tired fools

the 2nd installment:

tried fools (cont.)

HARLING
Brigitta called early today, around lunchtime I think. I was half-asleep and my conscious was filled with Sartie’s Gnossiennes. I didn’t want to be disturbed and I let it show. She cried.

We made up with a cuddle. Her hair carried a hint of the meadow I lived beside when I was a child. Everything about her reminds me of when I was a young man. I hate that.

Her father, John, was like a brother to me. Not that I didn’t have one already, though he and I were like strangers. But John died. I was with him, I saw him die. His face turned a deep red, he coughed fighting for breath, he checked out. We were roughly the same age, early forties, and Brigitta was yet to reach puberty. It came as a huge blow to her, losing her dad. Her mother had fucked off long ago. She went to find herself shortly after the millennium and ended up losing everyone she knew. She didn’t leave any contact details and we didn’t try, not even when Brigitta was left on her own. I was the sole constancy in Brigitta’s life, the replacement father. She went to live with an aunt in Deptford but I kept my promise to John.

I forget myself. I made no such promise, and no request was made. I invented that for Brigitta, and it made her feel better. But I did keep in contact, and as she grew up we saw more and more of each other. I watched her blossom. I watched her hair grow, her angularity soften into gentle arcs. She is more beautiful than her mother had been when I had known her, but she carries the same insecurities and my magic works just the same.

Brigitta hated the harshness of her aunt’s manners. She was tolerated but not loved. Everything she needed came from me. I funded her education, her wardrobe, set her up in an apartment not too far away, but not on my doorstep. She adored being a part of London and I took her everywhere. Arm in arm we’d walk across Waterloo Bridge as the sun set. I’d ask her what this and that building was. She learned the names of all the bridges. We still do it today, although the skyline changes so often that I don’t carry the answers to my own questions. She, however, is au fait with everything that is going on. She is my access to the emerging world.

When we go out to dinner I notice, with absolute satisfaction, the looks that we get. I stride as well as I’ve ever done, but I carry a silver-topped cane as an affectation. As we walk she smiles. She smiles more than anyone I have ever known. She takes my coat as we enter the restaurant; she ensures I am comfortable before she sets herself. She is an angel.

I hold her in my arms, the meadow wells up in my memory and I see my brother and I hurling clods of earth at each other. I carry a scar to this day, more visible than ever now that my hair has thinned and lost it’s colour. A stray piece of flint and my ensuing scream, more of outrage than of hurt, despite the blood from the open wound. I can feel the ridge of aged scar tissue, smooth amidst the dry leather of my skin. Brigitta looks up as I finger my skull and swears that she has never noticed that ridge before. I tell her of the clods of earth in summer and the snow in winter, how my brother and I fought until we left home, and have neither fought nor seen each other since. I don’t tell her how I revenged myself for that hurt, but I can see it clearly now. Odd how so many things we have gone through but of which we are unaware until moments like this. I can see him on the swing poking out his tongue. What is he? Seven or eight, perhaps. That would make me just ten. That ten-year-old barks for him to get off and do it now. Or what? He says. The rough plank I held behind my back now whirls through the air. I see a nail standing proud as it spins. Did I know, then, that there were nails in the wood? I can’t recall. So much blood.

It is okay now. Brigitta slips off to the kitchen and emerges with tea. I settle in my chair by the fire. There is a lamp on in the far corner of the room but it is not bright. The flames from the fire light her eyes as she talks to me from the floor, her fine fingers cradling her mug for warmth. She likes it here; she says it reminds her of home. I know that this is wrong but I know what she means. This is, or rather, I am, her home.

She wants to tell me something, that much is obvious. However, it’s part of the beauty of life to receive information on one’s own terms, hence the slight contretemps earlier on. But we are settled now and she may begin. Did I mention that she had a sweet voice?

BRIGITTA
You know that I applied for a position with the Bureau? Well I got it!

HARLING
That she is thrilled is obvious, that my approval is important, even more so. That education I had paid for, Oxford then United London University, all exemplary grades. She has a PhD and I half-fancied her remaining an academic. After all if she looked up to me, which she undoubtedly did, and if she were an eminent Professor somewhere, why, didn’t that say something about me? Not that her area of expertise in any way reflected my own, not at all. She majored in History and Archaeology and went on to study Genetics. I had a more humble background in Literature and Music.

BRIGITTA
Harling, . . .

HARLING
She called me by my surname in the same manner as her father, the two of us having left Lancing College suitably prepared for the previous century.

BRIGITTA
. . . you know it’s what I wanted all along, what I’ve worked for since I was fourteen. Now I’ve got it, aren’t you pleased? Really, I’m too excited for words.

HARLING
Me too, I assure her, and I demand to hear all about it.

Of course I knew of the Bureau, pretty much known as that because no one could remember quite what it’s full name was. Like every other organisation it had the letters U and N in there somewhere. What was it? UNBBM, or was it UNBEBM? What did it matter? I remember it being set up sometime after the millennium, a body to look after the public genome projects that were being undertaken. As far as I could recall they searched out malign genes and instigated programmes to eradicate them from future generations. They were variously hailed as being at least partly responsible, amongst other things, for the fall in infant mortality and the reduction in violent crime in recent years.

So, I say, you’re going to find all those nasty genes that make the world a rough old place?

BRIGITTA
Not at all. I’ve been selected to join the investigative department, ensuring that gene sequences which are identified as being ‘nasty’ don’t have any beneficial characteristics. We don’t want to wipe out a future Raphael or a Mozart do we?

HARLING
Apparently, and I didn’t know this, the Bureau employs several hundred archaeo-geneticists who trawl through archives. They look for traits and behavioural patterns that can be attributed to one gene or sequence. Fascinating stuff, if not without some inherent problems.

Does it pay well, I ask, as any avuncular figure should at such a time.

BRIGITTA
I’ll get by.

HARLING
She smiled a beautiful smile and I quite lost the urge to argue personal freedoms. Another time, I thought, another time. Right now she was happy and I was content that that was the case.

I proposed an immediate celebration and we agreed on The Lansborough. I ask Brigitta to call a cab as I busy myself with an old man’s fear of the cold.

BRIGITTA
You really must do something about your house, Harling, I can get someone to sort it out for you.

HARLING
We have discussed this a thousand times. Albeit with some affection, Brigitta sees me dwelling in some antediluvian hovel. In Brigitta’s apartment you only have to mention a cab and, by the time you got to the door, there would be one waiting. It’s not that she minds getting out her phone to hail a taxi, more the incidental things like light-switches. She can never find the one she’s after and she flaps her arms in frustration. Light switches, I guess, are intuitive when that’s all one is used to. Not that Brigitta gets mad. Emotional yes, angry no. But, when we walk out, it is she that checks to see if the door is locked. Not anger, just fear.

This generation will change us, as every generation does, and there will be no turning back. What confuses me is the extreme pace of it all. Life seems pretty much the same on a day-to-day basis; indeed, it doesn’t actually feel any different to my youth. However, one glance with the benefit of hindsight and one becomes aware of the vast differences.

I play this game with myself, and have done for many years. I stand before my bathroom mirror, an old-fashioned one, one I would recognise from my childhood, and I pause. I find that I can bring my twenty-year-old self forward. I always start with the mirror but I can exist in that state thereafter for quite a while. Why do I do this? I allow my young self to be amazed at the lifestyle changes that have occurred, at this almost fantastic technology that surrounds us, me, even in my semi-luddite manner of living.

There is also another aspect of it. Some part of me believes that by bringing forward that young man, I am also passing something to myself as I was then. Years ago I thought that I was saying ‘it’s okay, look, everything works out just fine, you’ve got all this to look forward to’. Now I suppose my attitude has changed slightly. It is more that I am still alive, that there is a future of some kind. I find it difficult to make any kind of judgement at all. In fact I pretty much think that any course I had taken would be equally as valid. The signal, I think, is just one of ‘keep on’. I have often found a sense of familiarity as I manoeuvred myself about life and found myself in new situations and places. I put it down to this practice of pre-warning.

So it is that Brigitta and I climb into a cab, she from one side, me the other. Her lithe form is settled first, my entrance met with a sparkle of sapphire. And on.