Graham Swift - England and Other Stories

He was going to the police station, voluntarily, to help with inquiries. He was cooperating. But then? All hell let loose, she was sure of that. All hell, either way, whatever the outcome, whatever the decision. Never mind the voluntarily. All hell, she was sure, if this wasn’t hell already.

Which was what they’d all said when they didn’t want to say — or couldn’t think of how to say — anything. All hell. You don’t want to know.

But there was still this night, this black interval, and she wished it could be truly lastingly black. She wished when she opened her eyes — what was the point of shutting them if it didn’t make things go away? — there’d not be that glow, from the streetlights, round the edge of the curtains. My God, she wished she had blackout curtains. She saw them again as if it were yesterday, the dusty black brutal things they’d had to get used to, instead of the swirls of flowers or the Regency stripes. The curtains in her old bedroom in Camberwell had daisies. Of course.

What did it mean? Voluntarily. ‘Clear all this up.’

And what did this mean, right now, him being in the other room? That he didn’t want to be near her, touching her, let alone talking to her? Or that he thought that she wouldn’t want him there, not now, next to her? That she wouldn’t want to be touching him or, my God, for him to be touching her?

She told herself it was his confession, his way of saying it. She told herself it was just the disgrace, the sheer disgrace at the very idea of it, the very suggestion. Imagine. Either way, he was contaminated, not to be touched. Either way it was all hell.

And how could you ever tell anyway when things themselves went right back into blackness? It was what Addy herself had said, it was her trump card.

‘We’re talking here, Mum, about earliest memories. No, not even that. We’re talking about when you shouldn’t have any memories at all. But you have them, don’t you, if they’re strong enough, if they’re bad enough? You just suppress them, don’t you, submerge them? You pretend to forget.’

Suppress? Submerge? It had gone through her head to say, ‘You’re not in one of your classes now, my girl, you’re not in front of a blackboard.’ And she’d seen for a moment (something she’d never ever actually seen) her daughter facing rows of young faces. Why had Addy chosen to be a teacher? The thought of her becoming one had once vaguely scared her. She’d seen herself back at school, a target for her own teachers.

Pretend to forget?

What could you say about that time where memory vanishes into darkness? You could say nothing. Or you could say anything, you could say what the hell you liked, it was anyone’s guess, and no one could prove you wrong.

My girl. Addy — little Addy — was forty-eight.

‘You tell me what your earliest memories are, Mum. Go on, try it on me.’

She actually said that, to her own mother, as if she was accusing her , or as if she was saying, ‘Come on, join me.’

And now here she was doing it, at three in the morning, trying to go back in her memory as far as possible, to where memory slips down a black hole. And she couldn’t tell if it was because she was searching for something — and why the hell should she be? — or because she just wanted to slip, herself, down that black hole and never come out again. .

She could remember being held against her father’s chest, when she was small enough for most of her to fit against it. She had a blue cotton dress, it was her first dress. She could remember him hugging her to his chest and her hugging him back. What was wrong with that? She could remember having her ear against her father’s chest and hearing the strange sounds it made, like rocks or pebbles shifting inside a cave — a cave by the sea with waves washing into it. She could remember it being as though he was letting her listen to the sounds, just her specially. What was wrong with that?

She could remember being in the paddling pool in the children’s playground in Ruskin Park, though she couldn’t say how old she’d have been, and a man had popped out from behind a big tree with his trousers undone and all his stuff showing. He’d done it very quickly and cleverly, just as she’d looked up and when no one else was looking, because she’d turned round and everyone was looking the other way. And when she’d looked back the man had gone as if he’d never been there. But she could remember his stuff showing, his red bobbing thing. She couldn’t have invented that. She could remember thinking what was wrong with him, what sort of — disfigurement — was that? Though she didn’t know then the word disfigurement.

Anyway she’d got over it and never said a word. And it wasn’t her daddy.

Her face was wet. Addy was making her do this. The bitch.

And if it had been all right to hug her father still, her father who’d been gassed, and for him to hug her since he was still her same daddy, then it was all right to hug Larry now, no matter what, to hold him and hug him against her own sad chest, against her own flat breasts, and say, ‘It’s all right, Larry, I’m here. You’re still the same Larry.’

Except he wouldn’t let her. He’d gone to the spare room. What did it mean? It could mean that he thought that she must think that he’d really—

The bitch, the evil bitch. She was making them lie like this in separate rooms, both in their own separate blackness.

And he was lying, for God’s sake, in Addy’s old room. It wasn’t, at least, in her old single bed. That had gone ages ago, it had been the spare room for ages with a new double bed from Debenham’s. But it was the bed where Addy and Brian had slept enough times when they’d visited, and they’d visited enough times in nearly twenty years. Brian had said once it had ‘tickled’ him to sleep in Addy’s old room. He’d said that. And then they’d brought their kids, Mark and Judy, first one then the other, in their carry-cots, to sleep with them in that same room.

And if all this, now, was true, then how could they have done that, come here, kept visiting, with their kids too? Though it had been a while, it was true, since any of them had visited, and the kids weren’t kids any more. She should have said, perhaps, like some interfering mother, ‘Is everything okay?’

Which was just the point Addy was making. Years went by and people never talked, did they? She, Adele Hughes, born Baker, hadn’t talked for over forty years, but she was talking now. She’d kept it to herself, she’d ‘struggled’, but now she had to ‘speak out’. And she was talking face to face, notice, she wasn’t flinching. She was looking at her own mother, hard in the eye, as if her own mother might have known all along what all this was about and covered it up. And she wouldn’t be the only one to speak out, would she, not by a long way? The world knew that by now. It was others speaking out that had given her the courage.

Courage?

She said she’d been ‘traumatised’. All her life she’d struggled. But it had to stop now. She had to have her ‘release’. At forty-eight? And had she talked to Brian first about it all? ‘Tickled’. Had she had him sleeping in another bed?

Or was he doing that anyway?

She said that when she was very small, almost too far back for memory — there she went again — Larry, her own father, had done things to her, had interfered with her. He’d molested her. He’d traumatised her.

‘He what? He did what ? Where? When? What ?’

She’d exploded into questions — which seemed to be all she had now. She was lying in this bed, under a rubble of questions.

‘You better have some facts, my girl! You better know what the hell you’re talking about!’