence that’s the real, inhibiting factor. Compare notes? Hardly.

In any case, I’ve been looking for the telltale signs and I don’t think either of you yet has some special friend, some really special friend, to whom you might just go and blab everything you’re about to learn. Or find it hard not to. Perhaps Mike and I should be grateful. You’re late and cautious beginners, it seems, for whatever reason. Though tomorrow, for all we know, may deliver you a pretty hefty kick-start. If your mum could do it with a test tube — what’s keeping you?

I fear for both of you. Mothers fret and wonder and lie awake at three in the morning. Tell me I’m foolish. I fear for you in ways that have nothing to do with tomorrow. As if tomorrow won’t be enough for you, anyway, to be getting on with.

YOUR DAD’S TURNING in his sleep. Don’t wake yet, Mikey, not yet. For a little while yet he can still be that: “your dad.” He’s snuffling softly like some rooting animal. How I want to hold him tight, but I’m afraid to wake him. In a few hours he’ll be in your hands. I’ll have to hand him over to you.

And it’ll be up to you then what you call him. It seems to me that he’s going to speak to you, one last time, more like a father than he’s ever done, a big, stern, serious daddy. Listen to your father, he’s got something important to say. And then he’ll be nobody, he’ll be what you make of him. If you want, you can even tell him to leave.

But I hope you know that if he goes, I go too. That’s how it is. I’m your mother, he’s not your father, but we go together anyway, just as surely as the two of you. Have I made that clear? When push comes to shove, that’s how it is. I’m your mother, but you’re sixteen now, and how much longer will you even need me around? That indefatigable maternal instinct eventually found its way from me to you, but I’m not sure if biology rules. Is that heresy? Your dad was never your biological father. That disqualifies him? How many real fathers are qualified biologists?

Tomorrow — if you decide in his favour — you’ll agree to make him, artificially, your father, as we once agreed to make you artificially (according to that ugly phrase) our children. But then, you’ll quickly discover, the artifice doesn’t stop there. It’s not just the truth you’ll be getting tomorrow, it’s that whole issue of pretence.

That little side-question of next weekend, of the Gifford Park Hotel, to let us go or not, will seem small stuff in comparison. Though I’ve already imagined how it might be — should it work this way — your neat means of revenge. Forgive me. I see you, next Saturday morning, after a remarkably calm and uncatastrophic week (but one in which you’ve had time to plan), standing at the front door to wave us off on our silver weekend — with all the ceremonial good grace, in fact, that you displayed at Grandpa Pete’s funeral. I even imagine Mike and I feeling for a moment like the spoilt (but humbled) children, while you stand there like the magnanimous householders of 14 Rutherford Road.

Except that when we come back next Sunday evening, you’ll have gone. The house will be ransacked, wrecked. Could you be so cunning? Pretence and dissimulation all round. My little pretence with your father in a five-star hotel, in a four-poster bed in Sussex will have been the least of my worries.

But that larger dissimulation — assuming we are all here, one way or another, under this roof after next weekend — where does it stop? Think about it. Your dad’s right, you might need next weekend just to think. We might have told Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen, years ago — think about it — and, of course, that would have been honest. But it would have robbed them, if you see what I mean, of two little grandchildren and burdened them with a share in our dishonesty. Now you’ll have to decide whether to be honest or not.

Children are brought up not to tell lies. Were we ever so big on that with you? Consider one little mitigating factor, at least. Everyone else’s ignorance — and surprising credulity — only made it easier to perpetrate the lie. Everyone else’s unwitting collusion only made it easier for us to feel (have a little mercy) that the lie might be the truth.

The rain’s getting harder, I think. You’ll have the option — the perfect right — if you wish, to tell the whole world. Starting on Monday, with all your friends at school. Though why wait till then? A few phone calls tomorrow afternoon. Pass it around. We’re in no position to stop you. Think what ripples you could set in motion in just a few moments, after sixteen years. But at least consider how far those ripples could spread, and that you won’t be able, should you feel like it later, to turn them around.

Here’s a thought for you that you may not even have this weekend or for some time to come, but I’ve certainly thought it for you. Suppose, one day, you have children. I mean (enough of that old childhood joke) that each of you or either of you one day has children. Will you be happy for them to think that this man lying here is their grandfather? If he isn’t, who is? Will that be a simple decision for you, hardly needing a moment’s thought, or will you think that one day, when they’ve grown up, they’ll need to know? That they’ll have to be told a story too, like the one I’m telling you now, involving, of course, a rainy weekend in June, once upon a time when you were sixteen?

Grandpa Mikey! Spare us, the poor man’s only fifty. He doesn’t look like a grandpa to me. But that’s not the point. It goes off into the future, you see. And it begs the simple question: will you, one day, have children — each of you, either of you — of your own? I don’t suppose that’s even a flicker of a question in your heads yet. But it’s one of the things you may suddenly find yourselves, as from tomorrow, having to think about intently: that line going off into the future, with more little Hooks on it, perhaps.

And that only begs another, bigger question, which may simply swallow up the first. Why have children at all? Clearly, I must have asked myself that big question once, and once I must have come up with an answer which, as you now know, lasted only so long. Life was possible without them. Without you two though — now that’s a different matter.

But then I don’t remember, even to bolster my rather peculiar position, ever putting the question like this: why bring children into the world? Is it such a good, safe world to bring them into? Is it going to be? I don’t remember Mike employing that argument either, though for him it must have been an even more tempting fall-back. Was it such a sweet, safe world then, in 1972, when Doctor Chivers gave him the news? I was afraid for our future perhaps, not the world’s.

Your dad likes to joke these days, when he can afford to, that it ought to be called The Perishing World. The magazine, I mean, though the same is true of the books. More and more of its pages seem to deal with declines and depletions, not to say outright extinctions, things going wrong with nature, harm being done to it, disasters in store. There even seems to be a readership that relishes this dire-warning stuff. Though there’s also still a dependable readership that, as your dad puts it, just wants to know about frogs.