built an enormous balloon and tied it to the car to travel around the countryside, high above the landscape. Whenever this story was told, Gareth’s father would make a big thing of trying to find ‘the photograph’, looking here and there in drawers, until he unearthed an old postcard of a Zeppelin and, pointing to the carriage slung underneath, which was tiny in the photograph, would say: ‘there’s the car, you see’.
It never mattered to the children that the stories changed. They were equally true; they had their own theories anyway. The car was a playground.
Dylan hasn’t been to the car for a long while, but years from now he will remember it as he drives past a convoy of Morris Travellers on their way to a vintage rally somewhere. And like all memories, that sit below us, out of the glare of our awareness, in shadow, the memory of the car will rush up, devastatingly. The red leather interior, in places busted, spilling stuffing; the windscreen wipers, which you turned by hand; the plastic padded sun visors; its perforated roof – like a teabag; the hot smell of the car and the broken floor, the sticky feel of the seats in the sun; the windows, that slid open.
It does not matter whether he remembers it accurately or not, this is his memory of it; and this is how it will live.
__
Gareth passes the car where his son used to play so much. He has to go back and tell his wife he loves her. For a secondhe sees the car as if it was new – the times they went for picnics in it – rising from the brambles, and only seconds later does his sense fill in the mouse droppings, and spiders, and the thick dust that is on the windows now.
He wants to walk back to Kate, and find her, and tell her very simply he wants her. He wants to love her with the clean love his father had for his wife. He knows she will be angry about the calf, which she will know about by now; and that she does not like her body, the way it has grown at the moment. But they have been through this before. After Dylan, when her body had changed and the pride of carrying was gone. She hated her body then, but to him she had grown more wonderful. Her ability to produce bewildered him, even though all his life he had been used to the processes of breeding. The things she hated most he loved. To him, her stretch marks looked like velvet brushed the wrong way, or wind across the grass. He wants her to be happy and to know that he does not want her to be any other thing but what she is; and she should walk barefoot again.
They should forget about the cow, and the children for a moment, and take off their shoes and go into the warm grass of the garden. He hopes very much that she is not going to be again like she was after the miscarriages, when she cut her hair all short and cut herself and would not speak to him for months. That was very hard. Thinking of it now it scares him that he won’t have the strength this time to live through it with her. He worries about his ability to fight for things, when he is tired like this – from not sleeping, and from being worried always about tiny things – his ability to navigate a tragedy, or news of an illness. The world, he thinks, is filled with such unbelievablesmall heroisms which to him have always seemed far more remarkable than the huge heroisms of history. Somehow, we find the strength, he thinks.
He pushes this thought out of his mind, this suddenly subversive want for a tragedy to bring them back together, and he thinks of her walking in the fresh grass. He knows she will refuse at first and make ridiculous excuses of responsibilities: ‘I have to do the washing’, ‘what about the cow?’, ‘you did not tell me of the calf’ but he will persuade her, in this lovely sunshine, will pick her up and carry her if he has to so she laughs and he will put her down in the warm green grass without her shoes.
__
the Other Calf
He crosses the yard. In the hay barn sparrows are collecting hayseed and
It never mattered to the children that the stories changed. They were equally true; they had their own theories anyway. The car was a playground.
Dylan hasn’t been to the car for a long while, but years from now he will remember it as he drives past a convoy of Morris Travellers on their way to a vintage rally somewhere. And like all memories, that sit below us, out of the glare of our awareness, in shadow, the memory of the car will rush up, devastatingly. The red leather interior, in places busted, spilling stuffing; the windscreen wipers, which you turned by hand; the plastic padded sun visors; its perforated roof – like a teabag; the hot smell of the car and the broken floor, the sticky feel of the seats in the sun; the windows, that slid open.
It does not matter whether he remembers it accurately or not, this is his memory of it; and this is how it will live.
__
Gareth passes the car where his son used to play so much. He has to go back and tell his wife he loves her. For a secondhe sees the car as if it was new – the times they went for picnics in it – rising from the brambles, and only seconds later does his sense fill in the mouse droppings, and spiders, and the thick dust that is on the windows now.
He wants to walk back to Kate, and find her, and tell her very simply he wants her. He wants to love her with the clean love his father had for his wife. He knows she will be angry about the calf, which she will know about by now; and that she does not like her body, the way it has grown at the moment. But they have been through this before. After Dylan, when her body had changed and the pride of carrying was gone. She hated her body then, but to him she had grown more wonderful. Her ability to produce bewildered him, even though all his life he had been used to the processes of breeding. The things she hated most he loved. To him, her stretch marks looked like velvet brushed the wrong way, or wind across the grass. He wants her to be happy and to know that he does not want her to be any other thing but what she is; and she should walk barefoot again.
They should forget about the cow, and the children for a moment, and take off their shoes and go into the warm grass of the garden. He hopes very much that she is not going to be again like she was after the miscarriages, when she cut her hair all short and cut herself and would not speak to him for months. That was very hard. Thinking of it now it scares him that he won’t have the strength this time to live through it with her. He worries about his ability to fight for things, when he is tired like this – from not sleeping, and from being worried always about tiny things – his ability to navigate a tragedy, or news of an illness. The world, he thinks, is filled with such unbelievablesmall heroisms which to him have always seemed far more remarkable than the huge heroisms of history. Somehow, we find the strength, he thinks.
He pushes this thought out of his mind, this suddenly subversive want for a tragedy to bring them back together, and he thinks of her walking in the fresh grass. He knows she will refuse at first and make ridiculous excuses of responsibilities: ‘I have to do the washing’, ‘what about the cow?’, ‘you did not tell me of the calf’ but he will persuade her, in this lovely sunshine, will pick her up and carry her if he has to so she laughs and he will put her down in the warm green grass without her shoes.
__
the Other Calf
He crosses the yard. In the hay barn sparrows are collecting hayseed and
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