The Peacock Cloak by Beckett Chris

Author:Beckett, Chris [Beckett, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Rat Island

Snap.

I took this picture when I was eleven. This tall man is my dad, his face in a kind of frozen wince, wishing he was back in his Whitehall office on his own, going through a draft report with his gold fountain pen. This pretty little girl is my sister, Clarrie, in her new red coat and fluffy earmuffs. She looks a bit blurred because she is doing a pirouette. She has just pushed my father’s arm up into that position, rather as if he were a tailor’s dummy and she is pirouetting round and round beneath it, while he thinks about something else. She would have been seven.

We’re in Piccadilly Circus, on the steps at the foot of the statue of Eros. Behind us are the famous lights. They were quite wonderful: reckless waves of colour sweeping across vast arrays of electric bulbs to summon into brilliant existence the giant logos of global corporations – Coca-Cola, TDK, Sanyo, Cinzano – more vivid and numinous and beautiful, surely, than any religious icon in history.

Incredible folly, blind recklessness, it all now seems – blazing electric light for no purpose at all except advertising and decoration – but it was a golden age, one of the pinnacles of history. We lived in an empire of light and plenty, fuelled by the ancient energy of ancient suns stored up over millions of years and burned up by us in one great glorious hundred-year binge.

“Round and round the garden,” sings out my sister for the tenth time, putting on even more of a baby voice, and turning up the volume to VERY LOUD. She glances at my dad with a mixture of defiance and longing and contempt.

She is being silly. She is being annoying. She is doing it on purpose. Dad’s face is taut with the agony of being kept from his world of abstract thought. If there was a deeper despair there than I’d noticed on previous visits, well, I couldn’t see it then and, to be truthful, I still can’t see it now, even looking at the pictures with all my knowledge of what was to follow.

“You’re being a bit annoying Clarrie,” I muttered.

Now, from this long perspective, I see something heroic in Clarrie’s refusal to give up on the possibility of getting our father’s attention, or on the possibility that there might be fun here to be had. There was something heroic about my sister. There was then, and there continued to be, until the day she died. No matter what, she insisted on her right to her own space in the world. She insisted on her right to be noticed and heard.

But then I couldn’t bear it if anyone was not as attentive to my father’s moods and responses as I was. The slightest smile from him and I would redouble my efforts at whatever I was doing to win his favour. The slightest frown, the slightest hint of boredom, and I would either end what I was doing

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.