I hardly remember her. I remember her fingers: on cold mornings I would stand waiting at her bedside, and she would extend her warm hand from beneath the blankets to fasten the cuff buttons of my shirt. Her face was … I don’t remember. Her face stayed beneath the covers. Vera was always poorly. I only remember her fingers, her fingerprints, her blemished nails and the mark of the white button on the contours of the tip. Presumably I couldn’t fasten my own cuffs. I seemed to need the human touch. I’m going to burst into tears in a moment but I’m not going to. Actually I was never going to, and never will. I seemed to need something to remember her by, and what have I got? Only her fingers and the difference in the house, the judgment, the shame, when she’d gone.
I liked my aunt and uncle, Lily and Norman, out in Trenton there. Vera, Lily, the sisters: their faces in the lost photograph look questing and American—wide smiles with inward-sloping top front teeth, funny bones, sweet teeth. The sisters look happily conscious of being sisters. There is gene enjoyment. Here’s to you, girls, I always thought when I saw that photograph (where did I lose it?) Have a good time. Also the faces are frightened. They were twenty and twenty-one. I know the feeling. When you’re young like that, the deal is — you keep looking confident while understanding nothing. The sisters came to England in 1943. I don’t know if English husbands were what they were after, but English husbands were what they got. Lily went home again with Norman. Vera stayed, with Barry Self.
I liked my two cousins, Nick and Julie, who were younger than me. Nick and Julie liked each other too — they were younger, and turned into Americans in a way I never quite managed. Except when they were threatened and I fought or bullied to protect them, they usually preferred it if I wasn’t around. Younger, not their fault. Yet I still feel the old exclusion. Where would I be in Animal Farm? One of the rats, I thought at first. But — oh, go easy on yourself, try and go a little bit easy. Now, after mature consideration, I think I might have what it takes to be a dog. I am a dog. I am a dog at the seaside tethered to a fence while my master and mistress romp on the sands. I am bouncing, twisting, weeping, consuming myself. A dog can take the odd slap or kick. A slap you can live with, as a dog. What’s a kick? Look at the dogs in the street, how everything implicates them, how everything is their concern, how they race towards great discoveries. And imagine the grief, tethered to a fence when there is activity — and play, and thought and fascination — just beyond the holding rope.
I have always understood that America is the land of opportunity. Vigorously mongrel, America is a land with success in its ozone, a new world for the go-getters and new-broomers, a land where fortune grins and makes the triple-ring sign… Yeah. Or not. Uncle Norman — he started out in the dry-goods business, in a small way, of course. Norman worked hard. The days were long and sweet. Years passed. And nothing happened. He was still in a small way in the dry-goods business. So he sold the concern and poured all his energy into household appliances. He failed again. Household appliances didn’t seem to care whether he poured all his energy into them or not. He tried his luck in the timber yards. Failed at that, didn’t have any luck. At this point Norman threw a curve: he took a mortgage out on the bungalow and put every cent he had into ventilation engineering. Ventilation engineering swallowed the money up with no trouble at all and didn’t give any back. Then he did the really hard thing. He came home.
I was returned to my father, at the Shakespeare, fifteen now and as big as Barry. I went out to work, which suited me right down to the ground. My small family scattered. Lily has married again: she helps her husband run a delly in Fort Lauderdale. Julie is married, too, with kids, up in Canada somewhere. Nick does God knows what in the Gulf — Qatar, I think, or the Emirates. Norman is in a home. I reckon he would have gone there whether he failed or not. A kind, baffled man, always scheduled for great confusions. It was written. Norman is the man that I owe money to. I once sent him some. They sent it back. In a home — that’s the only place where money isn’t worth anything one way or the other.