Become a columnist. Or write an article. Or head back to the homepage.

Columns

My Daughter's Path

My daughter left me, but I followed her into the brown pine-needle forest. By the time I got there she was already with the women, and I couldn't enter that place. So I waited outside for her to come back to me again.

I waited in my car, which I had used to cover the great mossy distances in the forest. It had taken her a long time, and she was on her own for most of it. It must have seemed like forever to her, although to me everything just flashed by. I never noticed anything until it was too late. A few times I even had to go back, having lost her path entirely. But I always found her track again.

Sometimes, as I passed, I would see a place where she fell or had stopped and cried, and I would cry as well, for her.

The crying stopped the further, the deeper in, I traced her. Here she had been hurt, but had kept going on regardless. I admired her courage, to travel such a road alone. I wished I could have helped her when she had to scramble over the mound of broken branches or jump a ditch. But then, I was who she was traveling away from.

When I reached the end of her trail she had gone behind the high walls and the thick brown gates. No news of her came to me from inside. Nothing could come to a man like me from inside such a place. So I settled myself by my car to wait for her to come out. I was her father and that, I knew, would always make her mine.

While I waited I would remember her face as she turned in our kitchen. I could never remember what I'd said to her, because I thought she'd always be there to hear it. She had been my happiness for so long. And at the same time I saw now how short it was- just a drive across a mossy forest. I knew I would have to keep her alive, all of her alive, by my thoughts.

I had been alone for some months when I found her first, on the doorstep. She was dressed in green knitted wool and a yellow knitted cap. I remembered that as a baby, my daughter had worn the same clothes. I had delighted in seeing the amazement on her face as her cap was pulled off and then on again. Her blue eyes would open wide and her shiny nose would move up, as her mouth formed a small round hole of surprise. I knew she was the only perfect thing I had seen. Nothing was more important than her. Her hand would grip my proffered thumb and her eyes would try to focus on what she had caught. I don't think she ever saw the size of her prisoner, or how firm a grip she had on him.

She would lie on her back and watch, all day. Even when there was nothing to see. She would watch the distance if that was all there was. But her power came because she never just saw how something looked. She always took it in fully, as it really was. No illusion could get past her clear blue filters. I sometimes felt I should fear her, if I did not love her so much.

Most movingly she would try to watch herself, as she caught sight of her outstretched hands or her lifted feet. But that was beyond even her cool gaze, as she would feed back on her own reactions.  Her hand would flex and she would react, moving her arm even more. I never knew if she made the connection between her inner world and that world she saw around her. I read once that babies make no distinction between themselves and others, that they see the world as just another mysterious part of the whole. It was true with me. I had become an extension of my daughter, and like her hands I reacted to her emotions. I felt as she felt, and through her I felt it totally.

 I was shocked when I found I had lost that daughter. I lifted the body of the baby I had found and carried it to my car. It felt just as I remember her feeling in my arms, but its closed eyelids and it's stillness weren't those of sleep. My granddaughter? My daughter. I held her for a long time. I still don't know how I didn't notice her going, or how I let her leave. But she was gone and I could only think about her with the past.

I wasn't ready to bury her, so I wrapped her up in a shroud (a small envelope she made) and laid her in the boot of my car.

I still yearn for the pressure on my thumb of her grip. I failed to keep her with me, and so am lost myself.

 I was some years waiting after that. It often rained in the forest, which was a darker place now than I remembered it. I would collect this water to drink and wash. I had brought sandwiches and boiled sweets in my glove compartment, so I never went hungry. It wasn't a luxurious life but I didn't care. Nothing was more important than what I was doing, and what I had to do.

One of those mornings I woke to find a child waiting for me at the foot of the door. Her clothes were those she had worn on summer when we had gone on holiday. Dressed in her lizard t-shirt and faded blue shorts,  my six year old daughter insisted on introducing herself as six and three quarters to everyone we met. I have an image of her still in my mind walking ahead of me, the grass on either side of the path taller than her head. Her hair was short that year, all those years, with what was called a pageboy style. She carried an adult tennis racquet, which looked outsized as she swung it with both hands. She would sometimes wave it unsteadily at the head of passing grasses, but mostly she let it drag in the sand behind her, leaving tracks of animals she sometimes called out to me. Kangaroo was her favourite, as she held the racquet between her legs and hopped in her canvas shoes, great arm swinging leaps taking her a few inches forward at a time. Often she would stop, and turn to reassure herself that she hadn't lost me. She would always smile with relief at my closeness and would walk on again. A child's voice murmuring to itself, its voice rising and falling as it tells its tale. She was far enough that I couldn't hear the songs and stories she told, but that I longed to be part of. And close enough that she could hear my crunching steps and the poke-rutch of my umbrella in the sand, carried against the wind as much as the rain.

We would play the video game in the local pub together. I would steer my spaceship, aiming it at the threatening asteroids and she would press the red cigarette-burned fire button. We often lost lives because I would have my attention fixed on her face as she watched the screen with the same concentration that my first, lost daughter had brought to her hands. When we did die, she would look up at me for reassurance and I would feed the machine another 10p. It was a small price to pay to remain her protector.

I remember showing her the stars, freed from their city-dimness. She looked up and watched them all. I had never known any of their names, but she wouldn't have been interested anyway. For her, any names given to such things would be meaningless. As we stood beside a roll of hay, another exotic touch, I saw again an echo of the amazement of my first daughter. For her the sky was mysterious. But it wasn't the sky filling me with awe that night, those nights.

I knew I mustn't lose this daughter, and I didn't seem to be in danger of doing so for years. Watching her wade into a particularly heavy snow so wrapped up that her arms stuck out from her body, blends into a picture of her silhouette as she bent on a beach, looking at a rock or a crab or a rock that looked like a crab. Her shadow stretched away on the wet sand, distorted by the sinking light. It was the figure of a much taller, more slender person which streamed away from my daughter. I feared it.

My daughter asked me questions and I told her many things. But I cannot now remember telling her anything as an answer to her questions. She would listen to me as I talked about the rock forms on the cliffs we passed or the erosion which made the beach. But when I was finally finished she would ask why the sea was better than the ground, sometimes? I never knew the answer to any of her questions, so I would tell her about something else. Once she would repeat her question, but she later learned that it did no good. When she stopped asking questions and I stopped not answering them, my fear grew.

I was always too late. My second daughter was gone. I laid her body, wrapped in a larger piece of cloth, beside my baby in my car. And as I did so I feared what was to come. I had only one child left to me. Two lay unburied, mourned, behind me. But the third was the last. There would be nothing but waiting when she was gone.

My third child will be tall and she will be quick. While I wait here for her to appear at the door, the forest has grown black and my hands have grown old. After she is laid down there will only be waiting left. I know my daughter will come back to me in the end. The last child on the doorstep will be taken in, not left out, and it will belong to her and it will be me.

Simon McGarr
25/3/2001

Topics