Signs of Life

by Anna Raverat

  What’s up? asked Carl.

  They don’t have any Marlboro Lights, I said, can we go somewhere else?

  Ha! You won’t get Marlboro fucking Lights round here, he said.

  I went back into the newsagents and armed myself with the wrong cigarettes, just enough to last me until I got back to Marlboro country.

  Now I see how I used habits to hold myself together, how routine can bind identity. Then, no matter how clearly I saw that the strong black coffee was going to strip the inside of my mouth and make me parched for the rest of the day, or how the toast would taste of nothing and give me no real nourishment, I had to have them. I couldn’t skip breakfast because it was my habit to have breakfast and I couldn’t have tried something else because that meant thinking of and then buying other things. Making these changes would have taken something I didn’t have. So I kept on with the black coffee and toast even though I didn’t really want them.

  I once wrote down something Sylvia Plath said, copied it from a newspaper article, which may have been a review of a Ted Hughes book. I can’t find that place in my notebook now, but I remember what she said almost word for word because it chimed with things I thought. She said something like this: I don’t want to become an uninspired, self-rationalizing, stay-at-home housewife while my husband grows intellectually and professionally. I don’t want to submerge my biggest aspirations, my embarrassing desires, refuse to face myself.

  The myth with Johnny was called ‘Domestic Bliss’. There was real love there but it became smothered by cosiness. Ingredients of the myth included a nicely furnished home, holidays abroad, children, his career first, mine second. In short, asking each other what we had had for lunch every day of our lives.

  The myth with Carl was called ‘Perfect Woman’. It was exciting, at first. Ingredients included being constantly admired, a lot of sex, but it was a prequel to the other myth, whose frame boxed me in. I had to rip the canvas, elbow my way out: Fall. Stumble.

  I have written this

  so that

  in the next myth

  my sister

  will be wiser.

  Let her learn from me:

  the opposite of passion

  is not virtue

  but routine.

  Eavan Boland

  I grew tired of Johnny asking what I had had for lunch. After four years, it stopped being cute. So one day, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice, I answered: Look, I don’t want to play that game any more. Oh, he said, crestfallen. He never asked me again.

  Apollo is running fast, breathing hard; he has been hunting for days; he is tired and hungry, yet his appetite for you is wearing off. There are millions of stars in the sky. There are others he could have. Perhaps it is not only you. He is no longer running, no longer searching. Apollo, whose slowing step you recognize from troubled dreams, is about to walk away.

  It was wonderful to be hotly pursued. I enjoyed the chase so much that I would have liked it to go on and on, but each situation has its own limits: eventually one party gets tired; gives in, goes away. The thrill of the chase is partly made up of wanting to be caught, but there comes a point where you do, actually, have to be caught – or escape. You have to choose.

  Eighteen

  I waited ages for a bus this morning and I am late to meet my sister at the garden centre. By the time I arrive, she is caustic. People are trundling round, filling their time. In order to distance ourselves from the Sunday drivers, we are businesslike as we select pots and plants and appropriate compost. I choose geraniums, thrift, valerian, some poppies and sweet peas, a cistus.

  It’s quite late to be starting a garden, I say to the man at the till.

  It’s always a good time to plant, he replies, which I find reassuring.

  On the way out I see a lemon tree in a large earthenware pot with a white glaze that makes it look all the more Mediterranean. The leaves are a lovely shade of green and curl elegantly at the tips. I love the faint citrus smell and there are two green lemons.

  Hang on, I say.

  My sister, who has had enough, rolls her eyes.

  The nice man at the till comes over and tells me it is possible to keep a lemon tree in London but that I will have to bring it inside for the autumn and winter.

  What’s the point, then? says Emily. How are you going to move it? You won’t be able to lift it on your own.

  You could have it on a little trolley, the man says.

  Now my sister argues with him: There’s also a step. A trolley won’t get over it without being lifted and she won’t be able to do that on her own.

  I could get a ramp, I say.

  She sums up: A trolley, a ramp, and a tree that has to be inside for six months of the year.

  It is a lot of work, the man concedes. My sister gives me a triumphant look.

  I buy the lemon tree.

  Nineteen

  There is what I remember, what I know, what I think, and what I imagine. Then there is how these things look, sound and feel when they are written down – the way, sometimes, the written down version seems to take away from the truth rather than add to it. I am not telling the story so much as finding it, making it.

  But I don’t want to make up too much. Right from the start, from the first kiss with Carl, there has been pain, for Johnny, for Carl, and for me. I tried running away from the pain, and that didn’t work; and now, writing, it seems to me that if I invent too many parts of the story, it is the same as running away. But if I stay still, sometimes I see how I could describe a part of what happened. And if I manage to write that part down, it might lead, like a narrow path between tall buildings, to another part of the story, and if I can write that part, another alley appears, and in this way I follow the story as if finding my way round the dark quarter of some strange city. But there are a lot of dead ends. When I find that I am stuck, surrounded by brick walls and locked doors, it is not because the story has dried up at that point: the alleyways have stopped appearing because my writing has not been true enough.

  Watching the builders opposite might be a form of running away, but it’s difficult not to because they are right in front of me, and so interesting – not as individuals (though I have a soft spot for the young one) but as a group and as parts of a group. We have a relationship, of sorts, unequal, as relationships often are, because they have many ways of avoiding work – of which looking at me is one – while for me they are the chief distraction.

  I make mistakes about them, though. For example, just now one was standing on the very top of the roof with his back to me, his arms stretched out to each side like Christ on the cross, and for a moment I thought he was going to jump and then I realized he was measuring distance with his hands, and the other day I saw one through a half open window and I thought he was praying but it turned out he was blowing his nose.

  I remember arriving at Carl’s mother’s house, a terraced house on a busy road, the doors and window frames painted in a bright red that clashed with the earthier red of the bricks. The front door was locked and Carl didn’t have a key. He banged on the door with his fist yelling, Hello! at the house. Maybe he’s not in, I said. He’s always in, said Carl. He pushed back the flap of the letterbox and shouted through the hole, Oi! Dozy bastard! Come on! Carl’s brother eventually shuffled to the door, unlocked it from the inside, opened it, then turned and walked away down a hall. It was the middle of the afternoon but he was wearing pale blue pyjamas and the soles of his feet were dirty. What have you got the door locked for? asked Carl, walking after his brother. I went in, closing the door behind me. I haven’t been out, said Carl’s brother.

  Since when?

  Dunno.

  Christ, said Carl. I followed the two brothers into a kitchen. Carl sat down at a small square table, in front of a dirty ashtray and an empty glass with a ring of milk at the bottom of it. Displaced, his brother stood by the back door and stared out of the window at the backs of other houses. He had the smell of desperation
about him – a smell I know because I have had it, although I didn’t have it then. I couldn’t help noticing a couple of stains on the pale blue pyjamas, around the crotch. His toenails were long and yellowy. He was taller than Carl, skinny, with dark blond hair hanging lank around his face, ears poking through; like a long-term unemployed Jesus.

  Put the kettle on, then, said Carl.

  OK, said his brother, not moving.

  I thought Our Kid’s real name might have been John, or Paul, but now I realize I have nothing to base this on and that I may have been thinking about the last Pope, or one of the Beatles. Most of the time we were there – two nights and three days – Our Kid played his guitar in the front room in his blue pyjamas. I think he had an amp plugged into the back of the television, but I could be wrong about that too.

  I made another mistake just now. A builder was leaning out of a window and I saw what I took to be a skull cap on his head and I was thinking how I hadn’t seen this before and began to wonder what percentage of builders are Jewish but I hadn’t finished this thought when I realized it was a face mask pulled up onto his hair.

  It was early summer – June, I think – when Molly moved in, a strange event: Carl and I trading gestures over the top of her small hard head as though she were a new currency we were dealing in. I bought Molly a present, a wicker basket with a red and white checked cushion, Molly bought me flowers and wine. I thanked her. Carl was visibly pleased by this exchange. I felt like screaming. But I went along with it because I didn’t want to upset Carl: already I was posturing; already I was boxed in. This is lying: acting one thing while feeling another. This is boxing oneself in.

  Carl showed Molly round the flat, giving her instructions: here is the bed – don’t go on the bed; here is the bathroom – don’t jump up on the shelf and knock everything off; here is the sofa – don’t scratch the legs; here is the kitchen – don’t lick the butter. And here is the kitchen window: this will be closed so you won’t be able to jump out. This last instruction was for me.

  Carl wanted to show Molly the garden. He attached a slender velvet lead to her collar and asked me to unlock the back doors. I felt like a jailer with my big bunch of keys, letting the prisoner into the exercise yard. Carl carried Molly down the steps, set her down on the dry grass and followed her as she padded and poked around at the end of her lead.

  Why don’t you let her off the lead for a little while?

  Because I don’t want her to run away.

  I organized a work event on a wooden sailing ship on the river. The ship was moored, but the motion of the river slammed the boat against the concrete siding and water slapped against the sides. This was after I had broken up with Carl, during his angry phase. When all the guests had gone home and we were clearing up, I found myself alone with him in the cabin on the lower deck. There was a big stack of brown plastic barrels that were meant to look like wooden kegs of ale or rum and we had to unload them from the ship into a van. Carl was on a stepladder, taking the barrels from the top. To begin with he was passing them to another member of our team, but this person went off, probably because he didn’t want to be alone with Carl and me, and so Carl started passing them to me, roughly. After a little while, I said, You’re passing those barrels as if you want to hit me with one of them, and Carl replied, without looking at me, If I wanted to hit you, I’d just fucking do it. I don’t know why I stayed in the room after he said this. I don’t remember feeling afraid. I just remember noticing, each time he shoved one at me, how nobody could ever really mistake these barrels for wood.

  A couple of days after this event on the ship, Carl was to go away on business. I couldn’t wait for him to leave. I helped him get ready for his trip, packing a box with a slide projector, slides, brochures to hand out, road map. I carried the box down to the car park and loaded it into the back of the company car. He didn’t thank me. He shut the boot with unnecessary force and went back into the building to get his jacket. I waited in the reception area and when he came down the stairs, I opened the door for him. Bye, I said, and Carl snorted through his nose like a bull. As I closed the door after him, my fingers released the latch so that when the door closed, it locked.

  What are you doing? asked the receptionist, irritated. I looked at her. You locked the door! Nobody can get in. Oh, sorry, I said, unlocking the door and putting it on the latch again. I went back upstairs to my desk, bewildered by the action my own hand had taken; I didn’t plan to lock the door, I didn’t know I was doing it. So that was a shock. My body felt heavy, there was the beginning of nausea, and then I knew: I am frightened of Carl.

  It doesn’t happen from the head down. That’s not how it is. You don’t always decide to do something and then do it, or decide not to do something and then not do it. And this doesn’t mean you are not responsible, it means responsibility is wider than you thought and includes all of the choices you made even if they were made by your hands or your feet or your lips before they registered in your head.

  I disobeyed my instruction: I left the kitchen window open. Only a crack. But one night while I was sleeping and Carl was in Switzerland, Molly escaped.

  Towards the end of that long bus journey in China, when it was dark, and the other passengers were slumped shapes, sleeping, the bus came to a sprawling town and stopped. I checked in to a hotel near the bus terminal and had just unlocked the door of a room on the eighth floor when there was a power cut: sudden and complete, the whole town in darkness. Not knowing when or if the power would return, but knowing the contents of my small bag as well as I once knew my way back from school, I found my torch and lit my way to bed, and there, far from home, in a blank room, in an anonymous hotel, in a dark town, on a huge continent, I settled down to sleep, feeling as buoyant and hard-soft as driftwood.

  The driftwood feeling is this: I am just bobbing along in a vast and excellent world. I didn’t have this kind of contentment all the time, only in sitting down moments here and there, but I knew it, and always believed it would come again.

  Molly was not allowed to drink milk. She didn’t get enough exercise because she was only allowed outside on a lead, and a vet had advised Carl to keep her weight down. I sometimes used to eat a bowl of cereal for dinner, and once, when Carl wasn’t there, Molly jumped up onto the kitchen counter and started to lap the milk in the bottom of the bowl. I let her finish it, and after that I gave her one secret saucer every day, though I always bought her skimmed milk.

  About to leave for his climbing in Switzerland, Carl almost decided not to go:

  I’ll miss you so much.

  But I’ll be here when you get back.

  I don’t want to leave you.

  But it’s only for five days. (Please go!)

  I want to stay with you here, in this bed.

  But (Please go!) . . .

  I fetched a black marker pen from my workbag, took the duvet and pillows off the bed and had him lie flat. I drew around him with the pen, carefully so as not to tickle. Afterwards we looked at the outline of his body on the white sheet.

  There – you see? You will still be with me.

  I did not sleep with the outline of Carl’s body. The night I drew around him it seemed like a fine thing to do (anything to get him away to Switzerland and give me a few days off ) but the next morning, after I kissed him goodbye at my door, I went straight into the bedroom and stripped the bed and put the sheet in the washing machine on a very hot cycle. The outline of his body was too spooky, like one of those chalk outlines of bodies you see where there has been a death; someone has been knocked down, or jumped, or fallen.

  I thought Carl was sensitive to the balance between us but he can’t have been, otherwise he would surely have noticed the false notes I played. I feel bad about this episode now because it amounts to a lie. Perhaps Carl did notice the disharmony and ignored it, preferring to believe I was genuine in my affection for him, or hoping that my affection would, in time, become genuine.

  Molly went on my bed al
l the time. She didn’t use the wicker basket once – I ended up keeping shoes in it. I would come home from work and find her fast asleep in a square of sunlight on the new white duvet, bright specks of dust floating above her warm, compact little body, a sunbeam shining down on her like a spotlight. Quietly, I would take off my shoes, lie down next to Molly, close my eyes, and rest.

  At my flat one morning, alone, I was about to spread my two slices of toast when I noticed something odd about the butter. All the edges had been blunted. And there was an imprint, as though a nail file had been pressed into the smooth yellow surface. Then I understood: this was no nail file; this was the work of a raspy cat tongue.

  Molly did other things Carl had told her not to. She jumped up onto the bathroom shelf, the one that Johnny made, and knocked things off, including the perfume that Carl gave me, which I was still wearing at that point. She sharpened her claws on the legs of my sofa. She pestered me for bits of whatever I was eating. She walked, purring, along the length of the kitchen counter, shedding hair. She dribbled on my clothes and dug her claws into my thighs before settling on my lap. But I could forgive her anything for those late afternoon naps in a sunbeam, her peaceful slumber an invitation to another world.

  Carl showed me his mother’s room. There was a deep pile cream carpet, white furniture, and a king-sized bed with a pink eiderdown. Carl wanted me to look round the room, urged me to open cupboards, drawers, the wardrobe and look inside. From this, I inferred that he wanted me to ask questions about her, so I did, and I picked up her things with what I hoped was the right mixture of curiosity and respect, handling each item with exaggerated care as though it was an exhibit in a museum. In the wardrobe, shoes and boots were placed neatly under the clothes. There were lots of dresses. Something about the garments hanging loosely reminded me of Our Kid in his pale blue pyjamas, his skinny body hanging off his bones; there was nothing in him, no agency, or if there was, it was buried deep. Other artefacts; white lace doilies under a set of three white china boxes with a pale orange floral pattern on the lids; airport blockbusters on a shelf; curlers and a hairdryer in the top drawer of the white dressing table; in another drawer, the brown glass bottles that contained the pills she had taken to kill herself.