In America they call it raising a child. We do not raise, we bring up. It denotes something more like walking alongside with just a hint of correctness. It suggests distance and discipline and a comfortable nearness, as with horses or dogs. In the midst of our disaster I sometimes think, We must remember to bring him up. He is not going to stop growing until this firestorm passes. Rockabye baby/Cradle and crucible. He is not going to wait or be put on hold. This is it. Zero to three. That’s when they say the brain lays down its patterns. Ev is not yet three and it is true. With us he is learning everything he will ever need to know.
His activity is ramping up in pace and speed. He can run off from a standing start shouting over his shoulder and in these moments he is in such ecstasy that although I leap in pursuit, at the same time I will him to go faster. He is a cartoon, a junior league Andy Capp: legs twinkling, feet facing forward, head looking backwards and roaring.
Around London roads is when he most needs discipline but I cannot do this rationally. As soon as I try, anger and anxiety escape me with such force that we are both upturned. The thought that something might happen to Ev, the thing that can happen to children on roads like ours parked tightly with cars along their length, is the trigger. My anger is not commensurate. It is molten and held down in place ever so lightly, like a lid closed with a homemade peg on a billycan set on a campfire. I take the entirety of the thing that is happening to us out on him. Like a coward I attack the smallest and weakest member. I grab him, roar and shout. I am so furious I can hardly see. Why am I angry with no one else? Why just with him? In my childhood, anger was not encouraged. Confrontation best avoided. With whom should I be angry now?
We have come to the National Railway Museum on an extended family outing. It is a vast shed and we are at the limits of our strength. My task is to hold Ev’s red anorak in sight as he speeds from train to train. He caresses pistons, walks under safety barriers and rolls himself like a rubber boy behind tender and chassis. The engines are the size of buildings so he is lost in every moment until I catch sight of him again in the next. Tom cannot cope with this. He finds a bench to sit down on. But I can’t do it either. When I catch myself in the mirror these days I find it strange that I still operate within a shape, that my body holds its border. I have such fitful energy I feel nausea all the time. I am shrivelled to half my size: the size of a child.
For an hour we spin in low-level pursuit. Aside from the boy in the red coat I don’t understand what the other families are doing here. We cannot pretend. Our game is up. What do we want? How shall we proceed? In a pause while Ev wonders where to run to next I grab him and press him to me. I am going to vomit. My head aches and spins. I wish I could die. I think this but by mistake it comes out of my mouth as speech. No, Mum. Don’t die. He says.
I need things to hit, friends I can scream at. I need meditation, medication, swimming or sex or sleep for months and months and months. I must not say things like that to Ev.
1.24
The air cracks and fizzles. Small energies creel around. I splay my fingers out, stretching them till white flashes between each one. I have been doing this for a year now. I am formulating my response. I am trying to arrive at an intellectual accommodation with death.
What is grief?
I tried to do all my grieving in advance so it might not hurt me later. I tried to burn it up in the firestorm of the initial shock, annihilate it in one pyre. Ash can be dealt with. Take note that this did not work.
What is coping?
This is what it is like: a cave underground deep in rock, hung across its roof with accretions of dripping salts. I am cavernous and hard as mineral. The cave holds a pool of dark water that has not seen light. The water is very cold; it is undrinkable and its size is unmapped. It is mine, but people cannot see it. Only Ev sometimes senses that it is there. All the time people say that I am coping very well. It is impossible to explain my strategy to them. It is opaque even to me.
At a party someone takes my arm and whispers to me, Strong Woman. Dear God. My magic vanishes. My power dissolves like powder in water. Weakness is in those nattering companionably all around me. I want please to be one of the weak. The weak are held close and given tea. They are hugged and warmed by the fire. The strong are revered but kept at a distance. They live outside the village.
What is the future?
I imagine I will become different but I don’t know how this will come about. My great fear is that I will not be able to achieve difference but will stay the same and be entirely conscious of it.
What is loss?
Loss is a sleeping giant. Moving up the side of an incline I assume it is a mountain or an inert landscape. I have no perspective on the whole. I cannot evaluate its scale but I understand it to be a terrain I must cross and hope that at some point I may gauge its length and breadth. I do not realise that it is not a landscape but a living thing. All knowledge of my situation is physical, gained obscurely by feel through the soles of my feet, palms of my hands and grazes and stumbles on the way. I keep going, tensing my body against the gradient and finding footholds. I feel the surface slip and shift underfoot and its colour and texture is familiar. I wonder why it is warm. I am on it and in it but I have no grasp of what kind of thing it is. I am mapping out its surface by feel and the task entirely absorbs me.
What is happiness?
The same as it was. Happiness does not change.
What is patience?
Patience has no geography. It has no physical border and cannot tolerate an edge or horizon. To even articulate its end or detect the proximity of its limits demands the immediate dissolution of the entire realm. It extends out and out and out. It is a time-based kingdom. It has no other rules.
What is belonging?
The moon pans across the sky. The world spins, the moon one way and the massing clouds pushed by high winds the other. It is a noteworthy moon: perfectly round, fat, big, bright. Our window is its private theatre and tonight we will have a show.
Ev coughs himself awake and I bring him into our bed to watch the drama. Look at the moon. He is quiet.
The clouds are like slate cliffs without scale, black with rain. The wind is up now, hysterical, extravagant. It gains momentum as the sky spools from right to left, breathtaking in its speed. It is a bravura motion shot. There are no edit points. Moon, clouds, eyes, triangulate in a sequence lasting many minutes. The moon approaches the edge of the cloud mass. And then, abruptly, before we can prepare ourselves, it exits right and is spun out, free beyond the bulk. The moon stops dead. Without counterpoint to mark its motion it is a perfect disc stranded against unbroken dark. We brake too, stalled and giddy. We are no longer spinning. We three in our location looking up are stilled. Tom sleeps first, then Ev, then me. The room remains bright.
1.25
My American friend Jeff is over and we meet in the local Japanese. About once a year we communicate by email and every four years or so he comes to London. This is a kind of friendship. He has a thin, rough, reddish face, like a plainsman beaten by weather. As he is a film studies lecturer in California this is unlikely. He inhabits the seminar, the lecture hall, the screening room and the library. We met in Hungary, when he appeared in the front row of one of our shows and became one of several Americans en route through Europe that our group befriended. There was usually room in the van for one other with cooking skills or good conversation or both. Jeff is from Indiana and our limited contact has stuck. He says, So, in spite of Tom’s illness you seem to be doing OK. I reply, There is nothing in spite of Tom’s illness, but yes, we are doing OK.
Then, as people do, he asks me about my work as an artist. I tell him I am not doing any at the moment and I have no thoughts on the subject. That line of questioning over, and being an academic himself, he asks me about my job. This is easier. I have a part-time post in a university. I teach Art in an Art Department. I find I can continue to do this with ease though I cannot make art and in the months following d
iagnosis I notice how my attitude to this work subtly changes. The job has shifted its function. It has become recreation. My role in the studio is reactive, and like swimming for a swimmer, the action of swimming incorporates the preparation. Here I can immerse myself in the complex creative worlds of others. We have tutorials, one to one. They bring their secrets. I bring mine. Mine is that it does not matter. In our circumstances this is a blessing.
But I am an artist. I have a studio in Bethnal Green. This was where I used to work. In the space of a month after Tom was diagnosed, I sub-let the studio for a year immediately. Recently I have signed for a second sub-let, which means that one calendar year has crossed into another. Over time it seems this can happen, events segue into other events and what drove me then does not motivate me now. I had not believed it possible quite so quickly but I am proof. Today I am here to pick up some papers I have in storage. Just prior to turning the key I am nervous so I stop, wait a bit to get my bearings. Then I open the door and step inside.
It is like being given a capsule to swallow or a strong drink. Memory is as comprehensive and clear as a diagram: of whole seasons of days and hours, through light and night, spent sitting, thinking, planning, making, talking about work, looking at work. A history of all the trails I have ever set in motion lies here, as complex as geological strata. As I breathe in, the warmth of the room unpacks around me. I feel deep affection. I smell it. It is me.
So it is me. But on the way my fear was that I might meet my doppelganger – the person who was me and who still would be here had things gone differently. This is the near past. I could argue that it has not been lost but is simply not part of what I am doing now. Why do I not yearn for my life as it was before? Why don’t I regret or chafe against its lack? It is not even true that I could get the studio back directly if I wished. We are too volatile. The economy of our household as it stands could not support it.
The studio sits discreetly in a residential area hemmed in by gardens and the backs of terraces. Pigeons peck at the roof and scratch the tiles with deformed feet. Dogs are harassed and bark back and the buzzing of artists’ radios filters through the walls. Otherwise it is calm. When I was here I worked usually in silence and these are the sounds I remember. The space is large, high and unheated, so freezing in winter and airless in summer as you might expect. A photographers’ light, whitish-grey and perfectly even, sifts down like translucent flour into the room through the window-lantern and two large Velux windows. People liked coming here. It looks like a space you might miss. But I don’t. For a year now there has been nothing I wanted to make. The visual world of objects and things, real or proxy on screen, has lost the edge it once had over the rest. The problem is perceptual and cognitive. My compass has shifted. My eyes are looking south, not east, in the direction of home. I have made myself redundant. And if I think back to how I felt before, when I worked here, this fact seems unfathomably remote and dangerous, like an intimate betrayal of self.
Loss of ambition means loss of focus, but the big one is loss of desire. I would have told you, or you might have worked out for yourself, that I was an ambitious person. I was busy. Things were going on. A project, an exhibition, a film, a work, a commission, a residency, a prize: at various points in the recent past, these things were going on. Now they are neither going on nor do I seek them out. I am simply not interested. At one stroke my ambition has gone private and it has a single goal: to keep us as a family alive so that our formation can continue. Our unit of three is like a geometric solid in all its three-dimensional permutations: material, weight, texture, surface, patina, form, colouration. This is all the matter I can grasp in my hands.
That this ambition is concrete yet different from any I have ever held before is a stark fact. I cannot achieve my ambition by my own or any other ends. By hard work I cannot make it happen, by being good I cannot make it happen, by self-sacrifice I cannot make it happen, by being clever I cannot make it happen, by being more creative I cannot make it happen. My previous ambitions, reliant on skill and will, are rendered mute, inert, of no interest.
So not to have any ideas at all, not for objects or images or films, seems to be the end of me. More singular still is not to care. But it is a fantastical, wilful abandonment. Not to choose is incredible. It makes the end of me so beautifully slight. I have an imperative. I may resist the imperative or I can love the imperative, it makes no difference. By no effort of will can I change the terms. All I can do is change my approach.
Standing in the doorway of the studio picking out the scents of shavings and glue, dust, papers, heat trapped under plastic and old tea, I am smiling. Relieved. Everything is in order. Aside from being with Ev and Tom, all I can do is put one word down after another and rearrange them so that you might have a sense of what they mean. This is the work and it seems endeavour enough. I am almost content.
1.26
The smallest things have the greatest mass.
Travelling is a risk. Going anywhere is a risk, so you could argue that we may as well be in Spain. We go to Madrid.
A flat white cloud like a neat child’s drawing outlined in blue hangs over the city. We are at the Prado. Inside the air is serene. Mid-week crowds move evenly in a herd-daze. We have come to see the Goya rooms, where the full-length canvases show uneasy courtiers and sullen kings waiting for the republic to hit them like a rain of eggs and rotten fruit. From afar I see a tiny painting, more potent than anything in the room. The picture is called Vuelo de Brujas, The Flight of the Witches, and it’s from 1798. I touch his sleeve and pull him over.
A man runs towards us, blinded by a sheet covering his head. Behind him on the left lies another man foreshortened on the shallow ground. He is in despair. His stops his ears and wants neither to hear nor see what is going on. The foreground is a strip of sand and the background noir speeds on to it soaking it up like a blotter. To the right stands a donkey, daft as a lever. The donkey’s head and skinny neck jut into the painting and its baggy nose grazes the edge of the sand. Flying above are three witches, their limbs plaited together like an airborne puzzle or pretzel. They are carrying a third man who is struggling for his life. What will they do to him? No good. Their faces are intent and shadowed, impossible to read.
The witches are naked to the waist. Their tall split-spire hats of pink, yellow and blue meet in an apex at the top of the painting as they attend to their charge. Their flight is articulate and self-generated: weights and lights and stresses fall precisely for their height and position in the air. How did he imagine this? Unlike most human fliers in paintings, they are not pretending to fly. This is a record of what three witches would look like if they bore aloft another person in order to destroy him.
1.27
An ivory sap obscures my vision. I have conjunctivitis. It is viscous and tough and hangs Christmassy on the lashes. My eyes are rimmed red and suctioned hard into my face. The diagnosis is the same from every layman I meet: Run down. Run down. I have an ulcer and spend two nights mostly awake unable to swallow without pain. It feels oddly exhilarating and super-charged, as if the possibilities are finally becoming limitless. Maybe I can live even without sleep.
We are a mess. For a while our night is continuous with our day and as disorganised; people rising, squalling, coughing, swapping beds, getting drinks – hot milk with turmeric – watching children’s DVDs in bed. All the while outside it snows, an early-year fall, intermittently hard and soft but deep. Snow piles up and blends all edges, softening the residential streets and gardens and anointing the roofs of cars like risen cakes perfectly baked. If it weren’t for the pain there’s a fizzy anarchy about. We are characters crammed into an apartment in a Russian novel, complicit in the plot that binds our fates together, doing acts of kindness for each other and groaning and cursing all the while. My driving test is cancelled under the snow. Tom has another scan and it is Good. On the far side of the world an earthquake shakes Haiti to rubble.
Since the middle of last year I
have been learning two new skills, driving and swimming, both means of propelling myself forward.
I was always uneasy in water, suspicious. I clung to the sides, hugged the steps and shallows and my toes were programmed to feel for the bottom. Now this changes. I learn to put my head beneath the surface and keep my weight low, face to the floor. I discover the glide and visualise the top of my head aiming forward as if pulled on a line of the thinnest, purest, soluble fibre from the other end of the pool. My lung capacity, through years of singing and brass instruments, is large. I can breathe long and glide long and I practise an ultra slow, streamlined action. I am given my first pair of goggles and suddenly I can see underwater. Why did no one show me this before? I feel cheated. With these eyes I dip to the bottom like a pearl diver to finger the smooth tiles and gauge with my body the volume of the pool. Its pearl-white grid is as elegant as a submerged dance hall, an inverted jewel in a municipal shell. I swim a length underwater coming up only once with hardly a ripple. I have not done a pool-length for years. At school I swam like a sewing machine in a dotted line of ragged splashes, each splash marking a small drowning.
Learning to drive is more pressing, as Tom’s diagnosis meant that he had to stop. On the road I learn a system of movements by heart until they become my own. Throughout the winter and into the New Year I roll in a sort of dream around the curls and traffic snags of south London; low-rises in creams and browns and greys splashed with tatty brick. Charity shops, speed humps, cemeteries, one-way systems, schools, chicanes, housing estates, markets, roundabouts, bus lanes, dead-ends: I spin on, pausing only to turn on three points of an ill-drawn triangle or reverse, prim and staid, around a corner. I love changing gear; my eyes and brain are fixed to the task and for the duration of the lesson I am free: West Wickham, Elmers End, Croydon and Crystal Palace, Woodside, Eden Park, Norwood and Anerley. Once, in a piece of late-year optical evening magic, I crested a hill to see a giant orange sun swollen three times as big as normal hanging below me over the Kingdom of the South. I have never been to these places and I will never come to them again. This is my wish.
The Iceberg Page 7