Dot (Araminta Hall)
hate are very similar emotions and they are so, so right. Why did you go out in that storm? The coastguard at the inquest said that it had been fine when you left, but you must have seen the storm approaching. You used to tell me how that was one of your favourite aspects of sailing, how you could look across the sea and see the weather approaching, like different seasons in the same day. If you saw that storm, why did you carry on? Or maybe you didn’t, maybe you turned back, that’s what the coastguard said was most likely. Of course your boat was so broken up it was impossible to tell what you had been doing, but I’m sure you headed for home. I’m sure you tutted at the wind in your pragmatic way. I hope to God you never even saw the boom coming, never felt a thing. You were there one minute and not the next; that’s all there is, that’s all there is for anyone. A ceaseless journey from one breath to the next, until it stops and we become nothing more than blood, flesh and bone. Except we were denied even that of you. Oh God, Howie, please come home. Please don’t leave me alone any more.
Everything changes and yet it stays the same. I am not shocked any more by the poll tax riots on the television or striking miners with starving children or continents baking in a relentless heat that deprives the land of food and water. I have realised that the only truly shocking things to me concern the people I love. If I was an African mother or a miner’s child, I would feel shock for these things, but they would look at me and feel nothing. This world we fight our way through is only personal and I think maybe I have realised that too late.
11 … Acting
Clive Buzzard liked to think he knew things. And one of the things of which he was most sure was the accrued worth of him and Debbie in Druith. He and Debbie made a fine couple, they were like the Posh and Becks of their moment, except cooler and more relevant.
Clive liked to say that he was all about rap music. His father was Druith’s parish priest and his mother ran the Sunday school and battered women’s shelter in Cartertown, but Clive liked to dream that he had been born in downtown Harlem and that if only Public Enemy could meet him they’d embrace him as a true brother. His family lacked imagination, that was their problem. His sister liked to please, doing well at school, getting into university, never staying out past twelve and seemingly had little or no interest in boys. Clive wanted to keep it real, hardly understanding that real is whatever you deem it to be and that Public Enemy’s reality was irrelevant to him.
Clive dreamt of being a rapper and moving to London and making millions like Eminem. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t grown up in a trailer park with a drug-addled mother, married too young and lost everything he had to gambling. He could still feel their pain and reckoned he could still be a cultural marker of his generation. So he wore his trousers low, his baseball cap backwards and walked as if one leg had been shot and had to be propelled round his body as a stiff entity. Debbie followed suit, pushing her breasts up to her chin, bleaching her hair, shortening her skirts and exaggerating her make-up. They’d even had matching tattoos, which hovered above the crack of their bottoms, predictably a decorated D for him and a C for her. And they spoke in a gangsta slang, sucking on their teeth and using words they sometimes barely understood.
It wasn’t only their words that confused them, but also often the ideas they attempted to express which were as mixed and murky as a sludgy pond. He had an intense desire to ‘be someone’ and to have lots of money, although both ambitions were as flimsy as the miniscule lace underwear Debbie wore. Life, to Clive, was all about what you had and what people thought of you and it didn’t matter how you got there, as long as you didn’t have to work too hard. Open any of the magazines that littered the floor of Debbie’s pink bedroom and you’d see people exactly like him or her whose lives were followed in minute detail from year to year without any real reason. But reasons had ceased to matter a long time ago; for Clive and his people everything was about the here and now, the immediacy of existence.
Occasionally Clive would watch the news with his parents and see pictures of boys his age who had died fighting in a country he would be hard pressed to find on a map. Suckers, he
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