by Anna Raverat
The police had a lot of questions for me after Carl’s death. Every day the doctors brought the police to my bedside. They came to ask their questions, drawing the royal curtain, arranging themselves in a horseshoe around the foot of the narrow metal bed and each time they came all I could think, my only thought was, Will this horseshoe hold my luck, or will it all run out? Their questions came fast and sharp, knives thrown at a target. My instinct was to protect myself and this is why I didn’t speak. My silence allowed me to listen, and what I heard was that they really only had one question. How doggedly they asked this question. And how furiously they wanted an answer.
I wanted to answer, but with what? It was in the hospital that I first started to write it down. It was Shirin’s idea: If you can’t talk about it, why don’t you try writing down what happened? Remember, remember and write it down. I started to record what I could remember, vaguely aware of this thing nudging at me that wanted to be fed or watered or let out. And the next day, when they came and drew the curtain and stood in a horseshoe at the end of the narrow metal bed and asked me their questions, I was able to answer, I’m writing it down. They were not entirely satisfied, but one of them persuaded the others to leave me alone, saying, She’s writing it down. As they walked away I thought, My luck is holding.
The only things in my fridge were coffee and vodka. I never ran out of coffee or vodka. Occasionally I would buy fruit, intending to eat an apple a day, but often the skin would go wrinkly and the flesh would shrink, and I wouldn’t notice until the apples were actually disintegrating, and then I would throw them out and, a few days later buy fresh apples to lie innocently in the bowl, untouched, until they too started to rot.
One morning I picked a new apple from the bowl to take to work, red on one side, green on the other, shiny, firm; a perfect Disney apple. Later that day, sitting at my desk, I took a bite. The apple was too big and too sweet. I noticed the sweetness of it hanging on my lips and inside my mouth and I had to wash the taste away with a gulp of water. I set it aside. The apple lay on the windowsill, gradually browning where I had bitten it.
When I noticed it again I became annoyed with myself: until the affair with Carl I had been a hearty eater but now I was a pathetic creature who couldn’t manage a whole apple. Who the hell did I think I was – Snow White, choking on the red skin of the poisoned apple? Except that I didn’t require a wicked stepmother to poison me, I was doing the job myself with drink and cigarettes.
Everywhere there were people living out their lives using aspects of suicide against themselves. They did not even have the authenticity of the final act to speak for them. Suicide is, in short, the one continuous, every-day, ever-present problem of living. It is a question of degree.
Daniel Stern
When Shirin visited me in hospital she would tell me stories about being a little girl in Tehran, and what it was like having to leave Iran aged eleven and finish her childhood in another country; she had to learn how to be Iranian in England, which is an entirely different thing to being Iranian in Iran. There was so much that she had to relearn – reprogram, actually – in order to fit in. For example, when she fell, she was used to saying, ‘Ai!’ but she learned to say, ‘Ow!’ instead. Even the shortest utterances that one assumes to be instinctual aren’t; they are learned behaviour.
The day the Shah left Iran, she smoked her first cigarette. That night there was a gathering at her parents’ house and when the adults went to dinner, Shirin who was ten years old and her friend Ali who was eight rifled through all the bags looking for cigarettes and took a single one from every packet they found. Upstairs, in her bathroom, they compared their loot.
I got a Winston!
I got a Marlboro!
I got a Silvester!
I got a Dunhill!
They smoked standing over the sink, coughing their guts out. When, later, the adults challenged the children, they flat denied it.
I read that we start growing up with the first lie we tell our parent figure, so it follows that when you carry out a crime, or a misdemeanour, and don’t confess; that’s grown up.
I tried to run away through work and other drugs. Even when I was with him, work served as a welcome distraction from Carl, and afterwards I used it even harder. Maybe I thought I could make up for everything I had done wrong by being good at work. Maybe I thought long hours in the office could ground me. Or that if I did well in my job, somehow this would balance out the lies I had told, like there was some kind of Virtue/Sin balance sheet and someone was keeping score. But I wasn’t at the front of my face. Even though I was physically present at work, much of the time I would sit in my chair, staring out of the window, feeling around in my hairline, touching my spots as if they were little ornaments, dusting them with my fingers.
Returning from work in the evenings, everyone around me looked tired and loose and drab, and all I could see was beaten down men and women with droopy shoulders in bad suits and cheap shoes. And trees with branches outstretched waiting for the day to drop into their arms, exhausted.
At home, after feeding Molly, I liked to pour myself a glass of wine or vodka, sit on the rough wooden steps to the garden with the light of the kitchen behind me, light a cigarette – a Marlboro Light, preferably a soft pack – and read poetry, especially, then, John Keats. I liked the voluptuousness of Keats on death.
I was hooked. Not just on the drinking, the smoking, the reading of poetry, but on the idea of myself drinking and smoking and reading poetry. I stood apart from myself and watched. I had to reach the point where I could pass out as soon as I tipped into bed, but it was difficult to judge. Sometimes I drank and smoked until I could barely stand up to brush my teeth and sometimes I would wake to find myself on the sofa with the lights still on and drool on my shoulder. A pattern emerged: every night I would work late, until half-past nine when it was dark or even later, and then go home and drink and smoke until I simply cut out, and every morning, coming round after a night of inadequate sleep, with a furry mouth and a fuzzy mind, I would light the first cigarette, bitter, necessary, and brew the coffee strong and hot: the black coffee and the dry cigarette working to cut through the fog from the night before. And that was my life. Evenings: cutting out. Mornings: cutting through.
Twenty Seven
I wanted to love Johnny. I thought that I might fall in love with him again. He had not yet fallen out of love with me and he was willing to forgive me, I think, but only if I worked. This was an unspoken condition. Perhaps he noted how hard I was working in my paid job and thought that I should be putting an equal if not greater amount of effort into repairing our relationship. He had no way of knowing that even though I was putting the hours in at the office, I spent a lot of time staring into space and picking spots, and that the effort I was making at work was much less than it seemed. By the time Johnny and I got back together, Carl had been sacked and this also met a condition for Johnny; he could not have tolerated me spending each working day in the vicinity of my ex-lover. Before we got together again, Johnny slept with a woman he met at a conference. He didn’t tell me; I just knew. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Perhaps I smelt it. When I asked him about her the only thing he would say was that she was petite, which made me feel lumpy. Although I didn’t like the thought of him with another woman, I could hardly complain. And anyway, having slept with someone else was another condition for Johnny.
Falling in or out of love – what does that mean, exactly? How long does it take to fall in love? Thirty seconds? One minute? A minute’s fall is a long, long way down. There is no hope of survival. Fallen in love is like fallen in battle – dead and gone. Sometimes people say, ‘I was falling in love with her/him, but . . .’ This ‘but’ is curious; it implies that they stopped falling, but how? Dropping onto a ledge? Grabbing a convenient branch on the way down like they do in cartoons? Opening a parachute? No. It’s not like that. The whole idea of ‘falling’ in love is wrong. One doesn’t ‘fall’ in love; one simply k
nows. You know in an instant whether or not you could love a person. There is an opening towards that person, a sense of coming forward, of discovery.
I’ll be watching the crane – mesmerized – looking up at the man in the clouds and then realize the builders are watching me so I come back to my work and my desk where my anglepoise lamp is a scaled-down version of the crane, minus the man. I want to wave at him, partly to discover if he can see me from such a height and distance, but if I do that, the builders might think I am waving at them.
I wondered why I couldn’t make myself do what I should to mend it with Johnny. I just knew that trying made me sad and tired.
You are not working hard enough on this relationship, he said, and it was true but by saying this he squeezed the ambivalence out of me, like getting rid of a pocket of air – the trouble is, I was breathing that air.
There are no builders in sight. I attempt a wave at the crane driver but just as I lift my arm and start waving one of the builders, the fat-faced one, comes to the window. I abort the wave soon enough that he couldn’t possibly think I was waving at him, but unfortunately it did attract his attention. It’s pointless anyway, waving at the man in the crane because if we met in the street we wouldn’t recognize each other. He may as well be the man in the moon.
It is said that you are not over the last lover completely until you are into the next one. Johnny must have heard this too because when we split up for the second time, he found a new girlfriend almost immediately and he was already quite established with her by the time Carl died. The weird thing was that she was also called Rachel. Of course I quizzed him. How did they meet? How old was she? What did she do? Where did she live? And, most importantly: what did she look like? He told me all, enjoyed it rather, I thought, and fair enough. He said she was beautiful ‘in a classical way’ but he didn’t give me enough to go on: I couldn’t see her. Classical how, exactly? I asked. Like a Greek goddess? A Roman coin?
What I really wanted to ask (but didn’t) was, Am I prettier than?
I would wake early, often around 5 a.m. One morning I pushed my feet into some old trainers, pulled on a cardigan and went out to the shop looking for cigarettes. It was already light and birds were singing but the streets were empty apart from an old drunk shouting at the sky; just another person wrestling with his demons. Along came a young businessman in a suit striding down the pavement. I asked him if he had a light, but I must have startled him because he drew back as if I had scorched him and then walked around, giving me a wide berth. This man would have seen me as a peer at 9 a.m. but at 5 a.m., he clearly didn’t. I was puzzled by this at first and then realized what I must have looked like to him: snaggly unwashed and unbrushed hair, old pyjama bottoms, skanky trainers, bags under my eyes, tired skin – I probably looked more like the old drunk’s daughter than a young professional. Instead of seeing this as a warning sign, I was filled with contempt: my pyjamas may have been old but they were satin, for goodness’ sake, and that fool didn’t recognize a princess when he saw one.
We think we can escape down half-deserted streets but all the things we use to defend ourselves – overworking, over-drinking, over-eating, under-eating, smoking, etc. – are well-worn pathways. The really frightening thing about the abyss is not that it exists, but that there is always a road in, and we take it.
The fat-faced builder keeps popping up at the window, usually with a phone pressed to his ear. He may have good reason to be on the phone, perhaps he’s the foreman or something, but there are other places he could talk, it doesn’t have to be the window opposite me. I think the phone is an alibi.
(Usually I object to the use of the word ‘pop’ unless it refers to bread in the toaster, or bubbles. I can’t stand it when people say they are going to ‘pop’ to a shop, for example. Toast pops. Bubbles pop. People do not. And yet I can’t think of a better way of describing how the fat-faced builder appears at the window; he really does pop up – like a Jack-in-the-box. Or toast.)
Twenty Eight
The bottle of whiskey on Carl’s desk was the excuse they finally used to sack him. I don’t know where the whiskey came from. I have a feeling that Sheryl/Michelle gave it to him, though she could barely have been old enough to purchase alcohol. In any case, the whiskey was important to him. It sat on his desk, an open gesture of defiance. The bottle had been opened, some of the whiskey had been drunk, but the level never seemed to go down. And yet Carl would arrive, late, unwashed and unshaven for days at a time, with puffed shadows under his eyes. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He was definitely drinking something hard, but not from this bottle.
The whiskey reminded me of the perfume that Carl gave me at the very beginning of our affair: same square bottle only larger, our affair book-ended by these two bottles of amber liquid, with the end much bigger than the beginning. Like the perfume on my shelf, which signalled Carl’s entry into my life, the whiskey on his desk became largely symbolic, something to do with his exit. He was sacked for a symbolic reason, and he accepted that. I see now there was a certain dignity in how he played that.
I was slowly merging back in with my people – management, the rule-makers – and as I re-joined my group, he struck out on his own. Without a job, or some sort of structure to undermine, what does a rule-breaker do? Carl had more time for brooding. Perhaps he also spent a lot of time at the climbing wall, or climbing random buildings, I don’t know, but certainly his obsession darkened and deepened. I used to think that I was the object of his obsession but now I am not so sure that obsession has an object – I think there are vehicles that the obsessive locks onto, thinking they will carry the weight of it, take some of the unbearable heavy pain away, but of course they don’t – can’t, even if they are willing to.
Last night I was woken by horrible shrill screams that went on and on. They came from the street outside. When I looked out of the window I saw a fox in the street. Perhaps it had been chasing or fighting something but now it stood silent by a parked car, looking down the dark street, and then leapt onto a high wall and padded softly away. I was surprised how small and thin it was – not much bigger than an adult cat – and how nimble. This morning I saw muddy paw prints on the skylight in my room, I wondered if they were made by the fox, but I didn’t hear anything on my roof last night. I suppose they could have been there before and I just didn’t notice them. I can’t tell by the size of the paw prints if they belong to a fox or a cat. Now it is raining heavily and they are being washed away.
The crane is like a weather vane for a different stratum: when idle, the lifting hook hangs so very high that it sways even when the air is breathless down here. I like to watch the crane turn sedately and I like to see what comes up on the hook (earlier it was a great bundle of dripping blue net that looked like it had been dredged up from the bottom of the sea). Often the crane doesn’t move at all for quite long periods of time and the man waits alone up there in his bubble.
Today he’s wearing blue jeans and a red T-shirt. At the moment he is out of sight because the cab has swung right round. Then back he slowly comes, with tons of blocks wrapped in a blue plastic sheet that flutters in the breeze like washing on a line. I am beginning to understand why people watch sports like cricket or darts or golf.
There seems to be much more traffic in the sky. Or maybe I am simply seeing what is already there because I am looking at the crane so much.
Twenty Nine
I didn’t want to let Molly go, especially to this crazed freak, but I wanted the calls and threats to stop and she was, after all, his. He wanted his cat back. He had just moved into a flat on the fifth floor. A friend of his at work gave me the address and a key. The plan was that I would take Molly and all her things to this flat. Carl would be out. I wanted to see Molly into her new home, and maybe I was curious as to what sort of life that would be, what sort of place Carl was in now.
The morning I was due to deliver Molly, I dug out her lead from the dusty box and took my shoes out of her cat
basket. I washed the red and white gingham cushion by hand, cleaned the food and water bowls, and wiped the inside of the basket with a hot cloth. The litter tray had long gone and I had asked Carl via his friend to buy a new one. I folded over the top of the bag of cat food and sealed in its pungent, salty smell with tape. I had bought some single cream for Molly, as a treat, and imagined basking in the sun with her or having her paddle my lap and then sleep on me for one last time, but of course that didn’t happen – it was a grey day and Molly was nowhere to be seen. This made me anxious and I began thinking I should have kept her in the night before. But she’s going to be a prisoner again soon enough, I thought, damning Carl for choosing a high rise flat. Anyway. Molly came back and the taxi came. There wasn’t time to give Molly the cream.
I carried her and all her things up five flights of stairs and didn’t stop until I got to the door – blue, with a frayed, dusty doormat and some take-away menus and a free local newspaper sticking out of the letterbox. I reached into my back pocket for the key and went in. I wasn’t sure how to say goodbye. I was sweating and out of breath and now I started to cry. The flat was horrible, as I knew it would be. Molly jumped down from my shoulder. Her weight leaving mine was a physical wrench. I suppressed the tears; the journey here had taken longer because of traffic and Carl would be back soon. No time for crying. A state-of-the-art television dominated the room, a huge thing, silver, like my car.