excerpt

A grainy monochrome archive snapshot: Nick, in tiny heptagonal smoked
glasses, poses proudly under a giant pop art sign. Pauline, his smiling fellow-
conspirator, is putting up a poster inside the sunlit shop window. Lucas
suddenly feels wildly protective towards these funny silly people—and simultaneously
enraged. All that rich energy. How could they blow it? What went
wrong?
Outside there’s a distant rumble. The picture wobbles for an instant, as if
there’s a glitch in the power supply, the sudden gust of breeze smells oddly
saline—Abbotsburton is miles from the coast—but Lucas mustn’t lose anything,
even the pontifications of the commentary.
“. . . less than a decade later was permanently hospitalised. How did Pauline’s
nightmare begin?”
His mother’s face fills the screen, against a background of bookshelves.
She’s backlit, face in shadow, but he can discern her sharp nose, firm lips, large
anxious eyes. Her chin was more cleary defined then. And she’s wearing one of
those red t-shirts with a message. She’s staring through the screen, waiting for
the right words to form. Lucas can confirm now that he was, indeed, almost
there himself, off-camera, in his little bedroom at the end of the corridor,
Uncle Larry minding him, and special new cars and trains to play with.
This has always been puzzle corner, this dazzling fragment of memory.
How old was he? He’d blundered into the beginning of the shoot, had flinched
from the heat of the lights, had walked right into the anxious squint of the
cameraman, until women with smooth voices and clipboards had steered him
back, promising sweeties, better than grown-ups’ boring chat.
No sweeties for him now. He pauses the tape for a second, kneels with his
face only inches from the curve of the screen. He has to go through with this
ritual, there’s no going back . . .
Playback. Yes, that’s her voice, bright, edgy, slightly nasal, like a soprano
sax, solo: “It’s hard to pin-point the beginning of the end . . . Nick had always
been a little obsessive, a bit impulsive, his moods swung on a big pendulum, as
it were. You had to anticipate the motion. Either I was a fairy princess or a hag
fit to die in a garbage bin. In the first few years I was mostly the do-good fairy
on the Christmas tree, as long as I stayed in the confines of that role it was
fine . . . And believe it or not, I think I wanted to please . . .”
She’s almost managing a bitter smile, as the take fades. This nuance matters
to Lucas but the presenter, off-screen, brisk as a toothpaste advert, has left the
rest of it on a cutting-room floor and sticks to the rhetoric of his script.
“Did Pauline recognise those all-important early warning signs of mental
disorder?”
Pauline leans forward into the camera. It’s confession time.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186508