The Cost of Living

by Deborah Levy

  While the Big Silver continued talking about himself, I saw the man who cried at the funeral coming towards me. We embraced warmly, lingering for a while in that embrace to acknowledge the last time we had met in very charged circumstances – the funeral of his long-time lover, the end of my marriage.

  ‘How are you?’ he whispered in my ear.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Well, okay,’ I replied, ‘this afternoon I had an argument with my copy-editor about commas. She is keen to insert more commas into my text for easy reading. She loves commas. Her affliction is nothing less than a comma psychosis. She inserts them everywhere. It is like working with a comma on Viagra.’

  When the man who cried at the funeral laughed, it occurred to me that I had only heard him cry, which was an odd way round to meet someone.

  We were both now talking over the Big Silver.

  He said he had been reading Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America.

  ‘Apparently Stein thought it is obvious when something is a question so she stopped using question marks and she thought that commas were servile. In her view it was up to the reader if they wanted to stop and take a breath.’

  He leaned forward to lift two glasses of champagne off a silver tray and passed one of them to me.

  It had taken him a while to recover from his ex-lover’s shocking death, but a strange thing had happened. He told me that Love had not only signed the visitor’s book, it had moved in. His name was Geoff. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘where’s your pearl necklace? I thought you never took it off, even when you swim?’ After I had told him about it exploding on my behalf in the front car park, he said, ‘If you are doing all the heavy lifting, you should do something that’s the opposite.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Why don’t you make ice cream?’

  He took my arm and led me into the garden.

  ‘Who is the man you were talking to with the silver hair?’

  ‘He writes military biographies. War is his subject,’ I said to my new friend, who had given up smoking but was nevertheless smoking.

  ‘Ah,’ he replied, waving his cigarette about, ‘I wonder if he agrees with Brecht: “War is like love; it always finds a way.” Aren’t you cold in that dress?’

  ‘No. I spend so much time outside I don’t feel the cold any more.’

  ‘I need a blanket if we’re going to stand here.’

  While he shivered and smoked, I told him about a sixty-year-old female masseuse who had recently pummelled my spine as I lay on my stomach with my face shoved into the hole in the massage bed. She had apparently spent the weekend buying soft blankets – very-good-quality mohair and hundred per cent wools – which she had laid over her sofa and chairs. When I asked her, ‘Why blankets?’, she said, ‘Because the war is over.’

  I had found myself guffawing with my face in that hole. She was laughing too. I wasn’t sure what we were laughing about, except to guess she was alluding to making peace with an undisclosed hurt.

  I would have liked to know more about her war. It was not won on the playing fields of Eton, that’s for sure.

  We could see that people had started to dance inside the house.

  The man who cried at the funeral pushed me towards the door. ‘Come on, your dress is so lovely, let’s dance, let’s dance, let’s dance.’

  We danced as if it was our very last night on earth – and to celebrate his new love and my new freedom and to celebrate my having been nominated for a big literary prize and to a thousand and one nights without pain, and because, as he put it, ‘life is as fragile as a glass slipper’. I didn’t quite get that, but he said he’d had too much champagne so maybe he meant a glass coffin – which was even more bewildering, but then he was The Man Who Cried at the Funeral.

  We kicked off our shoes just like the song that was being played told us to do. Three luscious red velvet sofas had been pushed against the walls. We whirled and leapt around and sweated and then a striped kitten slunk on to the dance floor, like a tiny leopard, its tail raised. I gently lifted it up from the feet of the crowd and placed it on top of my new friend’s head.

  ‘I can feel it purring through my fingers,’ he said. At that moment I thought the tempest was over. I was ready to do something I had never done before – like write a manifesto on the toilet wall in a pub.

  I believe in people who are nervous and whose hands shake a little

  The kitten had now escaped and was making its way towards the red velvet sofas, just as Bowie sang about falling and trembling and about a flower. I followed it and sat next to a woman with long black hair who was perched on the edge of one of the sofas. She was wearing a white shirt and was engrossed in sewing a small pearl button on to the left cuff. She was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear her that well because she had a needle in her mouth. My hair, which I always wore up, had come undone and I had a hairpin in my mouth. The man who cried at the funeral made his way towards us, very slowly and lightly, as if he were walking on a glass coffin.

  ‘Hello Clara,’ he said to the woman on the sofa, ‘I would like you to meet my friend. Do you know she can put her hair up with just one pin?’

  ‘Yes, I know how to do that too,’ she said.

  When I returned home, I spent an hour on the Internet in conversation with Gupta in India about my faulty Microsoft Word program.

  When I next looked at my chat box, Gupta had written, Don’t worry. I am here to help you.

  For some reason, the letter I on the screen was blinking and jumping and trembling.

  That’s how I felt too.

  SEVEN

  THE BLACK AND BLUISH DARKNESS

  My new life was all about fumbling for keys in the dark.

  I had a key to my mother’s house and a key for my daughter to get into her father’s flat. There was a key to Celia’s garden door that led to the writing shed and a key for the shed itself, a key to Celia’s house, a key to my electric bicycle, a key for the e-battery, a key known as a fob to get into my own building and then two keys for the front door. It was February in Britain. The early morning sky was like midnight. It was dark again in the afternoon when I locked the shed and walked through the sodden garden carrying the bike battery (which had been charging during the day). Then I unlocked the garden door (a tricky door to open and close even in daylight), wheeled the bike and my bags out of the garden door and locked it again. Often Celia’s car was parked in the driveway and it was near impossible to squeeze the bike past it. She was not getting any younger, given she was in her mid eighties, so I did not want to interrupt her from shouting at everyone in the house. Instead, I had to lift the whole heavy e-machine over the car bonnet without scraping off the paint.

  I bought a torch and carried it with me everywhere. I was also enjoying my new electric screwdriver. It fitted perfectly into my purse and looked like a small revolver. There was something very satisfying about pressing the red button and listening to it whirr like a maniac. I tightened up the loose screws in the garden door and in my shed door. This made locking and unlocking the doors easier in the dark. What with the keys, the screwdriver, the torch, my bags heavy with books and groceries and extension leads, it took some doing, even on an e-bike, to cycle up the perilously icy hill.

  One afternoon, I made my way from the writing shed to a meeting about a possible film option on one of my novels. I should have travelled by tube, but somehow my bike was looking particularly seductive, standing tall and strong under the apple tree. At Mornington Crescent, I was obliged to turn the bike upside down on the pavement and attend to the links of the chain, which had jammed.

  My hands were covered in black oil and I’d had to run into a noodle bar, buy a pot of green tea and then wash my hands in the toilet; no mirror, no soap, no hot water. It was very important not to be late for this meeting. There were school trips to pay for and a gas bill and also the horror of my computer starting to make strange clicking sounds wh
en it refused to shut down.

  The executives sat around a polished oak table in a windowless room. They were intelligent, experienced, groomed, at the top of their game. I was offered a glass of water and accepted it gratefully. After a while, I realized I had an old-fashioned idea of what a meeting such as this one should be like, and I had acquired it from watching too many black and white movies. What I had in mind was an atmosphere in which we sipped negronis in a nightclub in Rome, plotting the main arc of the film while dancers adorned in feathers cavorted in the background.

  I was asked an important question. Who did I consider to be the main character in my novel Swimming Home – Kitty Finch or Jozef Nowogrodzki, also known as Joe? I replied that if it was Joe’s film, the scriptwriter might be obliged to rather literally fill in his back story (born in Poland, Jewish, smuggled through a forest in 1943 age five en route to East London) but that it would be more interesting to give the task of tracking his back story to Kitty Finch, who anyway believed she was in telepathy with him. I suggested that I should write the screenplay because I knew how to unfold this back story from Kitty’s point of view. ‘We don’t need to tell the past through flashback,’ I said, but when asked to explain how I might reveal the past in another way, I found myself stuck for words.

  Actually, the coexisting past and present was a technique I was starting to develop in my fiction, and I could see how it might work in film. They clearly didn’t believe me and asked me to email them a list of minor and major characters by the end of the week.

  After the meeting I made my way to a café for a much-needed espresso. There was a large mirror in a baroque gold frame hanging on the wall. This is where I discovered that I had sat through that meeting with three small muddy leaves stuck in my hair. I think this was because I’d had to duck under the apple tree to get out of the shed. It was not a good look, but it could have been worse: spiderwebs trailing on the edges of my ears, small dead bugs hanging from my eyebrows. Working in a shed had its problems when it came to grooming. And so did riding an electric bike. In a sense it was the main character in my life.

  It was such hard work. The main character is always the hardest work.

  My e-bike was more demanding than my children. Earlier, on my way to the meeting, two different men had stopped to ask about my e-bike, one at the traffic lights at Camden Town, one by the fruit stall outside Goodge Street station. I had wheeled the bike over to this stall to buy one single purple plum. At first I thought these pleasant men were just finding an excuse to speak to me because I was incredibly attractive to them, but no, I was the minor character and the e-bike was a countercultural celebrity. I suppose the men were minor characters and I had stepped outside my character, happy to explain that the maximum assisted speed was 15mph and it was fitted with a motor of 200 watts. While I talked to them, I felt I had joined a kind of brotherhood, while at the same time struggling with motherhood. I was an e-matriarch in a patriarchal reality. Life was hard and I had no script. Perhaps I was writing one. And what had happened to the plum? I had bitten into it while I spoke to the man at Goodge Street station. It was juicy, firm and plump. If I was writing the script, that plum would be a turning point in the plot – the man would have said, ‘By the way, do you know there are three leaves stuck in your hair?’

  I knocked back the espresso and stood up to continue with my day. Whatever, it was essential to add a compact mirror to my bag, along with the lipstick, electric screwdriver, fountain pen, torch and the small bottle of essential oil of rose (Rosa centifolia), which I was now applying to my wrists to make me feel calmer.

  Does serenity smell like a rose? A rose is kind-hearted. A rose is consoling. The rose is the empress of the pinks. Perhaps a rose is the empress of the blues. When Bessie Smith sang about not being able to live in a house that was falling down, that’s how I felt about my old life. It is also the song that James Baldwin listened to one winter in the mountains of Switzerland, where far away from Harlem he wrote Nobody Knows My Name.

  Actually, I had no idea what serenity felt like. Serenity is supposed to be one of the main characters in old-fashioned femininity’s cultural personality. She is serene and she endures. Yes, she is so talented at enduring and suffering they might even be the main characters in her story.

  It was possible that femininity, as I had been taught it, had come to an end. Femininity, as a cultural personality, was no longer expressive for me. It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the early twenty-first century. What would it cost to step out of character and stop the story? There were many variations of course, including corporate femininity, in which women with male bosses were still required to dress in a way that gave a nod to the boardroom and the bedroom. How was it possible to be erotically and commercially switched on for your boss all the time? That sort of femininity does not wear very well. After a while it starts to show the dirt. My friend Sasha, who was financially thriving, had told me that on Fridays she and her female work colleagues ended the week by getting blind drunk in various bars and vomiting all over their corporate uniforms. I thought Sasha and her friends were late capitalism’s version of the maenads, female followers of Dionysus also known as the ‘raving ones’, except they wore bull helmets and could tear up sturdy trees when intoxicated. In fifth-century-BC Athens their bodies were imaginatively possessed by various gods. Sasha pointed out that in the twenty-first century, her body was imaginatively possessed by her various male bosses – who insisted that wearing high heels and short skirts to work was incredibly empowering.

  No, there were not that many women I knew who wanted to put the phantom of femininity together again. What is a phantom anyway? The phantom of femininity is an illusion, a delusion, a societal hallucination. She is a very tricky character to play and it is a role (sacrifice, endurance, cheerful suffering) that has made some women go mad. This was not a story I wanted to hear all over again.

  It was time to find new main characters with other talents.

  As I walked towards my e-bike, which I had locked up outside a Tesco Express, I groaned at the disaster of that meeting. How was I going to conquer the film world if I sauntered into the executive suite with leaves in my hair? How was I going to get a break if I couldn’t find words to explain a technique for flashback in the present tense that I had learned from film in the first place? Directors such as David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais were my muses and teachers in this regard. And in particular the films of Marguerite Duras, mostly because of the ways she cinematically revealed the return of repressed memory in the lives of her screen protagonists. She had made a language in film that cut as close to human subjectivity as it is possible to get without dying of pain.

  Somehow I had repressed that information in the windowless executive suite.

  One of my own undiscovered talents, I was convinced, was to be a scriptwriter. Everyone I knew was bored with the same old performance of masculinity and femininity written for the major and minor characters. I flash-forwarded to my seventies, and saw myself typing at the edge of my swimming pool in California. I would be a legendary sun-damaged genius of cinema, known for typing in my swimming costume, surrounded by verdant tropical plants which always open the mind and make something happen. At lunchtime my staff would shake up my cocktail and toss fresh squid on the barbecue.

  It had started to rain. The London pavements smelt of old coins.

  Yes, my sunlit garden in California would be full of chirping colourful birds. The bird clock in my London apartment was just a rehearsal for the real thing. At the end of the day, shattered from finding techniques to haul the past into the present tense without a single flashback, I would swim in the moonlight with my chosen companion – while all the minor and major characters in my film script patiently waited for me to greet them in the morning. Was my chosen companion a minor or major character? Major, obviously. And where were my children? Oh no! They woul
d be grown up, living their own lives, dreading a call from their mother – It’s her, she’s in California.

  And what could I say to my daughters? ‘Um, I’m not like those mothers who lived through you, no no, not at all. I have a major character in the pool with me. I am living a full exciting life. By the way, what are you doing for Christmas? You know the climate is tropical here?’

  I walked into Tesco Express and bought a chicken to roast for my daughter and her friends. As a second thought, I also purchased a single sprig of rosemary in a small sealed bag.

  That night as I cycled up the hill in the pouring rain, my bag split open and out of it spilled a book by Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the charger to my electric bike battery (instructions: do not expose to rain), a lipstick, a torch, a screwdriver and five tangerines. The traffic had to stop while I looked for the chicken. It was lying like roadkill near the wheels of the car that had run it over, flattened but intact, its skin imprinted with the marks of the tyre. I picked it up and let the tangerines roll down the hill.

  While I smashed garlic and lemons into a paste to marinate the chicken that had been killed twice, once in a slaughterhouse and once on a London road, I realized my clothes were soaked from the rain. I was truly exhausted and I was alone. There was no adult around to say, ‘Why don’t you take off those wet clothes and have a hot shower?’ I was alone and I was free. Free to pay the immense service charges for an apartment that had very little service and sometimes not even basic utilities. Free to support my family by writing on a computer that was about to die. It was urgent that I made that list of minor and major characters and emailed it to the executive suite without delay.