by Anna Raverat
So much of it happened in cars. With Carl, the parallel lines arrangement of driving soon suited me; sitting next to someone in a car does not require intimacy. When things were bad between us, in the period when I was trying to break up with him but before I really had, we barely spoke for a four-hour journey. I was driving. It was dark. I was thirsty. A small bottle of water lay at his feet, I kept looking at it, wondering if I could lean down and reach it myself but I was scared to in case he kicked me. He probably wouldn’t have kicked me, but that is how the atmosphere was. As we approached the outskirts of the city, I broke the silence: Could I have a drink of water?
You want a drink of water?
Yes, please, I said.
Right.
Carl wound down the passenger window and threw the bottle out. He wound the window back up. He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I.
Carl’s apartment – Molly’s new home – was filled with stale air. There was a full ashtray on the floor beside the big television and a few empty beer bottles. The gingham cushion that went inside Molly’s basket was still damp; it would absorb the smell thoroughly and I chided myself for not having made time to dry it in my garden. There was nothing green or alive in this place and from this side of the room, not even a tree was visible. I went to the sash window and opened it as far as it would go. It slid up easily and banged at the top. There was a pedestrian square immediately below, some bushes and litterbins around it and, a street or two away, the tops of trees swaying in the breeze. I looked for the highest leaf, which took some time because the branches were moving, found it and then realized how much it bothered me that I couldn’t see the trunks of these trees: This is all wrong, I thought – to keep a cat in a room higher than the trees she should be climbing – it’s all upside down.
I folded up the plastic carrier bag and put it next to the basket. I would have to say goodbye now. The last clear thing I remember from that afternoon is the sharp relief with which I noticed her empty water bowl: I couldn’t leave her without water! I took the bowl into the kitchen to fill. When I came back into the sitting room, with the full bowl of water, Molly was crouching on the windowsill, looking out of the open window, attentive. Misgiving shot through me but it was too late. A bird flew past; she leapt.
Yesterday evening I went out and, at the end of my street, by the church, I walked through the smell of a fox. There was a definite edge to it – I walked in and out of it a few times, to check – and then tried to pinpoint the source; I went up close to some shrubbery by the church door but it only smelt of greenery, and so I put my nose to the walls and they only smelt of brick and dust. I couldn’t locate the smell on something concrete (I wasn’t going to get down and sniff the pavement) and yet it was such a strong presence, hanging in the air like an invisible cloud.
I don’t remember what I did with the water bowl. I don’t remember getting out of the flat and down the stairs and out onto the concrete where Molly lay. There was no need to check whether she had survived the drop and yet there was no blood, at least I don’t remember any. I don’t think I touched her. I have no idea how long I knelt by her side. I don’t remember Carl showing up; he was suddenly there. Words may have been spoken, but not many were necessary. It was obviously an accident; animals don’t commit suicide, although another way of looking at it is that I gave Molly a way out and she took it. Carl dropped down and placed both his hands very gently on Molly’s soft body. His own body juddered with soundless sobbing. We were kneeling together like this, for a moment. Then something shifted – I am almost certain that my fear took hold just before his anger arrived and that I got to my feet before he lunged at me, otherwise I don’t know how I would have got away from him. I ran into the apartment block, up five flights of stairs, back into the flat and slammed the door shut. Carl was behind me for some of it, I heard his footsteps landing heavy on the staircase and heard him curse me, but by the time I shut the door he was not there. I cut my hand on the latch when I locked the door behind me, so now there was my blood, none of Molly’s and none, yet, of Carl’s. Strange that mine should be the first blood on the floor. I held the bleeding hand with the other hand but I couldn’t feel the cut. I was shaking hard now; fear and adrenalin chased the breath out of my body and it felt like drowning.
I saw a painting by Jasper Johns in the New York Museum of Modern Art, or it might have been the Met. The painting is called ‘Diver’ and is about the death of the poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide by jumping off the back of a boat into the Gulf of Mexico, off the Florida coast. I hadn’t known this about Hart Crane until I saw the painting. As I remembered it, the painting featured his two dark brown footprints on a dark red background, but when I looked it up again recently it wasn’t like that at all – it’s more watery. I actually prefer the version I have in my head to the real painting but anyhow, it shows Hart Crane’s dive, as a suspended moment between life and death; just a moment between the two. I think that’s terrifying, and a little bit thrilling. It reminds me of Johnny telling me to let myself fall into the pool below the waterfall.
I would have been better off running away from Carl in the streets. Running into his building and up to his apartment and slamming the door was like running away from him by running towards him.
The time I locked the office door after Carl without thinking not only kept him away from me but also stopped me from going after him. This time was different. On neither occasion was reasoning involved and yet both times a choice was made, my body decided and my head wondered about my real intention afterwards.
Apparently I called the police from Carl’s flat. They have my name and the time of the call on record and have shown me this and yet I have no memory whatsoever of speaking to them. Apparently I said that Molly was dead and that Carl was coming to get me. I didn’t mention that Molly was a cat, which would be another reason they came so quickly. The fact that I called the police helped me later; it cast me more as a victim than a perpetrator.
Thirty
At Carl’s funeral, I begin to cry and as I do, I realize that I haven’t yet done so, about Carl or about Johnny, which only seems like another failure and so I cry all the way through the funeral. I am genuinely crying but I am also aware that this looks good, or better than being completely dry-eyed, especially since the two police officers who were first on the scene attend the funeral. The detectives who visited and questioned me in hospital were not present, but I figured that the two police officers would tell the two detectives that I was inconsolable.
Our Kid wore a black suit, which he managed to make look like a pair of pyjamas, just the way they hung, loosely, off him. Perhaps he made everything he wore look like pyjamas, or perhaps it wasn’t his suit. Our Kid was forlorn. I couldn’t help feeling that he had been orphaned again by Carl’s death and I cried about this too. My sister, who accompanied me and looked incredible in a tight black dress and hair in a sober ponytail, said: It’s not your responsibility, he’s not your responsibility. But he has nobody, I wept. Well then, who’s that? she riposted, gesturing to a portly older woman sitting next to Our Kid. An aunt, I wailed. Aunts are great, said my sister crisply, and we left.
My sister came to stay after Carl was killed, but I didn’t want a nursemaid. What I wanted was not to have been there and since this could not be achieved I set out to de-wire that part of my brain so I literally couldn’t go there again.
I do not want to read, draw, talk or see tonight. I hope this doesn’t last long.
Francesca Woodman
I felt dizzy and sick the whole time; I was in a constant free-fall. I knew, intuitively, that when I hit the ground it was going to be bad because I was falling so far but after several days I was willing that hard landing because I just wanted to stop spinning. It wasn’t enough to kill the thought. And so, when my sister was out for the night, I took some pills.
It was like the nursery rhyme about the old lady who swallowed a fly: I took the pills to swallow the drink, I t
ook the drink to swallow the smoke, I took the smoke to swallow the caffeine, I took the caffeine to swallow the thought that wrangled and jangled and chewed my insides. Chiefly what I remember of the overdose – although you can’t really call it remembering, it’s more an impression – is a sense of merging, no separation anywhere. Know. Don’t know. And then forget. Swim on, strong strokes, go deeper, until the river gives into the deep green depths: a calm and easeful place where the edges of the breath dissolve into limitless space.
Events have been washed out of shape by thinking of them over and over. Sometimes it seems as though none of this really happened and then I come back to the fact of Carl’s death.
Thirty One
Carl chased me into the building and up the stairs but I don’t know where he is now. I cut my hand on the latch as I rushed into Carl’s flat and I am inside with my back against the door, one hand clutching the other hand tightly, covering the cut, staunching the blood.
I keep seeing the moment that I see Molly crouch on the window ledge as the bird flies by and the moment she leaps out and away and falls down. Oh, Molly. I am replaying it over and over on a stuck loop. I hear grunting and scraping and panting. The top of Carl’s head appears at the open window.
I experience the violence of extreme fear and it is like being run over, run through, by an invisible juggernaut. This horrible lurching feeling of having missed a step stays with me even now.
I am at the window and I slam it shut – I remember doing this – I slam it before I look at him. And then he raises his head and I jump back, away. Carl begins banging his forehead on the windowpane; red face, hair in his eyes and all over the place. Mouth wide open with threads of spittle – delicate, like the start of a new spider’s web – connecting his upper and lower teeth.
And the glass breaks, of course. A fairly big piece falls and leaves a volcano-shaped hole in the window, an odd detail but I have it, and other pieces fall, cutting the air down five storeys and shattering on the pavement around Molly’s little body. Most of the windowpane is still in the frame. There is more blood now, Carl’s. A crunch as shards fall out and maybe a sliver cuts him or a piece gets in his eye because he lets out an animal cry of pain.
He is yelling, demanding entry. I don’t think I calculated what would happen if I let him in and then ran out of the flat and down the five flights of stairs. Would I have got away from him? Would he have caught up with me on the cold concrete staircase with the thin echo that nobody would hear? He keeps shouting to be let in, and I open the window.
It happened so fast, and writing it is so slow. The act and the representation of the act, there’s a hopelessly wide gap between them.
The window doesn’t actually touch Carl as I push it upwards but maybe the movement puts him off. Broken glass falls onto our two heads like a handful of anti-confetti. He seems to lose his foothold and he slips down a little but he grabs the windowsill and holds on with both hands. He’s frightened now; I can see it in him. He scrambles. I can hear his boots kicking against the wall, desperately searching for anything, anywhere to push up from. He’s trying to pull himself up higher, to get an arm over the ledge, trying to pull his head and upper body over the ledge and into the room, to get that balance of weight through the window so he can land with a thud on his own floor, safely. His body is fighting; the organism wants to save itself, but there is a bigger fight going on inside him. I am pretty sure he decides, just then, to let go, because I see the decision rise in him, it comes over him like an eclipse.
I reach out. My fingers brush his neck as I take hold of his collar, or what would have been his collar if he were wearing a shirt but he is probably wearing a T-shirt so the fabric in my fist must be a handful of that. I do touch him; touch his skin I mean, touch his bare neck with my hand, but lightly, no more than a brush.
Thirty Two
It wasn’t your fault, said my sister.
It wasn’t your fault, said the doctors and nurses.
It wasn’t your fault, said Shirin and Delilah.
Everybody wanted me to be innocent or to stay innocent and maybe I should have taken this line immediately and stuck to it, singing it like a national anthem in my own country, no questions allowed, unless the questions are patriotic.
Immediately Carl fell, everything became distant. The pills they gave me later made it more distant still. I remember smoking cigarettes and feeling as though I was the smoke. A policewoman gave me the cigarettes and I wondered if she would get them back on expenses.
The police kept asking: Was it your fault? Not in those exact words, but this is what they wanted to find out. A man is dead. Was it your fault? All the questions suddenly became one question and not just a question, the question: Has a crime been committed?
Thirty Three
When I did speak, it felt awkward – like stumbling, or like I had a sponge for a tongue. I sounded odd to myself but I couldn’t work out why and I would ask each visitor: Do I sound weird to you? My sister was the only one who said yes. She said you are falling over your words and they are blurring; it’s the pills. It was such a relief to be told this and to realize that the reason I couldn’t speak properly was the same reason I couldn’t think properly, and it was these massive white tablets they were giving me at regular intervals, the kind of drug that could take down a racehorse, and I did wonder if these pills – so much bigger than the ones I gave myself – were a prize or a punishment.
I have been told that soon after I took my own little pills, I called Johnny and started talking about getting back to the beach, telling him urgently that the glass slipper is on the beach. He knew instantly that something was terribly wrong, and he called my sister and she called an ambulance and they all rushed to the flat where I was, by now, drowning.
I want to be released from the pressure of this story. I want to deliver the weight of it into the writing and when sometimes I manage it, afterwards I am more relaxed, like a dancer after the dance – limbs tired but hanging effortlessly, body light but grounded, a thing well used.
In a dream I am fighting a big tabby cat, up on its hind legs, the same height as me, and we are engaged in an old-fashioned boxing match. I am wearing boxing gloves but through the padded, balloon-like black gloves, I feel the cat’s hard, sharp little teeth against my fist. The fight feels more like a dance because there is no actual violence, though there is a real struggle going on. What stays with me from this dream, even ten years later, is the feel of those hard, sharp teeth through the gloves and a sense of great power – the cat’s, not mine – being held back.
I have to be ready to accept bizarre, even frightening things. Stage fright is just too banal to bother with, because if you are vain you don’t dare go to those unknown places. All you do is keep yourself safe. You think, Oh that’s far enough, that will do, they’ll buy this much. And it’s not real. Not real at all.
Jeanne Moreau
I knew, somewhere, that what I needed was a sitting down moment. A simple, spacious sitting down moment, a rest on a bench with my face in the sun and let it all come down and meet the floor, landing gently, in its own good time. I knew this but I didn’t dare to act on the knowledge. The drink and the cigarettes and the pills had me. Except, of course, they didn’t; I had myself. I was afraid. It seemed easier to carry on playing the part, to keep smoking and drinking and not eating properly, to keep slipping below thought, ducking responsibility. Keep wriggling on the hook.
I like my music empty – just one or two instruments, a piano or a cello or a guitar, a voice maybe. I like to enter the music and walk around in it or if I can’t achieve that, then I like to get right up alongside, reach into the music and pull out an empty feeling.
In hospital I sometimes thought I could hear a piano being played several rooms away and I would go wandering down long shiny corridors with swing doors, the hospital body’s own system of veins and valves, in search of this music that I never found and eventually concluded that it must be the soun
d of distant water pipes. I felt that I would like to stay in hospital for a very long time. I just couldn’t imagine having to get dressed, brush my hair and teeth, wash myself, prepare food; what a lot of time and effort it all seemed to take.
I started to make my own rules. I decided that there are only two emotions, love and fear, and that all the others are shades of these. I made lists:
List 1 – Love
List 2 – Fear
Courage, enthusiasm, kindness are all forms of love. Elegance, respect, forgiveness too. Anything that tightens the heart – hatred, envy, anger, judgement, greed – comes from fear, the fear of losing. (Stephen King says he thinks fear is at the root of most bad writing, I think he’s right and I think that fear is at the root of most bad living too.) What are we afraid of losing? The things that make us feel safe and solid, like property, work, money, power, control, but most of all – love.
One day, working on my Love and Fear lists, happily dividing all of human experience into two neat columns, I had a brainwave. Fear isn’t the opposite of love; fear is what arises when love isn’t there, so maybe, I reasoned, there is only one emotion. There is only love, and the absence of love.
The novelty of being in hospital began to wear off. There were disturbances. The nurses made private telephone calls just outside the ward. I didn’t want to hear the results of their fertility test or what time and on what train their mother-in-law was arriving, but it was as though they were in the same room as me. I reached a point where I couldn’t stand it for a minute longer. I wanted to get out of there. I was sick of the slowness and the two rows of bodies whimpering through the night.