Exquisite

by Sarah Stovell

  I cross the corridor, knock lightly and go in.

  ‘Emma,’ I say, and I do not flinch at the sight of her, beaten on the bed.

  Slowly, she turns her head. She looks at me for a long time. I take the seat beside her.

  ‘Alice,’ she says.

  I say nothing.

  She reaches for my hand. I let her clasp it in the bones of her own.

  Her voice is a whisper, hard as sandpaper. ‘Thank you.’

  I am silent.

  ‘Put it right,’ she says, and her grip tightens on my hand. ‘Forgive me now, and put it right.’

  A golden apple, wet with love. I take my hand away. Sweat glints on my palm, like poison.

  I put the pages down. This was autobiography, clearly – something I usually had no time for, but I could forgive this one. Its author must still be floundering in youth, hadn’t yet found a theme bigger than her mother that she could harness. And she was in pain, too. Oh, the words were brutal, the language sharply controlled, but I caught the vulnerability beneath: the longing; that endless, endless longing for the elusive love of the mother.

  I fired up my laptop and typed an email to the centre administrator of the country house where the course was being held.

  Subject: Students selected for Advanced Fiction, taught by Bo Luxton.

  I typed the first name, then highlighted it and put it in bold, to indicate that I thought the student worthy of financial assistance.

  Alice Dark.

  2

  Alice

  I rose to the surface of sleep. Before I’d even opened my eyes, I was aware of that old slump of my brain, my charred throat, the pain. I glanced at the clock. 12:36 pm. Another day moving on without me.

  Next to me, Jake slept on, the unwashed lump of him taking up too much space on the mattress. That mattress was a symbol of all our failures, I thought. We weren’t even mature enough to sleep more than six inches off the floor. What hope was there for either of us ever forging a path through the brutal world of the arts?

  I stood up, manoeuvring through scattered ashtrays, pouches of tobacco and last night’s empty lager bottles to the shower room. I could hear the sounds of Chris and his girlfriend shagging in the room next door. God, no one in this house had a job. They moved through time as if it were endless, their days not numbered. All anyone did was sleep, smoke, drink, fuck and talk about how great they would be one day.

  But this was what had attracted me to Jake in the first place: his brazen rejection of mainstream life; his refusal to conform. He’d told me when we met that he was a painter. It was his only passion; he couldn’t bear to do anything else. And he’d found a way to make a living from it – hauling his triptychs of colourful, geometric patterns down to the Lanes every Saturday and waiting for young professionals from London to come and buy them. That’s what Brighton was to these people: a place where you bought original artwork from unknown, impoverished painters standing on street corners. One day, when the artist won the Turner Prize, this early work would be rare and valuable, and dinner guests would envy the purchaser their gift for spotting genuine, embryonic talent.

  In reality, that was all horseshit, and Jake knew it. His marketable work was rubbish. He knocked it out over a couple of hours on a Friday night, in between roll-ups and glugs of Special Brew, and I would have to listen to him lamenting the poor taste of a public who hung this crap in their homes, while the other stuff – the real stuff; the good stuff that he laboured over – went unnoticed.

  When I met him the previous October, Jake had just finished a serious painting. He was going to spend a year putting an exhibition together; an agent had seen a piece of his work and been excited about it, but he didn’t have enough of a collection yet for her to sign him up.

  I said, ‘Oh, but that’s brilliant. You must do it.’

  He smiled shyly at me from behind his pint. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’

  Jake was just what I needed, I thought then. A man who’d turned his back on conventional expectations and was carving his own, alternative way to success. It was something I had to do, too. I’d been trapped in my admin job for so long, I could actually feel my personality being eroded by spreadsheets and extensive Word documents – each ten thousand words long, and not a single word interesting.

  I knew where I was headed if I kept this up. It was a one-way street to blankness – the endless treadmill of boredom that sucked everything out of you until your eyes clouded over and the spark of intelligence left your face, and you spent your days longing for five o’clock and your evenings watching people behaving badly on television because they were desperate, so desperate not to live tiny, insignificant lives like yours that they would actually do this: They would actually suck someone’s cock in front of the nation because they had to be remembered for something, and it was better to be remembered for sucking someone’s cock on Channel 4 than nothing at all … And I knew, as clearly as I knew night from day, that this life would destroy me, and I couldn’t live it.

  University had spoiled me. I knew conventional wisdom said that university was meant to prepare me for the workplace, but instead I’d spent three glorious years at York, doing whatever I wanted: a module in Shakespeare, a module in the Romantics, and even, for fun, the odd module in writing stories or novels. I hadn’t really understood that, afterwards, unless I’d somehow achieved greatness in something by the age of twenty-one, I’d have to abandon everything I loved (because no one paid anyone to sit around reading books) and grind away at a living which was, in all honesty, barely a living at all.

  It had been hard, then, to keep up with the things I loved. The energy dripped out of me and I had nothing left to give to my passions, and although I’d impressed my tutors at college, there were no grants available for someone whose only recommendation was a first-class degree and a love of the written word. Everyone had a first-class degree and a love of the written word. The people handing out grants wanted something more than that, though they couldn’t tell you what it was. It was something indefinable. Magic.

  But it wasn’t magic, I knew that. It was only magic to those who didn’t do it. For me, writing was a craft that came slowly, each word on the page some sort of mini birth. A labour. I missed it.

  About two weeks after meeting Jake, I took action. I stopped going to work. I didn’t even hand in my notice, just woke up one morning and decided not to go. Then I turned my phone off, sat at my table – which wasn’t really a table, just a tea chest with a zebra-striped cover over it – and wrote. I did this for three days. All that came out was a load of thinly veiled angst about my mother, but it was a start: eight hundred words, there on the screen. Impulsively, I sent it off to the New Writers’ Foundation, an organisation that ran week-long courses for aspiring authors in big, old houses across the country: Devon, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Northumberland. I was asking a lot, I knew. The course I wanted to do was a select one: Advanced Fiction. You had to be good, or at least reasonably good, to be allowed on it. Also, it cost £650. I filled in a form for a fee waiver.

  The course was in May. It was late April now and I still hadn’t heard back. I assumed I hadn’t made the cut.

  I stepped out of the shower, wrapped myself in a towel – damp, slightly smelly – and went back to the bedroom to get dressed. Jake was still asleep, so I made a lot of noise in an attempt to rouse him. He was meant to be at the Job Centre at one-fifteen or he’d be sanctioned and have his benefits stopped. It was the one thing he had to do, this fortnightly twenty-minute restriction on his freedom, and he only ever managed it by the skin of his teeth.

  Jake fell into the category of ‘long-term unemployed’. Once, when I’d ended up going with him to sign on, I’d seen a red box flash up on the computer screen when the woman typed in his National Insurance number. ‘This person has been unemployed for fifteen years.’ A waster. A waste of space. A waste of money. A waste of all that was good in him. But he had talent, I thought, a talent that existed outside of
convention and needed nurturing.

  He was thirty-six now; I was twenty-five. Since getting together, we’d talked a lot about commitment: to each other; to our futures as creatives; to building a good life together; but none of the work he’d said he was going to do had materialised. He had nothing for an exhibition, save that solitary painting he’d finished before we met.

  He didn’t move now as I clattered about the room, taking clothes off hangers, moving mugs thick with the dregs of ancient coffee, banging my tub of moisturiser hard against the shelf. I looked at him with distaste. He was urban decay: cigarette ash and scattered tobacco on the bedclothes; a smell of dirt and sweat; and on the floor beside him, a bag of weed and three cut-out images of airbrushed, naked women that he wanked over on the nights I wasn’t there to do it for him.

  I left the room and went downstairs. Maria was in the kitchen, photographing an arrangement of sliced beetroot and coriander. ‘It’s for the new vegetarian restaurant on Ship Street,’ she explained. ‘I’m going to take them some samples of my work and see if they want me as their food photographer. I could do their menus.’

  ‘Won’t they have already sorted all that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Worth a shot. Where’s Jake?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘Sure. There’s a letter for you on the table.’

  Oh, God. Another credit reference agency, probably, chasing me for a bill run up by the shit who took my mobile phone two years ago and spent a grand before I’d even got round to calling Virgin and cancelling it. It was the only kind of post I got.

  I poured a mug of leftover coffee from Maria’s cafetière and reheated it in the microwave.

  Maria slung her camera bag over her shoulder and headed for the front door saying, ‘Remind Jake he still hasn’t paid me for this month’s electricity bill. I’m not buying beer until he coughs up.’

  I nodded, then turned to the letter on the table. It was from the New Writers’ Foundation. I’d given them Jake’s address because I was never at my bedsit. I braced myself for a polite note, saying I hadn’t been successful this time, but perhaps I’d be interested in one of their other courses, for beginners, at an extra cost of £2,000 because those students suffering my particular level of delusion required a special kind of expensive tutor.

  But it didn’t say that. It said they were delighted to offer me a place on the course, together with a full grant to cover fees and food, and looked forward to seeing me in May. My tutor would be Bo Luxton, and they strongly recommended I read some of her work before the course started.

  I was shocked. I read the letter again, slowly this time, then grabbed my jacket from where it lay on the sofa and set off to City Books, just round the corner. I’d never read Bo Luxton’s work before, though her name was vaguely familiar.

  The bell above the shop door rang as I entered. The woman behind the counter looked up at me.

  ‘Have you got anything by an author called Bo Luxton?’ I asked.

  ‘Her latest has just come out,’ she said, and led me to the display table in the centre of the shop.

  The Poet’s Sister. I turned it over and read the back. ‘1800. Dorothy Wordsworth has sacrificed all her marrying years to care for her brother. While he writes some of the world’s finest poetry, she darns his stockings, cooks his meals and changes his sheets. William cannot live without her, but now he is engaged to be married to their childhood friend, Mary. How will Dorothy survive this loss, and what is the truth of this strange and deep love that the locals of Grasmere call “unnatural and rotten”?’

  I took it to the desk, paid for it and left.

  Instead of walking back to Jake’s, I headed for my bedsit on Brunswick Place. I’d hardly been there for weeks, mainly because I hated it. The size of it, the hard brown carpet, the greasy walls, the depressing kitchen unit in the corner of the room with a rusty Baby Belling that scarcely worked. And the electricity meter that swallowed pound coins until I had none left, and all the lights went out and the food was gone.

  But it was a place to be alone. No one would visit me here.

  I got into bed and opened the book. The dedication first: ‘For Lola and Maggie.’ Then the opening:

  ‘At last, I was outside again, walking the cottage garden with my brother. The snowdrops had gone now and all over the grass, the daffodils were out, holding the last of the day’s sunlight in their petals.’

  I read on – fifty pages before I put it down. I envied the writer that lyrical beauty. Bo Luxton must be lovely, I thought. Only someone angelic at the core could write those sentences. I wanted to be taught by her, let her pull me away from that brutal voice I’d written in: ‘The Japanese always burn their dead.’ Bash, bash, bash. Anger on the page.

  Bo Luxton wasn’t like that, I thought. Bo must write with feathers.

  But somehow, I needed to get the money for the fare to Northumberland. The letter said to take the train to Alnmouth and a taxi to the village. I was skint. Since quitting my admin job, I’d worked four mornings a week in a language school run by a man who paid me cash and told me, if ever the Home Office visited, to say I was on work experience. It was hardly enough to cover my rent. Buying that book today had been an extravagance.

  I phoned Network Rail and asked for the price of a ticket if I booked it in advance. Round trip: £147. There was no way.

  Of course there was a way.

  In a box, in a drawer, was a bracelet my mother had given me on my eighteenth birthday, the last day I’d ever seen her, just before…

  I rummaged around among knickers and tights and tops and bras until I found it. It was still there, glinting and expensive. I’d never worn it.

  I put my jacket back on, slipped the bracelet in my pocket and set off for the computers at the library. I knew I’d be able to sell it quickly on eBay; though I also knew I was heading into danger now. I stored my mother carefully, shrunk her to the size of a trinket, shut her in a box and locked her away in some remote part of me. She only rose up in those moments when some professional was trying to harness my subconscious (it was why I stopped seeing professionals, in the end) or, as I found recently, if I was writing. She became inevitable then, and afterwards I’d have to commit to wasted days – long hours when I could do nothing but rage at the memory of her and the loss of her and the awful, unmendable break of us.

  And then I would have to recover.

  I walked through town briskly, past the shoppers and the tourists, the beggars and the buskers, keeping my eyes fixed straight ahead. Always, I was aware of my pocketful of silver. But I didn’t dwell on it, not until the moment I saw her.

  She was right there on the corner of Bond Street, a take-away coffee in her hand and a smile on her face so maternal and serene, it took my breath away.

  ‘Alice,’ she said, and held out her hand. ‘Alice.’

  I stood still, then walked towards her, my hand raised to take the one she held out to me.

  She frowned, confused, and I realised it wasn’t Alice she was saying, but something else, some other name, for some other child. As I watched, I saw the little girl she was with take her hand, and then the two of them walked together, away from me, until they were lost in the throng and I could see them no more.

  3

  Bo

  I wrote it all down and stuck it to the fridge – everything Gus would need to remember while I was away in Northumberland. Monday: Lola ukulele club 6 pm; Tuesday: swimming lessons 4 pm; Wednesday: Maggie drama class, Keswick, 5 pm; Thursday: learn spellings; Friday: maths homework.

  It made me feel like a dictator, but Gus hadn’t a clue. He knew the girls went to school and how to get them there, but that was as far as his understanding of their lives went. It was me who knew their hobbies and hatreds, their worries, their friends, the crazes they had to keep up with: loom bands, Shopkins, Moon Balls…

  He’d been forty-seven when I met him, with three grown-up children from two previous marriages. He’d thought he was having a mea
ningless one-night-stand, but I was twenty-five and had my sights set on marriage. I’d been struggling alone for ten years, ever since running away from my parents’ old caravan and taking myself to London, where I earned money in any way I could and wrote poetry and stories when the jobs ran dry and I left with time to fill. I took my work to open-mic nights. Then someone told me about an organisation that arranged mentoring. Experienced, well-known authors would take on someone like me – young, enthusiastic, with a lot to say – and work with them, sharing their insight and wisdom and helping new talent reach giddy heights. It was 1994. There were grants available for people like me. I made an application. A bestselling author accepted it, took me under her wing and, after two years, took me with her on a festival tour; she let me read alongside her at Hay.

  That was where I met him. He walked in, dressed in a suit, out of place, listened to me read and asked questions afterwards. He said he worked in advertising. We swapped phone numbers.

  I played it cool, of course, but I wasn’t going to let him go. He was good-looking, solvent, easy to get on with. He was also ancient, with two failed marriages behind him. He wouldn’t be looking for deep emotional entanglement or a love that would rock the world. I didn’t want that, either. I was suspicious of love and what it did to people – those dark depths of anguish and horror; the thought of it all made me shudder. And anyway, I didn’t seem to have it in me. Gus would be stable, reliable, happy enough with a normal, quiet life in a normal, quiet home. He was everything I wanted.

  We got married when I was twenty-nine – ‘Yes, I suppose we might as well,’ he said, when I asked him – and Lola was born three years later. I’d had to push him for children. He was too old, he said, and babies were exhausting. You needed to be young to keep up with them, to chase them round the supermarket when they ran off, to teach them everything they needed to learn: riding a bike, football, tennis … He’d done his time as a father.