The festival took on a darker quality in the early hours of the morning. It always did in those crowds, when the drugs ran out and people began to fear the light of their ordinary lives leaking in. Repetitive bass boomed from a car park as people moved with dazed expressions and the shriek of laughing gas canisters tore through the dawn.
We danced under a makeshift wooden shack until it suddenly collapsed, tearing open shoulders and faces. Someone emerged from a warehouse wielding an angle grinder to fix it, and a rumour that a boy had lost a leg crackled electric through the air.
‘Let’s get out of here, shall we?’ said the architect, taking my hand. We climbed a shaky ladder to a roof that was arranged to look like a dining room. We had sex and afterwards there was blood pooled on the fake parquet floor. We couldn’t figure out which of our bodies it was coming from.
‘One of us must have cut ourselves or something,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, does it?’ I lay down in the blood and went to sleep.
44
My mother and I drink tea at the old wooden table; the only thing we didn’t burn.
‘The best meal I ever ate,’ she says, ‘was with your granddad, at this table. Lemon sole and new potatoes.’
‘What was the best part?’ I ask her.
‘I don’t know, really. It was very simple. Just me and him, at opposite ends. Butter on everything. Molten gold.’
‘Did you love him?’ I ask her.
‘Of course I did. He was a hard man, but he had a hard life. He gave my mam hell, but after she died, I started to let that go.’
‘Why?’
‘He taught me how to look after myself, I suppose.’
45
My first year ended and I didn’t go home. People’s parents came with big cars to move them out of halls with their suitcases, leaving the skins of their old selves under the beds for the next round of students to fumigate.
I sat on my suitcase in the street.
‘Where are you going to go?’ other people’s mothers asked me with concern. I shrugged.
My mam was hurt. ‘Well,’ she said, sadly. ‘It would be nice to have you here for the summer, but it’s up to you. You’re old enough to make your own decisions.’
I stayed on sofas for a couple of weeks until my friends and I secured our house for the next school year. It was a terrace in Elephant and Castle, just off the roundabout. There was no furniture and no electricity or hot water, but there was a gas stove and every morning after an icy shower I made instant coffee in a rusty pan that I found at the back of a cupboard. In the evenings my friends came round and we sat in the little garden surrounded by tea lights, drinking wine. I found a job in a different pub run by a foreboding landlady who hula-hooped on top of the bar on Saturday afternoons. It was just as chaotic but she had my back.
‘What do you want, babe?’ she barked at men when they lingered too long in front of the beer taps.
‘Foster’s, please, love.’
‘We don’t do Foster’s,’ she snarled, winking at me. ‘You’ll have to go somewhere else.’
I spent my days off cycling around the city and pasting collages across the walls of the house. I lay on the Heath and went on day trips with the architect to Brighton, where we ran along the seafront holding pink umbrellas. Every Sunday we went to the flower market on Columbia Road and bought flowers to match my dress. We sat on street kerbs and watched bands play in the sun. I spent my meagre tips on coffee and candles and I felt happy.
46
Josh turned sixteen. He left school and didn’t know what to do with himself. He loved trains. He liked the speed of them pulling into the stations and the thrill of the whistle as the doors slammed and they rushed off to other places. He had a discount railcard and spent his days riding up and down the country. He went from Durham to Manchester to Birmingham and back on his own, stopping off to eat chicken nuggets in a crowded station.
His favourite journey was the sleeper from London to Inverness, then on to Fort William. He would travel down to London in the daytime and meet me for an hour or two. We would wander along the canal or visit a museum, then I would go to Euston and wave him off.
‘Come with me,’ he pleaded when we got to his carriage. I peered in at the clean white bunk.
‘I can’t, Josh. Got work. Let’s plan a trip together sometime?’
‘Yeah, alright.’ He pulled his toothbrush and phone charger from his backpack and put them on the pillow.
‘You’re funny,’ I told him.
‘How come?’
‘Coming all this way, just to go back again.’
‘It’s so good, Luce. I can’t describe it. You go to sleep in the city and wake up in the mountains.’
I smiled. ‘You’re mad, you are. All those miles to go nowhere.’
He shrugged.
I gave him a hug. ‘We’ll go together soon. Promise.’
I left the station and walked through the dark streets, thinking about him riding through the night as the concrete disintegrated into open fields.
47
It begins to hailstone as I cycle home through the mountains. They are fat and they bounce off my skin, sharp and stinging. The distant hills are covered in white. I don’t know how to tell the difference between snow-clouds and rain-clouds. There is a weak half-rainbow in the distance and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
There is a certain hill I freewheel down every day that gives me an unbridled sense of happiness. I struggle past the bogs and the sewage plant. Mount Errigal looks down on me disapprovingly. I make my way around the corner and then suddenly I’m off, moving towards the wind turbine standing in the distance like a dirty angel. The fields are orange and brown and black yellow green and I take my feet off the pedals and stick them into the wind.
I often listen to Bob Dylan and pretend that I am him, hitching a ride on some highway and swaggering down the hill into the unknown. There is a kernel deep inside of me where the light can never reach that is one hundred per cent Dylan, flying past the mountains in winter. It is a special feeling; to be a 25-year-old Bob Dylan, on my own in the wilderness, in a snowstorm without a coat.
48
My skin started to fit a little better. I went swimming outdoors in the lido most mornings. I cycled to London Fields and spent hours doing lengths in the sun, watching the light dappling my arms and catching rainbows on the ends of my eyelashes. My head was clear and empty when I swam. Sometimes I went to Hampstead Ladies’ Pond and lay naked in the grass with the old women, feeling comforted by their posh, steady voices. They discussed world events beneath the trees and it seemed impossible that the roiling mass of the city with all of those grimy fingernails scrabbling to stay afloat could possibly exist beyond that leafy, moneyed bubble. I read poetry and drank beers on my own and then swam through the haze in the sludge among the lily pads, my lipstick strange and red against the water. I always forgot to wash it off. I loved the long, strong pull of my stomach as I moved through the pond and the tingles in my legs when I lay beneath the trees afterwards.
I trawled the five-pound basement in a vintage shop on Brick Lane and bought the outsized floral dresses nobody else wanted. I cut them and tied ribbons around the middle so they would fit me. I wore a pair of silver glittery jelly shoes with chunky heels and I clattered around, my arms dangling silver bangles. Some of the fog cleared and I had space for reading. I discovered Woolf and Plath and Sontag and began to feel less strange.
49
My mother called me to tell me she had sold our house.
‘I was going to clear out your room,’ she told me. ‘But then I thought you might want to come up and do it yourself.’
I softened inside as my train hurtled past the familiar chimneys with their smoke belching out. My mother and Ben met me on the platform and we all went to the pub. Groups of lads jeered and women in minidresses skittered around us. I felt skinny and weird perched on my seat. There was a delicate edge to me that hadn’t
been there before.
It felt good to be around people who didn’t give a fuck, who had never heard of Judith Butler and were just out for a good time. I was torn between a sense of pride that I’d got out and a bruised regret that I’d given it all away. It was as though I’d given up the keys to a special door. I worried I would never be able to claim that gentle roughness as my own again.
I went to a party with Rosie and some people from school.
‘You must be proper rich,’ a drunk boy said to me. ‘To be able to go to uni and that.’
‘Well, no,’ I explained. ‘I just got a student loan.’
‘A what?’ he asked me. No one had told him he could do that.
I spent a day on the floor in my old attic room, sorting through my things. I held up leather minidresses and spangled bolero jackets, jam jars filled with shells collected on beaches and stacks of photos and torn gig posters. I decided to throw it all away. I kept one box with my baby shoes and my old journals in it, and the amplifier for my neglected guitar. I packed everything else up into plastic bags for the charity shop. My mother and I sat in the kitchen among the bin liners and we both felt wobbly.
‘There’s just so much, isn’t there?’ she marvelled. ‘So much feeling caught in these walls. Where did those years go, eh?’ I helped her scrub skirting boards and clean fingerprints from unexpected places.
As we pulled out of the street with her car piled high full of our junk, I felt all of those years flushing through me. I thought of my dad passed out in front of the fire, and my mam in tears on the sitting room floor. I thought of Josh poorly in his cot and all the parties and the hangovers and the days curled up with my boyfriend in front of the telly. I felt relieved that I didn’t have to face those things any more, and that all of those memories could be left behind, ground into the carpets. I liked the idea that everything I owned was in London. I wasn’t one of those people with spare bedrooms full of clutter, rummaging for traces of themselves among torn pairs of jeans and tangled strings of fairy lights.
50
I have begun to measure my days by the tides. I often lose track of time here, but I can tell roughly what time of day it is by whether the tide is high or low. Tides are in my body and in my blood. They connect me to my mother in waters that burst and break. The sea is cold and salty. There are unknown things lurking beneath the water, fissures running through the earth I cannot see.
51
The new school year rolled around and I felt different. I coasted through the city on my bike, weaving in and out of traffic on my way to lectures. I did at least some of the reading and sat in my classes in shirts I embroidered myself, warm in my big leather jacket, my notes arranged in some semblance of order.
My new workplace turned out to be the haunt of a roster of famous artists. I leaned over the bar during quieter periods, chatting about politics and writing with musicians I’d grown up listening to and a selection of the Turner Prize shortlist. The landlady was always getting ready to go to some kind of dinner or opening and she flung her Chanel handbag across the counter so that a wad of notes often floated to the ground. I noted her perfume and jewellery and the dirty Dolce & Gabbana pumps she wore to scrub the floor. She left the imprint of her lips on my cheek in an Yves Saint Laurent smear.
‘Babe?’ she called. ‘Get me a lemonade.’ Her husband had died a few years earlier, and in mourning she gave up drinking alcohol and wearing colour.
‘Not in that glass!’
I hurriedly emptied the half-pint glass I had prepared.
‘In a brandy glass, babe. Let me tell you something. Whatever you have to drink, drink it out of a nice-looking glass. Orange juice out of champagne flutes, that kind of thing. It tastes better that way.’ She winked. ‘Trust me.’
I forced myself to start contributing in seminars. I took a poetry module and the lecturer began to call on me for my interpretation of the poems when no one else was speaking.
‘There’s something unique about the things you have to say,’ he told me in a tutorial. I sat up a little straighter. It turned out he was from the north-east, too.
‘Lost my accent years ago, though,’ he said, sadly. ‘Had to. I would never have got a job in academia with it.’
I spent a lot of time with the architect. I felt deeply envious that he could manifest his ideas in such a tangible way. He was older than me and talked offhand about old girlfriends and countries he had lived in. I loved the word ‘ex’. I was desperate to have a past of my own.
I figured out how to use the library and my essays started to make sense. I worked out how to shape the questions to fit the topics I was actually interested in and I took a couple of creative writing classes. I copied out Anne Carson poems and Blu-tacked them to my bedroom walls.
There was an afternoon when I felt like it clicked. It was one of the first spring days towards the end of my degree. I’d been writing in the library all day; an essay on Virginia Woolf’s depiction of trauma. I had a big stack of books in my arms to return and I was balancing a coffee that the man who worked downstairs in the café always gave me for free. I was wearing a long dress patterned with painted lilies, red lipstick and a pair of boots. I walked out into the sun to unlock my bike and bumped into a group of friends. We made plans to meet in a bar later. I was beginning to understand who I was and what I was doing there. I had a sneaking suspicion that I deserved to be there just as much as anyone else.
And then, just as I was really beginning to enjoy my lectures and have faith in my ideas, I graduated. People talked vaguely about internships and travelling but no one really seemed to know where they were going. The architect moved out of the warehouse and I moved into his new flat.
‘Just for a couple of weeks,’ I told him. ‘Until I figure out what to do.’
52
I was so nervous about my graduation ceremony. I resented the pomp and the grandeur and I couldn’t afford to hire the robes we had to wear. I felt guilty about the chance I’d been given and the opportunities I had. Somewhere along the way in my desperation to assimilate, I got snagged on a sliver of middle-class guilt and mistook it for my own. I mumbled to the architect about having paid for my degree and the ceremony being a celebration of privilege, failing to recognise that if anyone was celebrating it should have been me.
My mother was so excited. She called me for weeks asking what she should wear.
‘I don’t know, Mam,’ I told her. ‘A nice dress? I’ve never been to a graduation before.’
She called me again. ‘Your dad wants to come.’
I was secretly pleased. Despite the anger I felt at his neglect, I still wanted to be acknowledged by him.
‘But what will it be like?’ I asked her. ‘You two spending the day together?’
‘It’s one day,’ she told me. ‘I’m sure we can manage one day.’
53
I left your world to straddle another and the thing about balancing is that sometimes you fall. The boundaries between most things are very thin.
54
I felt sick the morning of the ceremony. I spent years sandpapering my edges so I could slip into the world of my friends, whose parents were doctors and academics; people who fainted at the ballet and made oblique references to Christina Rossetti. I was nervous about how my parents would look beside them and what unseen things might become clear to me.
They all came down. My mother was glamorous in a cocktail dress and lipstick and it was the first time I had seen my father in a suit. Josh wore his prom outfit and they stood on the Barbican terrace in the sun, small beneath the monstrous grey and wearing too much perfume. They were nervous of the city, and my friends, and each other. Other people’s parents wore trousers and open-necked shirts or drab dresses and chunky jewellery. It was a formality for them; something tedious they had done before and would probably do again. My family were overdressed and too excited. They were perfect.
‘Bit weird this place, isn’t it, Luce?’ said my dad with his han
ds in his pockets, looking around.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well.’ He looked up at the tower blocks. ‘It’s just a massive council estate.’
There was a heatwave and we prickled under our heavy robes. A man from the hire company helped me into mine. His hand brushed my bum.
‘Now, I wouldn’t get too close to your boyfriend while you’ve got this on!’ He winked. ‘You’re going to be a bit warm, to say the least.’
My friends mingled after the ceremony having pictures taken together, but I felt anxious to get out of the stuffy building and away from the potential for disaster. People trickled into the sunshine with restaurant reservations as we made for Regent’s Park. All I wanted was to take my shoes off and lie in the grass. We bought carrot sticks and posh crisps from Marks & Spencer.
My mother and I jumped on the bus while my dad took Josh back to their hotel, to change out of their suits. We sat side by side and watched my city flicker past.
‘Seems just like yesterday you moved here, doesn’t it, Luce?’ I looked at the streets that had once been unfamiliar and were now imprinted in the backs of my calves. I looked at the towers and the pavements I had wheeled my bike along in the cold. I thought about all of the tiny parts of myself that were lost. Strands of my hair caught in plugholes and chunks of my knees smushed into gravel outside nightclubs. I remembered how new and shiny I was at the beginning and I wondered what I looked like now. I squeezed my mam’s hand as the sun leaked through the window, melting our make-up.
When my dad found us in the park he was drunk. I liked how he juxtaposed the familiar skyscrapers; a fragment of my past definitively and willingly existing in my present. We cracked open a bottle of Asti and I watched my parents laughing together in front of the flower beds. They seemed relaxed and the knots in my muscles slipped into the grass. A royal baby was due to be born that day and Josh went off to the hospital with his camera, yearning to be part of something important. We lay on our backs and looked at the sky through our sunglasses.
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