by Anna Raverat
There was something staged about the mother’s room. She had been dead for years. The room was arranged to look ‘exactly as she left it’. And yet the wastepaper bin was empty, the hairbrush had no stray hairs on it, there was no dust anywhere, and on the bedside table there was a thick paperback with a bookmark sticking out of it about three quarters of the way through. The room was constructed, like a film set, to tell a story and it certainly conjured up a presence: you felt that at any minute she could walk in. Maybe if it had been my dead mother, I too would have built her a shrine. When we went out, Carl closed the door softly so as not to disturb the spirit of the room, but the spirit of the room – or something wider – had already disturbed me.
The unfinished book puzzles me: If it was no good then why had she read so much of it, and, having got so far with it, wouldn’t she want to finish it first?
When I discovered Molly was gone, I worried about how to tell Carl that she had escaped through an open window. If I was responsible for losing his cat, I would owe him and he would have power over me. I imagined him hissing, I told you about the window, and what would he do then? I had seen his anger ignite over much smaller matters, like being barred from the stately home or not being invited to meet my friends, so what would he do if I lost his beloved cat? But then Molly slipped in through the kitchen window with the grace of an otter dipping through water, and my relief was huge.
Twenty
I’m ending all of it, said Carl, standing on the edge of the roof of the office, six floors above the empty car park. It was early evening; most of the staff had already left. I had been waiting all day to tell him, again. It was no use telling him at my flat because then I had to get him to leave, and that would be difficult. I thought a public place was out of the question because he would probably cry, or shout, as he had done when I tried to break up with him before. My mistake was to think this mattered. I should have dumped him in a crowd and disowned his reaction. But I decided to tell him after work, on the roof. I lured him up there with the offer of a cigarette break. I knew I had to say the words quickly, and then leave. I lit a cigarette and thought: By the time I finish smoking this, I will be rid of him.
Breaking up with Carl had taken weeks because I tried to do it gently. Carl argued, protested, cried, sulked, pleaded, bought gifts, made apologies. I said things like: I need to be on my own for a while, I can’t settle into another relationship straight away, It’s not you, it’s me. These clichés seemed true enough, and it was easier than saying: It’s you. I was using clichés as a way of distancing myself from him, but it didn’t work. I said they were true enough, but they were not, they didn’t hold enough truth and so they were not believable. I had to tell Carl: It’s you: I don’t want to be with you: I don’t love you. And that’s when he threatened to jump off the roof.
While we were at their mother’s house, Carl tried to take Our Kid in hand. He decided they needed a clear out. My role was to witness this. Carl climbed into the loft and handed down dusty bags to Our Kid who lined them up along the landing. There were tied up black bin liners, small plastic bags, boxes, a couple of empty suitcases, a sewing machine, an artificial Christmas tree and a fold-up exercise bike. Our Kid passed the vacuum cleaner up to Carl and we heard Carl and the vacuum going back and forth across the small floor. While we waited on the landing for Carl to finish, Our Kid did not open any of the bags or look in any of the boxes; he did not look at the line of stuff at all. He leaned against the wall and smoked. Carl and the vacuum came down the ladder. Right! said Carl. We’re going to the tip.
Carl loaded the bags, boxes, suitcases and Christmas tree into the back of the van. He had a lot of energy that day, in contrast to Our Kid, who was floppy and had none. Carl started the ignition, put some loud music on and leant forward on the steering wheel while we climbed in; Our Kid in the middle, near the gear stick, me next. I noticed that Our Kid wasn’t wearing his seat belt but I didn’t say anything about that. At the tip, Our Kid dematerialized so I helped Carl throw everything into the gaping yellow container. It didn’t take long. Our Kid was back in his place in the van, with the Christmas tree on the floor between his feet. Carl leant into the van and reached for it. Our Kid picked it up quickly – the quickest I’d seen him move – and gripped it in his two hands like a staff, all the while looking straight ahead. Sensing trouble, I walked round to the back of the van and lit a cigarette.
While I was trying to break up with him nicely, Carl used to find excuses to talk to me all the time; invent reasons for meetings; call me on the internal phone and entreat me to have lunch with him; smoke cigarettes on the fire escape by my desk and chat to me as I was trying to work. But his emotions changed direction after he threatened to commit suicide. He switched from pleading with me to get back together with him to raging because I wouldn’t. He stopped talking to me and if he did have to talk to me, he wouldn’t look at me. We were barely speaking to each other even though his desk was near mine and we worked on the same floor. This was when he started leaving threatening phone messages. At first I was relieved that I didn’t have to listen to his whining any more, but after a week of coming home to poison on my answerphone I was anxious. His anger was so great; the phone alone surely couldn’t contain it. I didn’t see how he could continue to force his anger down the puny plastic line without some damage.
One morning Carl asked if he could talk to me for a minute. It was the first time in two weeks he had addressed me directly without venom. He pulled his chair over to my desk and confided this: on his way home the night before, he was coming up an escalator and there were two men standing just below him. One of the men said something offensive to Carl and when Carl challenged him he didn’t retract it so Carl punched this man in the face and the man fell all the way down to the bottom of the escalator. I don’t remember what I said to him in response, but whatever it was, it didn’t make any difference: within two days he started leaving horrible messages again.
The artificial Christmas tree had a star at the top. You could see that the tree once had shine and sparkle and thick tinsel boughs, but now the star was crumpled, the silver had faded to a greyish-white, some of the branches were bent, and there was dust in the rivulets that stood for wood grain in the brown plastic base. Still, I hoped to hear the engine start and that we would return to the mother’s house with Our Kid clutching that tree, pathetic though it was. But as I stubbed out the cigarette, I saw Carl emerge from the cab with the Christmas tree in his fist and a grim look on his face and hurl the thing after all the other stinking rubbish into the depths of the black hole.
Attempts to hang on are inelegant – I see this, I do – it’s just that making Our Kid let go of that tree was an act of violence and, even though she was Carl’s mother too, it seemed sacrilegious. At the house Our Kid trickled into his room. I barely saw him after that, except at Carl’s funeral.
Maybe Carl’s mother wasn’t even reading that book. Maybe Our Kid or Carl placed it there and placed the bookmark inside as part of the film set of her room; a relic – like the skinny Christmas tree, and Johnny’s records, and the photograph of Carl that I kept hidden. Relics are markers of loss: first there is the day and then the day is over and you have a photograph, a T-shirt, a memory. Years go by and you misplace the photograph, throw out the faded shirt and your memory falters. More years pass and the memory fades too. Losing memories is fitting. Loss follows loss. We build histories with surviving memories – whole civilizations constructed from lost days.
Carl went into his brother’s room and came out with dirty laundry including the pale blue pyjamas Our Kid had been wearing since we arrived. Our Kid emerged in jeans and a sweatshirt. Later, in Carl’s mother’s kitchen, I emptied the wash into a white plastic basket, took it outside and started pegging out the clothes. Normally there is something peaceful about hanging out a wash, like the mood I sometimes slip into when I’m writing; an idea comes to mind, presenting itself as a kind of line; I peg words onto it, take
some off, change things around, repeat this process until the words describe, as closely as they can, the idea that I am trying to communicate. But on this occasion I remember a growing sense of apprehension. I hung up the pale blue pyjamas, aware of the absence of their mother. I didn’t want to keep going as Carl’s perfect woman. Yet here I was, hanging out his brother’s socks, vests and underwear, and I felt I was intruding on the sorrow of the household because I was wrongfully occupying a role I didn’t even want, and so hanging out this particular wash on the line became a form of trespass.
Carl punching the man to the bottom of the escalator was on my mind all day. I decided to go to the station where the punch had taken place. There might be one of those big yellow crime signs asking for information about the violent incident on the escalator. I didn’t know what I would do if I found such a sign. Would I have called the police and given them Carl? Yes, I think I would, but that isn’t why I went. I wanted to verify the story for myself, to see what I was dealing with in Carl.
There was no escalator. I was sure I had the right station. But there was no escalator anywhere in the station. Did Carl mean stairs? If there was no escalator did that mean there was no punch? Was he making the whole thing up? Punching a man to the bottom of an escalator is exactly the kind of thing Carl was capable of and what’s more he said he did it. Ultimately I am not convinced it matters, for as I see it Carl could easily have punched a man down an escalator, might as well have punched this man, did punch him.
Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no-one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
Joan Didion
Might as well have; could have; did. The movement from possibility to certainty in the sentence is exactly how it works in the head; this is how imagination merges with memory, how dreams get confused with facts; why reality sometimes feels so unreal. The extract is from Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook. It unlocked my own imagination; something in me resonated strongly and I wanted to use that, the feeling of recognition, almost of ownership, when you read something and think, that’s exactly the way I feel! And a feeling of entitlement slips in. I started with her line, took some words off, pegged others on – I wanted to absorb the sentence fully, make my own version.
Twenty One
My sister came over this evening, with a nicer than usual bottle of wine.
Look what I found, she said, bringing a tatty cardboard folder out of her bag. Inside the folder was a homemade book called ‘Horses and Ponies’ that I wrote when I was six. I had forgotten how much my younger self wanted a pony. There are twenty-two pages, hardly any words. Emily insists on holding the book, and pauses at pages that she finds particularly amusing, like the labelled drawings showing the different physical varieties of horse faces:
Concave
Convex
Roman
At first, I am mildly put out at her laughing at me, and I want to hold the book and look at my own pace, but I know, we both know, that we are making up from our quarrel over the lemon tree. Emily laughs hardest at a page of labelled, disembodied legs.
Positions in front
Wide in front
Pigeon-toed
Correct position
Back Positions
Cow hocked
Sickle hocked
Correct position
Twenty Two
I have decided that I should include my own base actions and low words, those that are relevant. I am thinking in particular of something I said to Carl when he was standing on the roof threatening to throw himself off, and something I did while I was trying to break up with him. The material is already so compromised. It has been edited once, by memory, then again by substances – both processes I recognize but can’t know the extent of – and now I am editing again, to shape events into a story. I want the story to be true, and I see that if I leave out certain things I said and did, I am taking away from that. This is not to say that I am going back to the attempt to include everything: there has to be some boundaries. But the boundary between the relevant and the irrelevant has moved.
On the roof, he said, I’m ending all of it, and I didn’t catch his meaning, so I said, I’ve just ended it, haven’t I? No, he said, annoyed, and repeated, with different emphasis: I’m ending all of it. I understood, and instantly dismissed, the possibility that he was going to jump to his death. I knew he would not jump. I remember the huge contempt I felt towards him. More than contempt, it was a transforming force. It had fire in it. It contained cruelty. There was a very strong impulse in me and in that moment, I wanted to push him off the roof. Instead, I said something mean. Here are the low words: Go on, then.
His failure to jump made everything worse; I think he felt he had humiliated himself and that seemed to make him angrier. In the long period of unpleasantness afterwards, Carl and I had to go away on business and stay overnight in a hotel. He was angry; this was a tense trip. We had a room with three single beds in it. It was all we could get. He said, I’ll sleep in the car. Then he changed his mind. I’m not sleeping in the fucking car; you sleep in the fucking car. Well, I wasn’t going to sleep in the car. This was a car we’d fucked in anyway. We went out for dinner; we drove to the restaurant because we were in the middle of nowhere. The meal was appalling, not the food, the tension, he was seething. During the meal, Carl said: I hope whoever you marry beats you and beats your children. There are many things I have forgotten, half remember, misremember, but I remember the exact words and the way his face looked and the way his voice sounded when he uttered this curse. His eyes seemed to darken and shrink, his voice too – he spoke in a harsh whisper – everything retracted into concentrated fury. When he drove back to the hotel, he drove dangerously, on purpose, to scare me. And I was scared. The room was very dark because the hotel was in the countryside. We each got into a single bed, with the spare one between us. Here is the base action: during the night I let him into my bed and had sex with him and the sex was very dark too.
It is quite difficult to write about. Immediately afterwards, Carl punched the wall next to my head, a hard, fast punch, like a continuation of his orgasm – excess passion or aggression he had to shoot into the ground like lightning.
There are other writers I owe a debt. It’s not just Joan Didion I have taken from/been inspired by. Absorb, borrow, celebrate, decorate, distort, echo, mirror, pay homage, pay tribute, recycle, rework . . . Steal?
All of these.
Short of outright plagiarism, surely there is a line between inspiration and theft? If the difference is intention, are we talking about conscious or unconscious intent, and where do we draw that line?
Sitting on his mother’s vast pink bed, Carl played me what he said was her favourite song, ‘Only You’ by The Platters. I knew the song, and even if I hadn’t heard the tune I would have recognized the story, because it is universal: everyone knows it; everyone wants it to be true. Cities have been built and torn down on this myth, wars started, great art created, lives shattered. But I still love the song.
And Carl said, This song is not just my mum’s favourite, it’s also true, for me, about you: only you can make me feel all right. He said, I feel so alone sometimes, all the time really, just more or less aware of the loneliness: it’s not that you make me forget, but when I’m with you, and only when I’m with you, I can know that I’m alone, and not mind. It’s better than forgetting. You make it better. Only you.
One night, playing a gig with his band, Carl was drumming so hard and the crowd was so into it that Carl threw his drumsticks out to the crowd and continued to play with his bare hands until someone brought him another set of drumsticks. This aliveness – he just boomed – was one of the best things about him.
Carl was convinced that his anger was my fault and, to begin with, I was too.
But when he told me about punching the man to the bottom of the escalator, whether that was true or not, I began to see that he was in a state of anger that far exceeded me. He was as sure of this rage as he had been of his love for me. I realized – with a mixture of relief and disappointment – if the anger wasn’t all about me then neither was the passion.
I don’t know where the line is between passion and obsession but I think obsession is passion that gets stuck.
Perhaps boundaries are like horizons; not fixed, they move as you move, like the end of the rainbow. It’s like trying to see when water turns to steam – you can never find that precise moment.
Twenty Three
I have found the most wonderful shop, called Vera’s, and there is a real life Vera who runs it. What caught my eye was a dress in the window. On the hanger it looked elegant; dark paisley print, darts, tiny buttons at the wrist, like something Vita Sackville West or Virginia Woolf might have worn, but it looked like a dressing gown on me. (If I ever got another cat I would call her Vita.) Browsing around I found things I need for the flat, but what I like most are the hand written labels: ‘Lovely Repro Butter Dish’, ‘Sweet Little Green “Woods” Jug’, ‘Two Pretty Vintage Plates’, and my favourite – ‘Very Old Vermeer Print’.