three days old, with its catalogue of Advanced Level fiascos—everything E or
worse, even Media Studies. “I hope by the time I’m back you’ll have finally
decided on your next quantum leap . . .” Mega-Pauline, ever the teacher, in
control, had pursed her lips tartly as she strode to the door an hour ago, off on
one of her motorised Great Treks into Social History—around Abbotsburton,
of all places, with its folksy BMWs and health food stores . . .
What is he doing in this post-modernist Devon village, under picture-postcard
thatch? Why is he in this over-loaded world? He’s stuck in the middle of
August. Despite the haze and the ramparts of dark cloud massed above the
high crooked turrets of the old Priory (now the Abbotsvale Personal Growth
Centre) his clothes are bags of sweat. There’s bio-electricity in the air. And he
can’t stop shaking. How can she expect pro-active educational self-management,
all that crap? As if there was a miraculous future he could magically salvage,
her order out of his chaos, that’s what she wants. He decides to half-close
the curtains, and crouches in the protective gloom. The screen glows.
It’s the past he’s trying to sort out, the hidden order. Nine more cassettes
are spread out on the rug in front of him, and somewhere in the ferric particles
on one of them there are patterns that will tell him the secrets of how and why
and when, in dancing pixels . . . That’s the great distraction, only a trivial academic
detail—Was your dad mad or bad or both? Give reasons for your
choice and dates as required. He shuffles the cassettes around like dominoes
or toy building blocks.
Pauline hasn’t taught him very much about his father’s grey matter, this
greyish subject area. She’d rather go out for some purposeful activity on the
last day of her holiday. Says she needs to relax before going home to London
W9 to psych up for the latest teaching job. At bloody Westway Community
School, for God’s sake. She says she wants to escape from his messes. But she’ll
be going back to the site of his criminal failure. It’s insane.
He selects another cassette, at random. Or maybe because it’s more worn
and chipped—but has obviously been relabelled. Pauline’s neat ballpoint says
‘News Clips 10.’ And indeed, the VCR trundles at slapstick speed through
more prime-time fragments, all of them bad news. He mutes the volume.
The images shiver, blur, skip, all over the place: a derailed train like a broken
snake; a black beach of burning oil; white males in shell-suits compressed
against chainlink fencing; helicopter gunships landing amid scattering kids;
and, popping up like arcade-action targets, the relentless chattering heads, the
anchormen and continuity-women, yammering away like his mother in their
compulsive mission to explain, analyse, justify, rationalise, as if that could stop
the mad planet. Except Pauline won’t explain his dad’s little bit of the action.
Libros Libertad 