The Ned Wood Archive

Sam

Art Brut are playing Emily Kane at the Peel Stage and Sam feels tears welling up in his eyes.  Glastonbury does this to you.  When Brandi Carlile played You Without Me the year before, she introduced it saying it was about her daughter growing up and becoming a person in her own right.  That made Sam well up.  When First Aid Kit did Emmylou, he had tears running down his cheeks.  The time before when they did America, he cried, too.  And when Ray Davies did Days.  He wasn’t sure who he was thanking for which days, but the sentiment made him tearful. Always does. Fiona was right. Big boys do cry.

So when Art brut did Emily Kane, he got emotional.  They’d done loads of good stuff.   Nag Nag Nag, Little Brother, Wham Bang Pow, Hospital, Modern Art, and more.  Then when they played Emily Kane, he started thinking about Julie, the lass he’d met twenty five years back.  He’s pretty sure he’s not still in love with that old flame.  And Julie MacLeod doesn’t scan in the lyrics the same way Emily Kane does.  However, he knows what prompted the memory of her to appear.  It had happened that afternoon.  He’s strolling through Green Futures, checking out the bands at each of the stages.  Small World, Lizard, Toad Hall.  He spots Lyn sitting on a bench watching a performance by a group of acrobats.  Swinging on ropes, hanging on hoops, that sort of stuff.  He sits down next to her and catches up on what she’s been up to.  She’s just chilling out, waiting for Lex who is somewhere round here.  She’s obviously in no hurry.  

A couple of kids, maybe 5 or 6 years old are doing their own version of an acrobatics performance on the grass nearby.  Simple stuff like cartwheels and hand stands.  The older performers notice them and invite them to join in with them, modifying their own tricks, letting the kids do all the fun bits.

Lyn tells Sam that her niece is probably the same age as those kids and would love to be here, doing what they’re doing.  She says that Lex sometimes talks about starting a family, but Lyn’s happy being one step removed.  Watching her niece grow up, but not having to deal with all of the day to day grief.

She asks Sam whether he never wanted a family.  There’s something about the way she asks him that opens him up.  There’s something about this place that opens him up, too.  Sam tells her that, actually, he does have a family.  Well, not quite.  He has a daughter, Jackie, and that, sadly, he wasn’t able to watch her grow up.  

He tells her the story.  About how they met for the first time four years back, just after Covid.  She just turned up at work one day.  There aren’t that many Sam Raworths in the country, so he was easy enough to find.  She knew who he worked for – the same company he was working for when he met her Mom up in Edinburgh.  All she had to do was phone up reception and ask for him.  When they tried to put her through she was pretty confident she’d found the person she was looking for.

“So she turned up at work, took me out to the local Nero, and told me what her Mom had told her.  About the bloke her Mom had had an affair with up in Edinburgh before she was born.  Well, the dates matched.  Then, and this is with us sitting in Caffe Nero, right, drinking along with everyone else, she takes off one of her shoes and shows me her toes.  And she gets me to do the same.”

And Sam illustrates this as they are sitting in the Green Fields, next to the acrobats, by taking off his right shoe and his sock and showing Lyn his right foot.  

“See, we’ve both got the same feet.  Her big toe is shorter than the toe next to it.  Like mine.  Apparently, that’s not common.  Her Mom told her that about me.  I didn’t know she knew that.   Well, I didn’t think it was anything worth knowing.”

Lyn tells him that it is fairly rare, at least her toes aren’t like that and neither are Lex’s and as far as she’s aware, pretty much everyone else has a big toe that is also the longest toe.  Or at least equal longest!

Anyway, Jackie showed Sam pictures of when Jackie was smaller and she looks a lot like him.  So, he’s pretty sure that she’s his.

Lyn asks whether she can see a picture.  Sam’s got one on his phone.  It’s OK to show her because it isn’t breaking his detox.  Not really.  He switches his phone on without checking messages or mail and shows her this picture dominated by black haystack hair and explosive black Robert Smith eye shadow.  Lyn compares the image with Sam’s rapidly thinning barnet and reassures him, a little tongue in cheek, that the acorn never falls far from the oak.

“She gets in touch at random intervals, maybe once a year, Jackie does.  When it suits her.  I’ve got an email for her, but she rarely replies to my mails.  Then, out of the blue, she’ll say she’s in town or suggest I go and meet her, which I always do.  Never talks about her Mom, though, so I still don’t know what happened.  Then she’s off again.  I think she has her own eccentric orbit and only visits this part of the solar system occasionally.  Like Halley’s Comet.”

“Poor Sam,” says Lyn.

“You could say that.  Way I look at it, I’ve found a daughter which I didn’t know about, so that’s one more daughter than I thought I had.”

Maybe Jackie is the beast in his soul that can’t be tamed.