Sometimes speech is superior to novels in its ability to adapt, update and be instantly relevant. Novels are like tinned tomatoes but speech is the real thing – freshly plucked, red and ripe and juicy, smelling of today. Novels can be stored; reliable and predictable, they have a meatier flavor and melt and mature in your mouth. Novels are stocky, food-for-thought. But speech tastes of summer.
My parents are both moving on - to new people, new houses, new ideas. Which leads me to thinking. They’ve both evolved from their decades-long friendship – from their dialogue (of which I was the transcript, the novel, the endpoint). Which leaves me – where? Am I finally irrelevant?
No – I’m like the tinned tomatoes – I go back to visit both of them, I remind them of that summer decades ago when the air carried the heady scent of tomatoes and their youth glowed scarlet in the Grecian air. I’ve seen the photos of them – him with tousled strawy hair and a beard, lean and tanned – her, gypsy like with long curls and dangling earrings, skinny and beautiful, sea-skimmed.
Cassandra, by Christa Wolf, had just been published when they were living together, in 1986, as flatmates in Cardiff. Now, with mum’s copy in hand, sitting in my dad’s house in Cardiff, so near where I was born, pondering a holiday to Greece, is it any wonder that I’m drawn back to the story of my origin? The story that both my mother and father have now relinquished, the story that’s two decades old – the story that’s fast fading into gold-tinted illusionary myth. Then (it seems) anything was possible. Then they could have been together or not together. Now, they are who they are; they have become themselves, irrevocably.
Who am I to try and recreate the past? The story is old, and mythic, and very valuable. I am its author now.
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