Travel Light

Listen, goes the start of a book by a famous author. Not ‘listen to me’ or ‘listen to this’, just plain listen. The book is not necessarily meant to be read aloud, although it would do well if put to that test, so it seems to be a general exhortation to be quiet for once, and pay attention. On reflection, the author does well to get away with this; shouting about it isn’t usually enough to get people to take note. Neither is simply repeating oneself, or just increasing your declarations.

Anyone who’s been alive and awake recently will have noticed that the means, if not the good reasons to get others to listen to you, have proliferated to reach colossal levels. This doesn’t mean that anyone is paying any more attention than they were before, as the helpful birds in another wonderful novel frequently reminded us. That’s what this story is about, but you’ll be the judge of that.

 ‘Just changed the beer in the slug traps. And I tied back the runner beans.’

So went Nicolas’s updates to his daughter as he re-entered the wooden house from the garden. ‘Now, let’s have soup for lunch. There’s literally nothing so nice after a morning in the garden.’

He stomped about the kitchen, clots of earth falling from the tread of his boots. He pulled down a tin from a cupboard and poured the contents into a pan. ‘Oops,’ he said as some soup splashed onto his jumper. ‘Never mind, dirty anyway.’

Nicolas’s daughter Evelyn didn’t respond to any of his snippets. She was an elective mute; she didn’t have anything to say in response to her father. She hadn’t for seven years.

Nicolas was the opposite of an elective mute. He was an elective rambler.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll do the washing up,’ he said. ‘I need your help outside – to put your foot on the ladder for me.’

Evelyn used to be the talkative one. It was her twin sister who was the elective mute. At least, as far as everyone knew, she was mute. Evelyn seemed to be able to speak for her, so presumably Maria spoke to Evelyn from time to time. Unless you have faith in extrasensory perception or telepathy, that is.

Nicolas was old enough to be Evelyn’s grandfather, having married a woman half his age. He had now retired on the life insurance pay-out and spent his time in the garden, or, in winter and at night, painting and pushing tiny figurines for sprawling, complex war games on a board like a Thunderbirds set that covered the landing. He tirelessly shifted around battalions of infantry and cavalrymen, enacting tactics and a military strategy, as a chess enthusiast might play through the games of the greats, exploring the permutations of every position. His most recent wheeze was the construction of a fortress built into his bedroom door, providing yet more stages for his little humans and monsters. Their wooden house on the levels sometimes flooded, which was why the most important things were kept upstairs.

Evelyn kept all her books upstairs. Her father bought them for her to fulfil his duties: he had never sent her into a classroom, claiming that she was home-schooled. Periodically, someone visited from the local authority to check that Evelyn was indeed learning something. She performed exceptionally on the tests the man brought round. He had been piqued by her muteness at one time, and had social services come and perform an assessment. Evelyn filled out a questionnaire that reassured them, and they went away. Truth was, she learned all the normal expected general knowledge of a young adult from the encyclopaedia. Nicolas didn’t teach Evelyn anything academic, beyond the history of military manoeuvres from countless wars, which influenced the never-ending conflict that he played out on the landing. More helpfully, he taught he a great deal about growing fruit and vegetables and tending for flowers. Evelyn followed him around the garden, her faithful memory recording every technique and observation.

As a matter of fact, Evelyn was a girl of many talents: not only an elective mute, but one of the few people on this planet equipped with a wholly photographic memory.

There was no detail of Evelyn’s life that she could not recall, save events before the age of around four. Every moment, every word read and heard, every image seen was printed in ineffaceable ink on her brain. She started writing it all down one day, a kind of inch-perfect memoir of a life perfectly remembered, if not an examined existence. Evelyn gave the first twenty pages of repetitive, painfully meticulous prose to her father one evening. She quit the whole project when she saw he had dozed off after three pages. Now all she could do was record it all on her memory, every inane and banal, plus every profound, utterance of her father.

Prior to Evelyn’s disappearance, he had increasingly been asking her to record the day. Nicolas had his daughter write down everything that had happened and everything that he had said, in a perverse volte-face on her attempt at a memoir. He had bought a spiral bound blue book for the purpose, putting a large label on the front saying ‘My Life’. Nicolas never explained why he wanted this done; of course, Evelyn never asked. Sometimes Nicolas would go on for hours, blithely ignoring Evelyn’s wilting eyelids as he expounded on some detail of earthing up potatoes or, indeed, a long-forgotten battle. This was reaching an obsessive level, with eight books filled, when the floods returned.

It was spring, and record rainfall overloaded aquifers, canals and rivers. The ground floor of the house was under a foot of water. Evelyn and Nicolas were confined to the first floor, where a routine was established where he played out combats real and imagined while she read the encyclopaedias again. After a meal from a can, cooked on a portable gas stove, Nicolas got the blue book out and handed it to Evelyn. She wrote and wrote, barely thinking about it. But her dad felt that it was important, so what was she to do? At least, that was her interpretation. It may have been that Nicolas didn’t think it was important, but it was a compulsion. It wasn’t about conversation, either. This was no single father trying to engage elective mute daughter tale; this much was obvious because he continued the obsessive recording of his day, his life, after she’d gone.

It happened as soon as the flood water had retreated. Nicolas was weeding the vegetable patch, commentating all the while. Every so often he looked up, taking in the sight of his daughter but not really taking her in – Nicolas often saw her as something in the background, white noise in his blaring brain. Then he looked up to see she wasn’t listening and indelibly documenting any more, because she wasn’t there.

When she left, Nicolas didn’t call the police. He didn’t call his sister, perhaps because he was pathologically selfish, and didn’t care, perhaps because he was oh so used to his family becoming lost to him, or perhaps because he couldn’t ever hear her anyway, so he didn’t really notice. 

Evelyn had just slipped out of Nicolas’s life, as though he’d just put down a book and lost his page.

Nicolas adapted in his own way. He went on writing in the blue books at the end of the day, after pronouncing his thoughts to no-one. The problem for him was he forgot many of the day’s statements, so entries for each day shrunk considerably. This vexed Nicolas, so he took a rare trip into town and bought a Dictaphone. It was far less convenient for him to keep tugging it out of his pocket and hitting record when he had an update to make, but it improved his accuracy. He took it around the garden with him, and to the landing with its hills and plains, clicking down the button and bringing it to his mouth with increasing instinctiveness. Nicolas played back the tape every evening.

All his recording was Nicolas’s attempt to live in the present, or so he thought to start with. With Evelyn gone, this became more difficult. Her disappearance inevitably reminded him of the loss of his wife and his other daughter, Evelyn’s twin. It was a loss at sea, no less. Nicolas had made the choice; he swam for Evelyn, since she was the furthest out, and he hoped his wife would manage alone. By the time he was back out in the water, it was too late.

At the funeral, a sparse and weirdly emotionless affair, Evelyn was approached by an aunt who was visiting from the US of A, as the aunt called it. She was the kind of person fond of saying things like, ‘There are times when you just need life to come up and slap you on the ass!’ To Evelyn, she said, ‘You girl, you’ve got it rough. But your daddy…’ She whistled through her teeth. ‘You’ll have to look after my brother for me.’

From then on, Evelyn became the elective mute, until she went away. She was fifteen when she left Nicolas weeding the garden. She had been eight when her twin sister and her mother died.

To live is to lose. That’s the refrain that Nicolas recorded most commonly on his Dictaphone. Evelyn had never heard him say this; he came up with it after she had gone. He had thought that marrying a much younger woman, as his sister had always referred to her, would have meant an end to the losses. And yet, he had found, to live is to lose. He realised that he was fated to be lost in memories, and resigned to it.

Evelyn, for her part, intended to return. She loved her father, found his uncompromising aspect, when it came to gardening and war games anyway, inspiring. She left to cure herself. Evelyn felt no need to cure herself of her muteness, which she saw as a lifestyle choice, typical, maybe, of a fifteen year old. She was seeking a cure for her photographic memory.

The cargo of near-endless memories was incredible to bear. Evelyn stood atop an inverted pyramid of recollections, since year-by-year, she added a wider layer of memories. It was always organised so perfectly; she couldn’t help doing so. Evelyn went to therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and all the other talkers and listeners. She saw a neurologist who gave her electric shocks followed by psychotropic drugs. Afterwards, she was in a stupor that distracted her for a time, but didn’t stop her uncanny retrieval of every detail of her life, and her continual building of the upended pyramid.

It would be a valuable resource, if it were worth anything.

So Evelyn returned, still afflicted, to the flood-tainted house, her father and his blue books. She walked in the front door and saw the inside transformed by a dazzling collage. Every wall, cupboard, cabinet, wooden beam and even on the pictures and mirrors were pages from the blue books. Some pages featured her own writing, but the majority were in her father’s hand. The walls were covered in a description of his every moment, his every reflection on little element of his days.

Evelyn let her eyes travel over the papers. She saw innumerable comments on gardening, the movements of birds, hedgehogs and other fauna, and even more interminable commentary on his battles and skirmishes. Her eyes flicked onwards in embarrassment at an entry about an episode of masturbation over some images of civil war widows.

Nicolas began talking only a few moments after he saw her, reserving judgement and saying nothing about her disappearance and return. ‘I’m looking for patterns. I wanted to see it all at once, so I put the pages up, but they ended up spilling over into all the rooms, upstairs too.

‘I realised I kept writing the same thing. To live is to lose.’

Evelyn stared at Nicolas, her eyes matured by her time with the doctors, yet dewy like an overtired child. She spoke to him for the first time in eight years.

‘Dad, what was the point in it all?’

If he was surprised, Nicolas didn’t show it. He shrugged and looked away.

‘Maybe there isn’t a point,’ he said sadly. ‘But it’s a life, isn’t it? This is all I have and represent.’

To live is to lose, thought Nicolas, but here is a gift of memories preserved, at least.

‘Without this, I don’t remember it all.’

‘I’ve been trying to learn how to forget,’ Evelyn admitted.

‘There’s so little in a life,’ said Nicolas. ‘So little, that every detail earns remembering. My dear child, when it’s gone, it’s gone. Don’t travel light. Please, my darling, do everything you can to remember it all. For me, I have to write it down… I was trying to show you how much that mattered. For you, you have the greatest of gifts. Keep it all, horde the memories like most people horde money. They are all that will keep you going. Don’t try to travel light.

‘All this,’ Nicolas indicated his eccentric wallpapering, ‘has been only just enough for me.’

Evelyn smiled gently then, and Nicolas smiled back.