| s-1
| 'And did he?' |
| s-2
| 'What?' |
| s-3
| 'Become somebody else.' |
| s-4
| 'Yes. Yes he did.' |
| s-5
| There were compensations. |
| s-6
| Now that I was officially not clever my father began to take me with him on his business trips. |
| s-7
| He reckoned that if I could not benefit from an expensive education I could perhaps benefit from experience. |
| s-8
| My sisters were sent to board at Benenden, I went to the local Catholic school, from whose piety and Home Economics lessons I was frequently removed to accompany my father. |
| s-9
| In 1973, when I was thirteen, we flew to New York to join the QE2 on a Comet Watch. |
| s-10
| It was this that constellated my future. |
| s-11
| And if she was thinking of the school, or his first job in a collar and tie while his mates were at the boats, or the ordinary girl who had loved him, or her own pride, she never told me, then or at any time. |
| s-12
| Like my father she could not speak what she felt. |
| s-13
| Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. |
| s-14
| But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved. |
| s-15
| 'Oh not yet,' said my mother. |
| s-16
| Father said: 'There was nothing to tell.' |
| s-17
| I felt that my father had gone to his death. |
| s-18
| 'I should have tidied up first,' she said. |
| s-19
| Alluvia: the deposits collected and jetted by the river. |
| s-20
| 'You were born in 1940. |
| s-21
| He was born in 1947.' |
| s-22
| I wear a white coat, tie my hair back and assume the proper attitude to what I call my life. |
| s-23
| I will examine it, but underneath the dark things stir. |
| s-24
| What would happen if I came face to face with what I am? |
| s-25
| I think it is happening but because I do not recognise myself I say it is somebody else; him, her, them, who are responsible. |
| s-26
| Responsible for my terror. |
| s-27
| Every piece of furniture in the room has been destroyed. |
| s-28
| It was night, about a quarter to twelve, the sky divided in halves, one cloudy, the other fair. |
| s-29
| The stars were deep recessed, not lying on the surface of the night but hammered into it. |
| s-30
| The water, where the ship cutted it, was broken and white, but once the ship had passed the water healed the intrusion and I could not see where the black of the sky and the black of the water changed into each other. |
| s-31
| I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air. |
| s-32
| There are many legends among seafaring people of a bright fish so hot that it shines in the deepest water, a star dropped and finned from God, an alchemical mystery, the union of fire and water, coniuntis oppositorum that transforms itself and others. |
| s-33
| Some writers mix the stella maris with the remora, a tiny fish that sticks to the rudder of a vessel and brings it to a halt. |
| s-34
| Whatever it is, the fateful decisive thing that utterly alters a confident course. |
| s-35
| 'Is that why you're doing it?' |
| s-36
| To meet: to come face to face with. To become acquainted with. To be introduced. To find. To experience. To receive. To await the arrival of. To encounter. To encounter in conflict. |
| s-37
| My mother lay awake pondering the matter and applied with some urgency to her father next morning. |
| s-38
| What could be done? Nothing. |
| s-39
| The young man had only recently been promoted in charge of the Atlantic crossings. |
| s-40
| He would have to prove himself there. |
| s-41
| Unfortunately he resisted all attempts by my mother to prove himself elsewhere. |
| s-42
| In despair my mother consulted my grandmother who suggested they try the Navy Position. |
| s-43
| This down-to-earth advice was not well received by my father who had already added a veneer of conventional morality to his conventional respectability. |
| s-44
| 'But Jove is younger than you.' |
| s-45
| There he is, built like King Kong, as ambitious as the Empire State Building, as wide-eyed as Fay Wray, and as much a dream, an invention, as the movies and America itself. |
| s-46
| He was a giant projection on the blank screen of other people and that was his success. |
| s-47
| He was not a ruthless man but he believed in himself. |
| s-48
| That marked him out from the many others who believed in nothing at all. |
| s-49
| My grandmother, who was not a nervous type, said to herself, 'David must have got his promotion.' |
| s-50
| Nodding, she finished the chapter, let out the bath water and trudged home. |
| s-51
| He slept in his dressing room for the first couple of months. |
| s-52
| After my mother had fed me, sometime around 5 a.m., she would fall into a deep sleep and my father used to creep in and pick me up in his huge hands and take me to his room where the fire glowed. |
| s-53
| Perhaps it was there, held by him, in front of the mirror, the strange room in reflection behind, that I came to imagine other places, glowing steadily, just out of reach. |
| s-54
| I would argue with that. |
| s-55
| 'London,' said my grandmother, pronouncing it Hell. |
| s-56
| 'Where's the difficulty in that?' |
| s-57
| I want to feel but with feeling comes pain. |
| s-58
| I could advise myself to keep out of complications and I won't pretend that I have had no choice in any of this. |
| s-59
| I have noticed that choices seem to be made in advance of what is chosen. |
| s-60
| The time gap in between the determining will and the determined event is a handy excuse to deny causality. |
| s-61
| In space-time there is always a lag between prediction and response (synchronicity is a higher dimension phenomenon where the rules of space-time do not apply), sometimes of seconds, sometimes of years, but we programme events far more than we like to think. |
| s-62
| I do not say this is conscious, usually it is not, and there lies the difficulty. |
| s-63
| I have seen my father pushing the world, he quite unaware of what was pushing him. |
| s-64
| He did not believe in the unconscious, except as a soup of fantasy and half-memories that entertained his sleep. |
| s-65
| To suggest, as I did, that the mind is a self-regulating system, where consciousness and unconsciousness work as load-balancing pulleys, roused anger enough to make me think I had touched something relevant. |
| s-66
| I continued my reading: Paracelsus, Jung, Einstein, Freud, Capra, and although I still know nothing, I am no longer a disciple of Fate. |
| s-67
| 'I see why he likes you,' said Stella, examining my neck with her fingers. |
| s-68
| What can a little girl see that astronomers and telescopes cannot? |
| s-69
| There was no comet sighted on the official log of the journey. |
| s-70
| What was it then that hooped together ordinary night with infinity? |
| s-71
| I saw the silver prow pass over me and the sails in tattered cloth. |
| s-72
| Men and women crowded at the deck. |
| s-73
| There was a shuddering, as though the world-clock had stopped, though in fact it was our own ship that had thrown its engines in reverse. |
| s-74
| In the morning my father told me that we had identified an unknown signal, thought to be a vessel just ahead of us, though nothing at all was found. |
| s-75
| And she told me how she and her mother had visited the diner once a week, on a Saturday, for the next eleven years. |
| s-76
| It had to be Saturday. The Jewish Shabbat. Papa's ecstasy. Mama's defiance. |
| s-77
| Her daughter was not Jewish. |
| s-78
| Jewishness is continued through the female line. |
| s-79
| Mama would not have her daughter given up to Papa's passion. |
| s-80
| He left his desk with its four black telephones and filing tray, and without stopping to collect any luggage, bought an aeroplane ticket for the evening flight. |
| s-81
| In 1959 flying was odd, glamorous, expensive and blissful. |
| s-82
| There was a fifteen-minute check-in time and my father walked across the tarmac and boarded the twin-propeller plane with only his toothbrush to declare. |
| s-83
| Her breasts as my breasts, her mouth as my mouth, were more than Narcissus hypnotised by his own likeness. |
| s-84
| Everybody knows how the story changes when he disturbs the water. |
| s-85
| I did disturb the water and the perfect picture broke. |
| s-86
| You see, I could have rested there beside her, perhaps forever, it felt like forever, a mirror confusion of bodies and sighs, undifferentiated, she in me, me in she and no longer exhausted by someone else's shape over mine. |
| s-87
| And I had not expected such intense physical pleasure. |
| s-88
| The little boy had never seen a baby pink as a wolf's tongue. |
| s-89
| 'Too polite to be an American.' |
| s-90
| 'I suppose I am. |
| s-91
| My father used to come here. |
| s-92
| He loved New York. |
| s-93
| He said it was the only place in the world where a man could be himself while working his shirt off to become somebody else.' |
| s-94
| The dream to pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it. |
| s-95
| Perhaps my father was a treasure chest because he seemed to be able to lay up for himself inexhaustible riches. |
| s-96
| Whatever he tried succeeded. |
| s-97
| He should have been a Venetian merchant pacing the Rialto. |
| s-98
| He should have been Marco Polo winning furs out of Muscovy. |
| s-99
| Is that him, on the log rafts in Quebec? |
| s-100
| Is that him riding rapids with the snow mantling his shoulders? |