How Many Miles to Babylon?

Occasionally they would heave themselves out of the water and follow her up the path, displacing the neatly raked gravel with their ungainly feet. She would turn and wave them away, clapping her hands softly together, to admonish rather than to alarm.

‘The earth is not your element, my loves. Go now. Shooshy, go.’

‘They wouldn’t let us be friends.’

‘Why should they care?’

Yet I knew they would care. He was right. My mother’s mouth would purse up with disapproval, her voice rising alarmingly as it sometimes did when she spoke to my father.

‘Why is neither here nor there. Your lot would care. My lot too if it came to it. One’s as bad as the other.’

The rushes bowed to her as a little rippling wind stirred through them. A thousand thousand pikemen bowing.

‘With your pikes in good repair,

Says the shan van vocht.’

She looked round at me with disbelief.

‘Don’t. You never could sing anyway.’

All in all he seemed glad of my company, but in the same sort of way that a man on a desert island must be glad to see and talk to his own shadow from time to time.

‘Dulce et decorum est . . .’

‘I had hoped that when you grew up, my darling, I wouldn’t have to be lonely any more.’

‘I am sorry if I have been inadequate.’

[…]

‘Under other circumstances he would have been a more adequate man. I can’t bear to think that you . . . you will go, won’t you?’

Is hatred as necessary as love, I wondered, to keep the wheels driving forward?

Does it matter whose son I am? After all, it is what brushes off against us after birth that makes us what we are. That was what she had seen as she watched me growing. She had watched his giving and my taking. She too had to make her contribution.