Graham Swift - Tomorrow

YOURE ASLEEP, my angels, I assume. So, to my amazement and relief, is your father, like a man finding it in him to sleep on the eve of his execution. Hell need all he can muster tomorrow. Im the only one awake in this house on this night before the day that will change all our lives. Though its already that day: the little luminous hands on my alarm clock (which I havent set) show just gone one in the morning. And the nights are short. Its almost midsummer, 1995. Its a week past your sixteenth birthday. By a fluke thats become something of an embarrassment and that some people will say wasnt a fluke at all, you were born in Gemini. Im not an especially superstitious woman. I married a scientist. But one little thing Ill do tomorrow today, I mean, but for a little while still I can keep up the illusion is cross my fingers.

Everythings quiet, the house is still. Mike and I have anticipated this moment, weve talked about it and rehearsed it in our heads so many times that recently its sometimes seemed like a relief: its actually come. On the other hand, its monstrous, its outrageous and its in our power to postpone it. But after their sixteenth birthday, we said, and lets be strict about it. Perhaps you may even appreciate our discipline and tact. Lets be strict, but lets not be cruel. Give them a week. Let them have their birthday, their last birthday of that old life.

Youre sleeping the deep sleep of teenagers. I just about remember it. I wonder how youll sleep tomorrow.

Sixteen was old enough, sixteen was about right. Youre not kids any more, youd be the first to endorse that. And even in the last sixteen years, you could say, sixteens become older. Sixteen now is like eighteen was, sixteen years ago. Theres an acceleration, an upgrading to things that scare me, but seem hardly to touch you. 1995already. Ill be fifty in August, Ill have done my annual catching up with your father. What a year of big numbers. Fifty, of course, is nothing now, its last seasons forty. Lifes getting longer, more elastic. But that doesnt stop the years getting quicker, this feeling that the world is hurtling.

Perhaps you dont feel it, in your becalmed teenage sleep. Perhaps you want the world to hurtle. Come on, cant it go any faster? Perhaps what all parents want from their children is to feel again that deep, long, almost stationary slowness of time. Another sweet taste of it, please.

But sixteen years have passed and sixteens like eighteen once was, maybe. But that doesnt matter. To me, tonight, youre still little kids, youre tiny babies, as if you might be sleeping now, not in your separate dens of rooms, but together as you once did in a single cot at Davenport Road. Our Nick and Kate. And what Im feeling now is simply the most awful thing: that we might be wrenching you for ever from your childhood, in the same way as if you might have been wrenched once prematurely and dangerously from my womb. But you were right on time: the tenth of June 1979. And at two, as it happens, in the morning.

Mike will do the talking. He knows, he accepts that its up to him. On a Saturday, knowing you both, the morning will be half gone before you even appear for breakfast, and youll need your breakfast. Then Mike will say that we need to talk to you. Hell say it in an odd, uncasual way, and youll think twice about answering back. No, right now, please. Whatever other plans you had, drop them. Therell be something in his voice. Hell ask you to sit in the living room. Ill make some fresh coffee. Youll wonder what the hell is going on. Youll think your fathers looking rather strange. But then you might have noticed that already, you might have noticed it all this week. Whats up with Dad? Whats up with the pair of them?

As he asks you to sit, side by side, on the sofa (weve even discussed such minor details), youll do a quick run-through in your minds of all those stories that friends at school have shared with you: inside stories, little bulletins on domestic crisis. Its your turn now, perhaps. It has the feeling of catastrophe. Hes about to tell you (despite, I hope, your strongest suppositions) that he and I are splitting up. Somethings been going on now for a little while. Hes been having an affair with one of those (young and picked by him) women at his office. An Emma or a Charlotte. God forbid. Or Ive been having an affair (God forbid indeed) with Simon at Walkers, or with one of our esteemed but importunate clients. Married life here in Rutherford Road is not all it seems. Success and money, they do funny things. So does being fifty.

Youre in tune with such under-the-surface stuff from your between-lessons gossip. Its part of your education: the hidden life of Putney.

But then youre sixteen. Do you notice, these days, that much about us at all? Do you pick up on our moods and secrecies? Weve had a few rows in recent weeks, have you actually noticed? And we dont often row. But then, so have you. Youre at a stage dont think I havent noticed when that cord, that invisible rope that runs between you has been stretched to its limit. Its been yanked and tugged this way and that. You have your own worlds to deal with.

And youve only just finished your exams. Ordeal enough. This should have been a weekend of recuperation. And if youd still had more exams to go wed have stretched our timetable to accommodate them. Lets not ruin their chances, lets not spoil their concentration. Bad enough that your birthday, last weekend, should have been subject to your last bouts of revision. As it is, weve been tempted. Lets wait till after the results perhaps, till after one more precious summer. But we came back to our firm ruling: one weeks cushion only. And since your birthday fell this year, handily, on a SaturdayForgive us, theres more revision. Exams can affect your life. So can this.

Mike will do the talking. Ill add my bits. And, of course, when hes finished hell make himself open to questions, as many as you wish. To cross-examination, might be the better expression. It all just might, conceivably, go to plan, though Im not sure what the plan really is, apart from our rigorous timing. It might all be like some meeting that smoothly and efficiently accomplishes its purpose, but it can hardly be like one of your dads board meetings or one of our cursory get-togethers at Walkers: That was all dealt with at the meeting

I think, anyway, youll want to know everything, the full, complete and intricate story. And you deserve it, as a matter of record.

Your father is gently snoring.

I remember once you said to me, Kate: Tell me about before I was born. Such simply uttered and innocent words: they sent a shiver through me. I should have been delighted, charmed, even a little flattered. You actually had a concept of a time before you were around, a dawning interest in it. You saw it had some magic connection with you, if you still thought of it, maybe, like life on another planet.

How old were you then eight? We were on the beach in Cornwall, at Carrack Cove, we had those three summers there, this must have been the second. Id wrapped you in the big faded-blue beach towel and was rubbing you gently dry, and I remember thinking that the towel was no longer like something inside which you could get lost and smothered, you were so much bigger now. And a whole year had passed since the time when, off that same beach, you both quite suddenly learnt to swim. First you, then Nick almost immediately afterwards, like clockwork. One of those first-time and once-only moments of life. But Id suddenly called you a pair of shrimps. Why not fish? Or heroes? I suppose it was the pinkness and littleness. I suppose it was the way you just jerked and scudded around furiously but ecstatically in the shallows, hardly fish-like at all. I didnt want to think of you yet swimming out to sea. Shrimps.