A Traitor to Memory

“It is my life.”





“Sure. It's your life. That's what you've made it.”





I could tell by her tone that we were back to the uneven ground we'd walked over before, and I felt a surge of frustration run through me. “Libby, I'm a musician. If nothing else, it's how I support myself. It's where the money to live comes from. You can understand that.”





“I understand,” she said.

“Then—”





“Look, Gid. Like I said, I'm heading out to feed the ducks.”





“Why don't you come up afterwards? We could have a meal.”





“I've got plans for tapping.”





“Tapping?”





She looked away. For a moment, her face expressed a reaction I couldn't quite grasp. When she turned her head back to me, her eyes appeared sorrowful. But when she spoke, her voice was resigned. “Tap dancing,” she said. “It's what I like to do.”





“Sorry. I'd forgotten.”





“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”





“What about later, then? I should be home. I'm just hanging about, waiting to hear from Dad. Come up after your dancing. If you've a mind to, that is.”





“Sure,” she said. “I'll see you around.”





At that, I knew she wouldn't come up. The fact that I'd forgotten her dancing was, apparently, the final blow to her. I said, “Libby, I've had a lot on my mind. You know that. You must see—”





“Jesus,” she interrupted me. “You don't get anything.”





“I ‘get’ that you're angry.”





“I'm not angry. I'm not anything. I'm going to the park to feed the ducks. Because I've got the time and I like ducks. I've always liked ducks. And after that, I'm going to a tap-dancing lesson. Because I like tap dancing.”





“You're avoiding me, aren't you?”





“This isn't about you. I'm not about you. The rest of the world isn't about you. If you, like, stop playing the violin tomorrow, the rest of the world will just go on being the rest of the world. But how can you go on being you if there's no you in the first place, Gid?”





“That's what I'm trying to recapture.”





“You can't recapture what's never been there. You can create it if you want to. But you can't just go out with a net and bag it.”





“Why won't you see—”





“I want to feed the ducks,” she cut in. And with that, she swung past me and headed down to Regent's Park Road.

I watched her go. I wanted to run after her and argue my point. How easy it was for her to talk about one's simply being oneself when she didn't have a past that was littered with accomplishments, all of which served as guideposts to a future that had long been determined. It was easy for her simply to exist in a given moment of a given day because moments were all she had ever had. But my life had never been like that, and I wanted her to acknowledge that fact.

She must have read my mind. She turned when she came to the corner and shouted something back at me.

“What?” I called to her as her words were taken by the wind.

She cupped her hands round her mouth and tried again. “Good luck with your mother,” she shouted.

17 November





I'd been able to put my mother from my mind for years because of my work. Preparing for this concert or that recording session, practising my instrument with Raphael, filming a documentary, rehearsing with this or that orchestra, touring Europe or the US, meeting my agent, negotiating contracts, working with the East London Conservatory … My days and my hours had been filled with music for two decades. There had been no place in them for speculation about the parent who'd deserted me.

But now there was time, and she dominated my thoughts. And I knew even as I thought about it, even as I wondered, imagined, and pondered, that keeping my mind fixed on my mother was a way to keep it at a distance from Sonia.

I wasn't altogether successful. For my sister still came to me in unguarded moments.

“She doesn't look right, Mummy,” I remembered saying, hovering over the bed on which my sister lay, swaddled in blankets, wearing a cap, in possession of a face that didn't look as it should.

“Don't say that, Gideon,” Mother replied. “Don't ever say that about your sister.”





“But her eyes are squishy. She's got a funny mouth.”





“I said don't talk like that about your sister!”





We began in that way, making the subject of Sonia's disabilities verboten among us. When they began to dominate our lives, we made no mention of them. Sonia was fretful, Sonia cried through the night, Sonia went into hospital for two or three weeks. But still we pretended that life was normal, that this was the way things always happened in families when a baby was born. We went about life in that way till Granddad fractured the glass wall of our denial.

“What good are either of them?” he raged. “What good is any one of you, Dick?”