6. Robert

Inf. 1.6 Io li rispuosi: “Ciacco, il tuo affanno

Robert: (for my dad):

They sit around all day, everyday, as thought they’re quite used to it. Maybe they are, on the surface. Maybe their bodies have stopped bothering to have any reactions to things any more other than the barest functions necessary to stay alive, if that’s what you can call it.

There’s a new one turning up today, from Blackburn. Come from a street that was white when she moved in fifty years ago but now she’s the only one left, all the other houses Asian. It’s easy to say she shouldn’t mind about that but she’s ninety-two and the world changes much more quickly than we do. We evolve at the speed of a bloody snail.

She’s here. She’s hilarious. She walked in to the lounge and she picked on Jack straight away. ‘What’s your name?’ she said, pointing at him with her stick. They all started to turn their heads. ‘Jack,’ I said, to try and help things along. ‘Shhht!’ she said to me, quick as a whistle, sticking her stick in my face. ‘I didn’t ask you. He can still speak, can’t he?’ She turned back to the others. ‘It’s a slippery slope,’ she said. ‘Have you given up speaking for yourselves? That’s a major concession of power into the hands of the authorities.’ She roused herself beyond her five foot nothing, or whatever she was. To my astonishment, the collection of old dears seemed to do the same, sitting up straighter in their chairs, looking interested. Jack even took out the comb he’d always carried in his shirt pocket from day one, and never used, and very slowly, with shaking hands, reached up and combed his hair. He put it away again. ‘Yes sir,’ he said, nodding his head at her. From the corner of my vision I saw her wink. Or was it a twitch? Does it matter?

5. Lucy

Inf. 1.5 Ell’e Semiramis, di cui si legge

Lucy:

Semmy, they called her, her mum and dad, but we all thought of her as Semi because that was the easier spelling to turn into jokes. Semi-quaver, Semi-detached, Semi-automatic. She didn’t seem to mind what name you gave her as long as you spoke to her. I suspect that was the problem at home. They’d given her a stupid name in the first place because they didn’t really want a person, not someone they’d have to interact with. They wanted half a person, a cipher, a shadow: a canvas for themselves. It worked. Semmy never seemed like she was all there, or a complete person, somehow.

It made me wonder about my own mum and dad and why they’d had children. My dad hardly ever came home from work before eight o’clock, and quite often he worked the weekends, so we didn’t really see him, but neither did Mum. For kids, although it’s really hard, at least you’ve got the blood bond so the love keeps going. But for mum, hardly seeing him, doing all the hard work of bringing us up on her own, it must have been really hard to stay in love with him. She told me once that she fell out of love with him in 2001 but I was so shocked at the thought that she’d stayed in love with him that long, based on how she seemed to feel about him and act towards him, I mean, that I didn’t know what to say to her. I just gave her a hug but she didn’t seem to want it particularly.