The PowerBook (15 page)

We took a taxi to Paddington Station. She had just missed a train to Oxford, so we sat in the Costa Coffee place and ordered cappuccino and
tortina
, and tried to talk above the house music and the station announcements. There wasn’t much to say.

‘We should have let it end in Paris.’

‘Then it would have been nothing but a memory.’

‘A happy memory,’ she said.

‘In Capri, it turned into a possibility.’

‘I know.’

‘A door opened. A door in a blank wall.’

‘Love is a door in a blank wall.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes.’

There was something I had to know.

‘In Capri—’

‘Yes …’

‘When I came to find you—’

‘Yes.’

‘I was sure you wanted to risk it.’

‘I did.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘I did.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I couldn’t do it. I can’t untangle my whole life.’

‘And yet you came to London.’

‘I had to see you again.’

‘What’s the problem? Is it money?’

‘No.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I can’t be an exile from my own past.’

‘I don’t want your past.’

‘That’s just it. I can’t start again at year zero.’

Railway station. Point of arrival. Point of departure. A transit zone. How light she looked, with just a suitcase she could carry in one hand. Inside that suitcase was a marriage, America, a life of which I knew nothing. Inside that suitcase were doors I had never opened into rooms I wouldn’t recognise. The suitcase was stuffed with letters and an address book and a store card for a shopping mall, and dinner parties I had never been to, and wouldn’t go to now. In that suitcase were invitations from friends and pre-sets on a car radio tuned to stations I had never heard. In that suitcase were bad dreams and secret hopes. The dirty linen
was in a special nylon compartment. Her childhood was in there—the awkward child with rough plaits who grew into a beautiful heavy-haired woman, who never quite believed the compliments of the mirror. Her husband was in there, or maybe he was strapped to the side, where you usually keep the lifeboats.

I looked at the suitcase, suddenly heavy, too heavy to carry, and I realised that she could never drag it with her. She was right—it would have to be let go, or taken home and unpacked again.

‘Let’s just walk away,’ I said.

‘Weren’t you listening?’

‘Yes. I mean both of us. Together. You from your life. Me from mine.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’ll leave everything behind too.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘I can work anywhere. I can sell my house.’

‘Where would we go?’

‘Italy? Ireland? Where do you want to go? Paris?’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘I can. I will. If you will.’

What should stop me? What does a person need in this life except a roof, food, work and love? Here was the person I loved. I am able to work. Where the roof is and where the food is doesn’t matter.

‘If you’ll give up your past, I’ll give up mine,’ I said.

(She looked at her suitcase.)

‘I’ll bring clothes, books and the cat. That’s all.’

(Her suitcase was getting bigger.)

‘We can start again with furniture. We can make new friends.’

(The suitcase was filling up the coffee house.)

‘We’ll rent an apartment overlooking the river.’

(The suitcase was pressing against the walls.)

‘With a bed and a chair and the morning sun.’

(The suitcase was pressing against my chest.)

‘When we open the windows, we’ll be like birds.’

(The suitcase was in my ribcage.)

‘Our happiness will be like the flight of birds.’

There was an announcement. The 4.15 to Oxford was standing at Platform 9. You stood up. You picked up your case.

We walked to the dirty hissing train and found you a seat opposite a Walkman wearer and a woman reading Hello! magazine. This is the emotional and cultural life of the nation. No wonder grand gestures fall flat. How can you say yes when everything around you is saying no?

If you had said yes, I would have been scared to death, and it might have been a mistake, but I would have done my part. How can you go back? How can I? I’ll probably sell my house now anyway. My life doesn’t make sense. Starting again, as clean as I can, is the only way I’m going to make sense of it. The train, the station, the noise, are meaningless. Your leaving is absurd. I can’t stand it. I sit down and take your hand.

‘Come with me. Come with me now.’

Here are two endings. You choose.

Two minutes to go. I’m holding your hand. The woman reading
Hello!
magazine is clearly disgusted at the sight of real feeling and gets up to sit elsewhere. The Walkman boy props his feet on her seat.

The train is leaving, leaving now, and you won’t meet my eyes. I can’t come with you. You’re not coming with me. The whistle blows. I have to jump up, forcing apart the closing doors. Then I’m outside again, walking down the platform, walking faster and faster, miming at you to pull the emergency cord. Just pull it. The train will stop. You can get off, leave your bag, and come with me. I’m running now. There’s still time, still time. Then there’s a moment when time is so still it stops and the train moves ahead for ever.

Two minutes to go. I’m holding your hand. The woman reading
Hello!
magazine smiles at me. She’s sorry for me.

You’re looking at me and there’s still a chance. Dear love, risk everything, there is no other way.

The whistle blows. I stand up, still holding your hand, and suddenly you’re on your feet, and
we’re both out of the closing door as it shuts on your past, shuts on your suitcase, and the woman is miming desperately that you’ve left your bag.

The train is gathering speed now, taking time with it, and we’ve found a second where there is no time. The second that beats between your life and mine.

Then the clock is ticking again, but we’re together. The train moves ahead without us.

Night.

I’m sitting at my screen reading this story. In turn, the story reads me.

Did I write this story, or was it you, writing through me, the way the sun sparks the fire through a piece of glass?

I see through a glass darkly. I cannot tell whether the moving shapes are on the other side, or whether they are behind me, beside me, reflected in the room.

I cannot give my position accurately. The coordinates shift. I cannot say, ‘Where,’ I can only say, ‘Here,’ and hope to describe it to you, atom and dream.

Why did I begin as I did, with Ali and the tulip?

I wanted to make a slot in time. To use time fully I use it vertically. One life is not enough. I use the past as a stalking horse to come nearer to my quarry.

My quarry is you and I, caught in time, running as fast as we can.

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.

Here’s my life, steel-hitched at one end into my mother’s belly, then thrown out across nothing, like an Indian rope trick. Continually I cut and retie the rope. I haul myself up, slither down. What keeps the tension is the tension itself—the pull between what I am and what I can become. The tug of war between the world I inherit and the world I invent.

I keep pulling at the rope. I keep pulling at life as hard as I can. If the rope starts to fray in places, it doesn’t matter. I am so tightly folded, like a fern or an ammonite, that as I unravel, the actual and the imagined unloose together, just as they are spliced together—life’s fibres knotted into time.

Gently the rope swings back and forth through the mirror, through the screen. What is my life? Just a rope slung across space.

Poor Ali. What happened to him? He never did deliver his bulbs to the Botanic Garden at Leiden. He bought a piece of land by the river and planted a pleasure garden for the ladies of Holland.

Tulip mania is well documented. Any economics textbook or gardening history will tell you that. And tell you too of the tulip’s later success in England, ‘where many partake of the delight of this noble flower’.

Ali’s story is not well documented, and the uses found by the ladies of Holland for this amorous flower have been kept a close secret.

A Dutch lady, Mrs van der Pluijm, taught the Earl of Hackney’s daughter how best to arrange her bulbs and stem and the practice soon spread. Few men were aware of their wives’ and daughters’ true passion for this Exotic from the East, and as men are apt to try and please women, and love to gamble, it was easy enough to whip a craving into a craze.

When Ali unstrapped her bulbs and planted them in the good earth, she was obeying the command of the scriptures to go forth and multiply. Multiply she did—bulbs, balls, fortune and
friends—for every lady of fashion longed to walk in the gently nodding garden and lie under a tree, where she could experience for herself those exquisite attributes of variation that humans and tulips share.

There is some pictorial evidence to suggest that one man, at least, knew what was going on.

Rembrandt’s 1633 painting of his wife Saskia, as Flora, goddess of abundance and fertility, pictures Saskia/Flora holding a bridal bouquet suggestively near her pleasure-parts. In the centre of the bouquet, its head raised, is an opening tulip.

Rembrandt. During his lifetime he painted himself at least fifty times, scribbled numerous drawings and left twenty etchings. No artist had done this before. No artist had so conspicuously made himself both the subject and object of his work.

The picture changes all the time. He dresses up, wears armour, throws on a hat or a cloak. The face ages, wrinkles, smoothes out again. These are not photographs, these are theatre.

Why did Rembrandt use himself as his own prop?

Well, because he was there, but, just as importantly, because he wasn’t there. He was shifting his own boundaries. He was inching into other selves. These self-portraits are a record, not of one life, but of many lives—lives piled in on one another, and sometimes surfacing through the painter and into paint.

The fixed point is the artist himself, about whom we know enough to write a biography. But the fixed point is only the base camp—the journeys out from there are what interests. Rembrandt’s pictures are the journeys out and the psychic distance travelled can be measured as light.

Light made a palette of dark and shade out of Ali’s face as he slept. Was he back in Turkey, tending his mother’s eggplants and tomatoes? He might have been there, nervously dressed as a boy, telling his stories as tall as he was short.

The stories he told made him too old to be alive. Some made him not yet born. He slipped between the gaps in history as easily as a coin rolls between the floorboards. Ask him about anything and it’s himself he’ll produce, dusty but
triumphant—the piece of good luck, the hidden observer, in the right place at the right time.

Ali tells stories for a living. Someone has to do it. Stories are his bread and butter and he carries a slice in his pocket, to eat himself or to offer to others. He shares all he has, then goes home to make more.