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All the Beggars Riding

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
272 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am29.01.2013Main
When Lara was twelve, and her younger brother Alfie eight, their father died in a helicopter crash. A prominent plastic surgeon, and Irishman, he had honed his skills on the bomb victims of the Troubles. But the family grew up used to him being absent: he only came to London for two weekends a month to work at the Harley Street Clinic, where he met their mother years before, and they only once went on a family holiday together, to Spain, where their mother cried and their father lost his temper and left early. Because home, for their father, wasn't Earls Court: it was Belfast, where he led his other life...Narrated by Lara, nearing forty and nursing her dying mother, "All the Beggars Riding" is the heartbreaking portrait of a woman confronting her past just as she realises that time is running out.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextWhen Lara was twelve, and her younger brother Alfie eight, their father died in a helicopter crash. A prominent plastic surgeon, and Irishman, he had honed his skills on the bomb victims of the Troubles. But the family grew up used to him being absent: he only came to London for two weekends a month to work at the Harley Street Clinic, where he met their mother years before, and they only once went on a family holiday together, to Spain, where their mother cried and their father lost his temper and left early. Because home, for their father, wasn't Earls Court: it was Belfast, where he led his other life...Narrated by Lara, nearing forty and nursing her dying mother, "All the Beggars Riding" is the heartbreaking portrait of a woman confronting her past just as she realises that time is running out.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571270576
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2013
Erscheinungsdatum29.01.2013
AuflageMain
Seiten272 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse810 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.1275374
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe




The Chernobyl Effect


The Chernobyl Effect was the name of the documentary. It was what started things. Late one mid-week channel-crawling night.

It was one year after my mother died, almost to the date, and I had suddenly realised that I was an orphan now. Orphan´: it sounds ridiculous to call yourself an orphan at the age of almost forty. But that evening, out of nowhere, it hit me - I felt it in my chest, like something physical - I was truly alone in the world.

My mother was ill for a long time before she died. She suffered from heart disease, which is a grim sort of irony: intrinsic cardiomyopathies, to give the condition its medical name. Unpredictable weaknesses in the muscle of the heart that are not due to an identifiable external cause. It´s one of the leading indications for heart transplant, and indeed she should have, could have, been on the register for one, except that at every stage she point-blank refused. It was her heart, she said, over and over. She didn´t want it ripped out of her - she was occasionally, surprisingly prone to melodrama like that, my mother - and she didn´t want someone else´s heart in her. The drugs they gave her to try and stabilise her, as her condition deteriorated, caused her much suffering and weakness and confusion, but still she wouldn´t change her mind. She was stubborn as hell, my mother, when she set her mind to something. She was young, too: only fifty-nine when she died. Sometimes it felt like one more thing she´d set her mind upon, although it wasn´t as if she was religious, or believed in any grand reconciliation or redemption after death.

So, anyway, she´d died, and for the first few months things had been indescribably bad, even though we weren´t particularly close. From the outside, I managed to look like a normal person: phoning the agency, getting my rota, seeing the patients, shopping, cooking, all the mundane rest of it. But inside I was alternately blank and lurching with grief, thick and oily, like waves, that would rise up and threaten to swamp me utterly. I won´t try to describe it any more: I´ll only sound histrionic. People kept saying, time will heal, and in a terrible, clichéd way, it does: every day life pastes its dull routines over the rawness, although the rawness is still there. Six months after, I´d begun to feel that I was surfacing; on a good day I might even be above the water, although of course without warning you can still be dragged back under. Then everything happened with Jeremy, and terrible as that was, it was galvanising in the sense that some kind of survival mechanism kicked in and there was so much practical stuff to sort out - a bit like the immediate aftermath of a death - that I was on autopilot for a while.

I´m not explaining this very well: I´m getting everything jumbled up together. Which, in a way, is what it was; but that doesn´t help the telling of it. I suppose what I´m trying to say is that I thought I´d come through the worst of it, when that night - two weeks ago now - I came across that programme on the TV and everything changed.


*


The documentary was about the aftermath of those explosions that destroyed the fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant near Pripyat on the 26th of April 1986. I hadn´t thought about it in years, but as soon as I saw those infamous, grainy satellite photos of the power plant matchsticked and smouldering, and the rubber trunk-nosed radiation suits, it all came back to me. Sitting cross-legged with Alfie on the brown shagpile rug through Newsround and then all of the other news bulletins we could find, right through to the Nine O´Clock News and BBC2´s Newsnight, at which point our mother came home from work and made us switch off the television, saying it would give Alfie nightmares, which it did, of course: how could it not? The Soviet government was equivocating, and they were starting to detect radiation as far away - as near - as Glasgow. People on panel discussions were saying things like Is this the end of the world as we know it?´

Our world, that is, Alfie´s and mine, and our mother´s, had come to a sudden, messy and public end the autumn before. Sunday 24th November 1985: the date is seared in my memory. I was twelve, then, twelve and four months, and Alfie had just turned eight, when our father was killed - a freak accident, a helicopter crash in bad weather. Then came the revelations, and the reporters, and soon after that we had to move out of our home and into the grotty, ramshackle rooms on the North End Road. Unsurprisingly I had shut down: closed in on myself so tightly that nothing got through, or touched me, until I saw those first shaky BBC images.

Within a millisecond or so of flicking to the channel, in less than the time it took me to realise what it was, this swirling, churning welter of things was set going inside of me. As if all the griefs in my life, my father, my mother, and to an extent Jeremy, as if I was mourning all of them: mourning myself and all my other selves.

I´m getting ahead of myself, I know, jumbling things up again. I do intend to come to things properly, in their own time, in at least approximately the right order. It´s harder to tell a story, though, than you´d think. As I said earlier, lives aren´t orderly, and nor is memory: the mind doesn´t work like that. We make it so, when we narrate things - setting them in straight lines and in context - whereas in reality things are all mixed up, and you feel several things, even things that contradict each other, or that happened at separate times, or that aren´t on the surface even related, all at once. So I need somehow to convey the sensation of chancing on this documentary, so late at night, when what I was probably searching for and expecting was something banal and mind-numbing, anaesthetic, like reruns of Friends. Seeing the Chernobyl footage, and understanding on my pulses what it was, and the surreal sensation of being there a year after my mother died and at the same time it being five months after my father had died: as if both things, both times, were happening at once. I´m really not explaining this very well. It was as if there was no distinction between times and they were all just overlaid on top of each other, the same things happening again and again on their little loop in a hellish eternal present. And in that instant, I knew I had to do something: I was trapped and I needed to do something, change something, before it was too late.

If you´ve ever had a panic attack, you´ll know what I mean. The feeling of everything happening at once, everything closing down on you, and in on you, and there being no way out, and worse than the physical is - and yes, this sounds over-the-top, too, but there´s no other way of putting it - a creeping, almost existential, sense of doom.

The thing I just said, about separating strands out, and putting them in order, a beginning a middle and an end, and trying to understand them: that moment is when I decided - more than decided, knew - that that was what I needed to do, had to do. As if the telling of the story could somehow save me.

Perhaps things will make more sense once I have explained the documentary a little.

The Chernobyl Effect was made maybe ten years after the catastrophe. It consisted of a series of interviews with survivors from Pripyat and evacuees from the surrounding villages, and two doctors or scientists with deliberately distorted voices and blacked-out eyes. The doctors, or scientists, were the least interesting: they talked in solemn chains of statistics and made predictions about percentages and roentgens per hour. But the survivors - or victims´ might be a better word, because there was nothing triumphant about them, no sense that they´d overcome - they were twitching and palsied, clinging on to life by their flaking fingernails. Hardly any of the men spoke. It was the women who wanted to tell their stories. The women, with their craggy, sunken faces and teeth like pickled walnuts, looked like grandmothers - older than grandmothers, like ancient crones or hags from Belarusian folk stories. But most of them were no older than me, and some of them were five, ten years younger. When the reactor exploded, they´d been nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-four. Newlyweds, young mothers, strong, healthy wives. Most of their menfolk worked at the plant, and they supplemented the wages by keeping chickens, and maybe a cow; by growing potatoes, cabbages, and a few rows of black radishes. The day of the explosions was a Friday. At about midday, word got around that there was a fire at the plant. As the sun set, they watched it in the distance, and it was wilder and more beautiful than you could ever imagine, they said, the flickering streams of colour and shining light, like something from an American movie. They piled outside to watch it, passed around bottles of the local spirit, let their children stay up way past their bedtime. The word had spread to villages further afield by this time, and family, friends came in cars or on bicycles to see the unearthly light and the showers of sparks - like fireworks, on an indescribable scale - holding their children on their shoulders so they too could see and remember. No one knew how dangerous it was. Even the next morning, when the streets filled with tanks and gas-masked soldiers, they weren´t scared. It was reassuring, one woman said, to think that the might of the Army had come to help them. They were to leave for a few days, the loudspeakers said, just as a precaution, so the scientists could do...


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