This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan

Author:David Keenan [David Keenan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571330843
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

19. A Minor Cog a Small Life a Little Bird: an anonymous mother writes about bringing up Lucas Black and love at first sight (the kind that only happens in the past) and the etiquette of the tête-à-tête and dreams of being swept away like in a science-fiction novel or a fantasy while always coming back to the snow the unimaginable snow again and again.

I don’t want you to print my new name. Things have changed and I live a different life now. Not that it matters but anyway, I don’t want you to print it, if that’s alright with you. I’m a minor cog, a small life, a little bird. Even if I did give you my name it would mean nothing, less than nothing, even, it would just be another name without a face, another Carol or Philippa or Elizabeth. What would that tell you? But still, I prefer to withhold it. As I’m writing this I’m looking out the window, on the third floor, at Paris in the snow. Can you imagine that? Of course you can. I mean, Paris in the snow: it leaves little to the imagination. Imagine if I had said Budapest in the spring, or even better, Arran in the autumn, or let’s push the boat out, Nigeria in the winter, which will figure later in my story, so start imagining it now, if you can, and let’s see where we end up.

At first there’s not much to tell, at least not much that would interest an outsider. I grew up happy. I did well at school. I couldn’t get a job. I moved around a lot. I took menial jobs, minimum wage. Then one day a man came into the shop – I was working at a shoe shop, an average shoe shop on Dumbarton Road in Glasgow. He guessed my shoe size; I was a size 3. I’m the one that’s supposed to have the expertise, I told him. It’s not expertise, he said, it’s intuition. Do you like music? he asked me. I had always dreamed of liking music, of being carried away, which is what music can do to you or so they say. Am I going to be swept away like in a novel or in an old-fashioned film? I wondered. My tastes were old-fashioned, even then. I read books, I liked crossword puzzles, in a way I was a spinster before my time. And here was my suitor, ready to rescue me from a future that I might have found in a word search or a board game. I was naive, too. I kept up the discussion of shoe sizes long past the point where it should have turned into the first awkward manoeuvrings of a romance. You like music, he said to me, this stranger who was dressed so well, but you don’t like to dance. I took this as a personal affront, although deep down I knew it was true. I can dance as well as any of them, I said, and I intend to prove it.

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