metaphors, they seemed to me, compared to a vision of infinitely receding blackness.
Nigel’s discovery of my fears brought him sharp pleasure.Every so often, he would look up from his copy of New SF or Asteroids or Worlds Beyond and with a serious expression encourage me to
‘Keep going, kid. Last out till 2057 and you’ll be able to check in for Body Renewal.’ Or Time Transfer, or Molecular Stabilisation, or Brain Banking, or any of a dozen phrases which, I suspect, he made up to tease me with. I never bothered to check in his mags; there may, after all, have been a tiny percentage of truth in it; or if not that, then something different to start my fears and my imagination.
I often wondered about Nigel, and why things seemed so much clearer to him. Was it more, or less, intelligence; more, or less, imagination; or simply a more stable personality? Was it merely perhaps a question of time and energy: that the more industrious you were (and he was always doing something, even if it was only reading pulp), the less broody you got?
When doubts stirred in me, Mary at least could be relied upon to make me feel better. She was always a comforting shambles. My favourite memory of my sister was of her kneeling on the floor bawling, with one of her pigtails neatly plaited and the other undone: the rubber band had broken and there were no more left in the house. She had been faced with the harrowing choice between ribbons, which she hated as cissy, and using the remaining band on a single, central plait.
Her crying jags were a constant feature of my childhood. The dog had a thorn in its paw, she didn’t understand the subjunctive, a friend of hers at school knew someone whose aunt had been slightly hurt in a road accident, the retail price index was rising – everything would set her off. Good for morale though it was to have her bawling, it was a noisy way to feel better. Once, I made the mistake of asking her what she thought happened after death. She looked up with that help-me, pleading, blubby look in her eye. I didn’t give her time to flee the room. I ran myself.
10 • Tunnels, Bridges
Life at sixteen was wonderfully enclosed and balanced. On one side, there was the compulsion of school, hated and enjoyed. On the other side, the compulsion of home, hated and enjoyed. Out there, vague and marvellous as the Empyrean, lay capital-L Life. There were sometimes things – like holidays – which seemed as if they might give a foretaste of life; yet they always turned out to count as home after all.
But there was a point of balance in the oscillation between home and school. The journey. An hour and a quarter each way, a time of twice-daily metamorphosis. At one end, on the whole, you appeared clean, tidy, hard-working, conservative, responsibly questioning, unworried by sex, attracted by a fair division of life between work and play, not unhealthily interested in art: a pride, if usually less than a joy, to your parents. At the other end, you slouched out of the carriage, shoes scuffed, tie askew, nails neurotically bitten, palms forested by wanking, satchel held in front of you to conceal an expiring hard, loud-mouthed with merde and bugger and balls and fug (our only euphemism), lazy yet smirkingly confident, obsequious and deceitful, contemptuous of authority, mad about art, emotionally homosexual for want of choice, and obsessed with the idea of nudist camps.
Needless to say, you never noticed the transformation yourself. Nor would an outsider have spotted it: at the point of change, he would merely have seen an averagely clean schoolboy, his satchel on his knees, testing himself on Frenchvocabulary with a sheet of paper half-covering the page, and every so often looking up and staring out of the window.
Those daily journeys were, I now realise, the only times when I was safely alone. Perhaps that was why I never found them tiring or boring, despite sitting for years with the same chalk-striped men and watching
Nigel’s discovery of my fears brought him sharp pleasure.Every so often, he would look up from his copy of New SF or Asteroids or Worlds Beyond and with a serious expression encourage me to
‘Keep going, kid. Last out till 2057 and you’ll be able to check in for Body Renewal.’ Or Time Transfer, or Molecular Stabilisation, or Brain Banking, or any of a dozen phrases which, I suspect, he made up to tease me with. I never bothered to check in his mags; there may, after all, have been a tiny percentage of truth in it; or if not that, then something different to start my fears and my imagination.
I often wondered about Nigel, and why things seemed so much clearer to him. Was it more, or less, intelligence; more, or less, imagination; or simply a more stable personality? Was it merely perhaps a question of time and energy: that the more industrious you were (and he was always doing something, even if it was only reading pulp), the less broody you got?
When doubts stirred in me, Mary at least could be relied upon to make me feel better. She was always a comforting shambles. My favourite memory of my sister was of her kneeling on the floor bawling, with one of her pigtails neatly plaited and the other undone: the rubber band had broken and there were no more left in the house. She had been faced with the harrowing choice between ribbons, which she hated as cissy, and using the remaining band on a single, central plait.
Her crying jags were a constant feature of my childhood. The dog had a thorn in its paw, she didn’t understand the subjunctive, a friend of hers at school knew someone whose aunt had been slightly hurt in a road accident, the retail price index was rising – everything would set her off. Good for morale though it was to have her bawling, it was a noisy way to feel better. Once, I made the mistake of asking her what she thought happened after death. She looked up with that help-me, pleading, blubby look in her eye. I didn’t give her time to flee the room. I ran myself.
10 • Tunnels, Bridges
Life at sixteen was wonderfully enclosed and balanced. On one side, there was the compulsion of school, hated and enjoyed. On the other side, the compulsion of home, hated and enjoyed. Out there, vague and marvellous as the Empyrean, lay capital-L Life. There were sometimes things – like holidays – which seemed as if they might give a foretaste of life; yet they always turned out to count as home after all.
But there was a point of balance in the oscillation between home and school. The journey. An hour and a quarter each way, a time of twice-daily metamorphosis. At one end, on the whole, you appeared clean, tidy, hard-working, conservative, responsibly questioning, unworried by sex, attracted by a fair division of life between work and play, not unhealthily interested in art: a pride, if usually less than a joy, to your parents. At the other end, you slouched out of the carriage, shoes scuffed, tie askew, nails neurotically bitten, palms forested by wanking, satchel held in front of you to conceal an expiring hard, loud-mouthed with merde and bugger and balls and fug (our only euphemism), lazy yet smirkingly confident, obsequious and deceitful, contemptuous of authority, mad about art, emotionally homosexual for want of choice, and obsessed with the idea of nudist camps.
Needless to say, you never noticed the transformation yourself. Nor would an outsider have spotted it: at the point of change, he would merely have seen an averagely clean schoolboy, his satchel on his knees, testing himself on Frenchvocabulary with a sheet of paper half-covering the page, and every so often looking up and staring out of the window.
Those daily journeys were, I now realise, the only times when I was safely alone. Perhaps that was why I never found them tiring or boring, despite sitting for years with the same chalk-striped men and watching
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