David Herd

I remember, once, my daughter was bought a scooter, and for months afterwards she would scoot her way to school, and when, on Saturday afternoons, we would visit the playground, she would scoot away proudly in and out among her friends. They all had scooters too, they were a most amenable melée – for which read an orchestrated loosening of the parental grip. Until gradually the front wheel started to loosen, which is by no means to re-state the previous analogy. I decline to comment on the day I left. I wasn’t a good father, but somehow with even the least responsive parent there develops a bond, a strand of infantile affection. I decided I would drive north for a couple of hours, dump the car and catch a train back. I figured this would be sufficient to shake the authorities off.

And so it has turned out. A single swerve and the whole apparatus is thrown in the wrong direction. Not that I am fooling myself - even the most cumbersome of operations can settle on the truth. I take precautions when I go out in daylight, and of course the longer I stay the greater the likelihood of recognition. Only the other day, for instance, one of the men building up the beach defences took it upon himself to say ‘Hello’. He must have seen me around. They work with the tides, so that sometimes it disrupts my sleeping. He was friendly enough, and meant, I’m sure, very little by it. I remarked that they seemed to be doing a very valuable job. (That’s Satie of course, and his instinct for susceptibility.) He said the system was good for anything, except an improbably large wave. ‘Like a Tsunami?’ I offered. ‘Like a Tsunami.’ he smiled. ‘So you should be ok for a while, tucked away there in your hut.’ Momentarily I was thrown into a rage. The thought flared that maybe now I would have to kill him, but I quickly put this down to watching too much television. I told him I only used the hut occasionally, as and when I couldn’t get off to sleep. He looked at me quizzically as if to ask whether there was something on my mind. I looked back that he might like to drop the ‘I-can-be-your-therapist’ shtick, because frankly it didn’t suit the hard-hat, and anyway didn’t he have gravel or something equally stony to shift. We parted on what seemed to be perfectly amicable terms. After that I didn’t venture out for a while - except very early to pick up supplies of seaweed. It seemed reasonable to assume the man was taking no more than a passing interest. That night on the television a woman made suggestive remarks about a pig.