Free Sabine by A.P. Page B

of concentration, a bit of practice, and you’re away. If you do graduate to objects, though, remember: never use anything composite or difficult to retrieve. My medical books are full of lists of items that have got marooned up people’s bodies by mistake. Yes, even a portable umbrella cover, I swear. Although heading the list are Johnny Walker corks, but why Johnny Walker I have no idea, perhaps the name makes it a shade more personal. I de-virginised myself with a courgette, but that wasn’t very clever either.
    Oh, yes, Sabine, it was; if only I had followed your example. In the void I shout out your name sometimes. The world is so weird, with its black holes and time worms, perhaps in some dimensionyou can hear me. (The same way I can hear you now. That’s right,
Coeur de lion,
you are saying: Shift to mysto-physics when all else fails. Perhaps in some dimension I am still there, eating and grousing and puffing on my reefers. Hah. Little tip: perhaps you ought to go and see a good psychiatrist – regularly, I mean, undertake a proper course of therapy – before it’s too late. Coming up to retirement age and you’re still raving on about that cat and the blood and the Marquise …)
    And, oh, you too, my loved and hated father. I shout yours too. No, I don’t blame you for what you did – you were doing your best for me, I know, on your scale of values: getting me into the right set, assuring me a dim and lasting future – I blame you for what you
didn’t
do. I blame you for your silence. And for the veils and curtains you drew over everything, as far back as I remember. You weren’t shielding me, you know, you were exposing me. The half-light, the half-said, the dreadful bog of ignorance in which you left me floundering – this is what I blame you for. Oh, I grant the facts of
your
life might have been difficult to expound to a growing child, might even have been impossible, but that’s not what I’m talking about here and you know it. I’m talking about my grandmother’s – your mother’s – deathbed, for one. Why did you let me go into that room of horrors unwarned, unarmed, uninformed? I could have said goodbye to her properly, I could have understood why she couldn’tsay goodbye to me. I could have governed the grim paraphernalia of the sickroom – those towel-covered basins and stained wads of gauze – so they wouldn’t have haunted my head at night-time, drifting around in my dreams like ghostly galleons. Or, if they had, at least I would have been empowered by knowledge to repulse them.
    I am talking – yes, I am, yippee, at last one of us is – about my mother’s flight as well. Why didn’t you give me a scrap of mental armour against that either? For years I thought it was me she had run away from. Didn’t that ever occur to you – that in my ignorance I might blame myself and suffer as a result? A child so bad her own mother gives up on her and scarpers – with a ski instructor, of all people, she who doesn’t even like skiing. Again, maybe you couldn’t have told me everything, or even very much, but you could have told me
something.
Told me that marriages fail one in three, or whatever the statistic is; that young women get restless and hanker after a day-life as well as a night-life. After mountain air as well as the fumes of the Four Hundred, or whatever your favourite hang-out in those days was called. You could have told me about the accident in which she died, too. Yourself, instead of just dousing my bedlinen in your tears and leaving the task to Grandmother. It was beyond you at that moment? OK, fair enough – a steering wheel through the sternum is so neat an end in the circumstances that it almost smacks ofpurpose – but you could have spoken about it later, spoken about her later.
Spoken,
for Christ’s sake… If only to say you couldn’t speak