Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott Page A

heirloom and they were acting on her instructions as per a codicil to her will made before her departure.
    Yes, I thought that at the time, too. ‘Departure’. On the other hand, I thought Belfast lawyers might be old fashioned and not want to call a death a death. Of course I heard nothing more.
    It is all ended.
    All of it.
    Denzel
    My mother is not dead. I could not say that to Gwen, though for her, let it be properly ended.
    Sometimes I think my mother might as well be dead. She has given up talk just as she gave up sight. I think the giving up of sight was willed, by the way. It was a way of escaping.
    Just as I was a sort of escape, but one that could not be disposed of easily. It is amusing, I suppose, that in the end she was a victim of her genes like everyone else, except that I was the consequence of her mid-thirties crisis and the desperation of the empty womb.
    Didn’t I fill it up! Didn’t my old man, too.
    To seek him out, though, all these years later: perhaps I am also a victim of genetic fixations and an incurable nostalgia. Daddy dear where are you?
    And what did I expect?
    I had a friend in Bristol who went on a daddy search and ended up claiming a manor and three well-paying tenant cottages that the tourists line up for in the spring and summer, Americans mostly.
    My daddy was a – is a – minor radio personality in Melbourne. It is a regional Australian environment. I like that word, environment. I like my daddy too, as a matter of fact. Is that a disappointment?
    I do not like my mummy, but whoever does? Tell the truth, it is the old dependency, I had to break free, I really did have to get away from the claw-like hand and the lovely oh so lovely voice always begging me just to help a little here or maneouvre this there, or that somewhere else, mainly friends or enemies but sometimes simply groceries or the light bulb.
    I am cruel, I am ruthless. I have to be.
    And her voice, it is a man-trap, all steel teeth. The strange thing is that my daddy, my new found daddy has actually convinced me (I think) that Juliet Klein in her prime was just the goods.
    As a kid, I adored her.
    The goods.
    Just helping her I felt so important. Now, helping her, I feel used, a chattel, she hardly acknowledges my existence.
    Do you know when it was in that first interview I realised my daddy was still hooked? Yes yes, he was still hooked and that made him more truly my daddy, poor idiot poor old lover-man, yes, that’s my poor ol’ daddy.
    I brought along a CD. The Voice. And after he had finished slobbering and remembering and thanking me for showing an interest I gave it to him. I played it. It was put down only last year, a recording made in Brno, on a minute label trying to cash in on the capitalist market. The Voice Herself, yes you could tell who it was, though the range is now about two inches and the emotional depth just as narrow.
    At least to me. But perhaps I am not exactly impartial.
    I did hear her sing wonders, I think nobody else but I heard my mother try out everything from Paul Simon to Gorecki. I did even pride myself I was her best accompanist, but when the shutters fall from your eyes, well the shutters fall.
    Her only late triumph was to catch onto this Eastern European pastiche stuff, you know, Schnittke and Pärt and G ó recki, ecclesiastical imitations with a bit of folksy rhythm, a dab of Stravinsky and lots of monotony.
    My mother was hypnotic at the monotony, endlessly repeated slow phrases, she wove them like a cat’s-cradle, she used that narrow voice like a really profound incantation, she held a note forever and made you think it was the soul of music.
    There I go again. She remains The Singer.
    I nearly wept when my father grew so passionate, listening to that CD. Wept for him, not me, for music, for my mother too, yes, for my mother.
    I did not tell him a thing. You learn tactics.
    But of course I dreamed, again, the old impossible dream. You