coats lay on the floor where they’d been dropped. I saw that there was a kitchen off to the left, and a flight of stairs on the right. It was our old house, the one in Hunter’s Rock. Every aspect of the furnishing and décor was different from the way I remembered it, but the spaces were the same.
I watched, wide-eyed, as the camera walked across the hall and then started up the stairs. For a moment there was little more than swirling darkness, and from downstairs the muffled sound of bear-guy bellowing. ‘Sodomy … fellatio … cunnilingus … pederasty …’ without any attempt to approximate a tune.
My father made it to the upper landing, paused a moment, muttered something under his breath. Then started forward again, and I realized with a lurch where he was going. It was quiet below now, and all I could hear was his breathing and the quiet swish of his feet on the carpet as he pushed open the door to my room.
At first it was dark, but gradually enough light seeped in from the landing to show my bed against the wall, and me sleeping in it. I must have been about five. All you could see was the top of my head, a patch of cheek where the light struck it. A little of one shoulder, in dark pyjamas. The wall was a kind of mottled green colour, and the carpet brown, as they always had been.
He stood there a full two minutes, not saying or doing anything. Just holding the camera, and watching me sleep.
I sat and watched, too, barely breathing.
The quality of the ambient sound on the tape changed after a while, as if a different song had started downstairs. Then there was a soft noise, could have been footsteps on carpet. They stopped, and I knew, knew without seeing or hearing anything to confirm it, that my mother was now standing next to my father.
The camera stayed on the boy in the bed, on me, for a few moments longer. Then it moved, slowly, panning round to the left. At first I assumed they were leaving, but then I realized the camera was being pivoted, turned to face the other way.
It turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and stopped.
My parents were looking directly into the lens. Their faces filled the frame: not crowded together, just side by side. Neither looked drunk or stoned. They seemed to be looking right at me.
‘Hello, Ward,’ my mother said, softly. ‘I wonder how old you are now.’
She glanced over the camera, presumably at the sleeping shape in the bed. ‘I wonder how old you are,’ she repeated, and there was something in her voice that was sad and off-key.
My father was still looking into the camera. He was maybe five, six years younger than I am now. He, too, spoke quietly, but without a great deal of affection in his eyes.
‘And I wonder what you’ve become.’
White noise. Someone clanked past my hotel room with a trolley.
I didn’t pause the tape. I couldn’t move.
The last scene was from 8mm, too, but the colours were more faded, washed out, pale surfaces bleached to pure light. Dark hairlines and spots popped and flickered all over the screen, making movements behind them feel measured and distanced.
A blaze of hazy yellow sunshine through a big window. Outside, trees rushing past, leaves blurred into sound. The steady beat of a train, and some other quiet noise I couldn’t place.
My mother’s face, younger still. Hair shorter, and black with lacquer. Looking out of the window at the passing countryside. She turned her head, looked at the camera. Her eyes seemed far away. She smiled faintly. The camera was slowly lowered.
Abrupt cut to a wide city street. I couldn’t tell where it might be, and my attention was caught by the shapes and colours of the cars parked by the sides of the road, and the clothes worn by the few passers-by. The cars had panache, the suits didn’t, the dresses were on the short side. I didn’t know enough about such things to date it on the dime, but I guessed we were now back in the late ’60s.
The camera moved forward at an even walking pace. Every now and then the back of my mother’s head wandered into the left side of the frame, as if my father was slightly behind her and to the right. It wasn’t obvious what he was supposed to be recording. It wasn’t an especially interesting street. There was what looked like a department store on the right, and a small square on the left. There were leaves on the trees, but they looked tired. He kept the camera high, panning neither up nor down nor to the sides. They made no attempt to point anything out, or to communicate with each other. After a while they crossed a road and then turned off down a cross street.
Cut to a different street again. This was a little narrower, as if further from the centre of town. They seemed to be walking up a steep hill. My mother was in front of the camera, seen from the shoulders up. She stopped.
‘What about here?’ she said, turning. She was wearing sunglasses now, businesslike. The camera hesitated for a moment, and wobbled, as if my father had taken his eye from the lens to look around him.
His voice: ‘A little further.’
Onwards they walked, for perhaps another minute. Then stopped again. The camera panned round, giving a tantalizingly quick panorama of what seemed to be the top of a rise in the middle of a hilly city, tall buildings either side of the street. Signs at ground level declared the presence of grocery stores and cheap restaurants, but the windows above looked like those of apartments. People stood outside the stores, assaying produce, wearing hats; others walked in and out of the stores. A busy neighbourhood, coming up for lunchtime.
Mother looked back at the camera and nodded. It was her call. She made it, reluctantly.
Cut to later in the day. A slightly different view, but the top of the same hill. Where before it had been morning light, now the shadows were longer. Late afternoon, and the streets were nearly empty. My mother was standing with her arms down by her sides. An odd gurgling sound came from somewhere out of shot, and I realized it was similar to the noise I’d heard on the train.
There was a little movement of the camera, as if my father had reached out to touch something. Then my mother moved forward a little way, or he stepped back. A harsh release of breath from my father.
And then, thirty-five years later, from me.
My mother was holding the hands of two very young children, one on either side. They looked to be the same age, and were dressed to match, though one wore a blue top, the other yellow. They appeared little more than a year old, perhaps eighteen months, and tottered unsteadily on their feet.
The camera zoomed in on them. One’s hair was cut short, the other slightly longer. The faces were identical.
The camera pulled back out. My mother let go of the hand of one of the children. The one with the longer hair and yellow top, a little green satchel. She squatted next to the other child.
‘Say goodbye,’ she said. The child in blue looked at her dubiously, uncomprehending. ‘Say goodbye, Ward.’
The two children looked at one another. Then the one with the short hair, the child that must have been me, glanced back at his mother for reassurance. She took my hand, and lifted it up.
‘Say goodbye.’
She made my hand wave, then took me in her arms and stood up. The other child looked up at my mother then, smiled, held his or her arms to be lifted, too. I couldn’t tell, not for sure, what sex
