Read Online Serious Sweet by A.L. Kennedy - Free Book Online

and a kids’ show about the Little Sandman who sent boys and girls off to sleep. Instead of picking them up in Stasi vans and sending them off to other, less pleasant places. Or inviting them to variations on a theme of suicide.
    East’s a beast and West is best.
    I could be that simple, then. I could. I was clear-minded.
    We all like to be clear-minded and simple.
    The Terrible Enemy is different now. And the same. It serves the same purpose.
    We like to repeat our themes – like good opera and bad television.
    But do I now dwell amongst the least beastly?
    Where are there not beasts? Encouraged and permitted and condemned beasts …
    I never would have suited the Foreign Office.
    And the FO only recruit the cream from the top of the churn. Or the shit from the top of the water. I’m neither I’d hope, although I could be mistaken.
    Plus, I sound foreign … I have an unsuitable name. And that would be one of my repeating themes.
    Good opera, bad telly and worse propaganda … Of which I watched a great deal, along with the Sandman show, when I was a student – over in Berlin and fastidiously observing. I’ve always been a man for details, can’t get enough of them. Not a spy, not a bit of it, not really. An observer. Product of an unsentimental education.
    It’s the least you can do – watch.
    Watch it all tumbling down like the Wall – Berliner Mauer, the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart. Never a good sign when your wording tries that hard to fight reality, it suggests the beginning of your tumble. Yes, it does. It always does.
    But I’d rather watch beauty.
    And is that a denial of reality, or an attempt to embrace it? I think I am too tired to know. I hope I am too tired to know.
    That day with Becky, trying to be on holiday with Becky, I watched the city moving, everything moving – details, details – as we motored on. Mild to uncomfortable guilt – the usual – that here she is, an adult, and I’d been so often held back in the evenings and still working when she was a child, when it was time to talk, to be, to set my own dear baby safe in her bed. Night night.
    I’ve missed a lot.
    School concerts, parents’ evenings, the time she fell off a pony and scared herself, the times when we should have talked.
    I missed the lot. Almost.
    I’ve missed my life, I think. I think that might be true. If overly emotive as something to mention.
    Regrets apart – and I do always pack them for holidays – in Berlin I was having a good day. In terms of weather. An airy afternoon ahead for hands in pockets and brisk walking, arm-in-arming it along Unter den Linden, wandering about in the theme park and high-gloss purchasing opportunity that central Berlin has become. Poor old Mitte – freedom has done some ridiculous things to you.
    Which isn’t what I was thinking – I was full of how much, how so much I like being arm in arm.
    And that weekend she hadn’t let me yet.
    But on the boat Becky had taken his hand. Their barge had sway-glided on while an instructional narration had attempted tointrude via the tour-guiding headphones that he’d refused to wear. And Jon had closed his eyes against the glare, or to prevent the leakage of his own variation on a theme of stupidity, or to prevent glancing across at his only daughter’s disappointment in him.
    But then she had taken his hand.
    Always the same way, but always more – she is always more.
    The stroke of her forefinger at his wrist and then the warm, soft enquiry when her hand closed over his knuckles, when her thumb slipped under to find out the heart of his palm and make it rest.
    Beautiful. A lovely shock.
    Not that it was remotely unheard of. They took each other’s hands quite a lot. She’d just surprised him on that occasion because they’d spent the weekend fighting until that point: Friday