Where Love Lies

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by Julie Cohen


  Novelists are magpies, and this shiny titbit fascinated me. I immediately copied it out and stuck it on my wall – this idea that your brain can, at any point, reproduce not only the sensations of something that’s happened to you in your past, but all the emotions that were associated with it as well. What if, I thought, a person were to have a seizure that felt like an emotion? Something that felt real, and more intense than everyday life? What about the feeling of falling in love – celebrated in a million pop songs, poems and love stories – the feeling that we believe is more authentic and precious than anything else?

  I was introduced to Dr Dirk Baumer, Research Fellow and Neurology Registrar at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, who told me that, although it’s not common, it’s entirely possible to have temporal lobe seizures caused by a cerebral aneurysm. He also told me that yes, those seizures could consist of evocative phantom smells, and emotions associated with a particular moment in the past. He explained the nature and symptoms of seizures to me, and he also passed me a number of case studies. One was of a man whose cerebral aneurysm was causing him to relive, in his own brain, specific scenes from his past life.

  The Dostoevsky quotation that forms the epigraph to Part Three of this novel is also in Sacks’s book, and that got me thinking, too. A person sick with love may not want to get better. They may prefer to stay in love, even though their love might kill them. It might work as an addiction, an artificial euphoria that nevertheless comes from the innermost part of a person’s being.

  I was halfway through writing the novel when I came across the quotation at the beginning of Part One, from Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Bliss’. Her heroine Bertha, a married woman, has an intense attachment to a female friend, something that makes her unbelievably happy, which lends a glow to everything. And yet the story is highly ironic (and has a masterful, cruel twist), because although we might fall in love with someone, we can never truly know what their innermost emotions are. We can only understand the reality inside our own heads.

  I collected all these things together and they made me excited. I wanted to write a story with an unreliable narrator, someone who can’t quite work out what love is, or what is real, or what she really wants. Someone who wants to be authentic but is at the mercy of structures in her brain. From my own experience I know that scent is incredibly evocative of the past. I’ve had the unsettling experience of catching a whiff of aftershave on a stranger in the street, and believing that I’d just passed the boy I used to date in high school. Quinn tells Felicity a story of opening a book and being overwhelmed by a memory because of a scent trapped between the pages, and that’s happened to me, too. So many of my friends and family have said the same: that scent can hijack you and transport you.

  My friend Ken’s surgery was successful as far as removing the aneurysm went; he no longer has a squid inside his head, and he doesn’t hear snatches of Star Trek: The Next Generation any more. But during surgery he suffered a stroke which caused damage to another part of his brain. He’s spent the last four years learning how to be himself in a new way. Ken was generous enough to talk frankly with me about his symptoms, treatment and rehabilitation, and to give me permission to lend certain parts of his wonky brain to a fictional woman. You can read his ongoing story at www.mylifeasasemicolon.com

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Ken Shapiro, Dr Dirk Baumer, Dr Natasha Onwu, Dr Matthew Cohen, Dr Joanna Cannon, Monika Mann (RN), Jennifer Cohen (RN), and my friend Ben Pearson’s mum.

  Thank you to Cat Cobain who teased out the story with tea. Thanks to Gemma Sims and her mother Sue Edwards. Thanks to Lee Weatherly and Ruth Ng, Brigid Coady and Anna Louise Lucia, and all of my Reading mummy chums. Thanks to Rowan Coleman, Miranda Dickinson, Kate Harrison, Tamsyn Murray and Cally Taylor for a particular weekend near the inception of this book. Thanks to Kathy Lewis, who donated to CLIC Sargent to have her name used for Quinn’s first love. Thanks to my husband, Dave Smith (aka ‘The Rock God’), for information about tour buses and life on the road, and for actually breaking Graceland.

  An enormous grateful slobbery hug type of thank you to my agent Teresa Chris, and to Harriet Bourton, Larry Finlay, Tessa Henderson and every single one of the team at Transworld who have made me so amazingly welcome.

  Finally, thank you to my family for showing me what love is.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Julie Cohen grew up in Maine and studied English at Brown University and Cambridge University. She moved to the UK to research fairies in Victorian children’s literature at the University of Reading and this was followed by a career teaching English at secondary level. She now writes full time and is a popular speaker and teacher of creative writing. She lives with her husband and their son in Berkshire.

  Her novel Dear Thing received great acclaim and was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection.

  Talk with Julie on Twitter: @julie_cohen or visit her website: www.julie-cohen.com

  Also by Julie Cohen

  Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak

  One Night Stand

  Honey Trap

  Girl from Mars

  Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom

  Getting Away With It

  The Summer of Living Dangerously

  Dear Thing

  For more information on Julie Cohen and her books, see her website at www.julie-cohen.com

  Can you imagine keeping a secret so devastating, you couldn’t even tell the people you love?

  Honor’s secret threatens to rob her of the independence she’s guarded ferociously for eighty years.

  Jo’s secret could smash apart the ‘normal’ family life she’s fought so hard to build.

  Lydia’s could bring her love - or the loss of everything that matters to her.

  Grandmother, mother and daughter – three women whose lives are falling apart. But one summer’s day, a single dramatic moment will force their secrets into the open.

  Can they save each other from falling?

  ‘A beautifully poignant and uplifting novel, exquisitely written and wonderfully wise’ Rowan Coleman

  Coming out in paperback in July 2016

  Read on for an extract . . .

  Chapter One

  Honor

  THE LAST STAGE of Honor Levinson’s life began at the top of the stairs in her home in North London.

  The windows had been cleaned two days before by the young man who came every spring with his bucket and ladder. The sun shone through the glass, warming a stripe of carpet and wall, stroking against Honor’s cheek as she passed through it on the way to the stairs, carrying a basket of laundry to be washed.

  She was thinking of the laundry she used to have to do: the weight of PE kits and trousers caked with mud at the knees. School uniforms and gardening clothes, shirts that needed ironing, knickers and pants and handkerchiefs. So many loads every week, one after the other, unrelenting, just for one child and one woman. Sometimes it had felt as if her home were festooned with dripping clothes. She had to negotiate a jungle of drying socks and tights just to get into the bath. For something that took up so much time and effort, washing clothes was under-represented in literature.

  This afternoon her basket contained two blouses, a vest, a skirt, and three pairs of knickers. None of them dirty, really; what did she do to make her clothes dirty these days? Those days of sweat and soil and spills were over. Now her basket was light, as light as the sunshine in the side of her vision.

  Honor balanced the basket on her hip and put her hand on the banister. The wood was warm, too, from the sun. Downstairs on the ground floor, the phone rang. She stepped forward to go down the first stair and she missed it.

  The shock wasn’t that she was falling. It was that she had missed the step, that her body had forgotten the language of the house, how to do this thing she had done every day for most of the years of her life. Honor put out her hands to stop herself but the banister slipped from her grip and she hit the riser hard with her hip and k
ept falling, slithering down the wooden stairs on her back.

  ‘Stephen!’ she cried to the empty air.

  No pain, not yet, just thuds as she slid down the rest of the stairs, with no one to catch her. The back of her head bounced off a step and she saw stars. They were clearer than anything she had seen in a long time.

  She knew this feeling, as if she had played this out in her mind many times before. The last moment, familiar as a child or a lover.

  She came to rest at the bottom, splayed on the floor. The phone rang for the second time. Two rings, Honor thought. It all happened in the space between two rings of the telephone.

  Now she felt it, or some of it: the back of her head, her hip, her back, her bottom, her elbows – impact rather than pain. Her head was resting on the last step. She lay in another pool of sunlight and dazzle. But she was alive. When she called out, she had been certain she wouldn’t survive.

  Honor touched the back of her head. It was warm and wet, and her hand, when she saw it, was shaking and covered with blood.

  Seeing it, the pain came.

  ‘Stephen,’ she said again and her voice came from someone else, someone old and weak.

  Honor sat up, ignoring the screaming from her back and hip, the pounding in her head. She sucked in a breath and, holding on to the banister, tried to pull herself up.

  She immediately fell back down, squealing aloud with pain from her hip.

  The phone rang for a third time, or perhaps it was the fourth. Broken hip, old woman living alone, what a cliché she was. All these years of struggling, and she was a cliché. Carefully, gasping, Honor turned herself so she was lying on her left side, the side where her hip wasn’t broken. Using her arms and her left foot, pushing herself across the wooden floor, she crawled towards the phone.

  There was a telephone on each storey of her house: one in her bedroom, one in the kitchen in the basement, and one here on the ground floor, in the living room. Her mobile was upstairs in her bedroom. Honor crawled through the doorway, slipping on her wet hands, her weak foot, to the Persian rug. She rested for a moment there, the wool scratchy against her cheek. Blood dripped from the back of her head, down her face. Cold water to wash that out, she thought, and the phone rang again, for the sixth time? Tenth?

  It had been ringing for as long as she could remember and she still had a metre to crawl.

  She drew in a deep breath tasting of dust and wool, and pushed herself forward once again. It was more difficult across the carpet. As soon as she was better she was going to put this carpet in the nearest skip, bloodstain and all.

  The phone was on a low table by the sofa. She wriggled the last few inches, using her shoulder to propel herself forward. Honor hooked her arm around the table leg, pulled as hard as she could and the table toppled over. Thank God for flimsy furniture.

  Luckily the phone landed beside her, the receiver off its cradle. She snatched for it with her good hand. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello, I need help.’

  A pause. Her hair had come loose and was hanging in her face, dark with blood. She could feel sweat on her upper lip. It had been some time since she had last sweated.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ said a voice on the line at last, heavily accented. ‘Good day, this is Edward from Computer Access Services. I am calling about trouble with your Windows computer?’

  ‘Piss off,’ she told him clearly, and pushed the button to hang up the phone. She dialled 999. ‘I require an ambulance,’ she told the operator, and waited the million hours until she was put through.

  ‘Ambulance service, what’s the nature and location of the emergency, please?’

  ‘I’ve fallen down the stairs and I have broken my hip and I am bleeding from my head.’ She gave the calm-sounding woman her address.

  ‘All right, ma’am, I’ve alerted the dispatcher, and I’m going to stay on the line now and try to help you while you’re waiting. You say you’ve hit your head and broken your hip? Are you having any difficulty breathing?’

  ‘That’s about the only thing I’m not having difficulty doing.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, I’m old enough to be your grandmother. My name is Honor.’

  ‘Yes, Honor,’ said the dispatcher, a hint of humour in her voice. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, your telling me off is a good sign. Is there anyone with you?’

  ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘Is your head still bleeding?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, Honor, is there anything you can use to press against it and stop the bleeding?’

  She groped upward. A cushion, squashed nearly flat from use, lay near the edge of the sofa. Honor pulled it off. She pressed the cushion against the back of her head, gritting her teeth at the stab of pain. She held the phone to her ear with her other hand. It was slippery with blood.

  ‘I’ve done it,’ she said to the woman on the other end of the line.

  ‘That’s good to hear.’ She sounded young and chirpy. Like Jo. Honor closed her eyes and pictured wavy hair, a pink-lipped smile.

  ‘Honor? Are you still with us?’

  She shook her head, trying to clear it. Still with us, another cliché, trying to make this whole incident sound inclusive, when she was more alone than she had ever been before.

  ‘I can’t walk to the door to let the paramedics in but there is a key under the blue plant pot holding a geranium.’ There was a buzz in her ears; blackness grew from the centre of her world. ‘I’m going to pass out now, so I hope they come quickly.’

  She is at the top of the stairs, noise from the party swelling around her. She leans on the banister and sees the top of a man’s head below her. He has dark hair, glossy and thick, and is wearing a brown tweed suit. He is taller than the people standing around him. He holds a drink in one hand, whisky, and the other one is resting on the newel post of the banister, on the round ball that crowns it. His hand is slender; even from here she can see the nails are clean, cut short. He wears a watch with a thick black leather strap.

  Every detail so clear. Sharp.

  ‘What’s his name?’ she asks Cissy, standing next to her.

  ‘What, you haven’t met him yet? That’s Paul.’ Cissy turns to someone else, and Honor keeps on looking.

  There are people around him but he is alone. Somewhere, someone laughs loudly and instead of looking for the source he turns his head and looks up, straight into Honor’s eyes.

  For the first time, she feels as if she is falling.

  ‘Hello, love? Can you hear me?’

  Honor opened her eyes, tilted her head. A blur above her, two blurs, wearing green and yellow. ‘Paul?’

  ‘No, my name’s Derek, this is Sanjay, and we’re paramedics. Can you squeeze my hand for me? Fell down the stairs, did we?’

  ‘I fell down the stairs. I don’t know about you.’ Her mouth was dry. How much blood, how much time? One of the paramedics was messing about with her head, with any luck stopping the bleeding. She heard the rip of packets opening, the rustle of bandages. She tried to struggle up, get some of her dignity back. She’d called him Paul. How embarrassing.

  ‘What’s your name, love?’

  ‘Honor Levinson.’

  ‘Can you tell me what day it is, Mrs Levinson?’

  ‘Tuesday the eleventh of April. You shall have to ask me something more difficult than that.’ Her voice was raspy and hard.

  ‘I’ll get these questions out of the way and then I’ll start with the Pointless questions, shall I? Are you taking any medication?’

  ‘I’m eighty years old, of course I’m taking medication. It’s in the bathroom cabinet.’

  ‘Blood pressure eighty over fifty, Sanjay. Are you feeling dizzy, Mrs Levinson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you alone here?’

  ‘Do you think I would have left my underwear on the stairs, otherwise?’ She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth as the paramedics shifted her, placed a restraint on her head to stabilize it
.

  ‘She must have pulled herself all the way from the bottom of the stairs to the phone,’ said one of the medics. ‘Pretty impressive.’

  ‘Morphine,’ she gasped.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got gas and air in the ambulance and we’ll have you to hospital in a tick. Do you have anyone you’d like us to ring for you, Mrs Levinson?’

  ‘Doctor. Doctor Levinson.’

  ‘Is that your husband?’

  ‘No, it bloody is not. It’s me. I don’t have anyone to call.’

  They lifted her, more delicately than she could have thought possible, onto the stretcher and out through the door where the ambulance was waiting. Honor kept her eyes closed, unwilling to see the pedestrians who would be pausing to gape at the helpless old lady carried out of her home, frail as a bundle of twigs. Once she’d known all these people, everyone in the houses all around. The outside air cooled the tears on her cheeks.

  ‘No one,’ she whispered as they slid her safely into the back of the ambulance, and she repeated their names in her head like a song, the names of no one.

  Paul, and Stephen. Stephen, and Paul.

  Chapter Two

  Jo

  ‘HEY, MAN, WAIT for me!’ The teenager pushed past Jo, who was pressing all her weight down on the back of the pushchair so the front of it would lift up onto the bus. He flashed his pass and was up the stairs, yelling to his mates, before she could say anything.

  ‘He was in a hurry,’ Jo said to Oscar, sucking his thumb beside her. Iris yelled out ‘No!’ and threw her beaker out of the pushchair. It landed in the space between the bus and the kerb, and rolled out of sight.

 

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