Defined

by Alex Keegan

I do not know if I define myself or I am defined. What is the hammer, what the anvil? I grew in the lengthening shadows of an old war (and we all grew taller) and my mother, my father, they were of that war and everything was of it, the victory, the missing, the empty shelves, other shadows. Only slowly was there a bright light, futures, the rubble swept away and concrete, shining new walls.

We played soldiers then, Georgie Williams, me, Colin Hicks—odd that I remember so few—and Joseph Healey. Fathers had smuggled home souvenirs, helmets, Lugers, and once I wore a glorious swastika, red, black, white on my arm and snaked through shone gold bracken until it was Georgie's turn.

It was easy to switch sides.

Mothers then, if I remember, were plumped up, full and the world revolved around the womb, the breast, the stove. This was how the home was, solid, large, warm, definite and, before feminism, I remember that mothers, wives, were something certain and warm, like good wood.

I collected Air Ace comics, War Picture Library, and went beside the large tobacco of my father to see The Dam Busters, or to watch grey ships on artificial test-tank seas. Around my father was a golden circle. He was incredible then.

It is only now that I see. I was never with them. My life was either that in the brooded heat of my mother's sphere, or feral, escaped (as summer children we left our setts and hides for twelve hours a day without a breath of concern) or gifted with the presence of a father, to the pictures, or enlisted by him, foraging for blackberries, our jars, his punnet; our petty picking, his stream-straddled battles with the large. The memory, a smell, is almost dizzy, almost as exciting as the prelude to sex, a filling up, magnificent, as if that was really me, and all that has come since is a poor impression. Layer upon layer of earthly dirt hides my picture.

This is not literary posing. I mean, truly, that I do not recognise the child. My memories are not of me but of a distant relation. I have a photograph of me, two sisters against a gloss-painted school-wall. The boy is someone else. I would not, and do not, recognise him (yet my sisters are my sisters are my sisters.)

I left. This is what frightens me. I am someone else. I left or I was left behind. When I walk there now, when I imagine, I know that what was once real and what was once defined, was somehow slipped aside. I was replaced. I believe (and I do not mean this metaphorically) that my other life has been secreted in some drawer, is passive or un-run. What you hear is the sound of an impostor.

I did not know the arts. It was left to my father in his way to tell me, be copy now to men of grosser blood and teach them how to war. I know now that he sneered at me for I was not red-blooded, a killer or a thug. I suspect his disappointment in his first-born son was as deep as the disappointment he would one day feel for everything. Now I feel I am more like him than I ever was that boy. Can that be?

Now every old man I see does not remind me of my father. I am never tricked. I have not stumbled, a corner turned, a warm day, into a human face that is my delicious Madeleine, something that enters under the rib and fills the soul. Yet I see my mother, mothers, almost every day. They abound, my mothers, and they abide in me. But my father is dead as glass and he is gone.

I am defined by this, his elusiveness? Am I those grey films, their English diction (I am not English) or am I Shane, or a long, slow Wayne, and which uncle in me spits at the spittoon and strikes it with a clang of tobacco?

Or am I some Hollywood me, some grey sketched copy of How Green Was My Valley? I wanted to be. I remember I was always (in aching dreams) the child who imagined himself chosen, the bright boy called, who would throw away the braces, who would stumble bravely in the sun, and walk for a kindly master.

I can retrospect and piece together the facts of the disintegration, how my mother left, my father darkened, and how, eventually we were taken away. I can imagine, pretend to know, and even detail facts, construct emotions and pretend to remember. Ladies and gentlemen, a memoir, my autobiography, but all that is falseness, construction. In my gut it is all blankness. I am the spy who has rote-learned his history but has never felt the weight or pain of his growing.

Things may sometimes break the surface like a drowned man's hand sky-reaching from flood water, brief, resonating, horrid, then gone. I read and hear, Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack— it sticks, impinges.

I can sense the creampaint room around the boy (me?) Miss Duffner chanting, her penal rulers slapping into old lesbian palms.

But it is imagined more like possession. I am Marnie, The Seven Faces of Eve. I have walked with zombies. Something happened to me in Manchuria and I am disconcerted. The memory is more like the old film when the brain-washed airman (I wanted to be him too) is flash-revisited by old loves and old beliefs but they do not hold. I am unable to understand, now writing passively, calmly, why this writing self sees the memory as some intrusion—laboratory flashes—and not a simple uncovering of past things.

I read somewhere that we each live out a script. That we perform, or try to, based on some image of ourselves we create. I am more Woody Allen than John Wayne, but I know my father wanted me to walk the walk and strap on iron, and ride slowly into the sun. There is an ache in me, a wishfulness, a pointless false dream that there is, deep in me, that slow-talking man of steel.

But I am not Citizen Kane or the Sheepman. I am not Humphrey Bogart. I am not even my father. Whatever I am, I do not say, "I ain't got nothing but my horse." I do not frequent gin-joints or wear a white jacket.

What I know (in my head but not in the gut) is that my mother went away. We functioned for a while (my biggest emotion was shame) but it was only time before well-meaning people called in, tut-tutted and told my father we would need more care.

The leaving—I think I do remember—was frightening, but the greatest emotion was, and is, inferiority, a less-than-ness. I felt, despised, demeaned, patronised. I was a child without a mother (and why were they abandoned?) and thus some lower animal, some thing to be tolerated, as if the "care" was more to do with others defining themselves through us.

How I am defined. Is it by the glass-eyed, one-eyed stare of Father Maloney, the priest? Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? To know him, love him and serve him in this world and the next. And what will happen if you do not go to church? You will burn, burn. You will suffer forever. It does not matter whether you sin or do not sin. You merely need to think of sinning.

I have a photograph, one me, at age fifteen. I am unable to look at the camera. I am round-shouldered, slumping, my face looks away and down, anything but brave. I was a cripple, fearful, catatonically shy.

At fifteen, then, shackled by shame. At eighteen, unable to talk to girls, at twenty-one naive, a displaced person, a lost, unidentified adoptee, a Jew wandering. And then, bizarrely, my mother returned.

She was another person. She did not look like my mother. She was slimmer and wore good clothes. My father, by comparison, was dowdy and pathetic and she took him to his bed and let him know what he had missed. It would be years before I would fully understand the years between.

So I allowed these two to adopt me. They could have been an aunt and uncle. I would be able to function. We bought new furniture and painted a few walls and on Sundays the radio played while they cooked New Zealand Lamb, made gravy and cut mint on a wooden board. I was twenty-two.

And it was at that age that I awoke. Women came to me. I knew I was not myself but I was learning. Some wanted John Wayne, some wanted Bogart, or I would be Dylan Thomas and brood darkly. I did whatever was necessary and allowed them to define me. It is easy to be malleable. Tomorrow is another shooting day, next week another film.

Once I would have said the trick was sleep till twelve then watch TV, I have so much nothing but I can sleep in. But despite myself something almost solid began to grow in me. I had learned a role and I was almost comfortable. Then you came.

I did not expect you. You were a sound in the air, whispered. You drifted in and pretended to be looking away. I was being Jack Lemmon that day. You merely smiled and waited.

You never said, ever said, "Know then thyself,"and it would have been too difficult to explain to you that dislocation I lived after, that I really did not know myself, which person to be.

From time to time our love was like a snail. You simply learned to always be there and I began to reflect you. I think I may have been Dustin Hoffman for a while. There had been Mrs. Robinson but I loved her daughter and wanted to save her, then run away.

I told you once, how I had walked into the cinema with my father. The foyer was filled with aircraft instruments and skull-faced helmets and goggles. I wanted to fly then. You asked me, "To be you, as the pilot, or to be the man in O for Orange, sailing towards the dam?"

Somehow, the peaceful waters of your mouth settled me. I had found a new definition; lover, husband, father. If I talked about books, you asked me to think of the edits, of what had been crossed out. You were patient. Understand, you said, that nothing is that good, life is not composed.

I am a tree, you said. My parents are my branches, our children are our roots, it is upside down. If they cut us to pieces, the roots will remain and birds will sing and small things crawl through. If I go, my love remains.

I did not know you were preparing me.

I wished then, that I could believe in something more, beyond you, hope, our children. You said, "Hush," and told me, "Let them be their own dreams, let them go their own way." You were telling me you were dying but I had no idea until the day you came home and told me how long. You told me I would have a job to do, another fifteen years and more. Your face was wet and you were sad, but you swelled up with a sort of pride. You soared. I would need to be large and real for the kids, you said.

And now I sit here, your urn in my hands. It feels like I'm in a film but I cannot remember which one. I am not well-lit, there is no second take. If I open the urn and pour, you really will go, but that was what you asked for, so I do.

The sea is calm tonight. Amber harbour lights glaze wet cranes. I place my hope on the water. You defined me. Now I have to remember how to be.

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