I was looking up at the open window, what used to be your old room. “All right if I go into the house?” I asked. Look,” he glanced back at the house, “there’s no one here at the moment. And underneath it all, the sound of rushing water. Hot sun on the water, all eyes on me blinking back tears, blood on my thigh, laughter ringing in my ears. Mum, thinner and frailer, sleeping in the armchair in the living room Dad disappearing on long walks with the vicar’s plump, pale, sun-hatted wife.
Later, when we were older, you in denim shorts with a bikini top under your T-shirt, sneaking out late to meet a boy. Dad sitting on the river bank, sketching. Mum, wearing a light-blue sundress, barefoot in the kitchen making porridge for breakfast, the soles of her feet a dark, rusty brown. You coming home with blood streaming down your leg after you misjudged one of those jumps, biting down on a tea towel while Dad cleaned the cut because you weren’t going to cry.
Picnics on the sandy bank by the pool, the taste of sunscreen on my tongue catching fat brown fish in the sluggish, muddy water downstream from the Mill. I was in the car, driving, and the nearer I got to Beckford, the more undeniable it became, the past shooting out at me like sparrows from the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.Īll that lushness, that unbelievable green, the bright, acid yellow of the gorse on the hill, it burned into my brain and brought with it a newsreel of memories: Dad carrying me, squealing and squirming with delight, into the water when I was four or five years old you jumping from the rocks into the river, climbing higher and higher each time. Why is it that I can recall so perfectly the things that happened to me when I was eight years old, and yet trying to remember whether or not I spoke to my colleagues about rescheduling a client assessment for next week is impossible? The things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.
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