Crustaceans Read Free Page A

instruct you, and too conscious by far of the life you’d grow out of. Whatever you wouldn’t remember or notice, I made it my job to preserve. Nothing should be lost or discarded or buried. At first Ruth was indulgent – she saw the fear in all my behaviour – but she later grew wary. As if it wasn’t enough simply to be there, your father, it seemed I must also become your curator. I treated you like history. In the weeks before you were born I packed a small suitcase with jars and cartons and tins from the supermarket, a capsule of brand names and packaging I wouldn’t let you see till you were older; much older. I bought a copy of every newspaper published on the day of your birth, then added a videotape of that evening’s news on TV. I kept the plastic bracelets that identified you to the nurses, and the shrivelled stem of your umbilical cord. I filled a shoebox with the cards and letters of congratulation that arrived in the first weeks of your life, and added to this the microtape from our answering-machine, another half-dozen messages, including one from my grandmother, who died before she could meet you. In Ruth’s old rucksack I saved the toys and books you seemed most attached to, and some of the clothes we most liked you to wear. I kept a memento of each of your birthdays, and a souvenir from each of our holidays. I photographed you constantly, and sifted through every drawing and painting you made, adding captions and dates, and filing all of this neatly with your nursery-school workbooks in a banker’s box in our attic. And then, in a black-and-red notebook, twelve inches by eight, I registered each small leap in your development – the age you sat upright, abandoned your pushchair, copied your name – until the changes were too many and too subtle and I decided at last I could trust to your own memory.
    For a while I was able to recite the entire extent of your vocabulary. There were thirty or forty mispronounced words, and I listed them all on a page in the notebook – abo for apple, banki for blanket – each one dated, explained, and spelled as you spoke it. Your word for my hands was hams, and this at least I could share with Ruth, who had used the same word herself, lying beside me on that bed in my flat eight or nine years before. My hams. They were, she’d said, splaying the fingers, the worst thing about me. Sexual attraction for Ruth always began with the hands, and she preferred them smooth and unknotted, slim-fingered, unblemished – more like a young woman’s in fact; much like her own. And mine were like spatulas, like shovels, too broad and too square. Also too pudgy, too knobbly, too blotchy. But they’d do, she assured me, pressing my palms to her cheeks and holding them there; they’d pass. She found their ugliness endearing, I supposed, another excuse to feel sorry for me, and I was relieved when later she called them dextrous, a reference to my performance with clay on the wheel, though meaning, I hoped, much more than that.
    Years afterwards you examined them just as intently, hunkering beside me on the floor of my studio. I’d collected you early that day from nursery, as I often did then on a Friday. You had your own corner, your own tools and clay, and I would fire whatever you brought me, no matter how formless, how far from completion. Which was my promise to Ruth – not to try to teach or correct you – though I knew from the start that you’d never allow me. You wouldn’t be shown, hadn’t the patience for lessons, and of course you rarely stayed long in your corner. Every task I began became a game that involved you. Completing my paperwork, my orders and invoices, you would sit by my side with some forms of your own and scrawl through them. As I tidied my cupboards, my benches and shelves, you’d want to drag out the boxes, the sieves and stacked buckets that were stored underneath