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Say Yes

Originally published in In the Red Issue 5, 2007

In the photograph I have of her, she gazes into the camera’s lens as if it were a friend – as if it were her best friend.
     Perhaps it was.  It held her as nothing else in life managed to do.
     It’s a Bank Holiday Monday, 1935: there’s her neat print on the back to prove it.  I imagine it’s her handwriting, and not the photographer’s: Knights of Blackpool, the name stamped in blue.
     She is leaning on the prom and the wind messes with her hair.  She is twenty-two, and laughing, mouth wide, lipstick so thick her mouth looks sore.  
     Straight away, you know that face belongs to the 1930’s – a period face.  It’s not just the French plait or the striped blouse with its fussy bow at the collar and both shoulders that date her, but the long back-of-the-spoon curves of her cheeks, the too-much jaw ever to be thought pretty nowadays.
     Even in faded black and white, she glows. The hair – its gold, its wiry texture – she passed on.  It skipped me right by, and went to Jason, my son, who made good use of it.
          This is my mother, Maureen. The arms of her handsome young lover are wrapped around her waist.  I don’t know for certain so I only hope he was young and handsome. His face is hidden as he nuzzles her neck as if he’s found a home there.  His hair is lacquer black and over-combed, as sleek as an old .78. His hands look strong.  His fingernails are clean.  He wears a suit. 
     That’s as much as can be known.
     Maybe she didn’t know that much more about him.  Maybe his name.  I hope she knew his name.
     There’s not much else to be known about my mother, but this: months later, she dies in a workhouse with an illegitimate child she didn’t live to see more than a month old.
    
A workhouse?
     In I936? 
     You’d think all this had happened a century before, that workhouses were closed in Dickens’ day, but no. 
     They were still about, called homes but workhouse all the same, still busy even then. 
     Things last longer than you expect.
    
Asked what God did before he created the world and us on it, St Augustine answered that time was a thing of this universe. God has no time or any need of it.  Time is human. God’s gift, or his curse.
    
She called me Patricia, a name common enough then, but I wonder if it was an echo of my father’s name. 
     I look at those hands.
     Are they a Patrick’s hands.  Irish?  The fingernails so clean.  Not a worker’s hands – although Maureen’s are. I imagine Maureen sighing at their touch, that lipstick mouth parting in pleasure.
     It’s night I see them.  The sea laps at a beach the colour of bones. The stars throw themselves across an orange sky.
     Fairground lights glitter in his oiled hair. His neck smells of Lifebuoy and Park Drive.
     Their kisses taste of rum and pep. 
     Say yes, he says, say yes, and he holds her fast, like gravity, but she pushes against him for the pleasure of it, stretches out for joy. 
     She feels his touch on the surface of her skin, but, inside, it’s as if she might explode, expand, occupy the whole earth she is so happy, free.
    
Of course, God had nothing to with time.
     In an unimaginable dark, there was an explosion of densely concentrated matter and energy, and there, eventually, were we. 
     This world, and us on it, fragments flying apart and yet bound, shaped, made purposeful by gravity’s restraining hands.
          We are expanding still, stretching out, not for joy, but because we are compelled.
     Soon we will tire, relent, fall back, contract.  We will contract once more to an infinitesimally dense point: a dot.
     What then?
     Will we expand again? In and out? Will we rhythmically dilate, expand: a pulse, diastole and systole, like the human heart?
    
Think of Maureen Lees, twenty-three, giving birth in a workhouse, contracting puerperal fever and, after an agonizing month, her heart stopped. It gave up all hope of getting on, of doing well or just getting by because there was one moment when her lover was not content with his hands around her waist, his face nuzzling her neck, but who wanted her to say yes, yes, yes – and so did she. Yes, she said, and, no doubt, yes again.
     Think of Jason Dennehy, her grandson, twenty-four when he died on me. At some previous point, a lover whose name I do not know, whose hands I cannot see, whose face I do not wish to imagine, told my son that he loved him, that he wanted him, wanted him all the way, wanted to be inside him, no protection: say yes, he said, say yes, say yes – and Jason, for the same reasons I believe his grandmother said it, said yes to this man and then to others after him, having acquired, he told me – telling me to hurt me, I do know this – the taste for it.
    

Yes.
     There are myths that one should give all for love; that a moment in love is more utterly commanding than all the long years one might live outside without it; that nothing is safe, nothing is guaranteed; that in the end we will fall back, relent, return to nothing, so why not chance it, wing it; why not say yes.
    
I have always said yes, not out of passion, but obedience.
     I have always been submissive to God’s will – even those days and times and years now when I no longer had any faith in God at all.
       I was fostered and adopted by a religious pair in Rotherham.  I felt my good luck in this.  I loved these people.  I loved them much more then than I do now. They would ask me if I loved them and, because that’s what I thought I had to do, obedient, girl, I said yes.
     I married when I was no older than Maureen to a man who worked for Shell.  These were good years, safe.  Always I felt I had been rescued from whatever love of risk tempted and so damaged  Maureen and, in time, my son.  And I hadn’t been short of suitors. 
     Thomas was the one who asked outright, and so I said yes.
     He left me in 1962 when Jason, our long-awaited son, was newborn in his crib. He had given me no warning. Neither did he ever quite give me an explanation.  The morning he left, I heard door click shut and I gripped the table’s edge.  I clung to it.  I was so sure the world would melt away.  It did not.
     I got on with life because I had to do, and I had Jason.  I went to college, was certificated, and taught General Science and Scripture in Rotherham until quite recently in fact.  
     The work anchored me, supported me in very sense.  Now some mornings even gravity has trouble holding me down.  I cling on, wait for the dreadful moment to pass.  It lingers, fades, and returns throughout the day.  Nightimes are worse.  I close the curtains before it even gets dark.  I cannot bear to see the sky, all those stars, dead suns, no longer there, but visible. 
     The sky is full of ghosts. 
     I sleep as much as I can.  I contract into a dot, and wait for the day when I can begin again.
    
This is time.
          A dot in the darkness expands, contracts.
          One moment changes a life.
          One word.
          Yes.
    
He was my son.  He was Maureen’s long-jawed ghost.  At night, I would watch him sleep.  His blond hair, I promise you, glowed in the dark.
     Mostly – always – there was only him and me.
     I expected his adolescence to be a tough time.  I was a teacher, after all.  I knew how time takes a teenage boy, wrestles and perplexes him.
     I wanted to show that I was on his side throughout it all, but somehow he stopped believing it.
     I came home one evening unexpectedly early. I had walked so slowly too. We had rowed in the morning, and he had a friend round and I wanted to give him space.  I didn’t want to come home to arguments.  There was a full moon.  The streets were lit as if by magnesium. 
     At that time I did not hate the night.
     The lights were out, but I heard movements, murmurs from his room.  I knocked and without waiting – I was his mother – I walked into the room.  I saw Jason sitting on his bed, naked in the full moon, that dead planet’s light, his hair almost white in it, and another boy, behind him, his arms wrapped around my son.
    
I did not react well.  I admit that.  I taught Scripture.  I believed in sin.  Imagine what followed, how unrelenting I was.
     Let me summarise.  Let me leave so much out.  The arguments are too many to recount.  I have forgotten none of them.  I feel each one now like a whiplash against my face.  No wonder I flinch from details.
     He grew away from me.  He would claim I pushed him away.  Not so.  He hurled himself away from me.  I thought if I stood still and hard and heavy, I would anchor him.  I thought I could pull him back to me.  I thought I would be gravity’s restraining hand.  He would feel my touch and, at last, say yes and cling to me.
    
I retired some while ago, but I stopped teaching scripture long before. I still had Lower School Science.  I much preferred to talk of joules and gas and particles than Adam and Eve and how because Man did this so God did this to make him sorry. 
     You cannot scold people into love.
         A colleague, after the funeral, a long while after, found me crying in the Humanities stock cupboard.  I suppose I had been brave just a little too long.
        I told her about Maureen, my one photograph, and the story I made of her.  I told her as if it was that and not Jason made me cry.
       She said, ‘Well, both of them said yes to something when they should have said no.’
     She saw me, evidently, as a woman who has always tried to do the right thing, and Maureen and Jason as people who didn’t, and were punished for it.  It’s like a lesson from Scripture really.
     Not so.
     It makes no sense to think of punishment and reward, even if the mind likes to lean that way for the cruel comfort it affords.
     I don’t look for blame.
     I look for patterns.
     Maureen's short life, my long life, Jason’s too few years: see how we contract, expand, contract across the generations.  In and out.  A pulse.  Diastole and systole.  The human heart.
     I look for patterns, glad of them, their seeming sense.
     One day, we might understand the universe, how God, perhaps, whispered yes to the dark, and the world came to life, spreading, stretching, outwards and away, until, in future time, we fall back and God holds us once again, small and tight in His restraining hand, and how He might say yes again, and again yes, and each time we will stretch out for joy, or because we are compelled.