her that the image told a different story, that the fort had resisted while seven decades of years had surrendered? “Yes,” I said. “Tere’s George.” Later I would look at all the places my grandfather
had been posted, from Malta to Portsmouth and Nigeria to North Africa, and I would see that same stark concrete signature wherever he had kept watch. Once your eye was tuned in, it became easy to spot the sharp geometric figures cut into the ragged edges of scrub or jungle, always at a commanding altitude, occupying some stubborn outcrop that was resistant to cultivation or development. Tey held their quiet vantage points and kept vigil over the lowlands, where life turned in on itself and advanced in its sprawl of proliferating suburbs and its gossiping web of cables. Tose big artillery forts were too much trouble to demolish. Tey had been designed to resist all insults, including that of their own obsolescence. Te years themselves had no more need of such heavy ballast and slipped their chains and floated free, rising in quickening silvery bubbles towards the moment where they would break the surface and, in that same instant, be no more. Everyone’s letters are drowned. I showed my grandmother how to use email. I set her up a contact book with the addresses of everyone in the family. We sent a few test messages forward and back and she was delighted, but of course the email address she wanted most was George’s. Aſter a few minutes of resistance, which was greeted alternately with stern and with anxious looks, I capitulated and invented him one. It was a web-based email account, and I gave George’s login details to everyone in the family. For a few weeks we all just watched, from the outposts where we were variously stationed, as my grandfather’s inbox filled up. She wrote to him every day, unconcerned that he didn’t reply. She told him that the Times was too small to start the fire now. She told him that their son, James, had been round to connect the internet. She told him that a case of oranges had been opened on the quayside at Lowestoſt, and that their colour had seemed like a sunrise. Before I leſt my grandmother’s house, she made
us supper. It was chicken stew, with rice. She served hers on a willow-pattern plate, with a mismatched stainless-steel knife and fork. She served mine on a child-size plastic plate with a plastic knife and fork and a drink of water in an unspillable, self-righting cup with a sipping lid. Te stew was excellent. On the doorstep we hugged before I went out to my car. She looked at me with a flicker of anxiety that she quickly submerged in cheerfulness. I realised she had no idea who I was. I watched her taking in the family features: the sandy red hair, the distinctive chin. Finally, she nodded. “I’m sure you’re one of mine,” she said quietly. Driving home in the dusk and the summer rain, I understood that I would not see her again. I don’t remember which of us in the family broke
first. Someone – my aunt, most likely – wrote the first email back from my grandfather to my grandmother. It was nicely done, full of uncontroversial news from the front. In truth it was not hard to write that way. Matters tactical were censored by the army; events emotional by simple decorum. What remained were oranges glimpsed rather than eaten. We all took turns, and the epistles of my
grandparents’ marriage simply picked up where they had leſt off, happily and without complication, stepping around puddles as necessary. Tey were to be correspondents long aſter they were lovers, years aſter my grandfather’s heart gave out. When I saw that first reply from him, I turned from my screen with tears blurring my vision. My three-year-old daughter was standing there watching me with a half-anxious expression and her lower lip clenched between her teeth. I told her that everything was OK. And then, for good measure, I told her that I loved her. She grinned, and pointed a finger at me, and yelled: “Not if I love you first!”
Te end
Taken from the second Book Slam anthology, Too Much Too Young (available at bookslam.com). Chris Cleave’s latest novel, Gold, is available in paperback (Sceptre, out now)