(2007) Tomorrow by Graham Swift

Author:Graham Swift
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: UK, General
ISBN: 9780307472755
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2007-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

18

PICTURE US, ANYWAY—and mock us, if you will—in our bedroom in Herne Hill, in the first weak light of dawn, our backs grimly turned on each other, waiting, hoping for a little duvet-denting pounce. After the fifth or sixth day, even this pathetic scene would have looked more pitiful still. The fact is, Otis wouldn’t have been there, but nor would your dad. You’d have seen your mother lying by herself with just a dip in the sheet where your dad had been.

I never urged him to it. On the other hand, I never told him not to. I never said: don’t be a fool. Your dad, who could hardly blame himself for Otis’s disappearance, nevertheless, after a certain while, saw it as his duty, his vaguely penitential mission to get Otis back. The days of his dawn patrols.

I’d pretend still to be asleep or at least I’d never acknowledge his slipping from the bed. I’d give the impression, perhaps, that this was behaviour I only expected and would even have demanded. There’s a word, perhaps, for my behaviour. I’d be aware of him getting up and stepping carefully across the room. A little later, I’d hear the click of the front door being gently shut behind him. I wouldn’t move.

It may be hard for you to imagine your father—though it may become tomorrow’s presiding image—like some vagrant without a home. When these days he drives a top-of-the-range Saab, and in any case has the occasional services of a driver, in a dove-grey jacket and peaked cap, to pick him up, often me as well, and drive him hither and thither (I’m talking, of course, about Tony, in his black Mercedes, who’s stopped threatening—I know it wouldn’t look cool—also to drop you off at school). It may be hard to picture your father wandering like a lost soul round the streets of Herne Hill. But I still see him doing it and never without a pang.

I’m seeing him doing it now, though he’s here beside me, as if the whole sorry phenomenon could be weirdly transposed, even now, to Putney. And I think Mike still dreams of it—those dreams we all have of impossible searches, unendable tasks. He may be dreaming of it this very minute. He’s back there, tonight, in those dawn streets, looking for Otis again.

I didn’t force him to do it, but once the pattern was established, it couldn’t be abandoned. It became a kind of ritual, a superstition. Your scientific father, your hard-hearted mum. Our cat might already have perished, but if your father missed one of these sorties, then Otis was surely doomed.

I don’t know what he actually did. But I suppose he did what anyone committed to such a desperate exercise would have done. He kept his eyes open, he scoured the gutters and kerbs. He looked under parked cars, among putout dustbins. He stood listening intently, perhaps, beside plastic-sheeted skips. And, of course, he would have called out. Perhaps reluctantly and softly at

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