So Many Ways to Begin - Jon McGregor

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dinner at her house – David, his mother, a woman called Alice, Alice’s husband – sitting around a large table in the bay window of the back room, listening to Julia and Dorothy talk mostly about their time working together during the war. Dorothy told the story, not for the first time, of how they’d once had to use sterilised strips of torn bedsheet when they ran out of bandages, and Julia did what Dorothy assured everyone was a note-perfect impression of the merciless ward sister inspecting the resultant dressings. Alice’s husband asked Julia why, when she was clearly in no need of the income, and could have gone to live with her brother in the country to be with her son, she’d gone into nursing at all, and Julia said that she’d just felt the need to be useful for once. One got the impression from the newspapers, she said, that there was an awful lot of nursing to be done. David sat and listened, and asked questions occasionally, and tried not to look as though he’d let the heavy red wine go to his head. Towards the end of the meal, when the puddings had been eaten and the talk had turned to coffee, just as a warm sighing quiet had settled on to the room, Julia took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one up, offering them round to the rest of the table. It surprised him, because he’d never seen her smoking before, or smelt smoke around her, or seen ashtrays in the house.

      Alice and her husband both took one, leaning in towards the candles to light them. David shook his head quickly as Julia held the packet out to him, and his mother just looked at her. Julia put the packet away, inhaled deeply, coughed and tapped a few flakes of ash into her pudding bowl. Dorothy watched her. When did you start smoking again Julia? she asked, sounding surprised.

      Cigarettes weren’t a problem at the time. Most people seemed to smoke to some extent; pubs were always clouded with it, cinemas provided ashtrays, and people often offered a packet around at the end of a meal. He didn’t know why his mother was so worried about it. Later, she told him that they’d both given up after the war, when a surgeon had shown them some photographs of tar-blackened lungs and told them what medical opinion was only just beginning to suspect. It was something we decided together, she said. It was like a pact between us, something to do after it was all over. I don’t mind, she told him later, I’m just surprised, that’s all.

      Julia looked at Dorothy blankly, as if she hadn’t heard her. Dorothy repeated herself. My dear girl, what are you talking about? Julia said. I’ve been smoking since I left school, since before I met you, you know that. The room shifted to a very different sort of quiet, a catch of breath and a stilling of hands.

      Dorothy tried to laugh and said but Julia I thought we both gave it up, didn’t we? Julia frowned, took a long draw on her cigarette, and coughed again.

      I think you’ve had too much to drink Dotty, she said, smiling. Should I make those coffees now? They were all looking at her, wondering what to say. David didn’t quite know what was going on, but his mother, and Alice and her husband, obviously did.

      They looked at each other, and then Alice said, quite calmly, do you have an ashtray Julia? I hate to make a mess of your dishes here.

      Of course, of course, said Julia, getting up from the table with a jolt, how silly of me. Now then.

      And she swept around the room, her hands reaching for the ghosts of ashtrays which had long since been got rid of, on the sideboard, on the coffee table, on top of the piano, beside the record player. She went twice around the room, and then spun to a standstill by her chair, looking at them with a sudden flicker of fear in her face. She looked at the cigarette in her hand. She said, oh bugger, oh bloody bugger, and for a moment she looked like a child, shrinking in front of them. She looked at the cigarette and stubbed it out on her pudding dish. She laughed, and said well that’s me showing my age already then, eh? twirling her finger around the side of her head, her bracelets spinning and rattling against each other. No one else laughed. She sat down slowly, covering her face for a moment with her hand. She looked up at Dorothy. Oh Dotty, she said quietly, her voice cut with disappointment as well as fear, her eyes flitting to each of them, looking for some kind of reassurance.

      It wasn’t long before her fears began to be realised, piece by disjointed piece. Conversations started to peter out in the middle, names were repeatedly forgotten, doctor’s appointments missed. She got lost in a department store in town, bursting into confused tears at the top of an escalator, and when the staff took her into a back room and tried to calm her down she was unable to remember her address. Dorothy began to realise that she wasn’t eating properly, or changing her clothes, or keeping the house as clean as she had once made a point of doing. They started to visit her more often, doing her shopping for her while they were there, trying to prompt her into using the bathroom and changing her clothes. They took her to the doctor’s, looking for a name for what was happening to her, looking for things they could do to make it better. I’m too young to be doolally, she said, and the doctor said he couldn’t approve of the term but unfortunately there were cases where loss of faculty could have an early onset. It seems, bluntly, that yours might be one of those cases, he said. Laurence was an officer in the army by then, and when they tried to encourage him to take leave so he could look after his mother he told them he didn’t think that would be possible. You carry on there, he wrote, in a short letter to Dorothy, I’m sure you’re doing a fine job. Julia asked about him, often, and continued writing to him for some years, and when even people’s names began to slip out of reach his was the last name she forgot.

       12 Picture postcard, Union Street, Aberdeen, c.1966

      When he made his first journey back to Aberdeen, five or six months after they’d met, they still hadn’t used the words boyfriend, or girlfriend, or going out, and there were a few awkward first hours where they realised how little they still knew of one another – taking a moment to recognise each other at the train station, standing a little way apart, avoiding eye contact and having no idea what to say. But eventually, helped along by a couple of beers and a gin, they stood at the end of the harbour, next to the coastguard’s tower, and dared to put their hands together, and to kiss, and it was a fierce, breathless, impatient kiss which lasted so long that the coastguards banged on the window and shouted at them, laughing and cheering. They walked quickly away to the end of the harbour wall, embarrassed, laughing, looking out at the calm bright sea, looking across the harbour mouth to the lighthouse and the half-ruined gun battery on the rocky knuckle of Girdleness, and the black cormorants standing along the jetty like a funeral party, waiting for whatever the next tide might bring. She pointed out her house, anonymous amongst the rows of stone-built terraces that climbed the low hill away from the shipyards, cut off from the rest of Aberdeen by the River Dee, and she pointed out the rooftops and towers of Union Street’s grand procession, and he smudged his thumb along her narrow eyebrows and kissed her again.

      They walked back along the harbour wall, through the huddled rows of fishermen’s cottages and out on to the long unexpected sweep of beach which stretched for two miles or more up to the River Don. Everyone had their deckchairs turned away from the sea to face the sun, and as they held hands along the prom they felt as though they were on a stage. They walked past the ice-cream huts and candyfloss sellers and postcard stalls, and she told him how in winter the waves would race each other up the steps and over the refreshment huts, lunging landwards with the full weight of the North Sea rushing in behind. You should come back and see it then, she added.

      They didn’t go to her house that first time. They walked back into town along the harbour road, through streets piled high with fish crates and ropes and chainlinks as fat and heavy as Brunel’s, wandering through the richer part of town to Duthie Park and the old Winter Gardens, scrambling down from a small station platform on to a recently abandoned railway line, hopping along the sleepers and make-believing they could follow the tracks all the way to America. My brother Hamish has been to America lots of times, she told him, once they’d given up and turned back towards the park. He’s in the merchant navy, she said proudly. Donald’s over to see him there next year; him and Ros are thinking about emigrating.

      Have you ever thought about emigrating? he asked her lightly. Or going south at least? Slipping his arms around her waist and pulling her towards him, kissing her cheeks and her eyelids and her

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