Jon McGregor - So Many Ways to Begin

Kate in the garden in the winter, putting the head on a snowman with her friend Becky, throwing a snowball towards her dad, the sudden jerk and jolt of the picture as he ducks. Her hair back to something like its original colour, still tangled and long but a familiar mousey-blonde again.

This was why he'd bought the camera, using up some more of the redundancy money, so he could pin her down on tape before she'd gone. Because even when she was still thirteen, fourteen, he could imagine all too easily sitting in a quiet and empty house after she'd left, wondering what she was doing at that very moment, wishing he could picture more clearly the times they'd spent together when she'd still been at home.

Kate in her room with her hair tied neatly back, looking serious, a pile of textbooks on the desk beside her and a chewed-up pen in her hand. Saying this is my revision timetable, pointing at a sheet of paper on the wall, patchworked with highlighter squares. And how long did it take you to do that? David's voice asked, squashed against the microphone. Two days, she said, smiling and glaring at the same time. And when do your exams start? he said. Next month, she replied, standing, pushing her hand against the lens; so get out now and let me work, go on, get out! The door closing against the camera, and the sound of her happy gentle laugh.

This was his favourite scene, and the one he could hardly bear to watch; Kate on the very brink of being an adult, her purposeful seriousness reminding him of his own adolescent self when he first started work; Kate with her smile and her bursts of energy, leaping up from the desk to usher him out of the room in the same way she once threw herself at him in games of football at the park; Kate, closing the door, shutting him out, moving on, her laugh still reaching him from behind the closing door.

It seemed effortless, the way Kate passed her exams and got into university. She seemed to take it for granted, just as she seemed to assume there was no reason why she wouldn't leave home and begin again in some other town she knew nothing about, with people she had to hope would become her friends. She belonged to a generation which took these things for granted, which saw staying at home as something unnatural, and education as something which could be continued on a whim, and so she barely noticed the daunted and tentative way Eleanor moved around her while she was studying for her exams.

I don't want her to think I'm worrying, Eleanor would whisper when they were lying in bed at night and wondering if she was doing okay. I don't want her to think I'll be cross if she doesn't do well. She will do well though, won't she? she said urgently.

She kept a copy of Kate's exam timetable by the bedside, hidden under some books, and slipped a packet of multivitamins into her room, and watched for some clue in her face or her voice as they ate tea together after each exam. She asked Becky's mother how she thought the exams had gone, but she didn't dare say anything to Kate herself.

And when the end of August came, after a long summer of waiting and worrying and pretending that she didn't mind, she was up and awake with the first thought of morning, much earlier than Kate was; standing at the bedroom window, looking out for the postman, waiting breathlessly for Kate to wander downstairs and find the envelope lying behind the front door. Listening to the rip of paper in the front room, leaving it a few minutes before going downstairs to see what news had finally come.

And when Kate left home the house seemed to change, doubling in size and sinking into silence. They found themselves meeting each other on the stairs like strangers, lost in their own house. It took a long time to adjust. When he got back from driving her to the university it even took David a while to find Eleanor; he called out to her as he came in through the door, and as he went into the kitchen and up the stairs, but there was no answer. She wasn't in their room, or in the bathroom, or out in the garden, and it was only when he went back upstairs that he found her in Kate's room, sitting on the end of the bed, with a pile of clothes Kate had left behind on her lap. She was folding them into neat squares, picking off long stray hairs and bobbles of lint, stacking them into a pile on the floor beside her. She barely seemed to notice him coming into the room. He kissed her on the forehead, and she smiled softly up at him.

That didn't take very long, did it? she said.

No, it was fine, he said, traffic was clear all the way back to the ring road. She smiled again, holding up a long blonde hair and twisting it round her finger.

That's not what I meant, she said.

When Eleanor's oldest brother Hamish left home, before she was even born, his uncle gave him a knot-tying book as a leaving gift, saying it's not much but it'll see you well. Hamish was seventeen years old and ready to go; his bags were packed and the first ship of his apprentice life was set to leave in the morning, carrying timber to London. His parents brought the neighbours round to see him off, pushing the furniture back against the walls, hoisting open the windows to let the warm spring air in and the tobacco smoke out, baking up cakes and scones and sending young Donald round to the store for another bottle of whisky while Hamish stood awkwardly in the middle of the floor saying hello and thank you and aye I'm looking forward to it as the guests arrived and found a seat or leant against the wall or stood wherever they could find a space. Stewart made his way around the crowded room, filling glasses and saying hello, while Tessa, ten years old and forced uncomfortably into a dress, followed her father round with an overburdened plate of cakes. Will you have another piece? she said to each guest in turn, her voice quiet but confident, her gaze steady and solemn; and each of the guests, with a glass of whisky in one hand and a keen appetite in the other, said please Tessa, thank you, lifting a slab of ginger cake from the pile.

From the doorway Ivy watched her son standing stiffly in the centre of the small room, his shoulders forced back and the stubborn tuft of hair already springing up where she'd just licked her fingers and pressed it down. She knew, really, that he'd be fine when he was gone, that he'd been carrying his share of the household's weight for long enough, that he would manage on his own. But still, it was a hard thing to look at her own son, with the same snubbed features he'd had as a three-year-old, with the bumps and scars of childhood still mapped out across his skin beneath that proud new suit, and to see him as a man ready to head out into the world on his own. She watched the way he spoke to the friends and neighbours in turn, smiling and nodding at their jokes and suggestions, saying thanks for the gifts of warm socks, accepting firm handshakes and leaning forward to place brisk kisses on beaming wrinkled cheeks. Her hands twitched with the memory of holding his tiny warm body up against her face. Her hips shifted with the ghost weight of him, of bearing him or of propping his clinging body up with one arm while she busied around the house with the other. Cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, ironing. Her bones ached with the seeping tiredness of those many long years, the guilty resentment of it all, and she leant back against the door frame, still watching. She saw the way young Rosalind was looking at him, her warm eyes flicking up to his face and his chest when she thought no one was looking.

Rosalind's mother, Ellie, saw where Ivy was looking, met her eye, and smiled. Will I help you with that last lot of scones Ivy? she said, sweeping her friend into the kitchen at the back of the house, the room bursting into laughter as Stewart made some joke behind them. Aye she's a thing or two to learn about discretion that girl of mine, she muttered, as Ivy opened the oven door to a blast of hot air, sweet and damp with the smell of fresh scones.