Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

Alice was looking at the old wallpaper. ‘The way my mother spoke to you when you were a boy,’ she said. ‘She hardly spoke to me at all when I was a girl, and there were these long absences, when she was away somewhere, Blackpool probably or on holidays with him, and I stayed with the neighbours. My father I only saw a few times and I can’t picture him ever once lifting me up. He was awkward. He once gave me a doll but I felt it had belonged to somebody else.’

‘Mum.’

‘No, it’s all right. It was different with you and my mother. I remember you saying to her “What’s colour, Granny?” and she pinched your cheek.’

‘I remember that.’

‘And she said, “Colour is light on fire.”’

LANGOUSTINES

When Gordon turned up he was pleased to know the menu better than anybody else and he wanted to argue about fisheries and good governance but Luke asked if they could change the subject. Alice blushed and looked at her husband. They knew Luke was wrong. Gordon stroked his moustache with his bottom lip as a way of not speaking up, though to him it was a pity about his stepson, who obviously went away too young and no longer understood the priorities of his country. He knew nothing about policy and taxes or what makes a people, and now, God help him, he was like those kids who think their country is Google.

‘You’re just not going deep enough,’ Luke said. ‘Money has imploded. Religion has gone mad. Privacy is disappearing. The ice-cap is melting and children are starving to death. And you want to sing an old song about national togetherness.’

‘He does a couple of tours in Afghanistan and suddenly he’s Bill Gates,’ Gordon said.

‘I did four tours in Iraq.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re not

thinking

.’

‘No,’ Gordon said. ‘We’re thinking, in our own country, about how it’s important to ensure that elderly people can still get their medicine.’

‘Luke,’ Alice said. ‘You’ve always had your head in the clouds. Always the idealist.’

‘Out of touch with reality,’ said Gordon.

‘The games are finished. All bets are off,’ Luke said. ‘We’re living in the big world now.’

‘This is a big enough world for me,’ Gordon said.

‘So why make it smaller?’

‘I thought you wanted to change the subject, Luke,’ his mother said and she smiled without comfort.

Gordon was wearing a yellow sweater. He knew how to make money but didn’t really know how to spend it. It showed on his face, Alice thought, wondering if she was just too caught up in the mystery of her own family’s approval. That was it. When his langoustines came and Gordon sniffed them on the plate she realised his lack of style told against him in a way she tried to ignore. She loved him for his kindness and his politics but not really for himself.

‘You’ll come round,’ she said to Luke. ‘The whole country’s slowly coming round and you will, too.’

After a while they talked about the business of Anne’s photography and the letter that came from Canada. Alice said the photographs were just another part of Anne’s secretive life. She had kept it all back for her private self and her times in Blackpool. ‘If the offer had come even ten years ago’, she said, ‘we’d all have jumped on a plane to Toronto and been proud to see her having her moment.’

Luke didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe there was ever a time like that, when Alice would happily have flown to Toronto to celebrate her mother’s achievement. ‘I don’t think it’s for us to say what happens,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about photography but it’s important for her.’

‘She’s just not fit enough,’ Alice said.

‘We’ll see.’

‘You don’t seem to understand something, Luke. I know my mother. I know everything about her.’

But he could see it happening. He was certain the exhibition would take place and that his grandmother would be part of it. He had no idea what it would take, but he knew he would go there, that his mother would come too, and they would see for the first time what Anne had done. He pondered the possibility that his grandmother had once had a fresh vision of life and he wanted to place himself within it. Alice, too: he wanted to put her there, even as she said no. He wasn’t angry at his mother for trying to bury the whole thing.

‘Maybe some day,’ she said.

‘But let’s try.’

She shook her head. It was too late for exhibitions and speeches and trips to Canada. It was enough that they take care of Anne and manage her illness. Alice said her mother didn’t know the difference any more between the past and the present, and Luke suddenly thought of an American poet he’d loved when he was a student, Wallace Stevens. After the lunch he would go to the bookshop and buy the poems.

‘They’re probably worth a bomb, her pictures,’ Gordon said, checking his phone. Luke said he would stand by whatever decision Alice made about the exhibition. Anne’s work, Anne’s life, would take its own course regardless. And Luke would try to help his mother, just help her to overcome all the pain and the mess of her first life.

He felt the strange, loose spreading of the afternoon that comes after a few beers. He could say something. ‘It’s true. I wasn’t always sure myself what was real and what wasn’t.’

‘When?’

‘Out there. On the last tour of duty.’

‘Why was that?’ Alice asked.

‘Too much gaming,’ he said. ‘Too much Dad.’

‘I buried your father in his Royal Western Fusiliers dress uniform. Red hackle and everything.’

‘It’s over,’ Luke said.

Alice just sat when he left the restaurant. Gordon was off talking to the maître d’ and she could hear him laughing, his present-day-ness, all that, making him free.

BOBBY’S BAR

Maureen thought it was funny to see him after all the letters and everything. Just normal, wearing jeans. ‘Don’t ask me how I get to know these things,’ she said to Alice on the phone, ‘but apparently he was in and out the pubs down the town, the wee Saltcoats pubs, you know, that one by the railway station. This was after he saw you in Glasgow. These pubs: dog rough, if you ask me, but there you go. The men like these pubs on a Friday night. The girl who used to work in the wedding shop in Kilwinning was behind the bar. She says he had an alteration with some of them.’

‘An altercation,’ Alice said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Dear God,’ Alice said. ‘I got a text back from him. He said he was fine and heading home.’

‘You don’t grudge a young man a drink, not after what he’s been through. You would sooner he didn’t get into arguments but there’s no controlling men once they’re together, sure there’s not?

Anyway, he came in here in the afternoon after he’d seen you and before he went to the pub. It was funny to see him wearing jeans after the lovely uniform and everything. I’d only seen your Luke in photographs, you see.’

‘He’s looking thin,’ Alice said.

‘He’s a handsome fellow,’ Maureen replied. ‘Anyway, he knows what he’s about. I said if his gran wasn’t in her flat she’d be down there drying her towels. He went off to see Anne and it was about an hour before I saw her in the corridor, dawdling back with her laundry basket. Quite happy. In a wee world of her own.’

Luke ended up in Bobby’s Bar and at one point was standing beside a girl with platinum hair. She had lilac eyes and false eyelashes and was part of a hen night. She said the colour wasn’t real, it was special contact lenses. He was talking to her and lifting shots off the bar and throwing them back, red shots, one after the other. His vision was blurred. He crooked an arm around the girl and she didn’t care one way or the other. ‘She’s spoken for, by the way,’ her friend said.