Page 61 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

this discreetly pressurised look, telling me she —Just leave it Jim, Rita said, with an arm around doesn’t have the energy to witness a ruction. Anika —haven’t you done enough.
She’s urging a platitude from me.
—Well, I suppose it is, son.
Indeed.
But, on this evening, I take my mug of tea and sit between Rosie and Thomas. I picture taking the iPad from Rosie. Now Rita, I know, could affect all this without causing a squall. Bit of distraction
Haven’t you done enough?
or whatnot. But me, I’m a warship taking a berth. And knowing this fact is not enough to offset it. The grind of my chair on the floorboards has Thomas peeping between the drapes of his hair- style and slanting his dark looks across the rim of the laptop. The clacking slows again.
—What are you reading son?
“There comes gravel and angles in the
silence between us.”
—Do you really want to know, he says? —Go on.
Anyway, this night, I decide to let it go about the iPad. And I turn to Thomas.
Thomas pushes back from the laptop, tweaks the hoodie to shorten the shadows on his face. Stretches the fingers, each one, very deliberately. You’d near swear he’d been working a shovel all day. He parts the hair from his eyes, straightens himself. He’s tall, our Thomas. He might be a good-looking lad, one day, if the acne doesn’t scar when it clears.
Thomas pauses, clicks about on the laptop, emerges slightly from the hoodie.
—Come on child, I beseech in a whisper to Rosie —you’ll melt the eyes from your head.
—OK, he says —I’m reading about The Mandela Effect.
Rosie, without looking up, tightens a clutch on her iPad. And I don’t have the heart to pull it from her. I know the uproar. I lift Rosie onto my lap and she drags the tablet with her.
—Nelson or Winnie, I ask. But he doesn’t get it.
—Hi Grandpa.
—Go on.
She leans into me.
—And there are huge numbers of people, out there, who remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison sometime in the eighties.
Our granddaughter is translucent blond, these icy
blue eyes, like you’d see in a Disney cartoon. Half-
Baltic, apparently. Those were the rumours doing
the rounds before we left Granard. Lithuanian, or
Latvian, or some class of Russian, allegedly, the —Hold on, I say —did Nelson Mandela not just father. Of course, Anika wouldn’t point him out, croak there, lately enough?
said it made no odds.
—It makes odds to me, I said.
And here it is: my son is giving me that half-smile again, like he’s just proved something.
—Whatever, he says —so, there’s this thing called collective memory, which is like heaps of strang- ers all sharing the same memory, right?
Swat of a hand from Thomas.
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