Journey home

Journey home

by R. Eric Swanepoel

(First published in New Writing from the North, Issue 4, CAC
Publications, 19 Berryden Road, Aberdeen, Scotland)

What would he have thought of himself now, if as a student he could
have looked twenty years into the future? No longer at the
cut-and-thrusting edge of research, more interested in family than the
structure of matter - Dr.Stevenson had changed. Lab-coated still, but
now trudging along institutional corridors for the paycheque, rather
than rushing through the antiseptic passageways powered by the joy of
knowledge... or the joy of the chase after knowledge... or, as he now
saw it, the joy of the illusion of the chase after knowledge...
Yes, when he hung up his labcoat at the end of the day's work, his mind
dropped its concern with the details of atom smashing as easily as one
might toss a ball of paper into a wastepaper basket, and as he smiled
his cheerful goodbye smile at the young lab assistants and headed for
his car he saw the whole institution and its work as irrelevant at
best, misguided at worst. The effects of atomic research on the NUCLEAR
family were UNCLEAR to say the least. This was the ridiculous but
persistent wordplay which appeared in his mind whenever he chanced upon
the word "nuclear".

His son's class had done a project on power sources and he had arranged
for the children to tour the facility. He hadn't been prepared for the
hostility this had provoked. His son had had to endure weeks of his
father being vilified as a cancer-causer and an anti-coal mining
fascist. Not a few traumatic evenings of counselling a very confused
Thomas had followed: talk of the medical uses of isotopes, the hopes
for fusion, and the effects of coal-burning on the greenhouse effect,
though even he had to admit to himself that the government's energy
policy was a bit cockeyed. But that wasn't quite the line of work he
was in anyway.

The trouble was he could now see that whatever questions were answered
a hundred more would crop up to replace them. The number of unanswered
questions seemed to increase exponentially, and they became more and
more expensive to answer...

Geoffrey relished the crisp instantaneousness of the clunk triggered by
his remote control when the doors of his car unlocked, signalling the
start of that space in his day when he could be entirely himself. The
tight certainty of disengaging the handbrake and engaging the gears,
switching on the radio and gesturing goodbye to the guard in the
gatehouse - same modern equivalent of a forelock tug in reply, year
after year, guard after guard. And then the one mile stretch to the
highway, unstately pain dome dwindling in the rearview mirror to the
sound of country music, which so suited the mood of driving. Tree-lined
avenue - if lucky filtering light from the westering sun. Tyre hiss on
matt tarmac surface as he coasted to a stop waiting for a gap in the
traffic. Now he was among the highway throng, and an observer in the
sky would not have picked out his car as belonging to a nuclear
scientist, ust one among many, anonymous, hands tapping the wheel to
Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers or Hank Williams, preferably Hank
Williams..

Today he registered the words of a song he hadn't heard before, forcing
him out of his almost complacent reverie: "...A little dog by the side
of the road, long been dead, long been cold, I see..." It was the song
of a man driving along a highway. Well, I ain't seen no dog but is a
freshly macadamed fox good enough? Fur ruffled by passing vehicles, it
would be groomed no more. Centuries of hound-evasion had culminated in
a little splodge of juggernaut jam... And perhaps some starving little
foxcubs somewhere, tentatively nosing their fluffy flea-ridden way out
of their burrow towards their deaths. No despatching of myxomatotic
rabbits for them. They didn't ask to die. They didn't ask to be born.
And now Geoffrey was thinking about his children: Thomas and Evelyn,
motorway fox-squashers of the future. Would they spend their days
beavering away deep in the viscera of some scientific-industrial
megalith, emerging briefly to burn fossil fuel and copulate? Spawn more
hapless angst-fodder? God, stop this cynicism! Look at the surface and
feel the instincts! Two kids in the back of the car he was passing,
looking at him, turning to each other, giggling... playing some sort of
game... one asking a question of the woman driving: "Mummy, why...?"
Evelyn was at the "Why?" stage. Jenny often called her "Little Miss
Wherefore" and as he thought of Little Miss Wherefore he could at last
wallow in warm instinctual feelings and drown the intellect for a
bit.

The endless "Whys?" of children were largely to test the boundaries of
your patience, he knew, but they had set him asking himself. All the
why-strings seemed to end the same way: "I don't know" or "Just
because." The mind could never satisfy itself. In the end it had to
cede primacy to the soul. How difficult that was. He could only achieve
that trick for short spells, and most often when with his children.
Like when he watched them absorbed in imaginative play - Lego, dolls,
or playing house. Or when he himself joined their games. Or showed them
how to make kites or bows-and-arrows. Or when he read to them and
piloted the exciting but predictable emotional roller-coasters of
well-known storybooks for them. All these things clicked something into
place as definitely as when he engaged the gears of his car. It was the
process of disengagement that was the greatest problem. Both in terms
of what happened to him as he walked away from his children, and in
terms of what would happen to his children as they walked away from
their innocence. Perhaps Thomas already had. The only way he could stop
them losing the gift of living simultaneously in the moment and in the
imagination was perhaps to find a way of staying in that state himself:
to teach by example. And for achieving that proto-nirvana one couldn't
depend on one's children - that was too circular...

And so Geoffrey had devised a little exercise for himself on these
hour-long drives home. Up until the Shell garage at Junction 23 he
could allow his mind to wander where it would, but from that point it
was sub-intellectual... NO, he corrected himself: supra-intellectual
feelings gleaned from immediate surroundings:

Car moving, straight road, arrow-like - Kahlil Gibran's analogy of
children as arrows from one's bow... he was someone's arrow...
forward... Flash of woman in garage shop serving cigarettes - frozen in
his mind as a servant of others' slavery... poor woman, trying to
support her three year-old son... identify with her, love her... Eddie
Stobart truck, brightly polished - pride in care and simple pleasure,
no matter the transience of such vanities, no analysis... Young man in
Porsche, speeding - feel the thrill of speed... Next turnoff: a reverse
tributary, peel away from the grey highway river and plunge into the
green fulfilment of the uplands... Sweep of road round hill,
spatterings of leaves matching piano ripple on the radio... Car
motionless now at the centre as music-generated scenes of verdancy
bluster past... Wham! Open bare flat ploughed earth... a tractor towing
a straggle of seagulls... sucked there by lust for glistening
soil-fruits exposed in the enactment of their holy earth-making
writhing rituals... Plane on now to green flatlands, a frieze of
Friesians blowing cud-breath from the depths of their bovine
benign-ness as they warm-eye one of the feed-creatures thundering past
in his stink box... Loom-string clouds above it all, parallelism
highlighted by the God-artistic juxtaposition of a jet's vapour trail,
as it wings windwards, lacing the world together... Friends linked
across the globe... most floundering amongst the pelagic flotsam of
once great and simple truths and trying to grasp with their minds what
only their souls might apprehend&;#8230; we're all in the same boat:
we... all... LOVE.

Tammy Wynette's entreaty to "Stand by your man!" is playing as
Geoffrey's car gravel-crunches home. Jenny waves through the kitchen
window. The kids rush to the car, hair billowed by enthusiasm. Today's
the day they test the giant kite.