Signs of Life

by Anna Raverat

  Emily came soon after she heard from Delilah and Shirin. She was brisk. Come on, we’ll make a list, she said.

  How is a list going to help? It won’t solve anything, I said.

  Lists are great, very comforting – one thing after another in a nice straight line, said my sister.

  My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star.

  Georgia O’Keefe

  I thought that writing a list in this situation was like trying to catch a storm in a butterfly net – this must have been only a few weeks before Carl’s death and though nobody guessed that this was what was coming, the feel of something dreadful was hanging, low, in the air. Undaunted by the threatening weather, my sister set to work like the fairy godmother arriving just after the wicked fairy has cast her spell; she can’t undo the magic, but she can soften it a little.

  She looked in the fridge and tutted. She listed the days of the week and against each day she wrote what I would have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which we consulted on, and then this list branched into a detailed shopping list, and she summoned Harry, her smooth new man, to come along in his sleek black colt of a car and charged him with the shopping, which he did, generously adding some ideas of his own, mainly chocolate but also one bottle of very good red wine, which was brave of him because I think he had been instructed to omit alcohol. Harry delivered the shopping discreetly, and left, which, had I been paying any heed, was a clue to how serious things were, or how seriously my sister and friends were taking things.

  My sister made calls because she didn’t think I should be alone. Johnny was included, because we were back together at this point, although he was still living in the yellow room at Robbie’s. I made a disparaging remark about the babysitting circle but my sister was not to be dissuaded and the list lengthened, itemizing who would be with me on each evening.

  Mon: Johnny and Emily

  Tue: Shirin

  Wed: Johnny

  Thur: Emily and Delilah

  Fri: Delilah and Shirin

  Sat: Emily

  Sun: Shirin and Johnny

  Making the lists did create a sense of order, something that I could hold on to, at least for a few days. My sister had spun me a silken ladder. Such showmanship! It reminds me now of the Indian test for cashmere: if the cashmere is of the finest quality – as soft and light as a cloud – then a large shawl will pass easily through a woman’s wedding ring.

  It needs a good woman, or a good girl will do, to bring you back from the stony desert that runs up flat to a precipice where the soul hangs by a thread over the abyss. And what is down below? Hell. And don’t say you don’t believe in hell or hell may get the laugh of you. And hanging by a sisal twist over the darkling void lit by an electric blue flash, like mending the tram lines, you know that blue flash?

  Stevie Smith

  Next my sister had a good hard look at my flat, still empty since Johnny had removed his things and I had not yet replaced any of them, and made a list of what was needed, which included stuff like cushions and rugs, blankets and lamps, and then she called upon Shirin and Delilah, who appeared with quilts and pillows and scented candles. Delilah brought a large round rug from her own home and Shirin brought several floor cushions that used to be on her family’s roof terrace in Tehran. The three of them prepared food, turned off the lights and lit candles, played gentle music, and all the soft sounds and low light and cooking smells transformed my flat into a place with fewer hard corners. I didn’t have a table so we sat on the floor and ate soup and rice and syrup pudding. No wine, that night, which is probably why I remember it so well. Also I remember it because of the luxury of being looked after, which I hadn’t had since very young. When we were little girls, my sister and I visited our grandmother together and she would indulge us: I liked mushroom soup, my sister preferred tomato; I liked chocolate cake, she liked Victoria sponge; I liked fried eggs, she liked boiled, that kind of thing. Alongside the comfort was this sense of being helped.

  At times I have the feeling someone else is working on this with me. I read a passage I haven’t looked at in weeks and I don’t recognise much of it, or only dimly, and I say to myself, Well, that’s not bad, it’s a reasonable solution to that problem. But I can’t quite believe I was the one who found the solution. I don’t remember finding it, and I am relieved, as though I expected the problem still to be there.

  Lydia Davis

  I looked at the list on Wednesday morning.

  Wed: Johnny

  And I suddenly knew without any doubt that I would not wed Johnny. I didn’t know why; I just knew that I didn’t want to. Our reunion had only lasted a couple of months; luckily he hadn’t moved back in so splitting up with him the second time was easier and quicker. And so, making the lists, did, in fact, solve something important.

  ‘View of Delft’ makes me feel spacious, gives working a dreamy quality – I am less craven, less inclined to muscle through. I still want precision but the way I go about reaching it is softer.

  Sometimes I just leave it, go onto the terrace to see the courtyard garden, water my plants, or go for a walk along the canal, which is only ten minutes away. Of course the light is never the same as in the Vermeer and it’s more industrial, but I like looking at the houseboats and I like walking beside water.

  Before they could get out of Iran, Shirin’s father was arrested and put in prison for five months. Shirin and her mother and sisters prepared for the inevitable raid on their house. There was a collection of fine glass animals, each a different colour, each full of alcohol, which had to be destroyed. They smashed them in the bath. Shirin described the stench of spirits, the stickiness of the liqueurs, the bottom of the bath covered with broken glass.

  Now she collects sea glass, mainly green, some bright blue, some dark brown, and some white pebbles that used to be bits of clear glass until they were scratched and soothed by sand and water over many years and made opaque. She’ll hold them under a running tap to show me how the colour changes in water. She keeps the glass in a wooden box with a metal clasp and brings it out in handfuls to make a pile of riches on the table. One day she plans to make a mosaic but when she spreads out her collection with her hand across the table, it seems to me a work of art already.

  I see now that much of the heightened emotion during and after the affair came from me, but not all of it. Other people noticed Carl’s behaviour towards me. One evening at work, one of Carl’s mates came over to talk to me. He sat on Carl’s desk in a casual manner, dangling his legs, and he told me that he and the rest of Carl’s team knew what Carl was doing – making threats, intimidating me – but that they couldn’t stop him. Cowards, I thought. Even Carl’s friends were frightened of him; and he wasn’t threatening them.

  One day not long before he was sacked, he and I had a meeting. We used an empty office on the same floor as the rest of our division. We could have used the meeting room upstairs but I remember thinking that was too far away from other people. We were sitting at a hexagonal table, opposite each other. The door was closed. Carl sat silent, glaring at me. He couldn’t contain himself for long. Something I said angered him. He stood up, muttered something thick and toxic, and then raised his arm and brought his fist down, punching the table hard. The door opened and a colleague, Sara, came in.

  Is everything OK in here? I heard a bang. I thought maybe a filing cabinet had fallen over or something, Sara said.

  We all knew that she didn’t think the noise had been a filing cabinet. Carl walked out of the room.

  The next day he sheepishly told me that he had been to the hospital for an X-ray and had cracked a bone in his hand. He was mild that morning, he even made me a cup of tea, but the situation felt dangerous and out of control. After Carl’s death, a policewoman told me that Carl hitting the table, and the steering wheel, and the door, and the win
g mirror, and the wall, was the next best thing to hitting me. I have held on to this as a defence.

  Carl found a new girlfriend. The main thing I remember about her was that she was very young. Too young to know what suited her – she wore her thick blonde hair in a helmet shaped bob – but young enough that it didn’t matter. She was about five years younger than me, and at least ten years younger than Carl. Her name was Michelle, or Sheryl. He brought her into work a few times, to show her off, to show everyone that he hadn’t totally lost it, but mainly to show me. Remembering it this way is revealing, perhaps because I have to admit some difficult feelings. I should have been relieved that Carl had someone else, but I resented being replaced so easily. Having a new girl didn’t stop Carl being vicious to me, so I realized fairly quickly that I had not, actually, been replaced and I was smug about that, which put me in the position of almost welcoming his harassment. I was all twisted up.

  I saw a note on Carl’s desk one night when I was working late. I knew it was from Sheryl/Michelle. The note was folded, not sealed, so I read it. The message was innocuous; an expression of affection, I think, but I clearly remember her handwriting, fat round letters barely joined up, like a baby’s limbs. Her handwriting made me feel guilty because it showed me her innocence, and at the same time I knew I was prepared to sacrifice her, prepared to see her consumed in the flames of whatever happened between Carl and me. I was not sisterly to that girl.

  The morning they sacked him, our director called me into his office to tell me first. When I came back to my desk, Carl threw me a look so cold and mean that I was afraid of what he might do next. He knew what was going to happen and calmly cleared his desk, packing his personal things into his little rucksack. He did this slowly, perhaps to show that he wasn’t intimidated by having to go and see the director and the chief executive to be told to leave the building for good. Or maybe he was trying to intimidate me by taking his time. His final gesture that morning, after collecting his things and turning off his computer, was to take his bunch of keys out of his jacket pocket, separate off the office keys and lay them on his desk.

  I assumed he hated me even more because he was losing his job over me, but now I think he was frustrated because he would lose his chance to carry on punishing me. He seemed to hate me so much by then that it may have been preferable to feed his anger by being near me than to be away from me and have to find other ways to sustain the rage.

  He put on his jacket, put his rucksack over one shoulder and said goodbye to my assistant, shaking his hand. He was only trying to retain some dignity but I remember a surge of irritation, Get on with it, I wanted to say. He wasn’t being sent to the gallows after all.

  — Have you made any plans?

  — Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself.

  — All those things together?

  — It couldn’t possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.

  Sarah Kane

  Twenty Five

  I haven’t done any writing for a week. Something has changed underneath me like a tide. (Maybe this hasn’t just happened in the last few days, maybe it started before and has only just surfaced.) It reminds me of when I gave up smoking, five years ago. I thought it would be difficult – it’s supposed to be – but in fact it was simple: I just realized that my position had changed. I found that I wanted to not smoke more than I wanted each individual cigarette.

  I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips.

  Virginia Woolf

  A memory from the hospital: I remember being pleased because I had a good spot in the corner of the ward. I thought, I am lucky: I have two walls, nobody gets four walls and most have none. The woman next to me had no walls, only curtains. I heard a doctor ask her if she had ever had an operation. She told the doctor she had had her spleen out. Her ex ruptured it. Now she had to get her remaining, splintered teeth removed. Did he rupture those too?

  You have to work it out for yourself. Sometimes it is difficult to see the point in even trying, but mostly I do see it, and the point is to be free (technically I am free, but this could be reversed). I recall the increasing claustrophobia of that time, how it felt like being in a coffee press, plunging steadily down and down, less and less room to breathe. Starless. The hole behind your life can’t be filled with sorrows or cigarette smoke. And my argument with myself – why did I go on, why did I stay, why did I leave . . . I can never win and it doesn’t fill the hole. It’s just a habit.

  I used to think that weeding and watering plants would be chores like dusting or ironing, neither of which I do, but there’s not much weeding and actually I like watering – it’s quite restful. The plants are doing OK – the lemons are nowhere near yellow and it’s nearly the end of August, but at least they are still on the tree.

  Earlier, two of the builders were cutting through red brick on the side of the building. The tool they used was loud and high-pitched but more distracting was the cloud they created – billows of rosy dust that looked lovely from where I sit, though surely not lovely to be in. Now it is very hot and these two are stretched out and inert on the roof like a pair of lizards.

  I don’t actually lie out in the sun – too many men around – but daydreaming feels a bit like sunbathing. My wall is sandy coloured and if it is hot, then by noon the sun has made the bricks golden and inviting and I want to feel their heat on my hand, arm, shoulder, cheek – and stay for a moment, resting against the warm wall.

  Twenty Six

  I have said I had a breakdown after Carl’s death, but I don’t like saying it. I prefer the word ‘crisis’, although that sounds too quick because whatever happened went on for months and in the middle of that I was in the hospital for weeks.

  The doctors gave me a sedative that warped my mental processes, though my mind was already strained to the maximum, memory already ragged. The pills made everything I did very slow, both physically and in my head, but they didn’t give me the rest I was longing for. One hundred enchanted years would have been lovely. All I wanted was to be soaked in sleep, to wake up drenched in it, but I would wake in the night, needing to pee, viciously thirsty, internal organs exhausted, especially liver and lungs, from processing alcohol and caffeine and tobacco, and now these pills.

  Perhaps I had a breakdown because I wanted to run away. I ploughed a lot of effort into that breakdown, though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. At least, I didn’t know at the top of my head. Somewhere underneath I might have known.

  During Carl’s ranting and raging I existed in a state of perpetual alert. I bought a pocket alarm, in fact it was a rape alarm. I was afraid he might follow me and intimidate me in some way. There was a short path leading from my front door to the pavement and a patch of dry, bare mud that could have been a small front garden but wasn’t because of the shadow cast by an enormously tall, thick, brambly hedge that scratched skin, pulled hair and tore clothing. I suppose the hedge was my responsibility to maintain, but I never did anything about it and neither did the people who lived upstairs so it grew and grew and grew until pedestrians began to cross to the other side of the road because it took up all the pavement. There was a narrow corridor between the hedge and my bedroom window and my main fear was that Carl would be hiding in this space, waiting for me when I got home.

  I developed a habit of calling the police. It was an escalation of the alarm calls habit, which I hadn’t quit. Any time I sniffed violence, I called. Walking along a street I came upon a man and a woman, he was walking ahead issuing threats and she was following behind, pleading. He had obviously beaten her before, and he was obviously going to do it again, and so I called the police. Another time, I heard a fight in the road outside my flat. It was late at night and I could hear male voices shouting and punches landing, and so I called the police, but the fight stopped and the men went away of their own accord. Even though the police came, each time, I kept calling
them because I didn’t feel answered. And perhaps I also sensed that they would be needed soon, for real.

  The builders are bored today. Two of them are jousting with long cardboard tubes, I can see them through the two lower windows, dancing back and forth across the floor. I wanted Johnny to be my knight in shining armour, my champion, my dragon slayer, my avenging prince on a charging white steed, which was probably why I got back together with him.

  In the hospital, each bed had a curtain that could be drawn right around, a parody of a four-poster bed, and the curtain design was a repeating pattern of blue crowns in diagonal rows. I clearly remember the sound of the metal curtain rings on the metal rail whenever the brisk nurses pulled the curtains; like the rush of small, heavy coins being emptied from a velvet purse onto a long table, or the crunching of chainmail on the arm that picks them up.

  The woman who runs the Spanish restaurant owns the whole of the building opposite and she is in the flat, viewing progress. The builders are moving around more than usual, looking busy. I know this woman because I go to her restaurant quite often now. She glances over into my room and sees me sitting at my desk, but she looks away again as if she hasn’t seen me. Whenever we see each other at ground level, we say hello. I don’t think she is being rude today. I think it’s just that up here there is a different etiquette. She is respecting my privacy, but this privacy doesn’t actually exist, as the builders, and me – and my sister – all well know. And yet I do not relieve her of this charade, I do not call Hello! or wave. She prefers to think I retain some privacy and I prefer to let her think that.