You E-Book

Phil Whitaker

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 352

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A man boards a train, hoping to see the daughter he has heard nothing from for seven years. As he travels towards his destination, he restlessly revisits the events that blew apart their seemingly perfect world. With acute insight, sparkling imagination, and vividly arresting prose, Phil Whitaker explores the very best and worst that families can do, and asks: what are the forces that shape us; and, against powerful traumas reverberating down the generations, can true love prevail?

Leseprobe

YOU

by 

PHIL WHITAKER

SYNOPSIS

Big Issue in the North Summer Reading Recommendation

A man boards a train, hoping to see the daughter he has heard nothing from for seven years. As he travels towards his destination, he restlessly revisits the events that blew apart their seemingly perfect world.

With acute insight, sparkling imagination, and vividly arresting prose, Phil Whitaker explores the very best and worst that families can do, and asks: what are the forces that shape us; and, against powerful traumas reverberating down the generations, can true love prevail?

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

‘A propulsive, cathartic tour-de-force – Whitaker’s finest work to date.’ —Xan Brooks

REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK

‘Brilliant, innovative, gripping, hellish, unbelievable truth. You is driven by honesty, humanity, compassion and love. A guaranteed page-turner. A story of supernatural hope over terrible experience, of understanding and even forgiveness. I won’t say any more. To unpack the magic of this art would spoil You for you.’ —Nick Child, The Alienation Experience

‘You, by Phil Whitaker, tells the story of a father whose teenage daughter cut him out of her life after he left her mother. Told in flashbacks as he makes his way across the country to meet her for the first time in seven years, unsure if she will turn up at the rendezvous, it is a tale of inherited hurts and modern manipulation. The premise may sound familiar but its execution soars above similar tales, offering the reader an incisive portrayal of family breakdown and the damage caused by a vindictive parent from a father’s point of view.’ —Jackie Law, neverimitate

‘The “you” of Whitaker’s emotionally charged novel is the narrator’s daughter. Stevie Buchanan, fiftysomething art therapist, is a victim of “parental alienation”, a severing of relations between parents and children as a result of marriage or relationship breakdown. In urgently, insistently addressing his daughter, a 21-year-old student, Stevie does the very thing he is prevented from doing in person, as he has been estranged from her for seven years. His desperation fuels flights of imagination in which, together, the pair revisit scenes of family history going back generations to examine the domino effect of traumas that repeat themselves with devastating effect.’ —Jane Housham, The Guardian

‘You can be appreciated on a number of levels. Firstly the language and the writing which is of the highest quality. Whitaker seems to put his prose together effortlessly creating word pictures and word thoughts that stay with you for several pages. Secondly his ability to characterise again seems to be effortless. I’m sure it isn’t! But for the reader it’s the end result that resonates and the characters here, especially Stevie, are real and substantially drawn. Thirdly, and arguably most importantly the theme of this book, parental alienation. If it’s not a term you’re familiar with, take heart. Neither was I. But I am now and how!’ —Gill Chedgey, Nudge Book Magazine

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORK

‘Whitaker is so genuinely inventive.’ —The Spectator

‘Whitaker is clearly a writer to watch’ —Daily Telegraph

‘Whitaker is an intelligent, sympathetic and eloquent writer.’ —Sunday Telegraph

‘Phil Whitaker has gone where no novelist has dared to go before.’ —Marcus Chown

‘Funny, engaging, insightful, and even moving. Masterful.’ —Phil Hammond

‘A wonderful story. if literary thriller means anything it means The Face. Buy at once.’ —Time Out

‘Heart-stopping. The Face is a thriller unlike any I’ve ever read.’ —Literary Review

‘A clever, beautifully judged piece of writing.’ —Financial Times

‘This novel about two sisters addresses the permanent themes of relationships, loyalty and trust. As one sister, Bridie, leaves her secular Catholic life to become a nun in Africa, and her sister Elodie sets out to look for her when she goes missing, the reader learns of Elodie’s own journey of self-discovery. As she concludes on her return flight: ‘Down there, somewhere, were human beings doing things out of hatred; many others down things out of love. And most, like Bridie and her, contending with the mess and muddle that lies between.’’ —Catholic Herald

‘While maintaining the fast-paced missing-person investigation, Whitaker also manages to weave in a separate timeline of Elodie’s memories of her sister. There are snapshots of their parents’ abusive marriage, an awkward 18th-birthday disco and euphoric experiences watching the electronic dance act Faithless. In these scenes from past lives, the complexities of sisterly strife are presented on a vividly human scale.’ —New Statesman

You

phil whitaker won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award for his debut, Eclipse of the Sun (1997) after graduating from the UEA creative writing MA. He went on to win the Encore Award with his second novel, Triangulation (1999), and has published three other novels, The Face (2002), Freak of Nature (2007) and Sister Sebastian’s Library (2016). You is his sixth novel.

ALSO BY PHIL WHITAKER

Eclipse of the Sun (1997)

Triangulation (1999)

The Face (2002)

Freak of Nature (2007)

Sister Sebastian’s Library (2016)

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Copyright © Phil Whitaker, 2018

The right of Phil Whitaker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2018

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-78463-145-1 electronic

For PA and RG

It’s not black, it’s not white,

it’s not dark, it’s not light

Secrets are the stones that sink the boat.

Take them out, look at them,

throw them out and float.

Something Dark

LEMN SISSAY

PROLOGUE

Rendezvous

The road through the village is closed. They’re digging up the drains – some problem with the sewage backing up or something, Christ knows. Red and white plastic barriers, portable but implacable, linked in a line from pavement to pavement, blocking the way. A rectangular yellow sign, leaning back on its spindly metal legs, black arrow and stencilled lettering redirecting traffic up the Farleigh Road. It’ll be a way round the impasse, sure, but the sat navs won’t like it, and the route will be clogged by the abnormal volume of cars. Some drivers – frustrated by the delay, feeling thwarted in their plans – will try doing their own thing. They’ll hang a right down some narrow lane, embarking on some tortuous circumnavigation along the ancient droves that thread between the hedgerows hereabouts. Do-it-yourself detours from which some, perhaps, may never return.

I think: a car could smash through it all, crushing the lightweight barrier, sending bits flying like a skittles strike. What would the ground workers do then, gathered round the shallow shit-filled trench they’ve excavated? Look up, alarmed? Hold out puny hands, thinking they might halt the oncoming threat? Dive to safety once they realise it’s futile?

But we don’t, do we, we users of the road? Such violence would be unacceptable. We obey the imposition, accept our fate. We turn around and try to find our way, some other way, any way we can.

The High Street has never been so quiet. Everyone who lives there loves it, I’ll bet. A break from the late-running commuters, defying the speed limit. A lull in the lorries rumbling through, their deep vibrations rattling family photos on the mantelpieces, and heirloom china on the shelves.

I phoned a couple of days back. The stop is the other side of the closure but I wanted to be sure. I’m making a journey on Thursday, I said, I have to catch a train. I shouldn’t have fallen for it, the youth on the other end yabbering through an endless list of road names I’ve never heard of, telling me this was the diversion that would bring the bus round. I couldn’t follow what he was saying. So I said to him: Look, fella, can you just tell me, is the bus going to stop here or not? Oh, yes, he said, the bus is definitely running as normal. You will definitely make your train.

Half an hour in the autumn chill, the FirstBus sign jutting from ten foot up the telegraph pole; the timetable mounted in its weatherproof frame below, making its empty promises. Me, interrogating every engine note as vehicles approach either side of the crossroads.

I should have ordered a taxi.

In the end a guy in a Toyota pulls up, passenger window winding down. He leans across, one hand on the steering wheel, peering up at me.

‘You’re in for a long wait.’ He gives me a rueful smile, like he’s been caught out before and knows how I must be feeling. ‘Would you like a lift? You can pick it up at Hinton.’

He’s called Sree, he tells me, as we pull away. He’s about my age, I guess, around fifty, but his face has barely any lines. How come Asian skin weathers so well? I’m surprised, meeting him; there are so few ethnic minorities out here. I figure he must be a recent arrival but, when I ask, he says he’s been in the village twenty years, ever since he and his partner left London. His other half is called André, which snags my attention; he sounds French, artistic. It sets me wondering about them: their history, how they met, what they do.

Sree chats on, checking his rear-view mirror, working up through the gears, warming to the opportunity to reminisce. They didn’t intend to live here, he says, not when they first made plans. They were thinking of Bath. But the village was so much quieter then. And when they came to see the house on the High Street, with its views over Churchmead, the tower of the fourteenth-century church standing sentinel against the backdrop of the hills rising westward towards Falkland . . . well, they fell in love.

He has a friendly, cultured voice. I’ve got him down as an architect, or a doctor or something – a professional not a businessman, at any rate – but I don’t ask. It only invites enquiries in return. I like him, though; I have a sense we could get on. He feels it, too, I’m sure. I’m chastened it should have taken this – this non-running of a bus – for us to have come across each other. I’ve been here three years already. I keep myself too much to myself.

‘So where are you off to?’ he asks, glancing at my hold-all, crammed in the footwell, and the curious canvas roll bag clasped upright between my knees.

I think about it. I could just tell him, be completely straight, but it would lay me open to questions – the well-meaning, life-affirming sort of questions we use to make connections. There would come a point when I would regret having said anything, where I would have to slap a layer of gloss on things, just to make them acceptable. Even with all the time in the world, it is hard for anyone to comprehend. Unless they’ve been here, too. Then they understand only too well. That’s what these past seven years have taught me – that people make assumptions, interpret things according to their own lights. When superficial appearances make such perfect sense, it’s the devil’s own job to persuade someone otherwise. On the surface: a river sliding naturally – peaceably, even – downstream. But beneath the sky-tree-light-reflecting sheen? All manner of currents swirl, and limbless creatures prowl. It’s something only I know. Me, and those of my clan.

The pause has become a silence. I’m seeming rude, to someone who has been only kind.

I tell him: ‘Oxford.’

I listen to the word hovering in the air. My tone has the hint of a warning: that is all I am going to say. But I might have left the door ajar. I look across – his face in profile, his aquiline nose, the frank brownness of his eye. He’s not that interested. He’s just making conversation.

I turn my attention back to the road. We flash past signs welcoming careful drivers to Hinton Charterhouse. There’s the FirstBus sign up ahead on the left, where in a moment Sree will drop me and I will wait a while longer to pick up the next hourly service.

‘Yeah,’ I say, as though talking to myself. ‘I’m going to Oxford.’

❦

I am on my way to see you.

I am on my way to seeing you.

Two sentences, virtually identical. Those three little letters, that innocuous i-n-g, spelling a whole world of difference. I’m no writer; I couldn’t tell you the grammar. All I know is, one sentence is definite, concerned with something that is going to happen. The other is contingent, provisional, a work-in-progress, with no end in sight.

All I know is: I am on my way to see you, but it’ll doubtless be one more wave from this distant shore. That’s what Prof calls it: waving from a distant shore. Seven years I’ve been on my way to seeing you. And I have to carry on, stranded here on this stony beach, the pebbles painful under the balls of my feet, so far away you can scarcely make me out. My arm is achingly tired, but I will keep describing these arcs of love. The sea breeze cuts cold across the impassive channel; there is salt on my tongue. Gulls cry overhead. I have to keep calling, my voice hoarse from not being heard, the sounds I make too puny to cross even a fraction of the gulf between us, even were they not to be whipped away on the wind the second they leave my lips.

Who are you? Your childhood was happy, your family loving and warm, I know that much. You skipped through those early years, your skirts dancing round your knees as you made your way. You have a sister, two years younger, and she was your only bane. Sometimes you were inseparable, playing together, exploring and adventuring. Other times you felt overpowering antipathy, and you would take it out on her in a thousand subtle ways – excluding her from your games, letting her know she wasn’t wanted, wounding her with words when no one else was around.

Then when you were twelve, an earthquake: buildings, their foundations, every structure rent and brought down. Your father announced he was leaving, leaving the home, the family. You. Your sister. Mummy – devastating her, shattering her heart. Wonderful Mummy. The times you would find her, hunched over her knees, crying and inconsolable, no matter how hard you tried to console. You felt so desperate, so powerless to help.

To think, you once stood in that kitchen and pleaded with him not to do it. Daddy, is there any hope? Your vulnerable young body sheathed in a pretty floral print dress. Your hands entwined tight together in front of you. Your eyes imploring.

To think. Back then you believed it was him deciding to go. Bit by bit, over the months, over the next couple of years, the truth dripped out. How the man you once loved as your Daddy was a tyrant, a bully. How he had controlled Mummy, repressed her, rendered her daily life a misery. How he had forced her to go out to work, keeping her from spending the time she craved with her young children. How he belittled her, monitored every penny she spent, humiliated her in front of others for a pastime.

To start with, in this post-separation world, you spent every other weekend with him in the modern box he was renting, and a couple of nights each week after school. But the more you learned of him, the more you began to see his true character in how he treated you, too: his rigidity, the way he kept over-riding your feelings.

Gradually, you learned about his drinking, his fecklessness, his domineering ways; how Mummy had, for years, kept the family together, putting up with virtual slavery for your and your sister’s sake.

Every time you were due to stay with him you would see the pain in Mummy’s eyes, you could tell how anxious she was about your well-being, how searingly she was going to miss you while you were gone. To go felt like a betrayal, and the guilt of it skewered you.

You wanted less and less to do with him, you could hardly stand to go there anymore. Still Mummy would take you, holding you tightly before you left the car. Your hands, encircling her body in that last heart-rending hug, could sense in her tremulousness things that you couldn’t name. You would insist you didn’t want to go. She would say: you have to, we have no choice, the court ordered it. And it’s important to see your father. Her voice would shrink and crumple under those last words, like paper on a fire. She would check in with you constantly while you were there – Skype, instant messaging, calls on the mobile – ensuring you were all right, letting you know she could come and fetch you at any point if it proved too much to bear.

The final straw, just after you turned fourteen. Your daddy wanted to take you – you and your sister – to Italy the following summer, to go round the galleries in Florence, and see the Siena Palio. Two whole weeks away from Mummy, fourteen days of unbearable pain for you and for her. You felt ripped apart even contemplating it; you thought you might be physically sick. And the prospect of it forced Mummy to tell you that from which she had so long hoped to shield you. How in the months before he left the home, your father had begun to spend more and more time alone with you in your room, the door firmly shut. How Mummy would come in and interrupt, to find him sprawled across your bed, a chilling grin on his face, with you sitting innocently beside him, focused on your homework, oblivious to the danger. With you in Italy, she would be a thousand miles away. She could no longer hope to protect you.

Those happy skirt-dancing days of your childhood, an utter sham. You broke off all contact with him. A two-line email. You never saw him again.

When you think of him now, on the occasions you are forced to, you feel nothing but cold fury. Fury and disgust. When you think of Mummy, nothing but admiration, and a love so visceral it hurts. You have surmounted those traumatic years, the both of you. Mummy has scaled enormous heights to carve some semblance of a career for herself. Cut off from all but token financial support, she somehow managed to feed and clothe you, and give you a home. As for you, you kept your head down, studied hard, achieved a clutch of As and A*s in your GCSEs at the local comp, and did a repeat performance in sixth form. It paid off: A-levels good enough to satisfy an offer from Oxford, where now you are training to be a doctor.

That is what I know of you. The story of your life thus far.

❦

The bus, when finally one arrives, is comfortingly warm after the morning chill. It takes me down the valley, deciduous leaves piled in huge mounds at the feet of the densely wooded slopes rising to our right. Opposite, I catch glimpses of Wellow Brook winding between thickly overgrown banks, a venerable waterway, unchanged over the centuries except by imperceptible degrees. At Midford, we pass the remnants of the old railway bridge, lopped off at either side of the road, the line severed, a victim of Beeching’s brutal disconnection of this community two generations ago. There’s the old mill house, home now to a family with a trampoline, it would appear. The mill race shows evidence of children’s epic dam-building, great mounds of sticks and branches and other debris heaped up and impeding the flow.

A quarter of an hour and I will be at the station. The train I’d booked a seat on has long since departed, but there will be another. I allowed myself leeway; I still have time to keep my side of our rendezvous.

We climb out of the valley, and I take in the views across this landscape that I have come to love. Up through Combe Down and into the city outskirts, past the Cross Keys, the Esso garage with its ever-escalating price of fuel. Scaffolding around a derelict house. A Union Jack fluttering from the flagpole at the old St Martin’s Hospital. Dropping down to Bear Flat, the Devonshire Arms clad in glorious russet Virginia creeper. The polar bear atop the porch of the Bear Hotel. Round the corner now, and views out over Bath itself, the perfect symmetry of the Royal Crescent in the far distance; a crane looming above the old quays, where new construction is underway. Down past the disused wharf houses on the banks of the Avon, the neo-Georgian SouthGate centre, and on to where I will catch my train.

Who am I? That depends, I have come to learn, on who is doing the looking. We can start with my name. Steven James Buchanan, that’s what I was baptised. Steve to Ma and Pa; Stevie to everyone else. Everyone else except you and your sister. To you, I was once known as Daddy. For now, let us just say, I am your father. I am your father, and I am on my way to seeing you.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge

If you are to come on this journey with me, you will have to trust. We will not be going anywhere together, not in a physical sense – that would be impossible, in any way, shape or form. We will dissolve ourselves instead into pure imagination, ranging over both topography and time, our consciousnesses scorching through the ether like twin spangled streams, unbounded by the laws of nature. Some of the places we alight you may recognise or remember. Others will be new – beyond the start of your memory, even of your life. Some, neither of us can know. These I will build from scraps and conjecture; extrapolations from what I was told.

How on earth can you trust me?

Come, let me show you something. Come with me to a sitting room. You’re immediately struck by the dated decor – those broad-striped curtains, the footstool made to look like a Rubik’s cube, the fatness of the TV set in the corner. It’s OK, don’t be alarmed. We have simply spanned time, materialising ourselves some twenty years ago. The room is one of those large spaces created from two separate receptions, the partition wall long ago demolished, the ceiling now supported by a hidden steel beam, the scars made good by plaster, paint, and skirting. It doesn’t matter much, but you should know that we’re in Oxford, in a Victorian terrace on Chatsworth Road. We’re looking on a man, turned partially away from us. He’s standing between a shabby blue sofa and an unlit gas fire across the other side of the room, jeans-clad as ever, cotton shirt under crew-neck sweater, leather moccasins on his feet. You feel a shock of recognition. At the same time, you’re taken aback by my appearance, how much younger I look. What am I? About thirty, at a guess; you’re too stunned even to begin to try to calculate. My hair is thick and dark brown – no hints of grey; no thinning, not even at the crown. Even at this angle, you can tell that my glasses are round-framed and tortoiseshell, as was the fashion of the time.

I turn towards us. What’s that I’m holding? Forgive me; perhaps this is too soon. What I am holding – one forearm beneath, one hand wrapped round its front – is a baby, eight, maybe nine months old. Terry towelling bodysuit, yellow duck on its front. Round faced, pudgy armed, wispy haired. You.

A sudden tightening inside. I’ve flipped the baby round to face me, then hefted her in the air. High above my head. You watch, horrified, as infant-you soars towards the ceiling. Christ, what would a social worker say? Inevitably, gravity asserts itself. You hang motionless for an instant, then begin to fall. What the hell am I doing? The very next moment, my hands gather you, slotting in against your sides, tight into your underarms. I lower you gently to my chest.

You watch, spellbound. This tiny, younger you starts to giggle. Hysterically. Peals of delight issue in a continuous cascade from your infant lips. I am laughing, too, the skin round my eyes crinkling with love. It dawns on you that this must be a favourite game. Again and again it happens. Up, down, catch. Up, down, catch. You see how my eyes never waver, always tracking the path of my precious child, arms outstretched in readiness. It’s the most wondrous feeling, whooshing up, your tummy caving inside as you crest the parabola. For that brief moment you are flying, absolutely free, nothing holding on to you at all. And every time, as you begin your descent, my pigment-stained hands clasp you and arrest your fall. Do you worry? Do you even know there’s the possibility of disaster? In the world you know then, is there even the chance you will be allowed to crash, bruising and breaking yourself on the floor beneath?

Perhaps you have questions. Perhaps there are already things twenty-one-year-old you would like to ask the me of then, throwing and catching baby-you like a human ball. You can speak, but you will not be heard. You can touch, but your hand will slip through me as though I were made of air. We are in that room, but we are not of it. We are two future selves who have yet to come to be.

Away, let us leave us to our game. It was just a little thing. Something to give you confidence – hope, even. Something to help kindle the embers of your trust.

As we travel, you will constantly ask yourself a question: what is truth? In this post-truth world – in which professions are corrupt, politicians lie with impunity, once-major religions contract – there is nothing left in which to believe, there is no such thing as truth. All we have are the myriad truths that bumble around, one inside each one of us on this benighted planet. Those truths collide continually, sometimes bonding to form complementary wholes, just as often bumping and bashing and repelling each other like particles of identical charge, or multiple north poles. What, if anything, is there left for us to cling on to?

Yet there is such a thing as truth. I have to believe that. That which exists outside our heads, independent of our minds and all that they can do. That which actually happens. Recognising it, knowing it – that is the difficulty.

How will you do it? How can you discern truth in what I show? Always, nagging at you, the stalking doubt: am I merely giving you my version, painting myself in flattering colours, brushing over imperfections and blemishes, drawing you into a web of justification and jaundiced sight?

I cannot answer that – that is a question for you alone. All I can promise is to apply no varnish, nothing to dull the colour, or protect the picture that my brushes will describe. One thing may help, though. Take my hand. I know: it feels strange, acutely uncomfortable – it will for a long while yet, perhaps forever. But take it. Let me whisk you to one other place, show you one more thing before you decide whether or not you will come along.

Do you recognise it? A cavernous modern hall, huge panes of glass forming one entire wall, pillars of white-painted metal, each as thick as a sequoia trunk, rising at rakish angles to support the roof. We’re light as air, you and I, hovering above hundreds of people, who are milling between the display stands below. Families, in the main: this is a place for children, for education, for eyes to be opened to the world. A cacophony of chatter assails our ears: kids exclaiming, parents explaining, everyone vocalising the wonder of it all.

I was never much into science, but it was something you loved. There you are, down there, purple sparkly jumper with the silver love-heart stitched to its chest. The way we wear things as seven-year-olds without a trace of self-consciousness. We’re walking briskly, we two, away from the exhibition about human embryology, over towards the adjoining section. Hand in hand. We live in the West Country now, Oxford long behind, left when you were just four, your sister two. This place is @Bristol, its name a fitting herald of the online world that is evolving around us as we breathe.

Mummy and your sister are elsewhere in the vast hall, your sister’s interest snared by the interactive stands demonstrating trompe l’oeil and all manner of other perceptual tricks. You and I are heading for engineering, though, returning to see once again the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Do you have any recollection? It made such an impression at the time. Look at you, a little girl with her dad, rapt in front of the screen, waiting till the video starts its inevitable next loop. Let’s descend, softly as sycamore seeds, so we, too, can catch the show.

You peer over your own seven-year-old shoulder, watching what your child’s eyes see. On the monitor, a film of a huge, girded structure, fabricated in steel and concrete, its fairway tarmacked like any regular road. A river torrenting below. It looks so solid, so substantial; the bridge should be indestruc­tible to any but the most explosive force. But now, look at it: it starts to twist, buckling around its longitudinal axis. Rapidly, the amplitude picks up, it’s warping now, great swingeing torques, oscillating wildly like a manic fairground ride, whole swathes of concrete and metal seesawing like they’re made of naught but the flimsiest card. In spite of ourselves, we’re laughing, child-you and I: it looks so comic, so counter-­intuitive, it doesn’t look possible. Bridges just should not do that. It’s like something out of a black and white Laurel and Hardy.

Look. Panicked people have abandoned their cars mid-crossing – they’re old fashioned ones, Fords mainly, this was the 1940s after all. Empty, the vehicles pitch side-to-side like sea-sick passengers in an Atlantic storm. The Tarmac starts cracking, disintegrating like a global-warmed ice floe. This is the bit you love the most. That guy, in his long greatcoat and trilby, running forward, barely able to keep to his feet, thinking nothing of his own safety. He was a professor or something. At last he makes it to the nearest car, grapples with the door, opens it. Allows the dog trapped inside to leap free. Then the pair of them scarper, unsteady as drunken lords, back to the safety of solid ground. Finally, the shearing forces overwhelm. The whole central section of the bridge collapses, plunging into the water below, displacing an almighty plume of spray.

The wind, the wind. That awe-full destruction caused by nothing more than the wind. Yes it was strong, gale-force if I recall, but nothing that would have qualified for even a mention on the news. Nothing that should have troubled that man-made colossus. Do you remember the explanation, intoned in voiceover as we watched it all unfold? How, unanticipated by the hapless engineers, a wind of a certain, very particular speed established a fatal resonance with the bridge’s structure, setting it vibrating like an instrument string. Untrammelled energy was channelled into its fabric, bringing about its eventual demise.

Come, let us leave @Bristol, leave your seven-year-old self to enjoy the rest of her day, all the marvellous sights she has yet to behold. You cast a glance behind as we ascend, up past the arboreal pillars, each of us starting once more to dematerialise. Below us, you and your dad have moved on, are lost now back in the crowd. Impossible to pick them out; Mummy and your sister, likewise.

My words; this story – you will have your stalking doubt. And for all I will strive for honesty in my brushwork, which of us can be unflinching in telling our account? But truth. Truth will be like that wind. Truth you will know by its resonance. Be under no illusion. It will set things within you vibrating, sometimes violently so. Like for those folk on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, it will feel scary. It will feel as though the ground under your feet is swaying, yawing, buckling, disintegrating. It will feel as though everything on which you have so long stood is about to come crashing down. Do not be afraid. For this is how you will recognise truth. And this is how truth will bring you, if you are brave enough to allow it – like that professor and that poor bewildered pooch – safe back to solid ground.

ONE

Origins

Arriving in the station foyer, I look to see when the next train is due before going to grab a coffee. A quick glance at the screen shows one is just about to depart. Suddenly I’m fumbling at the barrier, trying to get my wallet out, trying to get my ticket out, my roll bag sliding off my shoulder in the midst of it all, tangling my arm, everything conspiring to slow me. She’s so kind, the woman there – she buzzes the gate open and lets me through on trust.

I run full pelt along the underpass, taking the stairs at the other end three at a time, and emerge to find the train standing at an eerily deserted platform, diesel thrumming, everyone else on board, the guard with his hand on the door. Shrill whistle. I run towards him, breathing heavily from the exertion, managing a few nonsensical words: Is this Didcot? He looks momentarily nonplussed, then seems to get what I’m asking. He gives me a nod and a grin and ushers me past, shutting the door behind me with a heavy clunk.

I find a seat without a reservation and slump in next to the window. I have to get my breath back; things are slowing down, time is catching up. This is such a short life. It won’t seem that way to you, not the age you are now. Twenty-one. I remember how I was then, nearing the end of art school: nothing seems vital when you’re that age, there’ll always be a chance to change tack if you set off in the wrong direction. But believe me, it picks up pace, that clock, its hands turning more quickly with every revolution. Jobs and travel and dates and relationships, a decade chewed. Then maybe a career and a mortgage and maybe kids and then – whoosh – that’s another fifteen, twenty years. And suddenly you’re further from the start than the finish. And you begin to see it, that chequered flag in the middle-distance, in the niggles and the aches, and the changes in your body and face, and the evidence of what you can no longer quite so easily do.

We think there’ll always be time to make things right. But there won’t. There can’t be.

I’m sitting facing back. It’s easier somehow, looking out of the window; things unfold gently, none of the frenetic rushing-towards of a forward gaze.

The train gathers momentum, leaving Bath behind, heading for Wiltshire, and Oxfordshire beyond. Chimney stacks peek above a high embankment. A whiff of tobacco smoke as a guy goes past along the aisle. The guard comes on the loudspeaker but there’s something wrong with the sound; I can’t make out the first thing he’s saying. Then suddenly we’re out of the city, into open country, a long stand of tall trees beside the line, all grown at an identical slant, leaning like worshipful monks, evidence of the wind that has so long prevailed.

I check my phone. Nothing from you. There never has been, not in seven years. Every email I send, every text – chatty updates, interested enquiries, assurances of love – unacknowledged. Like coins down a wishing well.

I understand, though. I know what you have gone through. So I keep going, communicating every week or two. A marathon of waving from this distant shore.

What would you think to see me now, iPhone in hand? I’ve kept pace with technology, to a certain degree, anyhow. Do you remember that old Nokia, how you used to laugh at its push-button Ludditeness, its inert screen, its jiggling space-invader-style icons? We went together to that shop. You – tech-savvy twelve-year-old that you were – enjoying showing off your knowledge of smart phones, helping your dad take his first step into the new era. I’d been thinking of getting one for a while. Then when I moved out, into that rented place on Drake Avenue, BT taking untold weeks to get the broadband connected – it pushed me to take the plunge, to get a phone I could do emails and internet with. Something to keep in touch with family and friends, those who were rooting for me in this strange new life I was embarking on. Something I could use to keep in touch with you and your sister when you weren’t around. Bonus by-product: something you loved to play on – Temple Run, Flappy Bird, Candy Crush, all the faddy games so important to the young.

I put the phone away. There are voices from upfront in the carriage, a couple of families out for the day. Toddler chatter. A baby whining, on the verge of some need it hasn’t words to express. Train journeys tumble in my mind. Playing noughts and crosses and hangman with you at a table we felt lucky to have found. That time we nearly missed the stop for the airport on our way to Disneyland Paris – you, Mummy, your sister, and me – me pulling the cord to halt the train just before it left the station, buying us time to get off, that inspector furious that I’d abused the alarm, me thinking it was worth it so as not to have missed our flight. These things happen. Days and weeks go by for me, you tucked away in your box, me living the life I have now for myself. Then a random sight, an inconsequential bit of music, and I’m ambushed. They’re like crowbars, jemmying the lid off, splintering the wood, unleashing memories and the loss of you.

Enough of this. I get my phone again and send you a text, telling you I’m on my way, reminding you where the watching-the-world-go-by wall is, and saying I hope to see you there at three. Lots of love, Daddy.

Lots of love, Daddy.

❦

Come on, let’s do this.

I feel a sudden up-rush, I’m sucked out of my body, slooped through an air vent and out into the sky. The train whips past below. I catch one glimpse of myself behind the glass, sitting woodenly, staring out of the window, mobile in hand, eyes no longer registering. A hollowed out shell.

We have to be quick about it. I have to be back before a ticket inspector comes.

An incredible surge of speed. I’m going faster than sound, now, though nowhere near the speed of light. I do a couple of barrel rolls, testing my manoeuvrability. It’s exhilarating, this abrupt freedom, this ability to be. The air roars furiously, a thunderous noise, as though outraged by my flight. My whole being is vibrating, I’m in sensurround, alive to possibility, my perceptions sharpened to crystal clarity.

Just for a moment, my euphoria dims: I’m alone in the sky. Perhaps it was too much after all; it was foolish to think you might be ready. But then, a thousand feet below, I catch sight of you, a shimmering vapour trail, forging a parallel course. Current thrills through me; you have decided to come. Of course you feel reticent – you have no idea how to approach me. Seven years you’ve lived with me as the enemy. It would be a big step for anyone to take, to bridge that gulf, let alone you.

I change trajectory by thought alone. Close on you in a graceful arc. Then we’re alongside each other. I can sense your uncertainty; there’s something reserved about your velocity, even though we’re going at the same speed. I have to be careful, what nascent trust there may be is as fragile as a soapy bubble. I dive beneath you, loop round the far side, spin myself playfully back over the top, finishing up, in relative terms, where I started. I’m not showing off. My aerial acrobatics are intended to amuse. Distract. Reassure. Then it hits me, as it so often hits me: you are no longer the child still alive in my memory. You are twenty-one-year-old you. The larking, the clowning about – all the stuff that once-upon-a-time you so loved. Chances are that these now embarrass, even repel. How to relate to the you who for one third of your life I haven’t known. I try to tune in, try to sense your mood. Still you’re uneasy. I think I understand that. It was never going to be any other way, not really. But you have come. At least you have come.