Crustaceans (2 page)

Ruth had no interest in reading, but in her rucksack she carried a tattered collection of crosswords and sometimes, when we tired of talking, she would pore over these whilst I sketched her. I began from her eyes, or her nose, or her mouth, but rarely got further. I offered her fragments, so closely detailed she looked twenty years older. Then she'd draw me as rapidly as the artists who worked the seafront in summer. With one of her roll-ups between my lips I said I felt like someone other than myself, and she told me I looked unlike myself too, which wasn't unpleasant. Later we took photographs – of ourselves and the flat. Ruth had a camera on loan from the college, and would develop the film in the following term, her first time in a darkroom. The prints have steadily faded – she got the chemicals wrong – but the shots we took of each other were never meant to be likenesses. With half a film still remaining we stood before the cracked bathroom mirror and altered our faces with Sellotape. A long length flattened my nose. Another pulled hers upwards. I was trying to make her look ugly, I said, but couldn't. She tacked my eyes open wide, fixed my mouth to a snarl that she said was a smile, and then we photographed our reflections, the crack in the glass disfiguring us further.

What was left of the decorating we did the next morning. Then to celebrate we went out in a blizzard, tramping through snow that came to our knees, until we found a shop selling mince-pies. We helped ourselves to a bottle of milk on a doorstep. The cream was frozen, the silvered top perched on a column of flakes. Solid tubes of ice descended from drainpipes, glassy spikes hung down from the gutterings, the bus shelters and railings, and we saw no other people. Back at my flat the fire had gone out. We pumped our last coins in the meter and switched on the boiler, draped our wet clothes on the tank and climbed into bed. We made love in a litter of pie crumbs, and Ruth fell asleep in my arms. I learned then how she snored. Outside the snowfall was dwindling, the sun almost shining.

It was mid-afternoon when we packed. The coach station was less than a mile away, and we left in no hurry, our rucksacks bulky with laundry, weighted with presents. Ruth was going to stay at her mother's; my holiday would be spent with my grandmother. We walked along roads emptied of traffic, vacant hotels on each side of us, and I remember the leathery creak of our boot-treads, snow piled at the kerbsides, and Ruth's gloved hand in mine. We spoke very little. A woman passed in the opposite lane, tugging a small girl on a sleigh, her face pinked with the cold, and when she smiled hello we didn't think to respond. We turned instead down a side-street and descended a hill to a park – the municipal gardens – where we dumped our bags on a bench and sat for a while looking out at the boating lake. The water was frozen, a fresh felting of snow on its surface. A few children played round the edge. Their parents walked on, paused and called and walked on. Dusk crept in from the sea, and I watched as a couple of boys skimmed a football across the width of the lake, kicking it backwards and forwards between them, streaking the snow, until finally it bobbled and spun to a halt in the centre. I fumbled under my cuff for my watch. It was time to move on and I hooked one arm through the straps of my rucksack, then heard someone shouting, a woman urgently running, and looked up to see a small boy on a tricycle. He was pedalling out to recapture the ball, already yards from the bank, and as I stood from our bench, half resolved to run down, I heard the click of Ruth's camera. It's the final shot on the film, and the boy is still there, a line of frost-shocked trees behind him, a sheet of thin ice beneath, and the ball forever a few yards away. That, too, was the twenty-second of December – three days before Christmas, your birthday – and no harm could ever come to him.

THREE

You sometimes return in the night. I sleep thinly. I hardly know myself to be dreaming. Hours pass. There's the flat, predictable flow of my thoughts, the sluggish recall of another day in your absence. All is routine, nothing uncanny. I hear a phone ringing but don't answer it. The kettle boils and I watch it. A bus pulls towards me and I make no move to get on. And then you are there. You make yourself visible. The numbness of my waiting dissolves and suddenly I know more than one expression, more than one emotion. There is joy, and the ache of wanting to hold you, but you keep your distance, your separateness from me. This is as much as you will offer, and yet still I cannot stop smiling. I peer at you closely, trying to absorb – to remember – every detail of your appearance. But even as my gaze touches your face, it blurs and you fade, your likeness eludes me. I click my tongue; I concentrate harder. I focus perhaps on your mouth, or your fringe, or your nose. I ask you to help me; I joke and cajole. But I know I am losing you. And then you are gone. My legs give way beneath me, a blanketing weight falls over me. There is panic, and the puncturing pain of my longing. Fragments of light glint near my eyes, silica-fine and piercing, and my body shakes uncontrollably, my blood becomes turbulent. I hear the sea crashing, receding, windbreaks flapping. Voices are calling, viciously whispering. A dog barks. Electrical connections fizz loose in the fairground; a single note blares from the carousel organ. I try to shout for someone to help me, but I'm suffocating – can't make any sound – and I twist and arch to escape, then realise that I've been here before. I know I am dreaming, but the agitation is real and will surely kill me; I shall die before I open my eyes. I grab for Ruth's arm, dig my nails in to rouse her, dig deeply, and keep digging until my nails break, until I remember it's already too late, that there's no point in continuing.

When I wake my body is heavy on the bed, the sheets undisturbed, everything quiet. I haven't moved, Ruth isn't beside me, and my breathing is steady. But something of the disturbance remains, and I know that whatever I now look at is likely to move, become animate, unpredictable. I don't fear it. I stare into the shadows and corners, all the low spaces. I will your image to form, I wait for you to appear, but I see only what I wish to forget. I get up and wander the house, switching on lights as I move from one room to the next, and I feel your presence then, more real than dreaming. You are in the passages, the doorways, all the in-between places. You evade me, slip away as I approach. But I know you are there, and I talk to you, I talk to you endlessly.

FOUR

I remember a moment just after you were born. The midwives were busy with Ruth, washing her down, unplugging the wires, and I wandered into a corridor to stand a short while alone. It was as good as any place to be – peaceful, spacious, uncluttered – though a smoker would have had to search longer. There were
No Smoking
signs everywhere. I breathed and exhaled, the air was suddenly full of you. And I thought, Who am I now, and what can I show you? I stared at the palms of my hands, the empty hands of your father, and I made myself promise never to hit you; I made myself promise never to leave you. I trusted in promises then. I was what you had just made me, and my thoughts ran to the seashore in summer, absurdly, too hastily, for I knew the names of nothing we might find there, but already we were gathering shells, casting stones at the waves, raiding rockpools for crabs.
Crustaceans.
I knew that word at least, and I helped you pronounce it.

Of course my hands had no idea then of the work you would find them. Today, in this cold, with your coat plumped out by your scarf, they would strain to fasten your toggles and I would scowl at your restlessness, the effort just to make you stand still. I would shape a tissue for your hand and guide it to your nose, show you how to pinch as you blew. I would kneel and turn you around and demonstrate once more how to tie the knots in your laces. Then I'd count the fingers into your gloves, ease the rim of your hat over your ears, and hold you by the shoulders and smile. So many things you wouldn't want to be shown, and which you wouldn't have time for.

But I was always too keen to instruct you, and too conscious by far of the life you'd grow out of. Whatever you wouldn't remember or notice, I made it my job to preserve. Nothing should be lost or discarded or buried. At first Ruth was indulgent – she saw the fear in all my behaviour – but she later grew wary. As if it wasn't enough simply to be there, your father, it seemed I must also become your curator. I treated you like history. In the weeks before you were born I packed a small suitcase with jars and cartons and tins from the supermarket, a capsule of brand names and packaging I wouldn't let you see till you were older; much older. I bought a copy of every newspaper published on the day of your birth, then added a videotape of that evening's news on TV. I kept the plastic bracelets that identified you to the nurses, and the shrivelled stem of your umbilical cord. I filled a shoebox with the cards and letters of congratulation that arrived in the first weeks of your life, and added to this the microtape from our answering-machine, another half-dozen messages, including one from my grandmother, who died before she could meet you. In Ruth's old rucksack I saved the toys and books you seemed most attached to, and some of the clothes we most liked you to wear. I kept a memento of each of your birthdays, and a souvenir from each of our holidays. I photographed you constantly, and sifted through every drawing and painting you made, adding captions and dates, and filing all of this neatly with your nursery-school workbooks in a banker's box in our attic. And then, in a black-and-red notebook, twelve inches by eight, I registered each small leap in your development – the age you sat upright, abandoned your pushchair, copied your name – until the changes were too many and too subtle and I decided at last I could trust to your own memory.

For a while I was able to recite the entire extent of your vocabulary. There were thirty or forty mispronounced words, and I listed them all on a page in the notebook –
abo
for apple,
banki
for blanket – each one dated, explained, and spelled as you spoke it. Your word for my hands was
hams,
and this at least I could share with Ruth, who had used the same word herself, lying beside me on that bed in my flat eight or nine years before. My hams. They were, she'd said, splaying the fingers, the worst thing about me. Sexual attraction for Ruth always began with the hands, and she preferred them smooth and unknotted, slim-fingered, unblemished – more like a young woman's in fact; much like her own. And mine were like spatulas, like shovels, too broad and too square. Also too pudgy, too knobbly, too blotchy. But they'd do, she assured me, pressing my palms to her cheeks and holding them there; they'd pass. She found their ugliness endearing, I supposed, another excuse to feel sorry for me, and I was relieved when later she called them dextrous, a reference to my performance with clay on the wheel, though meaning, I hoped, much more than that.

Years afterwards you examined them just as intently, hunkering beside me on the floor of my studio. I'd collected you early that day from nursery, as I often did then on a Friday. You had your own corner, your own tools and clay, and I would fire whatever you brought me, no matter how formless, how far from completion. Which was my promise to Ruth – not to try to teach or correct you – though I knew from the start that you'd never allow me. You wouldn't be shown, hadn't the patience for lessons, and of course you rarely stayed long in your corner. Every task I began became a game that involved you. Completing my paperwork, my orders and invoices, you would sit by my side with some forms of your own and scrawl through them. As I tidied my cupboards, my benches and shelves, you'd want to drag out the boxes, the sieves and stacked buckets that were stored underneath them. When I loaded my kiln you'd insist on playing with the props, stilts and cones; any clay I prepared would be decorated with gouges, lumpy additions, your name. But I didn't much mind this. It was enough to have you around, for those few hours of my week, in the place where I worked. I liked you to see me, busy at something, your father, and when you wandered away, as you regularly did – down the white plasterboard corridors, looking for places to hide, other studios to visit – I would find that I missed you, the work that you caused me.

My neighbours, mostly painters and printmakers, gave you sandwiches, crisps, crayons and pastels, strips of bubble-wrap, postcards. You were, everyone told me, no trouble at all. You called them your friends, even remembered their names, and often when you came back you'd be carrying another clutch of scrap paper, some more paintings and drawings to add to the sheaf in your corner. But that afternoon you didn't want to go out, and you didn't once interrupt me. You cut a ball of red clay into pieces and carefully arranged them in order of size, then planted a tool in each one. You lay on your belly and drew a picture for Ruth, another for me. You sat for some time with your drink, staring at nothing, and then decided to empty my bowls of pebbles and shells onto the floor, my bucket of grog and my sand, and pretended you were alone at the seaside. My 260 square feet of studio became our caravan, our beach. At home in yourself, I might not have been there. For half an hour then, all my other chores done, I sat up at my wheel – where I'd been working all morning – and though I switched on the motor, and slapped some more clay on the disc, I did nothing, but watched you. Miming and talking, and constantly moving, you were, I gathered, an orphan. You picked through the mess at your feet, looking for objects of interest – treasure and crabs, imaginary creatures – and you explained them as I would, to another just like you. I heard my voice in yours; and Ruth's, her exclamations. I slipped down from my seat and squatted beside you. Pretend you're a daddy, you told me, and nodding, I laid a small shell on my palm. It's a periwinkle, I said; is it a good one, Euan? Not
so
bad, you said, and dropped it back on the floor. You shuffled closer. You asked to look at my hand, and studied it closely, tracing your fingers over the bumps, the clay that was etched in the creases.