Graham Swift - Out of This World

And it was really my decision. I could have said, that day, to Grandad: Yes, I want it. I really do. Yes. And Joe will take the job, a job he doesn’t even understand. For my sake. The weather-cocks, the yew trees, the orchard walls. The whole damn fragile illusion.

But now he keeps the illusion that he brought us here. Away from it all. And I know what he would answer if someone were to say to him that he’s in the business of dreams. ‘Sure. But better to sell dreams than — Better, any time, to sell pleasure, even pre-packaged, glossy-brochured pleasure, than — ’

You know what first struck me about New York? (I mean, after that first impression that lasts about two days, that it is all some vast hallucination.) That all these clean, hard, soaring, futuristic lines were mixed up with something crumbling, blighted, decomposed. As if the skyscrapers had to sprout out of some fertile rot. But sweetness and innocence were never really the ticket, were they? If you want them, go walk in some English meadow. And now that’s just what they’re paying, a thousand bucks a time, to do.

The land of cancelled memories. The land without a past. For you too, Doctor K? Some mishap in middle Europe, somewhere along the line? Refugee makes good? But — I forget — you don’t talk. You just listen. I’m the one who has to do the talking.

The land of amnesty. And the land of the gun. Do you remember (our little affair had only just started), we were walking in the Park, you in your tweed coat and hundred-and-fifty-dollar shoes, and me with a winter flush in my cheeks? And I said, just like a smart-ass student to her sugar-daddy professor, no, just like a pert little daughter to her daddy, no, just like a precocious young belle to her old-fashioned gentlemanly beau: This much-debated violence of American life, it was hardly surprising, was it? Since America was made out of bottled-up bad memories, by people on the run. And you narrowed your eyes and, with a little touch of mimic-Bronx, said, ‘Say, who’s the analyst round here?’ And then, straightening your gloves: ‘And spare me the collective unconscious, please. One mind at a time is plenty.’ You bought me tea at the Tavern. I thought: If you want to propose something — something strictly unprofessional — now is your chance.

Not away from it all. Joe wouldn’t have understood how I felt safe, here in this unsafe country, immune in this perilous city. Me, a sweet English (half-Greek) rose in wicked, wild New York. There’s a sort of comfort, a sort of security, isn’t there, in the absence of disguise, in knowing the way things really are? The land of violence, the land of the gun. You know, the ever-so-gentle and peaceable English have this far-fetched notion of America as the place where to settle their differences — to eliminate red indians, outlaws, negroes, presidents, protesting citizens, rival mobsters and business competitors — they pull out a gun and shoot.

So why this terror of a toy gun, Sophie?

I’m trying to tell you, for JESUS CHRISSAKE!

Dear Doctor Klein. The things I haven’t told you. The things I never told you. When we first came here in ’72, I didn’t know anything about anything. I was just a dumb young wife (‘Not dumb, Sophie, never dumb’), pregnant for the first — and I guess the only — time, not even suspecting she was going to have twins, waking up in a new world. I don’t know if I felt at once, this is where I belong now, or whether it was years before anything touched me. I thought: It’s ugly — so it’s beautiful. It’s threatening, that’s okay. I’d rather danger jumped out at you when you half expect it, than suddenly explode from green lawns and mellow brick walls.

Then the boys were born and Joe started to make good and we got this place here in Brooklyn. For a while there was this succession of men coming to fix the plumbing, the heating, to fit the kitchen. I did the proper things then — kept the chain on the door, asked to see their cards. If you put up barriers, you show you are vulnerable. One of them — his name was Georgiades, Nick Georgiades — said, ‘You new to New York?’ So I must have still looked like some dazed outsider. I said yes. He looked at me. ‘From Europe?’ I love the way Americans say ‘Europe’, as if little countries like England or Germany don’t count. ‘I bin to Europe,’ he said. I thought: He’s big and ugly. ‘They got a lot of pretty things over there. But I prefer New York. You know what I think?’ He was fixing some pipe under the sink, half lying on the floor, but looking at me as he tugged with a spanner. ‘Europe is like a broad all dressed up. You don’t know what’s underneath. But New York is like a broad without any clothes. She may not be a princess, but she’s naked and she sure as hell is real.’

I can tell you anything, can’t I, I can tell you everything — isn’t that the idea? Like the doctor I’d let peer up my vagina, I let you peer into my mind. You could be having a voyeur’s field-day, but it’s okay, because it’s your job, you’ve got qualifications.

I said, ‘So you’re not Greek then?’ He thought this was funny. ‘Just a name — one of my fathers was Greek.’ He laughed. I said my mother was Greek, and stood nearer so he could look at my legs. He said, ‘Uhuh. Uhuh. Old man at work?’

He got up, put the spanner down, and I can’t remember making up my mind to do it, but I put my hand on his cock, hard as a pistol, and he hitched up my skirt, right here in this kitchen, with his hands greasy, with the twins upstairs sleeping, and I said, ‘C’mon! C’mon fuck me, fuck me good, you great hog!’ And after that I was no longer a new-world virgin.

Every year I still go to see Marion Evans. She doesn’t lose her memory. We drive up to Epsom Downs usually, if the weather is fine. She brings a thermos. She’s never told me and I’ve never asked what she did with Ray’s ashes, but I have a hunch she just scattered them up there, early one Sunday morning. And I have a hunch too that what crossed my mind must surely have crossed hers: that there must have been some of Dad’s ashes mixed up with Ray’s. So it’s a kind of double observance when we drive up there.

We park the car, wind the windows down, look out over the race-course. She pours tea from the thermos. I ask after her married son and daughter and her grandchildren, and she gives me matter-of-fact accounts. She asks do I hear from Sophie? And I say, Yes, she’s fine. And the twins? Fine. Which is a lie on at least two counts. Because according to Joe’s latest bulletin (no, Mrs Evans, Sophie doesn’t write and I don’t write to her, and I’ve never seen my grandchildren), Sophie isn’t exactly fine at all.

I can tell from her voice and the look in her eye that neither she nor any of her family has ever got over that explosion ten years ago. There’s still this feeling that Ray was to blame somehow. He failed in his duty, should have looked under the back seat as well as the bonnet and in the boot and underneath. Just because he was a victim, he must be implicated in some way. And so must they. They will never get back again into that safe, simple, well-defined world in which the head of the family was a trusted chauffeur, seventeen years with Dad, and a shrewd follower of horses.

She always says I should take up ‘the photography’ again. People ought to know about ‘those things’. They ought to know. I say, Someone else can take the pictures now. And maybe, these days, people have seen it all anyway. I look away as I say this. Because eleven, twelve years ago I know she’d have thought differently. She’d have thought what Ray thought of me. Which, though he always gave me the respectful salute and the time of day, was that I was an oddball, a black sheep. Even when I’d made a name for myself. He took Dad’s side. Naturally.