Timothy

Timothy stood squarely before me, Jennifer looking very worried, perhaps occurring to her it may have been a better idea to have given some warning, some indication, not simply spring my Son and the Past at me, but youth is not only "cruel and without remorse". It is also quite blind.

Found really nothing to say after so very long of thinking what I would say ... what could be said ... A stranger. Difficult to think of anything at all. What was there between Father and Son after such a trauma? after so many years ... Jennifer ... Mark... how did he see them? Jennifer younger than he, yet he realised, a connection between the young woman, the child in the pusher and myself. Perhaps ... hardly what he would have imagined... what did he imagine? What made him travel so far finally? So many question poised. Travel from New world to the Old? ... to the crumbling concrete ... the battered escarpments of a once great Country.

My Mother very quiet, very subdued by the appearance of her Grandson, appeared almost overawed by him. Perhaps because of his height, her eyes level with his chest, perhaps she saw the likeness of her Husband, of me ... rolled into one being ... a strange apparition to grace the sadness of Lea View ... Quite obviously he was carrying all the virtues. He may well been from another planet such was his complete alienation from the present surroundings.

Suddenly a flat full ... No longer alone, hardly knowing whether I was going or coming, unused to the noise and activity of young people. Jennifer finding a new impetus with my eldest son ... a young version of myself.... unbroken by the long years in the wilderness.... someone she found it easy to communicate with, the three of them off over the Common .... strolling through the Park, Timothy pushing the pusher, a matched family unit, no one looking sideways at them.... Gradually, it became apparent that it suited them more if I went off in the old cab, to the old haunts, or drove them about, three of them lounged back in the back, like any other punters, cut off from them by the partition, the noise, only occasionally shouting at me that they required food, to go to McDonald's, or whatever, wherever...

It took time to analyse the situation, time for me to recover, having violent spasms of nerves, usually as we were all just about to go out somewhere, anywhere. They would wait silently in the hall or down in the street by the cab while I was being ill in the toilet. Jennifer showed some slight concern, not enough to come anywhere near me.... began to realise that she had stopped touching me, something that I was to notice in women right through the remaining years.

Long. so very long, after this realisation. In Pattaya, in Thailand, opposite the Marine Bar, a hot tumultuous night, the Welshman was to bitterly complain to me about the 'Touch' rather the lack of it.

"No matter what you give these girls" he went on to me, his sing song voice raised above the noise, „They never touch you. Straight in, give them the money ... straight out ..."

I smiled.

Slowly, imperceptibly, climbed out of myself, as I have always done, no matter how they have tried to put me down.
Finally deciding time for Timothy to get a job. The relationship between us stiff, almost formal, always feeling his hardly concealed antagonism towards me for what he considered I had done to the family, the distant past, the stretched tight years. "I had left them." The ultimate... the bottom line. There had never been any reflection as to why? ... this, quite obvious. The Cardinal sin ... I had committed it ... Yes Timothy, full of the Gospels ... right and wrong ... good and evil. ...all laid out flat in his mind, at the very back of mine, a faint satisfaction of knowing that he would, one day learn this Planet did not revolve on morality. unable to say this to him, difficult to say anything other than "Hello". His Mother, sacrosanct, never mentioned ... not one single, solitary word. Admittedly, on his first or second day with me he said "Well, pack your things, we are going home ... back to Australia" ... Said it in such a matter of fact way as if catching the bus to Bethnal Green, not the slightest possible doubt... assumed, a foregone conclusion ………I , to leap at this revelation ... the final escape ....
Jennifer and Mark both with me when he made this pronouncement, as if they did not exist, of no consequence ... would simply disappear or whatever from my existence. His attitude, remarkable, totally blind to life's realities ... Paused for a moment before answering him, looked at the two children... Jennifer and Mark ... was I to leave these also...? hardly thought so. These two people had become my life, my total existence, not doing any more running; my days of that ... long over.
Blandly, 'my back was to the wall', it has been there until this day.

Watched the penny drop with Timothy, the realisation, like a slap across the face, Jennifer and Mark were my life, he, no part of it..... emerging from the past, possibly expecting a totally different reaction from his Father. An idea he had grown up with, that one day he would resolve it all ... the clock pushed firmly back.

That day had arrived.

My son unsure of what he would do, could do by way of scratching a living from the hard surface of Hackney, unlike Australia, where work and money flowed freely, easily.

Over this, the first fissure between us sprang to the surface. Yes, he said he had a Job. Wondered, Jennifer, Mark and I, dutifully wandered off to Clissold Park, thinking what he could possibly he doing "Working" in a park.

By now, Mid Summer, school holidays, a heavy overcast day, Clissold Park in all its faded glory.

What was Timothy's reaction to this near rubbish dump... the poor enclosed almost emaciated animals, being poked at by the myriads of coloured children? The slime filled "Lake" with its few ducks. Paper wrappings drifting disconsolately across yellow lawns.

Long closed my eyes to all this. Rot, endemic in the Inner City. The convulsions of the early sixties had not died away, the more scruffy the situation, better people liked it. Everything reduced to the Lowest Common Denominator. Thought of the suits, collars, ties, trilby hats, the clean swept streets of Adelaide, how two friends of mine were arrested for looking rough in Rundle Street, how the van, with its cage, was always roaming around, ready to swallow any one who did not conform.

We found Timothy sprawled out on a bench, his body so long his feet hanging out at one end, head resting on the wrought iron bar at the other. At least eight small black boys crawling over him, about him. Perhaps incongruously, one very small white girl with very long blond hair. A strange foreboding for the English race.

Unimpressed with his "work" to say the very least. My mind rushing back to Townsend House School for the Blind and the Deaf, the years spent there insulated from the real world, willing to lose myself amongst the rose trees, to walk along the washed white, deserted beach.

No rose trees here, no beach, just an old park bench, history repeating itself on a much lower key. I was having none of that and said so, quite loudly, loud enough for the children to scatter, for my son to open his eyes and sit up straight.

No, it did not last very long, the reunion of Father and Son. He came back to the flat rather quietly, put his pack on his back, said good-bye to the children and went slowly down the thirty nine steps.

A sudden silence enveloped 69; Jennifer and Mark strangely quiet at his abrupt departure.

For the following few days, he camped out on the Common, under the trees opposite, perhaps thinking I would relent.

One morning looked out of the bedroom window...he was gone.