What I Know I Cannot Say Read online

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  What I Know I Cannot Say

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  What I Know I Cannot Say

  Dai Smith

  He had not seen her since the night of the exhibition. He had not heard from her after Billy had left. She’d said, on the phone, that she’d just like to see him. To say hello, and see how things were. Oh, and she’d added casually, as Bran always did, to ask a favour of him. He didn’t ask what kind of favour. With the ill-feeling and bickering, the malevolent quarrelling as the strike had finally unravelled, and then Billy’s terrible success at the exhibition before Billy had said goodbye and left them all behind, including him, he felt he could not shut her, or her need of a favour, out of his life. Not without foreclosing on everything else. She wanted to come over straightaway. Half an hour by car from the city. They fixed a time for late morning, and she said that would be great, and see you.

  He decided it was time to shave, to scrape off the bristly month-old half-beard. He shaved carefully, methodically, with scalding hot water from the kettle. He lathered the suds thickly with his brush and coated his face with them, more than once, successively removing them and the beard which they hid, doing it with deft sweeps of his safety razor until his face felt smooth again. He looked at its restored nakedness in the bathroom mirror. It felt to him like a discovery of self he did not want, but one he had been compelled to make, though he could not say why.

  When he had showered and found one remaining clean shirt, still in its dry cleaner cellophane wrapping, he dressed in a black cashmere pullover and black cotton trousers. He looked at himself in a wardrobe mirror and decided, with a wry look at the creased puppet lines below his downturned mouth and at the folded-in jowls of his old man’s neck, that, at seventy, he would have to do. He moved through the house then, though only downstairs, tidying things up, putting half-read books away, plumping cushions, gathering scattered newspapers together, taking rimed cups and stained saucers and empty plates into his kitchen, closing its door behind its mess.

  He decided against laying and lighting a coal fire in the Victorian black-leaded grate which he and Billy had once found in the back garden of a deserted house in an abandoned street. It was the time when people had been moved out from the terraces in the valley bottom to be resettled on a new mountain-top housing estate, one that had slid into architectural decrepitude and social despair within another decade. The grate had been installed by father and son when they had knocked through from front-to-back in the forlorn seventies. Its surround of plum-coloured tiles, each with lime green tendrils garlanding their edges, tethered the stone-built terraced house, however incongruously now, to the detail of its past. Much like himself, was his unspoken thought whenever he looked at them. Against the dank November weather outside, he notched up the gas-fired central heating and made some real coffee in the gleaming Italian percolator Billy had once bought for him. He sat down before the empty grate to wait for his son’s former partner to arrive. From the kitchen he could hear the sinister hiss and drip of the coffee percolating for them.

  He began to consider what the favour she wanted might actually be. He dismissed the idea of money, since he didn’t have any, and she wouldn’t need any. Advice, then. At his age he was always being asked for that. He’d given too much of it, too recently, too brusquely, he thought ruefully, to want to go there again, especially not with her. Maybe information, then. He could understand her need for that. It was the same for him. Where Billy was? He didn’t know. There had been no letters or cards or calls. What Billy had said, if anything, before he went? Nothing really. He’d muttered, “Time to move on”, with not even a perfunctory hug to soften the declaration. The Old Man, as he knew and resented he was called, had shrugged at that and said – too sharply, was his later regret – that Billy had always been a time-and-motion merchant at heart. Click, click. Snap, snap. Take a picture. Any picture. Move on. So he’d said, “Yeah. Bugger off then”, and picked up a book, wanting instantly to stifle the words and deny the sentiment. Too late both ways. He knew that much, but it was not for Bran to know, or care about. Nor had Billy left anything, words or objects, with him for her, and besides, they’d been apart for a while. So there was nothing there. He decided he didn’t know what favour she could possibly want. When she arrived and he’d let her in and she’d kissed him on his cheek and sat down. She came straight out with it in that abrupt but disarming way she had. And he could not have anticipated it.

  She wanted his life, she said. She wanted his memory. She asked him to tell her his whole story. She wanted to ask him questions. Or not, as she explained it, exactly that. It would be best, she said, if he could just free-flow. She’d smiled, self-deprecatingly, at the phrase. He’d grunted. It’d be easy, she’d assured him. Straight into a tape-recorder. She’d produced one from her bag. It was, and she waggled it between her fingers at him, the latest and most miniscule model. She told him she knew of his irritation with such things – his unease even, she’d heard him say, whenever he chose to pontificate to her generation – but, she stressed, this little beauty took the tech stuff out of the ology thing. Honest, she grinned. So easy, this one. Just switch on. Pause if you like. When you like. Batteries were long-lasting. Tapes, even these mini ones, did three hours each. There were more in tiny cellophane-wrapped packets. Simple to change them over. If he needed. And she placed the miniature instruments for his life’s recall on the low deal table which stood, its original legs sawn down to coffee table height, between them.

  Then they had sat together over the coffee he had made in his shining Italian percolator, that late November morning in the cold, ashen winter of 1985; and as he demurred, as politely but as firmly as he intended now that the favour had been asked, she countered his objections, his nothing-to-tell wave-of-the-hand dismissiveness, and began to make it personal in the manner she knew how to make count. For Bran. She wanted, she said, to draw him the bigger picture in which she was involved. It was such an opportunity. For her. It might allow her fledgling broadcasting career – and she made a winsome moue with her mouth – maybe, just maybe, to take off. A series. Thirteen thirty-minute episodes. For Radio Wales, with a possible migration to Radio Four if they caught the metropolitan ear. Nothing scripted as such. An edited montage of voices, only, to capture what lay behind the day-to-day events of the strike. Deeper currents. Social significance. Community spirit. She set each phrase before him like a market trader guaranteeing the goods. And his role was to provide a spine to what might otherwise be an unstructured cacophony of witnesses. She wanted, she said, the connection of experience. His knowledge. To show that defeat was not retreat but an engagement with survival by other means. She said the story she’d create was that of continuity in ordinary people’s lives, from then to now, and beyond, as people being, despite themselves sometimes, still together. That would be her intended effect, she said. He listened in silence.

  Billy, he noticed, had not been mentioned by her at all. Not once. Maybe, he thought, for the good. In the silence now dropping between them she said, more quietly and as a plea, that this was a really, really, big chance. For her. That she’d be the series producer. Not just a jobbing interviewer-cum-researcher. That the idea, for the whole thing, had come to her, the connective bit, because she’d been reading, at last, some of the history stuff he’d always been, and here she gave a little nod of her head towards him, “banging-on-about”. Then Bran leaned over to touch Billy’s father on his knee. Then she left her own chair to bend down, on her knees, before him. Her head was bowed, almost in his lap. Her hair had been cut since last they met at the exhibition. It was cropped very short, almost like a
boy’s haircut. Her black hair glistened like thick stalks of rain-stippled grass, and it smelled to him of citrus and strawberries. She lifted up her head to look at him, and said, “Please, Dai. For me. Billy would want you to, too, wouldn’t he? Please.” She rocked back a little, stood up and smiled down at him.

  His son’s name had been spoken by her at last. Her last, best card. He looked at her and wondered at her dogged persistence, at her determined sense of the justice needed to be done. In her interest. He did not know what to say. He shook his head. From side to side. Bran shrugged, but did not seem dismayed. She controlled the pace of the moment for as long as she wished. He took her all in now. Bran, in her current uniform. Riveted blue jeans tucked into low-cut black boots with dulled silver buckles for decoration. A short black woollen jacket, single breasted and worn over a plain white T-shirt. No make-up. No jewellery. No ring. No artifice. All plain dealing. With the future in mind. And so in need of a useable past. She sighed, but only slightly, as if he was being more of a disappointment to himself than he was to her, and as if, nonetheless, he deserved one last chance.

  Bran tapped an unpainted fingernail on the tape recorder on the table before them. She slid the replacement tapes a little closer. She reached into the inside pocket of her cinched jacket and with a gesture so theatrical it might have been – perhaps was – rehearsed, she pulled out a sheet of paper she’d folded in two.

  “I thought you might be a bit uncertain,” she said. “So I took the liberty of drawing this up. To give you a clearer idea of what I mean. What’s needed. For the programmes to be solid. To tell the truth. Like you can. Only you.”

  The paper, held still in her small and shapely hand, was a-tremble, as if it might, in itself, make the difference, fly into the gap between them and bridge it for her.

  “It’s a questionnaire”, she said.

  “I’ve typed it out. Others will have similar ones, but all bespoke, so to speak. Of course, you can go anywhere you like with it. In your answers. It’s a kind of aide-memoire, I suppose. Or a prompt. I’d only edit.”

  She paused, thoughtful again.

  “Look, we really need, you know, a real backbone, your story, for all the others we’d play in around it, because, you know, the longer haul, isn’t it? You were in it, and also, you know about it, too, don’t you? More than just being there. The history, I mean. You’ve taught about it. So, you see, I – we – have to have that spine. Your memory… of it all.”

  Bran had made her pitch. A good one, in the circumstances, she thought. Time to move on. She looked at the ugly, clunky, black plastic digital watch that smirked out its silent, undeniable presence on her wrist. She tapped it. Acknowledged it.

  “It’s eleven-thirty now”, she said. “I’ll come back after five. Tea-timeish. I’ll bring a bottle, eh? We can toast absent friends, the one we both know, mm? Look, you old grump, you might even enjoy this. And don’t worry about any hesitations or repetitions, I can always smooth all that kind of stuff away in the editing suite. Tell what only you know, eh?”

  He wanted to say that knowing was one thing, but telling was something else altogether. And that any such knowing, which he could not deny, was not the same as the experience he could not discard. He wanted to say that time always stood still before it was gone, and that what came later as knowledge was, because it was from the past, only a future stuck in the groove of whatever was now. He said nothing, and she smiled as if his silence was a complicit contract made between them.

  She said, “Look, got to rush. Back to work. Lovely seeing you again, Dai. Ta for the coffee. And all your help, of course. See you later, then. Okay?” And she put the questionnaire she’d prepared in advance onto the table set with the coffee cups and percolator. She said “Bye”, with her back already turned, and let herself out of his terrace house as easily as she had just let herself back into his life.

  * * * * *

  [For Dai Maddox

  15 November 1985]

  Tell us where and when you were born. And who your parents were.

  What was your childhood, your upbringing, like?

  How old were you when you left school, started work?

  Tell us about work underground, in the pit.

  So much happened to your generation in the thirties – hunger marches, strikes, riots, the Spanish Civil War – how were you personally affected, involved?

  When and why did you leave the coalfield?

  You went into the Army, didn’t you? Tell about that and the War?

  And after the War, what have we lost, have we gained anything? Did you?

  Dai, say whatever you like, how you like, in your own words, you know.

     Love

       Bran

         x

  * * * * *

  Holding the paper. Reading the paper. Staring blankly at the paper. Focussing. Wondering. Repeating the questions. Considering what it was. A road map. A menu. A list. What it meant. Meaningless, he thought. Not the way it happened. Or, yes, it was what happened, he granted. Might have happened, he supposed. Could have happened. To someone or other. To him, too. Suddenly short of breath. Wheezing through the latticed fretwork of his lungs. Dust. Not as bad as some. And cigarettes, yes, as he’d been told by more than one doctor. Which had, though long given up, made it worse. Emphysema. He could sense, more than feel, the gurgle in his chest, the urge to spit that was sucked back into a vacuum of dryness which made him gasp. A lack of air. Inside him.

  Recovering. Looking again at the paper she’d left. For him to study. How to respond. What he knew, he truly knew, he could not say. What had occurred in his life, yes, some facts as might be said, if dates and names and things could be called such, but he could not say, he knew, what might still need saying if it was to be fully known, and not in this way ever, not directly. Speaking out loud, that is. Into a machine. To speak into that would only be to tell her what he might think she wanted, in her sense of the word, to know. And that would be far less than enough. For what he knew could not be said.

  Yet, it could, perhaps, be told. If telling was what followed on from accepting the invitation to be questioned. All foretold, as it were, by being told already in advance, by the way in which a question elicits the nature of an answer. Or shapes the telling, at least. Guides the manner in which the tale must be told. Or worse, and he grimaced, shows how all is, by now, told. Gone and foregone, both. So, if so, why not tell all that will be nothing like it really was to live it? Rattle it off, then. His own story turned into a history fashioned for her needs. Rehearsal and enactment. Whichever came first. Whatever was which. This last, he didn’t think, even now, he would ever know.

  * * * * *

  TELL US WHERE AND WHEN YOU WERE BORN AND WHO YOUR PARENTS WERE.

  Holy Innocents’ Day. The 28th of December. In 1915. In a home for unmarried mothers in Cheltenham. Young girls, no doubt, from the country, from the coalfield, the town, the city. The war can’t have helped. All those uniforms, and a break-down – no doubt, is there? – of some of the conventions of denial and disgrace. My father’s name was absent from the birth certificate. I learned it later, though he was dead before the war’s end and there was no outcome to our connection. I have left Billy some notes I made, and a letter of explanation. But none of that is for now. Not here. I know my mother’s name, though I do not remember her. She left. And, in that sonorous phrase, “abandoned her child”. Me. I was just two and a half years old at the time. Pointlessly, I’ve cursed her, or at least never forgiven her, all my life. My mother, Gwendolyn Ann. Gwennie Maddox. My name, on the certificate I later retrieved I mean, was put down by her as “David James Maddox”. Her maiden name was my surname. My given name was David. Which I kept, though not the James part. Who was he? Her father? My father, I used to think. But it was not. Her occupation was put as “Housemaid”. What could she do, you might say? More than she did, I’d say back.

  I was, before I was three then, that summer of 191
8 as the war kept on killing before it finally stopped that winter, put into the care of my Aunty Rose and her husband, Robert Holcombe.

  * * * * *

  WHAT WAS YOUR CHILDHOOD, YOUR UPBRINGING LIKE?

  I was a child then, so I cannot say. I became something else, so I can remember, of course, but not make a judgment on it as to what it was like or its nature. I expect that others might say, from my recollections of it for them, that it was miserable, harsh, even cruel on occasion; limited, certainly.

  Yet this is not how I recall it. I do that, how else? Day by day. Hour by hour. One incident or another. One sensation from that time to place against a thought about that time. I can only re-enter it, that time, when and how it lets me, and if I wish to go there.

  There was, all year long, the foetid animal stink of the smallholding. Of pigs mostly. And rotting vegetation, animal fodder, shit. It seeped through the house, stone-and-brick-faced and detached. But the latter description is far too grand. It had been the workshop for the quarrying that cut the stone for the valley houses when the coal rush began in the valley below. It was two makeshift rooms, living and kitchen, end to end, and two small bedrooms, one on top of the other, at the end. The smell from outside sidled its way into our nostrils no matter how much snorting out of it you did, and it became a part of us, in our pores, our sweat, our clothes, our very sense of ourselves. In winter the stink was cold and sour, and the dark mud the pigs churned up in their pen was ridged stiff. It flaked or crumbled when you walked on it to slop out. In summer the mud, after rain, was creamy and grey, rippling in folds where the pigs rooted after the cabbage stumps we threw them. Often the three of us younger boys would, hungry ourselves, gnaw the stumps back to a white, leafless remnant. Rose and Bob had two sons five years older than me: the twins Dick and Jim, my cousins, with whom I played for a while. And there was Ivor, older again, and resentful of everything and everybody. I say it like that now – resentful – but perhaps it was not that which was felt, and not towards me as a child. More like an annoyance with my presence, one that could, and was, contorted into anger as we grew up together, sharing the same lumpy tick-mattress bed, with me at the bottom, with Ivor there too for a while, kicked and pushed by the twins. When the twins both went to work underground as collier boys, replacing Ivor who had left to marry in a hurry, and they had a shilling or two to contribute, as he had done, to the family purse, they seemed to want to make me feel, in my torment, their own rage. Punched and kicked, and thrown in, more than once, amongst the pigs, I would avoid the twins by day, if they worked nights, as much as I could, and hide away in the tightest, darkest corners of out-buildings even when my Aunty Rose called and called for me.