I can easily sleep for eleven or twelve hours at a time. It’s not my thyroid or an iron deficiency. I’ve had them checked. I told my doctor how much I slept, but she wasn’t interested, just said, ‘Lucky you,’ through gritted teeth.
I keep the Roberts radio Mum gave me wedged against the headboard. On a good night I’ll fall asleep before the shipping forecast.
When I wake up I stare at the white wall and the clothes rail at the end of my bed and marvel that I have a home after all the years I’ve spent wangling and ducking and diving. I can’t believe I’ve managed to pull it off, that I have a safe place for my daughter and me to come back to, and that I’m managing to pay the bills. (I do have scary periods when there’s nothing in the bank and no sign of any money coming in, but so far I’ve managed to weather them all.) For twenty years I’ve had a recurring dream that I’ve lost my home due to carelessness or stupidity and I awake with the same dreadful feeling I used to get the morning after I’d been dumped. A sickening, slow panic seeps up from my stomach to my chest and spreads across my body like blood through a bandage. I don’t get that feeling any more after I’ve been dumped. I feel fury for three days, hurt for two, disappointment for a week and then I’m over it. Lovely being older.
Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.‡
Even when I’m well I like to lie in bed and think. It’s as if I haven’t heard my thoughts for years and am getting to know them all over again. I let my mind drift where it wants to go – religion, food, teenagers, any old thing – and see what I come up with. During the day I crave silence. I enjoy outside noise – children playing, the train going over the bridge, sirens, shouts from the street – but I don’t want structured sound with strict rhythms and choruses, repetitive lyrics, familiar chords and rhymes cluttering up my brain. I want to experience the aural world directly now, not block it out.
The longest I ever spent in bed was following a stint working as a runner on films, straight after graduating from film school. I was thirty-three years old and sleeping on floors seven days a week so I could be on set or location by five o’clock in the morning. The lack of sleep took its toll. I went to bed after a year and a half of this, thinking, I won’t take any more work for a while and I’ll get up when I’m not tired any more. I emerged three months later. I didn’t eat very much or change the sheets or my shorts the whole time, just slept and slept and slept. My shorts were so cosy and soft, but one day I noticed a thick white curd building up in the gusset and was jolted back to life. I got up, had a bath, washed the sheets and the shorts, wrote a film script and sold it for ten grand. Three months though.
* Joan Didion, ‘In Bed’, essay in The White Album, 1979
† See Amy Marsh, ‘Love Among the Objectum Sexuals’, Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality 13, 1 March 2010
‡ ‘Human Hibernation’, British Medical Journal, 2000; 320:1245
53 When he saw my name on the death certificate the doctor told me he was a Slits fan. He was young and friendly and I liked that he was connected to me in a convoluted way. After we’d chatted for a while he asked for my autograph on a scrap of paper. I showed him my thumb and described the scene with my sister. He was very understanding, which made it all seem less grotesque. He also told me to go to A & E, said the same as Mia, that a human bite is more dangerous than an animal bite. I found that fact comforting. It made what had happened more serious somehow, bigger than just two silly sisters scrapping. I signed the papers even though I didn’t know what they said. Halfway through writing my name I looked up and saw the undertakers wheeling a trolley past the office window. It was Mum. She looked tiny. Her face was covered by a sheet. I’d always planned to look at her in the mortuary, same as I did with Lucien, but at that moment I decided not to. I knew I’d never see her again, that my last memory of her would be no wrinkles, peaceful, beautiful, the tickle on my hand, the three of us together. I looked away so as not to alert Vida to Mum’s passage, but she sensed it and turned her head. The lift doors opened, the men trundled Mum in, Vida’s face crumpled, the lift doors closed. You can’t protect them from everything.
Meadow
It’s all I have to bring to-day,
This, and my heart beside,
This, and my heart, and all the fields,
And all the meadows wide.
Emily Dickinson, ‘It’s All I Have to Bring To-day’, c.1858
Whenever I need to clear my head I turn left out of my house and walk up to London Fields. Everyone in London Fields dresses in muted colours. Male and female are almost indistinguishable, no girls or women wear heels. When I reach the middle of the Fields I stop, tilt my head back and look up at the sky and imagine I’m standing at the bottom of the sea or a massive fish tank: the grass is the seaweed, the trees are coral and the sky is the surface of the water.
I like to pick up fallen branches from the horse chestnut trees. Little things make me feel good since Mum’s death, like finding a branch on the ground with the leaves still attached. I found a brown and gold leather headband on the grass once, and a Mac lipstick. I’ve learned to recognise the song of the blackbird, thrush, crow, magpie, starling and, best of all, parakeet from running round the fields (it’s one mile all the way round; I do two). There are three acid-green long-tailed parakeets nesting in the trees. I recognise their cry immediately, like a bad-tempered child stamping on a squeaky bath toy. In autumn I take a plastic bag and pick up conkers. Mum told me that storing conkers in your drawers – not your underwear – keeps moths away. I like that I know a bit of folklore, old-fashioned stuff, because she told me about it. Now I can pass those tips on to Vida.
The row of pine trees along the outside edge of London Fields reminds me of the first time I ever saw one. (I’d probably seen them before but they hadn’t registered.) It was when I was eleven years old and visiting my father’s relatives in the South of France for the second time, when Mum was back in London swallowing boracic acid. Growing up in Muswell Hill, near Highgate Woods – there’s a mile-long muddy mound all along the edge, a ‘plague pit’ where the victims of the epidemic were buried – I learned to identify oak, cherry, horse chestnut, poplar, plane, copper and silver birch. Silver birch was my favourite because of the pretty bark, until I saw the French pines. They were leaning out of the fine white sand on L’Etalon beach (that’s what the locals called it, because white stallions ran along the sand), in the Camargue. I couldn’t imagine how a fir tree could grow through sand just a couple of metres away from the bluest, clearest salty sea. Lucien, Pascale, our uncle Jerome and I stayed on the beach all day. Uncle Jerome cooked hot-dog sausages in their brine by balancing the tin can they came in over a handmade fire. We poked holes into crusty fresh baguettes with our fingers, pushed the sausages inside, squashed the whole thing
flat – you can only do this with authentic French baguettes as they are so light – and sat munching our hot dogs. Pine cones rolled down the dunes into the sea and bobbed about in the surf. Pine trees, sand, sausages and sea, they were all wonderful but they just didn’t seem to go together.
On my way out of London Fields I pass the wildflower meadow sprinkled with red poppies, blue cornflowers, white clover and purple thistles. I keep my head turned to the left so I can look at it for as long as possible, even though it makes my neck ache. The scent of honey and almonds from the clover is so strong it follows you all the way to the gate. Last year there were flyers signed by the fashion designer Katharine Hamnett attached to wooden posts around the edge of the meadow explaining that the fertiliser the council used was toxic to humans and animals. I don’t think the council used it again because the following summer the plants were half the height and there were lots of patches of bare earth.
Mum loved flowers but never cut in a vase. They had to be growing. She liked things to flourish in their natural habitat – flowers, animals, birds. She knew the name of every flower in Nanny’s back garden – bluebell, snowdrop, snapdragon, goldenrod, hollyhock, crocus, forget-me-not, iris, laburnum, lobelia, lily of the valley, Michaelmas daisy, honeysuckle, lupin – and couldn’t pass a rose hanging over the pavement without stopping and sniffing it. Wild flowers were her favourite though. We’d go to the woods or the disused train tracks in Muswell Hill most weekends when I was a child (saw a flasher a couple of times, Just ignore him) and pick a harebell, a wild buttercup, a sprig of cow parsley and some interesting grasses. Only one of each – she was aware it’s not good to pick wild flowers. Back home we pressed the plants between two pieces of toilet paper and buried them under a pile of telephone directories. Telephone directories in the 1960s were fat and heavy, a different pastel colour for each one: A–D was pale green, E–H pale pink, and so on. They reached up as high as my knees when they were piled on top of each other. I’d forget about the pressed flowers and find them months later, perfectly preserved. Mum suggested I paste one flower onto each rough, grey, sugar-papered page in my scrapbook and write only one line of description in ink next to it, so elegant and so much wasted space. That project made a lasting impression on me. A surface looks better with less content and lots of empty space; it had never occurred to me before. It was a rare lesson that meant something from the world of grown-ups.
No matter how long I keep my head screwed to the left to look at the flowers when I pass the meadow, it’s never long enough. No matter how much time I had with her, how many phone calls, cups of tea and chats at the kitchen table, no matter what we did right and what we did wrong or how it ended, it wasn’t enough. And if I could go back and make a choice – consciously this time – of whether to be the fettered sibling or the freewheeling independent, I’d choose to be the fettered child all over again. I’d happily live those sixty years with Mum again, and this time I’d savour every one.
And I’d be kinder.
54 We arrived back in Hackney at six o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t find my keys, so we went round the back and used the spare set that I keep under a rock – a Rose de Sable made from whipped-up desert sand that we brought back from Morocco years ago. As Vida and I crossed the yard we made footprints on the frosty paving stones. They looked like interlocking slabs of chocolate – you know, when it’s gone stale and has that white powdery bloom on it. Vida kicked an abandoned yellow tennis ball. We passed four parked cars, two white, two red, before reaching the fire escape. As we climbed the stairs I collected the suspended raindrops on my fingertips by sliding my hand up the galvanised aluminium handrail. Sirens from Mare Street wailed over the roofs. No need to say a little prayer to the ambulance that morning, I knew where the two people I loved were: Mum was dead and Vida was next to me. When we reached the top of the stairs I heard chopping. The back door of the Vietnamese restaurant was open. I looked down and caught a glimpse of a white chef’s hat on straight black hair.
Red-Handed
… look at me as if you had never seen a woman before I have red, red hands and much bitterness
Judy Grahn, ‘I’m Not a Girl’, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, 1971
I can still picture Mum’s hands in perfect detail, they’re much clearer to me than her face. I bet every kid can remember their mother’s hands. Mum’s were covered in wrinkled, translucent skin draped over snaking, raised blue veins. She had long, tapered fingers and knobbly red knuckles. Her hands were worn out from decades of washing up and peeling potatoes. She didn’t have a washing machine until she was seventy and never owned a dishwasher. When we were young I’d watch her wash our clothes in a plastic bowl in the sink (sheets were washed in the bath), squeeze them through a hand-cranked mangle and hang them on the washing line in the garden to dry. We were always dropping everything at the shout of ‘Rain!’ and rushing out the back door to rescue knickers, vests and sheets, laughing as we pulled them roughly from the line, sending the wooden pegs flying into the mud. She used to get cross about that.
I’ve inherited Mum’s hands. At our wedding my husband couldn’t get the ring over my knuckle, he had to force it, and once on, it spun loosely on my thin, fleshless finger. Mum’s fingernails were wide and only slightly curved, like spades. She didn’t paint them but they were never bitten, always filed, cuticles pushed down neatly with the moons showing. Ridges ran vertically down the nail, like the effect you get on a curved wall when it’s made of flat concrete posts, and white specks dotted the surface. I used to track the progress of those little white flecks, like miniature clouds, drifting from the moon at the bottom of her nail right up to the tip until finally she filed the cloud away. Mum told me the specks were a sign of calcium deficiency. I’ve since heard that’s a fallacy; they’re due to dryness. When I inspected her nails I’d wish for her to be cured of her deficiency, but there was always another cloud appearing on the horizon. That’s how well I knew my mother, I knew the speed and passage of those chalky marks on her nails. She continued wearing her gold wedding band after her divorce – ‘Stops people asking too many questions.’ It was too tight, her flesh swelled around it like a tree trunk in the park that’s grown around a railing. It looked uncomfortable. Marriage was uncomfortable for Mum. She wasn’t the marrying kind.
Kerosene and Paraffin
Objects that remind me of my mother have become important to me lately, as if by cherishing the things she liked I’m carrying her inside me like she once carried me. And the sounds, smells and tastes she enjoyed conjure up a whole different time for me, so that I feel it’s not just Mum who’s died, but a whole era. Aniseed, cloves, marzipan, lavender, sugared almonds, Gorgonzola, black treacle, molasses, fruit cake, Bath buns, coffee and walnut cake, Madeira cake, Christmas pudding, rhubarb and ginger jam, gooseberries. My mother’s tastes revolted me when I was young. She even ate the overripe fruit that was left over, whereas I wouldn’t touch anything with a speck of brown on it. Black jelly beans, black jelly babies, black fruit gums, black fruit pastilles, blackjacks, black wine gums, Pontefract cakes, liquorice. The only sweets she liked, apart from the strong-tasting black ones, were humbugs and cough sweets. When she was a schoolgirl with unruly dark hair and grey eyes, she used to sit in the classroom sucking camphor sweets – they were cough sweets, not allowed today, too intoxicating – and drift into a soporific stupor. I thought they looked and tasted like something you’d find under a stone in the back garden. Mum also loved the smell of road tar and kerosene and paraffin. She wanted to name my sister and me Kerosene and Paraffin, because she loved the smells and the sounds of the words – in 1954. Those names would have suited us too. Dripping sandwiches: ‘You can have brown bread with butter or white bread with dripping,’ Frieda used to say to her five children. White bread was more refined and expensive, so she paired it with the cheap meat dripping. Mum loved giraffes, elephants and hippos, said she would have joined in the riots if she was strong enough and wasn’t intere
sted in royalty or the Queen. As for the Queen Mother, ‘No wonder she looks good for her age, she’s never had to carry four pounds of potatoes home.’
It seems perverse, spiteful even, for me to appreciate all her idiosyncrasies now she’s dead, but Mum being gone has freed up so much of my time and mental space. Now I have time to stop and admire a salmon-pink rose dangling from a garden by the bus stop. I sniffed one in Hampstead the other day. The smell of my 1950s childhood shot straight up my nostrils into my brain, and I cried. I want to hear her talk about the war and her father. I keep thinking of questions to ask her about grandmother Frieda or the early 1950s, when she lived in Australia, things she would have loved to tell me when I was young but I was in too much of a rush to listen to. She used words I don’t hear any more, like ‘bind’ (Oh, Vivvy, you are a bind), ‘fag’ (What a fag, meaning ‘nuisance’) and ‘palaver’.
Jelly beans, scented lipsticks in heavy gold cases, roast chestnuts (only smelled them once a year when we went to the West End to see a film at Christmas), the plaintive howl of ships’ funnels (God knows why, the only one I ever heard was on a Steve Miller Band record; perhaps it’s a memory from the ship when we sailed back to England from Australia), roast potatoes (eight, please), upside-down apple cake: these sounds and smells are an incantation, the poem of my childhood. They induce a sense of longing in me far more heart-wrenching than the memory of any girlfriend I fell out with, boy I broke up with, exam I failed or job I was fired from. Events that I thought were so important at the time have disappeared from my emotional memory and seemingly insignificant objects, tastes and impressions have taken their place.
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