Jon McGregor - So Many Ways to Begin

No David, she said. Don't be stupid. I just don't think you should give up, that's all.

He watched her walk back into the house, slam the door and tug the curtains across the back-room window. He saw the side-light going on, and the blue-white flicker of the television. He hung his head over the back of the chair and looked up at the darkening glow of the sky. He hadn't even been thinking about that when she came out. He patted the folded family tree in his pocket, checking it was still there. He noticed the faint white lights of an aeroplane overhead, the first of the evening's stars, the last of the daylight draining down to the horizon. He folded his arms across his chest. He hadn't even been thinking about that. She'd got that wrong. No. He'd been thinking about Kate asking if she could go on the school skiing trip, and having to say no, and that no matter how much Eleanor insisted that plenty of other parents would have to refuse it had still made him feel like a failure again. He'd been thinking about his father, working his hands raw each day until a few weeks before his death, and what he would have thought of a son who'd only worked half a life in cramped basement offices and dust-free store-rooms and now sat around feeling sorry for himself. He'd been thinking, again, that the loss of the job he'd been so proud of was his own fault for what he'd allowed to happen with Anna, and that he was failing his family by no longer being a working man. He'd been thinking, as he did again and again and again, that the failure to tell Eleanor about what had happened was the lowest failure of all.

He finished his beer. He tried to stand up. He sat down again. He rubbed at his face and tried to remember what Eleanor had said. He patted his pocket again. She was wrong. He hadn't been thinking about that. She thought she knew him so well, but she didn't.

He noticed that the television wasn't on any more, and then he heard the back door open again, and then he realised that Eleanor had sat down beside him. It's dark now, she said. Are you coming inside?

The gravelled surface of a car park, the rush of traffic in the background, the flap and flutter of wind across the microphone. David's voice saying is it working? Is it on?

A blur of camera movement, a streak of blue sky and green hills, a painfully slow pan from right to left: a copse of trees by the side of the road, a low stone wall, a long stretch of meadow leading up to a hill, a noticeboard, and then Kate, turning her back as she appeared on the screen. And from behind the camera, his voice distorted and thick, David saying so here we are in deepest Warwickshire on this fine summer's day, here for a walk in one of Kate's favourite spots. Can you tell us a little bit about it Kate? The camera circling round her, trying to persuade her to show her face, while she let her long thick hair fall across her eyes, her head lowered, her hands pulled up into the loose tattered sleeves of her jumper, her legs vanishing into boots two sizes too big. Kate saying Dad, stop it will you you're so embarrassing, and David laughing, clumsily, trying to make it seem like a game, trying to make it seem as though she was still young enough to play these games. She walked away from the camera, dragging her feet, and the camera followed, David's footsteps grinding across the gravel, David saying come on love, not even a smile for us now? Her back turned, the camera no longer circling around to face her, an awkward pause. Kate's voice, drowsy with sulkiness, saying I can't believe you Dad, you're a nightmare. David, a little quieter, a little hurt-sounding, saying Kate love, just a quick smile for the camera? Kate turning, quickly, lifting her dyed-black hair away from her face, a brief grimacing smile. Is that okay? she said sarcastically, already beginning to walk away. David's voice, chuckling as if it was still a game, saying end of take one, the camera fixed on Kate's back for a moment more, waiting to see if she would turn round, and then a blur of colour and a shot of gravel as he looked for the button to turn the bloody thing off.

Kate at her cousin's birthday party, standing in Susan's elegant garden with a glass of wine and a paper plate of food, talking to some of Mark's friends and turning her back as soon as she saw the camera, the camera drifting instead across the rhododendrons and fuchsias which Susan spent so much time on.

Kate on a day out in London, standing on a bridge over the Thames, watching a barge churn upstream, smiling, saying hello Mum.

Kate on her sixteenth birthday, getting ready to go out and meet her friends, unwrapping presents from her parents, her auntie, her gran. Relaxed about being filmed now, partly because she was used to it, partly because she'd been sipping from a quarter bottle of vodka in her room — David had known about this, had been able to see it in the happy excited glaze of her eyes, and had chosen not to say anything — and partly because she was just beginning to grow out of her acute embarrassment at being seen in the world. Kate with her hair away from her face, still dyed black but knotted and piled up on to her head, frayed strands sticking out in all directions. Still wearing the ragged blacks and purples of a year before, but no longer hiding behind them, her clothes a little less shapeless and baggy, her make up less smudged. She unwrapped a large square present, saying what could it be? to the camera, and she looked genuinely pleased and surprised when she saw which band the record was by, holding it up to the lens and saying hey wow, thanks Dad, thanks Mum, leaping up in a clatter of jewellery to kiss Eleanor wetly on the cheek. Eleanor, slightly uncomfortable, embracing her in turn, saying we asked your friend Becky and she said this was one you'd like. Kate nodding and saying I do, the camera focusing on Eleanor for a moment, her happy smile and the anxious twisting of her hands, then moving back to Kate as she ripped open her next present.

Eleanor didn't like the way Kate dressed or wore her hair, the music she listened to, the places she thought she might be going to, but she was careful never to say anything. You tell her, she whispered urgently, when they got back from a restaurant one night to find the washbasin stained an inky-blue and Kate sitting up in bed with her hair wrapped in a ruined towel. She's not going out like that, she muttered, another evening, when Kate came downstairs with stockings torn from her ankles to the hem of a very short skirt; you tell her. I don't want to get involved. Kate ignored what David said, of course, saying he was so unfair and slamming the front door as she left, and Eleanor watched her walking down the street from the upstairs window, turning to David as he came upstairs and saying my God David, what does she think she looks like? But she still said nothing; not when Kate came home with her ears bloody and studded with piercings, not when the school sent them a letter about her absences, not when she stayed out at a party until five in the morning. She faded into the background, telling David what she thought but withholding comment from Kate for fear of speaking the way her mother had once done. Sometimes, David thought, she was so busy trying not to repeat Ivy's mistakes that she was unable to see how uneventful her relationship with Kate had become. In many of the scenes on the tape, Eleanor wasn't there at all, and when she was she seemed to be pressing herself into the background, waiting for David to say something from behind the camera, waiting for the focus to move away from her.

Kate in the garden, in the summer, doing a guided tour of the borders, laughing and joking, welcoming the attention of the camera now, saying Dad planted these raspberries when I was a kid and most of them get eaten by the birds but we always get a few at least.