Read Online Spirit of Progress by Steven Carroll - Free Book Online

brief and now it was time she ceased to exist. And that was what the fifty quid was for. It wasn’t to provide help or comfort, nor was it even a sign of care. It was to make her go away. To make the child inside her go away and likewise cease to exist. And this is why when Vic tries to imagine a father doing something at this moment, as he cycles home from work, he sees only a vague shape, who a long time ago paid his mother a lot of money to go away. To vanish. For if something doesn’t exist it’s impossible for it to be on anybody’s mind, in a good or a bad way. No doubt he told her that there were places, institutions, for the child to be turned over to when it was born. And if she was wise, she would do exactly that and then just get on with her life. Everybody told her to farm the baby out: the father, her sisters and the priests. But she kept her boy, so that even though words such as ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from his lips, the words ‘Ma’ and ‘Mother’ come as naturally as breathing because they are the first words he ever learnt.
    When the child who will become Michael not only opens his eyes upon this world but grows into it, when he goes to school and on to a university (for Michael will bethe first of his family to go to university), he will, in his reading and his study, one day discover the phrase ‘the absent father’. It will pop out of a history book that has not been written yet, in the stuffy library of a university that has not been built yet. And as he reads about it he will also discover that his father’s father was not the only one who was absent. It is, Michael will discover in that sleepy library, a theme. A particularly sad little melody that not only played into the ears of his father but all those children who had been dispatched into non-existence, and who couldn’t trouble anybody’s minds because they weren’t there.
    But the phrase ‘absent father’ has never entered Vic’s thoughts because it hasn’t been invented yet, and it hasn’t been invented yet because nobody talks about these things. Such phrases belong to a world of private shame and it will be left to others, more distant from the shame than those upon whom it falls, to invent the phrase. Even if it did wander into Vic’s thoughts (and Vic is currently turning the front wheel of his bicycle into his street), the phrase would not be welcome. The phrase would be shown the door and turned out, a thought not worth dwelling on, one that would be as unwelcome as the blurred, vague, absent figure it describes, who may or may not be, at this very moment as Vic stops at the front of his house, pouring a cup of tea, indifferent to the absence he has created.
    And so, as much as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ ring strangely in his ears when he imagines them being spoken to him as they will be one day, this much he resolves, andit is a pledge offered to open sky and which the open sky takes in: the flaws of the absent father will not be visited upon his children, the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ will not ring strangely in their ears, and absence will not be repeated. No, he decides, the sad little melody of absence will fade and cease to play from this very moment, as he nudges his bicycle through the front gate of his lighted house. However imperfectly he may be there, he will be a presence, not an absence.

8.
The Dancing Man
    H ow did it go? How did it happen? The end of things? The end that was always coming but which came as a surprise all the same. To her, to Sam.
    Tess has locked the door of her gallery. It is dark and all she hears is the solitary sound of her footsteps as she departs along the lane. The short trip back to her tram stop takes her past a café, a café that has a touch of Europe about it and which the artists of the city frequent. She slows as she passes it and looks upon the cluttered spectacle inside. She knows most of the regulars and can guess the topics of