Authors: Jude Cook
Happiness? I had always thought people who expected happiness from life were deluded crackpots. Who told them that was on the menu? They look at the world with all its genocides and cruelties, its gassings and random murder and expect felicity? A pathological aspiration, surely. No, better to be content with just being
lucky
… and what do I expect from a visit to my mother’s, with all this weighty heart-baggage, this incapacitation of mine? Not happiness, surely? The whole project is dragging me into the earth, I think, as the train flies like an arrow into the night. How can I force my face into a smile after three months of grief-swallowed days? With my mother on her own too. I think of the last time we shared December the twenty-fifth. A pair of losers together around the cooling turkey; the clotted cranberry sauce. To spend Christmas at home with a family that has stayed together is to be part of, to be proximate to,
success;
or a success story of a kind. But to do the same in a broken family is always to take part in failure; and with weary reminders of that failure at every turn. The empty place at the head of the banquet, where the absent father should sit. The unpulled cracker. The missing relatives and their propitiatory cards hanging from the eaves, all of them having far happier Christmases elsewhere. It is a kind of anti-celebration that brings out the Scrooge in everyone. The sense of life becoming, year after year, ever more shallow—rather than deepening, or expanding like the concentric circles of an evergreen tree.
I allow my notebook to fall open at random, and see the entry for the fifteenth of November. My heart races at what it discloses. I had forgotten her card. Mandy’s card. Not a Christmas card, oh no, but a slim missive pushed under the door of my shared flat; waiting innocently for me one evening. It depicted a trellised Mediterranean house overlooking the sea, an amateurish watercolour with sentimentalised hanging baskets of crimson bougainvillea swaying over mysterious windows.
The heat of midday transforming the distant waves into a platinum shimmer. Vines looping the veranda and
b
acks of benches. A settled calm in the dusty street winding up the mountainside. A frivolously daubed black cat, its tail in the air like a question mark, just exiting the front door. A slatted bench scattered with simple things: a loaf onions, a pitcher of olive oil, white wine,
pescado
fresh from the bay. A tangible sense of life moving slowly, incrementally, at its natural default pace; not the sick hurry of London and its soul-shaking ructions …
‘Excuse me,’ interrupts a voice. It is Michelle. I look up from the page to be met by her inquisitive smile. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve been scribbling in that book since we set off. Are you a writer?’
It takes a while to get my bearings, to orientate this question in my mind, what with my heart beating so fast at the memory of Mandy’s card. Well, am I? A writer, that is? If passports still declared vocations, is that what it would state? Excited, despairing, feeling dangerously righteous, I realise I cannot read another of my own words.
‘Writer? That’s pitching it a bit high. Here,’ I say, then rip the page from my notebook and pass it over to Michelle. ‘Take a look. It’s rubbish, really.’
She flattens it on the table and reads with eager eyes.
…
But mainly the egregious red of the bougainvillea, their homely baskets; well-kept, tended daily no doubt. And not a soul around, not even a goatherd on the distant hillside rolling with pines. Wasps in the deleterious air; cicadas probably, if one were to go there. If one were to feel the warmth of that sun. Lastly a single white butterfly, a tiny smudge from the end of the brush, dancing weightlessly over the lintel.
Why did she send me this card? With its impossible message? The message which consisted of two sentences:
‘Our little home. We’ll find it one day.’
Michelle looks up from the crumpled page, and says: ‘That’s beautiful … the cow!’
O
NLY WHEN YOU STOP
moving do you realise just how fast you have been travelling. Like calm water in a sheltered ravine after the insanity of rapids. The bleak stillness of a platform after the berserk thunder of the train. The first day at home after a month on the run. Early in the spring of the second year of my marriage, after Mandy had irrevocably marked her card with my mother and my half-sister (not to mention with Antonia and Nick, both still seething after Mandy s unwitting telephone transmission of genuine spite), I stood outside the Hampstead flat-share that used to be occupied by Bea all those marquee moons ago. I say ‘used’, as I wasn’t sure she didn’t still sleep on that hard double bed in her raftered room; another hand peeling her Marks and Sparks knickers down her inexplicably erotic thighs. That lambent morning, I had a sudden feeling of stillness: as if, after long and violent movement, I had been brought short. Stopped dead.
Misty Victorian footpaths. Elegant frontages. Children late for school, climbing from sparkling people-carriers. Toddlers in three-wheeled buggies. Wicker trees. The sun aperture colourless and infinite … Ah, the children we never had! The coherent and productive life we never made. Nostalgia and sentimentality curdling to make their bilious brew. On the one hand, I was confident that I sought to explicate the present by an examination of the past. On the other, I felt like a stalker standing there, with no particular errand, attempting to peek through the slatted pine blinds. No, the Expressionist prints didn’t appear to be on the walls. Little sign of the three out-of-work gallants, either. Most likely they all found posts in the City, in the theatre, on the grubby streets of London’s media land—I couldn’t be sure I didn’t see one of them reading the news the other night, but that might have been his father. I considered rapping on the door, but thought better of it. The idea of buttonholing passers-by and informing them that, once upon a time, here lived all love, all beauty was briefly entertained. It occurred to me then that I was still in mental contact with Bea, that I conducted imaginary conversations with her, or with her ghost. The people we have mind-conversations with—lovers or friends from the past, the dead, even—are very important. To our current coterie they seem like marginal, never-mentioned people; but to the inner life they are central. Long after Mandy had usurped Bea, she made a point of bringing her up in conversation, mainly for the purpose of ridicule. She said, ‘That name, Bea, it sounds like a dog’s name,’ or ‘I don’t know how you could’ve put up with somebody so dull: she never went to parties, looked like she bought her clothes from a charity shop.’ I would tolerate these snide, rampantly jealous attacks in silence. The subject of Bea was never ventured by me. Instead, I was the loving curator of her museum, visiting the gallery of our memories with increasing frequency, holding those imaginary conversations. It wasn’t as if Mandy’s thin drizzle of poisonous calumnies didn’t have an effect, though. I began to question whether I truly used to like everything about Bea: her reticence, her rather too-wide shoulders, the way she made me feel, in Austen’s phrase, the inferiority of my connections. Then I saw sense. Bea had that rarest of attributes in a woman: ultimate indifference to what people thought of her. Usually, women lose their self-consciousness only when dealing with children: their habitual monitoring of their own behaviour and appearance disappears as another, stronger prerogative takes over. Sure, she used to swish her chestnut hair neurotically, lovably, from her eyes all the time, but her attitude to the whole package was: ‘Take it or leave it, baby.’ And, like a fool, I left it.
The London morning was full of a stirring clarity: deli smells, the breath of filter coffee, frost on the rear windows of banked cars, the noisy shutters of a florist’s going up, the narcotic odour of petrol. I felt like a kid with his nose pressed up against the glass of my past, loitering there outside Bea’s old bedroom, with no particular place to go. I didn’t even know what had drawn me there that morning; there was no special anniversary to commemorate. I had just cycled blindly across the peeling vistas of the Haringey Ladder, up the strenuous Shepherd’s Hill and past the bracing heath, the February wind making my eyes pour. But, it appeared that Bea was no longer resident in her timber floored flat where we spent so many candlelit nights around the kitchen table, a fug of sweet smoke from her Silk Cut Ultra Lows in the air. And even if she had been there, what would I have said? Sorry for dumping you, for having no faith in myself or you or love? Sorry for relinquishing our nascent passion for marriage to a barratrous harpy? It was all too late, I concluded, and I should sit out my purgatory like a man. I crossed to the railings on the other side of the street, unshackled my bike, and cycled off down the big hill.
I should stress this wasn’t an isolated incident.
If the truth be told, after this initial visit I could be found there, once a month, for a whole year. My eventless morning vigils at Bea’s reminded me of a similar pilgrimage undertaken in the early nineties. Only this was a poetic pilgrimage, not just furtively hanging around an old girlfriend’s flat. On the morning of February the eleventh 1993, I walked briskly from my Camden crash-pad to Fitzroy Road near Primrose Hill. The weather conditions had been strangely similar to my first return to Bea’s: the same washed-out chilly watercolour sky, the same slicing freshness to the air, the same grey London dawn with the thousand hands raising a thousand shades in a thousand furnished rooms. The purpose of my visit had been to commemorate the suicide of Sylvia Plath thirty years to the day—the barefoot, perfected woman with her head on the oven’s floor, discovered by her children’s nurse on a routine visit. My heart raced as I rounded the corner, whistling posties oblivious to the significance of the date on their postmarks. I had expected coachloads of Japanese tourists, the dismal peanut-crunching crowd, or at least a few fey dawdlers in overcoats like myself. Instead—nothing. The street as bare and empty as a Chapel of Rest. I stood very still in front of the solid-looking house, with its plaque celebrating Yeats’ brief sojourn, and felt a thrilling solidarity with my fellow bards. But still no flutter of activity. For some reason I expected the front door to open. Maybe that would occur later, I thought, when the guided tours with megaphoned poetry recitals from open-topped buses showed up. But I doubted it. The dead require no extra effort from the living, just lip service to their ‘tragedy’. I took a last look, fixing the scene photographically in my mind, then walked on, pretending to have other pressing business. It had all been dramatically eventless, like the repose a family must feel after a relative’s fitful existence has come to an end. The speeding life suddenly stopped dead, brought short with a terrible finality. As I passed the great, blackened, unused drum of the Roundhouse I pondered all those artists who had taken their own life; who had left their beautiful pearls behind but found the life that bore them intolerable: Van Gogh, Woolf, Plath, Hart Crane, Hemingway, Berryman. When thinking about that odd morning mission I also reflect on those who checked out further down the line: Kurt Cobain, Richey Manic, Sarah Kane. Now just T-shirts on Camden High Street; the living, sentient human beings all gone into the dark.
Mandy changed without the band to organise her life. She became (if that were feasible) brasher, more bitter. With the implosion of her great dream, she had no idea what she wanted to do with her time. Predictably, she lost the job at Iberia: not by failing to turn up, but by kicking the front door in after the area manager had disciplined her over uniform anomalies. Her skirt had been found to have a sluttish split from knee to hipbone; not what the airline wanted to promote in its junior staff. The police were called and Mandy was sacked on the spot. A verbal and physical tirade, one that few of the placid customers booking flights to Rio de Janeiro would ever forget, was unleashed by my wife as they hustled her from the office. When she arrived home that evening she tore the red-and-white barbers-pole shirt from her back, exposing her strangely elongated shoulder blades and crooked spine pinned under a black bra. On occasions, there was something of a ten-year-old’s tantrum about her rages. I would have laughed, if it wasn’t for her capacity for extreme and frightening violence, and the fact that we now had no source of income. Martin had been forced to lay me off indefinitely at the start of the year. He had said, with an odd gravity in his Bromley whine, ‘I wish I could tell you to sit by the phone and await my call, Byron, but I can’t be certain it’ll ever come.’ I had nodded quickly at this, observing how his brow pinched anxiously when delivering any kind of bad news. He added, ‘Anyway, you should be living in the real world, sorting your family out. I’m sure Mandy doesn’t appreciate the fact that you can never buy her anything or take her anywhere.’ He had a point. And he was genuinely sad to see me go. As I watched Mandy seethe and genuflect while ripping off the uniform that she had wasted ‘hard-earned’ cash on, I thought to myself: not content with alienating your tenants, our two best friends, my own mother and half-sister, you have to plunge us into penury by another rash masterpiece.
Four hundred years ago they would have burnt you as a witch.
Instead, I asked, ‘Are they going to press charges?’
‘What do I care? They can’t discriminate against what I wear. We’re not at school any more.’
‘What if you get a criminal record?’
‘I won’t get a fucking record from that, you idiot!’ she yelled. ‘Are you thick or something?’
It was a trope I had long noted in Mandy (and one which I related to Delph’s use of the word ‘ignorant’) that she used to call into question my IQ by labelling me ‘thick’. Not just occasionally, but all the time. And she really meant it too. For her, I wasn’t the full peseta. I had come to the conclusion that it was the trademark of the super-insecure, dim-witted of the world to slander the intelligence of others by using either ‘thick’ or ‘ignorant’ as insults. It was a more reliable test than any Mensa could provide.