Your Father Sends His Love by Stuart Evers

Author:Stuart Evers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The annexe is broadly cruciform, the western end longer than planned, extended to accommodate a series of tall octagonal spinners arranged in two banks, heading down to a small round window. On each wall is a unit, in each unit nine shelves, each shelf the height of a VHS cassette plus a quarter inch. Stacks of tapes, some still in cellophane, on the floor and on the desk. The used tapes are labelled and sorted, dated and shelved. An assistant is employed on Wednesdays and Thursdays. He is to tidy up, to label and sort. Bob is never present. He has seen him only twice since he was hired: a pudgy fellow, beetle-browed, the sort who wishes to solve a joke rather than laugh at it.

Bob pours Scotch and gets up from the sofa, crack in the knees, ache in the neck. He walks to the first spinner. As a collection it is kitsch. Every casing, screwhead and stretch of tape documents something in which only he is interested. A library of himself. Thirty-minute memories. Bob pulls out a tape at random. A drama called The Flip Side. In it he plays a DJ, a right-wing DJ, plays him with a fire and zeal and a sense of menace; his best work, some of his best work, taut and polished and the director afterwards saying that he should do more serious work, tread the boards, Pinter, Osborne, those kinds of people. He holds the tape, Maxell 180, more programmes on the tape, but the only one worth considering is The Flip Side. There is no other example in the world. It exists only in the memory of those who watched it and, thirty-five years later, are still alive and still recall a television drama that was shown only once. It is a plastic legacy, this junk he has collected.

The last time he’d seen The Flip Side was twelve years ago. An old friend disputing that Bob had ever done anything aside from making money presenting game shows.

‘The Flip Side,’ Bob said, ‘1966, The Flip Side. The Radio Times called it one of the boldest and most chilling performances they’d ever seen. The Flip Side. They said I should go on the stage. They said they’d not seen anything like it. Pinter, Osborne, those kind of people. I won a fucking award for that.’

And Bob made the friend put on his shoes and carry his glass to the annexe and they settled down to watch The Flip Side. The tape began. Bob was some twenty years younger. He was using an American accent, shaky but not without skill. Bob watched himself, Bob’s eyes only for the screen, only for himself. The friend took the remote control and pressed pause.

‘Go on, then,’ the friend said. ‘Do it. You want to do it, you know you want to.’

Bob looked at himself as a young man; a young man paused on the television screen. He smiled at the friend and stood.

‘And do you think,

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