My grandfather told me a story once. Thinking about it now, I don’t think he really believed it as much as he’d have liked to. He’d fought in the war, or at least repaired machines in the war–the second one, that is–and he’d divorced my grandma, and he had it in him to be a bit of a bastard, frankly. For the most part, though, I loved him with the sort of elemental commitment that comes with not realising you have a say in the matter.
I call it a story. I’m not sure why. It has no characters, as such, nor a plot. I suppose that calling it a story has become a convenient way to suggest that it is truthful without having to actually say so. It’s just more safe. Considering the circumstances.
Because I’ve remembered with pin-sharp clarity, more so than I’ve remembered his exact words, the expression that I thought I saw in his face, in his body. As if something was struggling not to be hidden, in fact, as he told me this story. It was something that I’d never quite seen before, or possibly something that I’d never noticed. That would certainly be possible. I was young enough to still think of him as an extension of myself, rather than an independent person, relative in some ways, important ways, but merely and hugely coincidental in so many others. When you’re young this has the consequence, it seems to me, of blunting affect. Emotions are read very blithely: that man is angry, or that woman is happy. This dog wants to play with the ball. You’ve been told about these things in bedtime stories, or read about them in books. The Great North Wind, or the Dragon King Beneath The Sea, these characters have needs and desires that are straightforward. Straightforward may be the wrong word. But all the same, not like your parents, or your grandparents. They don’t live in pain. So as I listened to my grandfather I watched him too, because he was an animated speaker with big expressive eyes, and he gestured with his hands, gnarled and knotted like the cherry trees in the playground at school, fascinating hands, full of craftiness, and that’s when I saw, or thought I saw, that he was afraid.
It didn’t make any sense to me. Later I dismissed the thought, because I couldn’t imagine what he could have been afraid of, and anyway the morning had turned into a glorious sunny afternoon and I was keeping my balance in a stream trying to catch minnows with a little net, really a ring of twine and fishnet stocking driven into the end of a bamboo cane, and through the warmth of the rubber boots around my feet I could feel the cold brilliance of the stream water, rushing is very much the word, or even racing. The little fishes seemed to swarm, almost, and I shuffled from rock to rock by the arches of my feet, frightened of treading on one, frightened of slipping on the treacherous stones. Happily there I was lost in the stuff of it. The sunlight where it hit the water, bright enough to scald, one hand flung up in front of my eyes as a shield, somehow keeping my balance.
I didn’t understand, and I forgot. I still don’t understand, necessarily, but now I remember, rather more than a decade later, almost two in fact, after a chance meeting with old keepsakes: a box, in fact, within which I found a fasces of strips of negative bound up with elastic bands who knows how long ago and now mostly melted together, three spoiled photographs of a river in the Forest of Boland, an sealed plastic carton of 0.22 air rifle pellets, and a heavy brass badge stamped ‘CITY OF SANTA FE DEPUTY SHERIFF’.
The unfamiliar taste of ham sandwiches spread with brown mustard from Germany at breakfast, mustard somehow seeming illicit and adult in its smell and flavour, the same sort of pungency of cigarettes and vodka, and that breakfast was at half past ten in the morning, and that from the living room window the garden was some thirty feet below, at the bottom of a precipitous wooden staircase formed by beams driven into the wall that I would never again trust with my weight. Among all this, the thing I had glimpsed in my grandfather’s face there for a moment, the thing that I realise, remembering, was actually evasion itself. I could not, still cannot see the thing itself that was being held back, but I saw something there that did not belong, the outline of something’s absence.
Suddenly he was not crafty and assured, as he so often seemed when asking me, for instance, how many grooves a record had (”Well,” I said brightly, “it actually depends on whether it’s an LP or a single, because …”, faltering, sensing a trap, “… er, wait a minute …”).
It must sound ridiculous for me to contend, after all that, that I can’t remember the story that he told me on this particular day, when so much else of it is alert to me. But I can’t. I can remember images and tunes and sensations, but words and tales, sequences, I seem to be incapable of marking these. I can remember the kinds of things he used to say clearly enough by thinking of the sounds that his voice made, by the shapes his sentences made in the air. The substance, though, the thread and weave of his thought, that seems to be permanently beyond the horizon, even if it only appears to be held there by a trick of perspective.
As if I stand at one end of a dark wooded avenue, and at the other end, in bright sunlight, there is an open market. People appear to come and go among the merchants, the book stalls and haberdashers and grocers and the man with things that are useful for computers, but I cannot clearly hear or see them (although nowadays, without my glasses, I can barely see to the other side of the room). The transactions they carry out are said to exist because I presume that they must. From here, I realise, I see nothing but colours and shapes, and I hear nothing but movements in the air. Nothing is direct. Everything is possible.
In this way, what follows is an assumption of the true events, a sort of reconstruction from the apocrypha that have been found.
We had eaten breakfast late that morning. Last night we had bought food at the Chinese takeaway, my first. Provincial to the marrow even then, I had had a steak and kidney pudding. Suet pastry remains an enduring passion.
“I suppose that to me,” my grandfather said very carefully, “what really is remarkable, what I just cannot understand, is how time speeds up. It gets away from you the more you try to pay attention to it, it really does, and believe me I don’t know where it gets to, or how, but there you have it – or don’t …”
“I remember,” he said, “unless my mind is playing tricks on me, how it used to be. Back when I was doing my National Service, for instance, an evening would last us all night. The rest of the time, the rest of the year, that was just the same way, only noisier. I say I was never one for getting staggering drunk but I used to manage alright, me and my chums, my chums and I. Whereas, and your nanna will vouch for this, it seems to me that now I’ve barely sat myself down in front of the telly, and you know what that’s like up here, Jim, but that it’s all repeats, it’s Minder and Murder, She Wrote and Monty Python–like I hadn’t seen enough of them first time around–and the next thing you know it’s the Ten O’Clock News, and it’s as though they’ve rung the bell for last orders. My days are getting shorter. It’s as if I’m asleep before I’ve begun, and I’ll tell you this as well: but I don’t sleep any better than I used to, either. I just cannot keep from waking up now at about five o’clock, and I find myself getting dressed in the dark and pacing around making tea with the World Service on like a bloody farmer, pardon my language, just for something to do.”
He reached for his tea with the precise judgment of the arthritic.
“I don’t think it’s anything to do with, sorry, love, anything to do with death,” he added, having set his cup back down. The aside was addressed to my nanna, who had just lit a cigarette and was now sat back with it held between two fingers of an outstretched arm, face unreadable behind her glasses that caught the daylight. “At least, I hope not, but I don’t think so, if that doesn’t sound daft. It’s something else that bothers me, that I’m afraid of.”
It was about here that I saw the shadow in his face, although I cannot say that those were his words as I saw it.
“I don’t know what it is,” he says, speaking my mottling memories as they stick together in the heat, forming inseparable superimpositions. Double, triple exposures. Already, I realise, his voice sounds less like his own.
“I can feel it, sometimes, but I can’t get a good look at it. If I could, I don’t think I’d be afraid. If ‘afraid’ is the right word.”
He hesitates, loudly.
“If any of these are the right words.”
I can hear a sizzling, a sudden warning: wow and flutter. This may be the end of the tape.
“I’ve asked it questions, Jim, but it doesn’t answer. It might be ignoring me.”
I suddenly think of a telegram that I found a few years ago among my grandma’s things. I may even have found it in a folder at her wake. He had sent it on or shortly after V.E. Day to say that he, unlike so many, would soon be coming home. It may have said something more than this besides, although I can’t be certain, because the last line of the telegram is a line from a song:
I’LL BE WITH YOU IN APPLE BLOSSOM TIME
“It might be ignoring me,” he says.
I see the memory of my grandfather as I see everything without my glasses. I see him in approximate clarity, pulled into focus through a painful squint. I hear the memory of my grandfather as I hear anyone. My mind walks the winter shore in its shrieking night, dragging ashore and piecing together what parts of their words are brought up by the longshore drift of uncaring time. Somewhere on the seas there are beaches of white sand, reefs of pink coral, blue lagoons. But I’m not standing in any of those places.
I draw my head up slowly and breathe in. The muscles around my eyes begin to relax, pulling back from their forced focus. My ears pop softly, and the noise floods in. They refute time. They give us back what it takes from us.
At the dining table with the stone inlaid in the centre for hot dishes, I see the semblance of my grandfather straighten in his chair. For a moment, it’s as though he does something I have never ever seen him do. As though he has shrugged his shoulders.
“It might be ignoring me,” he says. “Or perhaps it just doesn’t know what to say.”
_____
Daniel Kedges is 28 and lives in the UK. His diary is here.
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