Rejected Prologue.

His earliest memory is of a chronically depressed blue whale. Hers is of waiting. He remembers the anguish he felt at being the cause of the whale’s depression. She remembers branches weaving fingers of shadow on the window. The woman with yellow hair asked him to draw something so he would forget that his mummy was leaving, but he couldn’t forget. Her mother is waiting too, unmoving save for two red hands worrying at a tissue. The blue whale is his favourite mammal (dinosaurs being another matter), and therefore the natural subject for his drawing. All the lights have been switched on in the living room, and the radio turned up to full. Somehow his misery has run down through the crayon and into the whale. Her feet jiggle on the scratchy velvet and she clasps her arms round her knees to stop them (otherwise mummy frowns). A tear seems to tremble in the whale’s great suffering eye, its smile crumples under an ocean of sadness. Finally there comes the snicker of a key in the lock, and she is halfway across the hall before the door has moved. His sadness for the whale echoes and multiplies until hot self-pity threatens to engulf him. She hops from foot to foot as leaves of light from the carriage lamp fall inwards and the man’s shadow blooms. He forces himself to stare at the whale, willing it to feel better. Daddy, daddy she cries, and he scoops her up into the cold commingled smell of aftershave and darkness. If the whale feels better, he tells himself, then everything will be alright. There is so much she must tell him, so many stories about her day. Then all the noise and strange children will go away and his mummy will realise her mistake. But before that can happen she is set down and patted on the head, her stories untold. She’ll rush back to him, surely, and sweep him into her endless embrace. He never turns back or notices her there, still waiting in the darkened hallway. Tears will shine in her beautiful eyes.

(There are other memories, of course, bright blurred fragments from earliest infancy and the zoetropical flicker of later childhood in which single memories flow protean, one into another, their meanings coalescing. In themselves, these experiences are nothing exceptional for two children of their origin and era. One or the other, or both, can remember lullabies from faces fringed with light, a kettle pouring steam in a closed room, the terrifying rush of steam trains which no one else hears, a damp sandpit beneath cold streaming skies, a tea towel for the nativity play, the indignity of plimsolls, fetching rubber bricks from the bottom of a swimming pool, riding bicycles no-handed, airguns and bubblegum, best friends and daisy chains, kiss chase, dancing on blocks, building dens in the woods, a litter of puppies in the corner of a barn, ghost stories at sleepovers, jigsaw puzzles on wet afternoons, a toboggan ride, a rope swing, birthday outings, getting ill just as the holidays begin, summer stretching out forever, the dread horror of the first day back at school. And through them all runs the definitive and consuming passion for this mother and this father, irradiating that little girl and little boy with a certainty which was not altogether dependable or true. Still, for a while she was undoubtedly the most beautiful of all mothers in her tall brown boots and Macintosh coat that smelled of faraway rain and old perfume, and he was the strongest and best of all fathers, with his fierce laughing eyes and his dress uniform like the depths of a summer sky.)