Read Swimming to Ithaca for Free Online Page B

artefacts, maybe first-handeye-witness accounts. Yet these are just relics, things left over and endowed with a significance by the mere fact of their survival. We cling to them like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to flotsam – a broken chair, a piece of railing, a lifebelt.’ He smiles as he elaborates his analogy: ‘And while we grab for these chance relics, we must always remember that the ship itself, the wreckage of the past, is slowly sinking into the depths below us.’
    One of the girls giggles. ‘Like the
Titanic
?’
    ‘Just like the
Titanic
,’ Thomas agrees. ‘The
Titanic
exists in our minds as a historical icon, a piece of narrative – film, book or whatever – while the remains are actually there on the bottom of the seabed …’
    The girls are remarkably similar to the boys, most of them. Almost all wear jeans, all wear T-shirts, most have pieces of cupro-nickel embedded in various parts of their faces – a ring in this eyebrow, a stud in that nose, a cannabis leaf impaled in an earlobe. Thomas wonders about other, gender-specific possibilities. Does that girl, seated next to Eric and fidgeting all the time, perhaps have a gleaming ring through the nub of her clitoris? Does the one with the orange brush on her head maybe have a stud through a pink and perky nipple? But then, he wonders, does Eric?
    Only one of the women really stands out from the rest. She is wearing a silk shalwar-kameez and, among the funereal blacks and greys, glows as brilliantly as a gemstone. What is her name? Sharaya? Something like that. Inviolate, he guesses. Inviolable as well, in all probability. She too has something stuck through her nostril: a fragment of ruby gleaming like a bead of fresh blood. Next to her is the only girl wearing a skirt. She may be older than the others, but it’s difficult to tell. That’s what fashion does these days – reduces everyone to the pubertal. Thomas catches her eye and, gratifyingly, she smiles back at him.
    ‘And then there’s another problem,’ he says, addressing thisgirl alone. ‘That is the whole question of narrative. Did people in the past live out a narrative? Do we ourselves live out a narrative? I think the answer is no. Events just happen. No one is writing a story.’ He pauses, smiles acerbically. ‘You might walk out of here and get hit by a bus. A purely contingent event. It wouldn’t be part of any story, and no self-respecting author would allow it to happen halfway through a novel and just finish the thing there and then. But it might happen in reality. And in reality other people might make a story out of your life, with the bus as a dramatic and tragic conclusion.’
    The slide projector has been set up ready, pointing at the screen on the wall. He switches it on. ‘Can someone turn out the lights?’
    They are plunged into a sultry darkness. ‘Where’s the popcorn?’ Eric’s voice asks.
    ‘Look,’ says Thomas, and there she is, suddenly on the screen, thirty-three years old, standing against the car in the bright sunlight of decades ago.
    ‘Take this, for example. A photograph, a relic, one of those pieces of flotsam. What do you make of it?’
    There’s an uneven silence, a scuffling of feet and a few inarticulate whispers:
    ‘Who is she?’
    ‘Where is it?’
    ‘That’s what I want to know,’ Thomas says. ‘Answers to all those questions.’
    ‘
When
is it?’ asks the skirted girl.
    ‘The car’ll give it you,’ says Eric, who is, apparently, something of a connoisseur. ‘Nineteen-fifties, isn’t it? Ford Consul, or summink. Vauxhall, it’s a Vauxhall. Victor.’ It is unclear whether he is claiming victory or whether that is the name of the model.
    ‘And it’s not England, is it?’ someone else says. ‘The architecture.’
    ‘And that sky. Maybe you could identify the plants.’
    ‘And what about her? Hockey player is she? Strong legs.’
    ‘Trust you to notice that.’
    ‘Who is she?’
    ‘She’s class, isn’t she?’