by Anna Raverat
When I showed Delilah my haul, she rewrote the labels, verbally: ‘Was Cheaper First Time Round’, ‘Bit Of Old Tat’, ‘Chipped and Faded Plates’, ‘Fake Grand Master’. She never has seen the charm in secondhand things (unless they’re French).
The Vermeer is small and not a terribly good print, which is why it only cost £8.50, but I love it. I have it propped up against the anglepoise lamp on my desk. It’s called ‘View of Delft’ and shows a line of buildings by a canal, a few tiny people, darkly dressed, but mainly sky and water. I love the faded gold frame, and the proportion of sky, and the soft reflection of the houses on the canal, the way the glass adds reflections of my room into the picture.
After Johnny left, ‘our’ home did not become ‘my’ home. The flat looked different because Johnny had taken all his stuff with him and that included pieces of furniture. There were marks on the walls where this furniture had stood for five years, outlines like echoes of the shout I kept hearing in my head: ‘HE’S GONE, gone, gone, gone.’ Because the rooms were emptier, the walls seemed to stand farther apart than they had before, as if they didn’t want to be near me. There was too much space around my clothes in the wardrobe and around my books on the shelf.
I was grateful for Molly’s company. She neither approved nor disapproved of me and her evenness was a comfort. After she came back that first time, I began to leave the window open day and night and she came and went as she pleased. I didn’t tell Carl, of course. I did away with the litter tray and I never once used the red velvet collar and lead. I buried them in a box of old boots in a cupboard but I didn’t dare to throw them out. If I happened to be in the kitchen when Molly made an entrance or exit, I was thrilled, as if by the sighting of a much wilder animal. I loved how she appeared silently on the windowsill and then picked her dainty way onto the counter, and it was wonderful to see her leap from the sill into the garden, wash herself in the sun or run over the dry grass and jump to the top of the wall and disappear over the garage roofs beyond. Her jumps were not jumps, exactly, because they didn’t have a start or finish, no obvious effort, they were simply part of her flow.
Molly began to hunt. I found little corpses in the garden, occasionally a dead mouse brought into the house. I didn’t know what to do with these – it seemed disrespectful to put them in the bin. Disrespectful to Molly, I mean. Once, I saw her get a bird. I glanced out of the French doors and saw her crouched, taut, the chubby bird twittering about on the grass. Molly crept forward, concentration like a laser fixed her victim to the spot and seemingly had the same effect on me because I did nothing to stop her. She destroyed the bird swiftly using only a fraction of the power I sensed when she was poised on the grass. I was impressed, but I shouldn’t have been – cats are predators, predators kill easily. That evening I was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and eating a bowl of cereal for dinner, Molly came purring, winding herself round me like fabric. I finished the cereal and put the bowl on the counter for Molly to lap the extra milk and as I watched her, I thought, I know you – you are not a kitty.
Seeing Molly discover her own cat-ness gave me another reason to be angry with Carl for having kept her locked up in that high tower block. It seemed such a strange thing to do. Was he jealous of her? Climbing is quite cat-like and Carl was good at climbing but he was carrying anger and maybe because his anger came from an old wound it didn’t seem to fire him but rather to weigh him down. Perhaps that’s what bitterness is – old anger. Even the places Carl went to practise – roofs and walls, alleyways between houses – were cat territory.
The other day, sitting here at my desk, I saw a flash of black rush across a rooftop and it made my stomach lurch because I thought of Molly. Of course it was not Molly. It was right at the very edge of my vision so I can’t even be sure it was a cat. I haven’t seen any cats around here. Probably what I saw was the wing of a crow landing, or taking flight.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Seamus Heaney
A memory of Johnny: undressed, lying on our bed after we’d made love one Saturday afternoon, he is looking at raindrops making wobbly tracks down the dirty window, I am lying with my head on his chest, his arm over me, and I am looking up at him, loving him. Why do moments like this pass so quietly? It’s not until afterwards that you see them for what they really were; not the times you thought you’d remember, nor the ones you thought you’d miss most, but the ones in which you were truly open. Sometimes, listening to the words of a song or watching a scene in a film, I have a mini epiphany: Oh! I’ve had moments like that and I didn’t realize they were important. It’s as though the song or film has framed an episode in your own life so that you see it for the first time, but just as the moment is shown to you, you remember it’s already gone.
Sometimes I still wonder: What on Earth made me choose Carl over Johnny? Whatever could it be that brought me to that loss? I bring myself the closest I can to an answer and feel something inside me turn away, to another planet.
I decided to paint the walls white, to cover the marks where Johnny’s furniture had been and because I couldn’t bear the carnival colours any more. When we first moved in, I wanted bold, rich colours, so I chose a golden yellow for the bedroom, with deep pink woodwork, emerald green walls with pale grey in the sitting room, and kingfisher blue in the kitchen, and then I glossed the whole lot with shiny varnish. It was oppressive, like a funfair when everyone has gone home. Redecorating was a lot of work because I had to do three coats on each wall and all the woodwork, but I embraced it as a penance. The dark brown floors were stripped and sanded and stained white (doing the floors was even more work, so I had someone in to do it – my guilt wasn’t bottomless). Around the same time I got new blonde highlights in my hair. I wanted to strip everything away, dip my life in bleach and start new. White walls, blank page – but tabula rasa is a myth, of course.
I realize I am confused about beds. I thought that the bed in the dingy hotel where Carl and I first had sex was vast and pink, but I also remember the bed in his mother’s room as being vast and pink. Could there be two vast pink beds in this story? I did not have sex with Carl on his mother’s bed, but now the notion of Carl’s mother and her bed has mingled with the image of Carl and me having sex on that cheap hotel bed; a difficult enough memory on its own, without having his mother mixed up in it.
I remember going into the chief executive’s office one day. This woman was a role model for me, so normally I liked going to see her, but I was tired all the time by then, working too hard. She was on the phone when I entered, motioned me to sit and swung her own chair round to face the window as she finished the call. My exhaustion surely affected how I saw things, but all I saw was a grey woman in a grey office on a grey day: grey skin, grey hair, grey suit, grey voice. The sky was the same colour as the walls inside so that it didn’t look like outside. At that moment it didn’t even seem possible that there was such a thing as outside.
On dull days here, the rooms in the flat opposite are as dark as caves and I think they are empty. Then I see something white and shiny move across a back wall like a thin neon ghost and I can just make out the faint outline of a body underneath. These vests, with the fluorescent strips, are the only protective clothing they wear. They work with their bare hands. I suppose they could be wearing steel toe-capped boots but I have never seen any of them wear a helmet. Today they are working on the roof. They stride nonchalantly across it, attaching hat shaped vent covers. The roof now looks ridiculous, dotted with silly little white hats, but I know I will get used to them and stop seeing them soon enough. If the builders fell they would die. They don’t look like they want to die. They look like they believe they are invincible super-heroes. From that height �
� five storeys, if you count the roof as a level – helmets probably wouldn’t be much protection.
Behind them, on a much bigger building site a few streets away, there’s an enormous crane. It reaches up into the sky like a giant ladder you could never climb, or part of a huge steel ship. On one side of the crane, at the top of the mast, there is a cabin and a platform, and from the platform, there is a jib, longer than the mast itself. The lifting hook is attached by cables and via wheels and pulleys to the top of the jib. These cables look very heavy. When the crane is lifting they go taut, and when the crane is idle they dip into an elegant curve, which contrasts with all the straight lines and sharp angles.
I can see the man in the cabin. He is always alone up there, in his bubble among the clouds. I imagine that it is the same man every day but I have no way of knowing this because I am not close enough to distinguish any of his features, nor to get an idea of his height or build. I can make out the colours of his clothing. Today, and most days, he is wearing pale blue jeans and a white T-shirt. I can see him put his hand to his head. A lot of the time he just sits there but I can see him if he leans forward or stands up. And I can see his chair, at night, empty.
I convinced myself that I still loved Johnny. We got back together after a small party at my flat. Johnny arrived late, already drunk. He started a fire in the kitchen by spilling a bottle of whiskey and then knocking over a candle so that there was a patch of flames, which scarred the work surface. It was an accident, if you believe in those. Anyway, he stayed late and missed his last train. Johnny and I stayed up drinking and talking until it was light. We passed out in bed together, and later that morning, with terrible hangovers, we made love.
They seem to have an awful lot of breaks over there. Maybe they have to wait for other people to complete things or for deliveries or for things to dry or go hard, maybe, in this way, waiting is part of the job. Sometimes they barely seem to be doing any work at all, and yet visible progress is being made on the flat. More progress than I am making. Often, I will get down a couple of hundred words and then notice a dragging in my stomach that is getting more insistent and I stop, knowing I am veering away from the curve, and by more than a few millimetres. At other times, when I am working well and the builders, or some of them, are also engaged and busy, I feel a sort of companionship-in-work with them.
Johnny once woke me when it was still dark and trundled me over to a window because he thought we could watch the sunrise together; he had got up to go to the toilet and seen a glow on the horizon. We stood there for ages, getting cold, waiting for the dawn. Johnny had his arms around me, mainly to prop me up because I was half asleep. I finally realized what we were watching was not dawn but a fixed light on a crane some distance away. I told him and we went back to bed.
I was finding work increasingly stressful; I don’t now think it had got any harder, but my ability to cope was dwindling. Often I would find myself dizzy and anxious and I would fear a panic attack or worse, but usually the problem was simply that I had a hangover, had drunk too much coffee and not had enough to eat.
One day, I had been ranting about something and stalked out of the office. I walked around the block and smoked. On the shady side of the pavement, coming towards me, were a mother and small child. The child had a toy puppy on a lead and he and his mother were dawdling along, pretending to walk the puppy. The mother kept glancing up to see if they had been noticed. My anger flooded in. I wanted to kick that puppy clean out of that child’s hand, not so much to make the child cry, though that wouldn’t have bothered me, but more to rid the mother of her bovine contentedness. The mother’s eyes found mine, aren’t we adorable, her look said, and oh, the urge was strong, to pitch my sharp toe into the toy and whip it away. The mother quickly looked down; she had seen something deeply wrong in me. I imagined one long strong kick, the kind of kick that would have scored goals, the toy puppy describing a high arc and coming to land in the middle of the hot dusty road with a soft but satisfying thud. There is violence in me. I don’t know how much.
Twenty Four
This is what it is like to have a secret; it is like hiding a pebble in your fist and having to remember to keep holding it all the time, because if you drop it other people will see and you will be found out. It’s like being at the end of a long, satisfying day at the beach, when the whole of you should be spread out to dry in the sun, relaxed and open – but with a secret, there’s always one hand clenched. It’s lonely. Many affairs must continue way past their natural end because of this loneliness, especially if the two lovers are the only ones who know. If they end the affair, they don’t have anyone else to share the secret with.
Confession is not always an impulse towards honesty; telling the truth can be selfish. When I told Johnny about Carl, I thought I was being honest but really I just wanted to unburden myself.
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:
O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
Hart Crane
Carl fascinated me because he was new to me. Johnny had become my standard for what a man was like and it was a revelation that there were other, saltier, versions of maleness. I was interested in everything: the length of his arms, the breadth of his hands, the depth of his voice. But there was one early autumn day when we visited a beach together, the third and last time, and he knew by then that I was looking past him, at any available horizon, trying, failing, to make out the difference between the flat grey sea and the flat grey sky.
We walked along the beach, which was not deserted. I remember that he was wearing a denim jacket. On the sand, close to the shoreline, I saw a wallet and bent over to pick it up. Inside there was a small amount of money, two credit cards and a card with the owner’s name and address. When I looked up from my find to tell Carl, he was standing a little way off. I noticed that he was standing weirdly, looking at me. His posture was like a vulture; shoulders hunched over in a tight curl and his head sticking up and out. His face was screwed up in apparent concentration. Then I saw his belt undone and the top of his trousers open, his hand inside, moving fast. I turned and walked quickly away.
My alarm clock broke. Actually it was Johnny’s alarm clock, but anyway it broke, and I discovered that it was possible to book an alarm call: you phone a service, tell them what time you want to get up, and your phone rings at that time in the morning and someone, a real person, would say: This is your alarm call, and I would say: Thank you, and then me and the real person would say goodbye to each other, and it was a little bit like having someone there with you to wake you up: a little bit, a tiny little bit, like not being alone.
I left Carl on the beach and travelled home alone to my empty flat, arriving late, and went straight to bed with a bottle of red wine. It was cold. I wore a jumper, scarf and socks and pulled the duvet up to my chest. I drank too much of the wine, and I meant to. I didn’t read anything, didn’t listen to any music, just sat in bed, drinking, smoking, trying not to think about Carl on the beach but thinking a lot about Carl on the beach and how it had become such a mess with him. The cold white walls reflected the city light. I looked out from my crow’s-nest bed at the wooden floorboards and heard the city roar like waves pouring onto a far off shore. And I was adrift, a drunken sailor.
When you booked the alarm call, it was also a real person. But the person you spoke to at night was never the same person who called to wake you in the morning, which was a shame because having spoken
to someone just before sleeping it would have been comforting to have the same person wake you. I often got the same night time person, a man. He had a nice voice. I was usually drunk, and he must have heard the alcohol sloshing around my words but he never rushed me when I was prevaricating over a slight variation in my wake up time. I had him for a long stretch – four or five weeks in a row. Foolishly, I felt I was getting to know him. One night I even said to this man that he was becoming a friend.
You don’t need a friend. You need an alarm clock, he replied. He didn’t sound unkind. In fact, he sounded deeply kind, but embarrassment seared me anyway. Embarrassment and blind, drunken panic, because I didn’t know, couldn’t think, had absolutely no idea where I could buy an alarm clock.
I don’t know where to get one, I said, and hung up.
I wrapped up the wallet I found on the beach and posted it back to its owner, with a note explaining where I had found it. A week or so later, I received a letter from the owner. The letter thanked me for returning the wallet with credit cards and money intact and said that the enclosed cheque – for double the sum I had returned – was a reward for my honesty.
After most of my long days at work, I would arrive back at the flat, pour myself a glass of wine or vodka and read, mainly short stories and poetry. I wasn’t reading novels because I didn’t want that kind of continuity; I didn’t want to carry over any part of any narrative from one day to the next. Sometimes I read poetry in languages I didn’t fully understand – with a sense of the meaning, but reaching for it, grasping after it. One of my other pleasures was smoking, but I didn’t dwell or savour; I narrowed it down to lighting up and the first few drags – after that I lost interest. I read like I smoked: fixating on my new favourite in its entirety to begin with then honing in on the exact phrase or phrases that gave me the fix, then reading only for those, discarding the rest and when that poem had been emptied out, moving on to the next. I liked this line, from Nerval, ‘ma seule étoile est morte’ (my only star is dead), and this one, from Virgil, ‘Sic itur ad astra’ (Thus is the way to the stars). I had enough French to work out the line from Nerval, but struggled with the whole poem. I never studied Latin so I can only read it in translation and I have only ever read a few lines of Virgil. Not knowing exactly what the lines mean transforms the words into objects on a shelf, little bottles of amber.