She collects Lee from Penny’s, chats briefly, fancies, oddly, a joint though she hasn’t smoked one for years and knows Louise would disapprove. They are quite puritanical, kids these days. That’s probably for the best. Her generation probably did too many drugs, and where did it get anyone?
Another early night, 9.25. How gorgeous to be in bed, between clean sheets early and tired enough to know that soon you’ll sleep, that there are eight blissful, restorative hours before the morning’s necessities. She has been reading Alex Hargreaves’ book,
Gilligan’s Century
, and finds it a little unengaging: smart, crammed with information and surprising turns of phrase, chock full of incident and detail but somehow hard to take in. She feels she should finish it, that sense of obligation again, but is tempted to return to the McFarlaine mystery she interrupted for this one,
Quantum Homicide
. Alex Hargreaves’ photo is displayed prominently on the back of the book and he is a nice- looking boy, a major selling point probably. He will do well.
She wouldn’t mind a man. She has been surprised to find herself warming slightly in her email exchanges with Alex Hargreaves and she chides herself; he’s a boy, he must be, what, 27, 28? Perhaps it is not so much him as the fact that she could see he was attracted to her when they met. And a young, blond boy, well spoken, very courteous, that’s not unappealing. He would, she is sure, be quite inexperienced in bed, like Vernon was, like Harvey was, like they all are really once they get over the idea they know what they’re doing. She wonders what they are like, this younger generation. They have seen things, online, she would imagine, that her generation had little idea about. Paula Adonor has had a look herself, on the odd occasion.
The book goes onto her bedside table, the box file unopened sitting on a chair against the wardrobe. Tonight, especially, she is too tired to concentrate. Drifting off now, a cotton soft lassitude threading her veins.
That day in Wales, the bouncy castles, the funfair, the light show, the music, the sense of a mass spontaneous effort whose only aim was joy.
Sitting with Vernon on the low wall one summer night in the shadow of the Crescent. He wanted her to explain it all to him, time, space, matter, multi-dimensionality. Do you think, he asked, that a person might end up in the wrong world, as time forked and branched, they might get stalled or stumble into a universe they were never meant to live in?
She can hear a small, high pitched voice, wafting in on a warm current from nowhere, singing over and over,
Time dies when you are with me, Time dies when you are with me
.
What tune was that from? She rouses herself, props herself up on one arm, wonders whether she should send Nick a message, squints at the clock. It is just after ten, but perhaps, well, if he is asleep it won’t wake him.
Sorry. Tune stuck in my head. What was that track that went
time dies when you’re with me?
A few seconds later the message comes back with a YouTube link, Krispy Biscuit by Rufige Kru.
She laughs.
Where did they get these titles from?
I know. Great track, terrible title. It’s like they just didn’t care.
You awake/available?
The phone buzzes and she answers it.
What’s going on? Nick asks. You getting nostalgic? His voice is soft and welcoming.
Yeah, she says. She keeps her voice down. I keep thinking about that day in Wales.
Oh, yeah. He laughs. The Beacons. I played a set in a tent somewhere. Hardly remember anything about it now.
Thinking about Vernon.
A pause.
Yeah, that guy, Alex got in touch.
You don’t mind that I passed on your details do you?
Nah. I don’t have much time to think about stuff like that at the moment though. Work is crazy and getting worse everyday.
Same here. The kids?
Yeah, good. It’s good that Theresa stayed local, for all of us. How is it going with you and yours?
It’s a struggle. It’s a struggle.
I am sure.
Anyway.
Oh, one thing, well two things actually. There’s a little kind of nostalgia thing going on down here, end of next week, a mini-rave, a Back To 95 thing. I might even spin a few old tunes myself. If you fancy getting out of London for a bit, come down.
Well. There’s lots of things would need arranging even for a day trip let alone an overnighter. With Lee, obviously.
Bring him down too. We can arrange something.
I’ll let you know.
And also that lyric is time
flies
when I am with you.
Oh I see. All these years. She chuckles. Alright, sleep tight.
You too.
Don’t let the memory bugs bite.
She chuckles. Bye.
Bye.
Time flies? She is disappointed, time dying seems far better. Vernon got it wrong too then, misheard it. He used to sing it over and over.
The dead, she has heard someone say, must die twice; first the physical death, then the death must be recorded, ritualised, through periods of mourning, funerals, the scattering of ashes, acknowledged in stages. And perhaps they must die twice in order to live again. She remembers how for a year, perhaps more, they didn’t speak of Harvey, the father, the husband, for fear of the emotions they would provoke in each other, and so repressed him, kept him locked away, ghostly, gestating, until one day the conversation at the dinner table turned fleetingly to him and Lee remarked that now he could hear certain songs he associated with his Dad and not tear up. A few days later Paula Adonor had a dream that Harvey was sitting in the bedroom, waiting patiently as the kids hoovered up outside and made the place clean, as though in preparation for his return, and that in the dream she was Harvey too, and also the kids, and herself, watching. The room was full of light and there he was, quiet, patient, returned from his exile in death, a figure they could discuss, invoke, enjoy again.
In that sublime dream she was everyone and all things, both herself and others, the observer and what she observed. But in the telling of it language got in the way, broke things up, forced the dream to take on difference and contradiction, separation; when in that beautiful suspended moment, in that light of a life brought back from death, there was no time or separation, no words, only the holistic, perfect, uncompromised image and the wisdom to know we are outside life or death, space and time, self and others; and that words, words will divide us up and cage us and condemn us.
Well, what does that mean? Except that Vernon, poor Vernon, has not even died once, he still has so far to go before he can return, but perhaps this interest of Alex Hargreaves’ will help to speed his passage back to the world, let him mingle with us again, silent, contented, reborn.
And as she drifts off she finds herself gently lulled and lifted out of time into a realm where all borders become progressively more porous and dissolve. It all makes sense here on the threshold of sleep, the echo-memory of the bliss of the yet-to-be-born, a mounting babble of soothing nonsense that crowds out her thoughts, language that liquefies into pure tones and dim modulations, a soft flurry of half-forgotten scenes and…
She finds she’s talking about Hulme Crescent, Alex Hargreaves sitting arms folded in his car, heading North, Paula Adonor in bed, tablet resting on her knees. Twenty years ago they would have been amazed that such technologies were possible, yet perhaps something like Hulme Crescent might seem, to someone like Alex Hargreaves, equally fantastical, mythic, unreal.
And yet, well, she doesn’t want to admit it to herself even, but she used to hate going out to the Crescent. The dirt, the burned out cars, the dogs most of all, all these half-starved dogs running around, and the drugs, fun for a while but then the state of some of the people who had got locked into it, the people with obvious mental health issues, violent people, criminals and yes, she supposes she saw a lot of what was best in people too, but to live there long term, those damp, grey crumbling walls, the subsistence diets, the endless hustling and haggling.
Well, they criticised her at the time, especially Rob, of course, for wanting her own space, her own little enclosed world, her privacy and her things, her property, though she pointed out to them that they were quick to appropriate poor Nick Skilling’s computer equipment and keyboards, liberate them from his student flat and then lock them away in their own in the Crescent, padlocking a cupboard so no one would get in and take them. Yes, they exerted all this pressure on everyone else to be less bourgeois, less selfish, less obsessed with property, but they themselves were happy to secretly squirrel things away and appropriate other—especially better-off—peoples’ possessions for their own exclusive use, in the name of the art that they alone, the children of the sacred working class, could create.
Well, they had a point in some ways, but they were too easily persuaded, she and Nick and other people who fell into their orbit, bullied even. Poor Nick especially was pulled around by the nose, pressured into relinquishing things, space, hardware, time, money, into ferrying them about.
In that last year, 1995, when the place was getting demolished block by block, still they clung on in absolute denial of reality that the time had come for them to move on. And when they did, to Castleford, Rob and Howard were talking about how they would transform it, how a thousand cybernetic flowers would bloom in the slag heaps and the broken mines, in the gutted factories and warehouses, by which point she was tired, tired and did want, yes, a little bit of calm and stability, tranquillity, and a sense of a structure and order to the days, the coming years. Though that has never really come, pockets of reprieve perhaps, little islets of solid ground among the shifting sands and now, well, she is back in the situation they were in then.
You are beaten Paula, accept it, it’s time to go.
It is, she has started boxing things up, almost unconsciously, setting inessential things aside, has asked Lewis to look at what can be thrown away. Even if they haven’t been given anywhere yet she knows the interim accommodation will be smaller than what she has here, though that’s not much. There’s talk of Lee going into a temporary USG care facility but she has refused to allow it. She should go down, take up Nick’s invite, have a look around the place, maybe it won’t be so bad to be down on the coast, probably half of Deptford will end up down there anyway.
It will be nice to see Nick again. Yes, life moves if not in full circles, then half circles perhaps, slow crescents, waxing and waning.
Slow crescents. She thinks of Lee’s eyes. He had such beautiful, deep brown, soulful eyes, and now they are rolled back in his head as though he were caught permanently looking up in bafflement, lids half closed, iris invisible, his lips moving, softly muttering. As a boy he was …
No, no.
And so excited when she came home, standing in the hall waiting for her.
No.
And when Harvey was dying in the hospital he was so brave at the bedside in the last days, sitting with his arm around Louise.
No Paula, don’t look back, keep your eyes on the present, on the needs you have now, don’t let other people slip through the gaps. Guilt? She has nothing to feel guilty for. Is she being punished? Her husband, her son. Who next?
She pushes those thoughts away as her phone beeps a message at her. Nick has updated his Facebook page with a flier for the upcoming rave.
Return to Dreamland
. She closes her eyes. Holds his image in her mind.
Why not?
She hopes the past will not consume her, that she will not brood, dwell upon it. The great long, dizzying loops and returns, the cycling of time through the mind, its tides and seasons.
Back from work, dropping her things in the space behind the doorway and about to bring Lee in from Penny’s next door, she senses something is wrong with the flat, a change in the tension, poise, atmosphere of the rooms that only someone deeply familiar with them could detect, imperceptible to a stranger, even perhaps to someone who had lived there for years, but Paula has been here for getting on two decades now.
Her first thought is that it’s the Police again. They have been in, trying to find ways to discredit her, planting things. Perhaps they are still in here.
She steps quickly back through the door and taps on Penny’s window, after a second her face appears: you alright, darling?
Paula keeps her voice low; has anyone been in the flat today, did you see anyone, hear anything? The walls are thin enough.
No. Why? What’s wrong?
No one came past?
Come on, come in here, Penny says, running round to open the door. No one has been past, Lee and me have been watching like hawks, haven’t we?
Oh Penny, what am I going to do when you are gone? Paula asks, and laughs.
The bastards, Penny says, the bastards, lighting a Pall Mall. Don’t let them get to you, love.
Too late for that, she says and reaches out to stroke Lee’s head as she sits down at the table and accepts a cup of tea.
Louise about? In Wavelengths, I suppose, bossing everyone around.
She’s got a lot of energy that girl of yours, she’s a fighter. She told me that she will do it all, she told me she will study, work, look after Lee here. She said she doesn’t care how long it takes or what it takes. Penny laughs. She’s her mother’s girl, that one!
How is she Penny? I am worried she is going to get herself into trouble.
Penny looks confused and Paula laughs. No, not pregnant.
That’s the last thing I am worried about at the moment.
Oh she’ll be fine, she’s not stupid.
Neither was Lee.
Penny smiles. He is still a lovely boy, she says and rests her hand on his shoulder, he’s as much her son in many ways as Paula’s, in the way that Louise is as close to her as her own daughter. She remembers Paula and Harvey moving in and thinking what a good looking couple they were, what a beautiful family, Lee a tiny two year old, furious with energy, Paula all tall, pregnant and aglow, Harvey proud as punch and beaming, big arms full of clothes and boxes.