by Anna Raverat
I am getting married, said Johnny, at my bedside. And suddenly I can’t hear anything because the wind is howling in my ears. I tried to look undaunted but I felt my eyes widen and my mouth and chin collapse, just for a millisecond. Of course he noticed; we reveal ourselves in the smallest gestures.
To the other Rachel, I say, a statement not a question.
Yes.
She is not ‘the other’ now then, is she? She is ‘the one’.
Johnny shakes his head as if this stuff doesn’t matter, and then he brings my satin shoes out of his backpack and puts them neatly on the end of my bed.
What the . . . ?!
You wanted them, he says, you asked for them.
I do not remember asking for them, but I know that he is referring to the nonsense I garbled to him on the phone: the glass slipper is on the beach.
In the middle of one hospital night, a cat appeared at the end of my bed. I sat up and looked at the cat, a dark tabby, like the cat in my dream, except this was a normal sized cat and this wasn’t a dream. I felt its weight on the mattress as it picked up its paws and padded up the bed towards me. There was no purring or any other noise, in fact the ward was unusually quiet. I could tell by its atmosphere that this was a wild cat. I held very still, willing it to come closer. The cat came within arm’s reach and slowly I put out my hand to touch it and it was gone. I didn’t fall asleep again afterwards.
Johnny leaves pretty quickly after presenting me with the glass slippers. I have no right to feel abandoned, yet I do, and I can’t smoke or drink my way out of this one. Once he’s gone, I go out of the ward and into the corridor and look out of the huge window. Three floors below me is the main entrance to the hospital. I look down and I see Johnny leaving the building; I know it’s him because of his height and his curly yellow hair bobbing down the stairs. He has a spring in his step, which irritates me. I am holding the beautiful satin shoes, still a bit stunned by his news – he’s only known her for six weeks – and by him bringing me these shoes, which seems like a cheap trick now; confuse the confused lady with a pair of shoes after you have just told her that you are getting married to someone else. He hadn’t even approved of these shoes, we fought over them, and now he’s handing them to me as if they are some sort of consolation prize. Suddenly I am more than irritated, I am incandescent. I hurl one of them out of the window after Johnny. I aim for his head. He doesn’t even notice. The glass slipper lands on the steps.
The cat may have been a hallucination, although I prefer to think of it as a visit from some other dimension because the experience was more real than real. Of course the cat made me think of Molly, though this one was a tabby and Molly was black, but thoughts and memories of other things stirred too, like snowdrop bulbs taking root in dark earth, months before the flowering, a very delicate and secret beginning. I am not sure what the purpose of the cat’s visit was, other than to remind me of these, as yet unnameable things.
Believe thou, O my soul,
Life is a vision shadowy of Truth;
And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
Shapes of a dream!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I was convinced that the ‘Love and Fear’ spectrum was my own idea and then, a while later, I saw the exact same thing in a film. I haven’t come across my third list anywhere else, though I now know that H. G. Wells did write something similar, obviously before I wrote List 3.
List 3 – Things there are not
There are no deals.
There is no protection.
There is no return.
Nothing can be singled out.
There are no instructions and no rules.
There is no getting away with it,
There is no getting away from it,
There is no getting around it, under it or over.
There are only choices to make.
Or choices to fail to make.
I decide to go and fetch the shoe myself. It’s been kicked and trodden on so it’s a bit scuffed, but nobody’s taken it. I suppose it is an unremarkable object unless you have invested it with meaning.
My fifth favourite drug, if drink, cigarettes, coffee and hard work are not readily available, is a very hot bath. I find they can knock you out quite nicely. So I shuffle along the wide corridor to the institutional bathroom in my poor old satin pyjamas, which are not feeling particularly royal right now, and lock myself in.
Falling for someone who makes you feel special because he makes you feel special says nothing about you except that you are needy. It says that you crave this kind of attention, crave the adoration. It shows up your vanity. Maybe, as long as it doesn’t reach such extremes, there’s nothing inherently wrong with vanity – perhaps it’s just another way of coping; a way of making the world smaller. But if you persist, you are fooling yourself. Look around! You are growing old and leaky, it happens to everyone and it doesn’t matter, but it’s a fact.
I was wrong about everything, even the music – the water pipes that sounded like a piano playing a great way off – because there is no music now, just hot water thundering out of the oversized taps and a gloomy industrial echo. I turn off the taps and watch my toes disappear in the steam. Everything has evaporated. I think it would be better if I disappeared.
This is not a moment you should have in a bath because things are breaking and they need to fall to the ground and smash into a thousand tiny pieces and not be softened or bloated by water. A whole sense of self is shattering. The pieces that are coming away are hard and they need to hit the ground. This is a point of honour. Contact with the ground must be made, smashing and clattering and splintering, total obliteration of what falls.
Thirty Four
Climbing five floors up the front of a building is risky even if you are calm and focused. Carl was angry and upset. If you can have suicide by cop, it stands to reason, surely, that you could have suicide by climbing. Doesn’t it?
I know instantly that Carl is dead. I know this even before his body hits the ground.
Slap!
I lean out of the window, looking down. Blood is already beginning to pillow his head, seeping out from under, not like red wine dashing across a table – it spread slower and seemed thicker, more like the syrupy vodka in the clouded bottle in my freezer.
Though my eyes are on his broken body I am not, in any familiar sense, looking at him. I stay like this. I don’t know how long. Were people rushing towards him now? Recoiling? Did some scuttle away again? Was it all done in silence? I stay, watching, leaning out of the window. I am trying to deny it. Then this shock: his whole body shot out one great twitch, the last thrash of a landed fish.
Thirty Five
If I owe a debt, then to whom and how shall I pay? Is ten years enough? I want things to be simple. Sometimes they are. But even when they are not, I tend to bulldoze in and reduce things anyway, make them neat and tidy, easier to cope with. This aspect of myself shows in my writing: the mistakes I make in writing, clichés and sentimentality among them, are the mistakes I make in life. I know this, but it is difficult to eradicate all faults, especially when they have grown slowly over years and formed a mental carapace.
Watching the sky this afternoon, I was thinking how years go by like aeroplanes and how you don’t have to ‘get through’ the day, or the night for that matter, because nights and days pass all by themselves. And what passes for love.
I said that Johnny never again asked me what I had had for lunch but he did; he asked me when he came to visit me in hospital. What did you have for lunch today? Hearing it was like looking at an old photograph that stirred up memories of what we once were to each other.
Love remoulds your inner landscape, creates its own chambers within you. You carry it inside like heart and lungs. Perhaps this is where feelings of ownership and belonging come in. I don’t fully understand this process but I think it involves an exchange at a very deep level. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether it’s someone els
e’s cat or someone else’s writing, if you love it and it touches you like this, somehow and in some way it becomes yours.
The first time I stayed at Johnny’s parents’ house, they put us in separate rooms. In the middle of the night I sneaked into his room and we made love, and afterwards Johnny went downstairs and brought back a midnight feast: his father’s port and his mother’s homemade cake and big fat sandwiches he made himself; delicious, all of it. We finished it all up and Johnny went downstairs to make the same again. We were young then, with huge appetites, and there was a feeling that there was always more.
In a sitting down moment, which could be any given moment or all and doesn’t, of course, have to be taken sitting down, sometimes a soft feeling arises. You might be close to tears, wide-eyed and absorbent, zingy, still, or very private. I read something that reminded me of this feeling: ‘I am my own home and this is where I belong, and things keep going forward, endlessly.’ This is from a story by Banana Yoshimoto. The story features a lonely young woman who is given an amulet that has healing qualities. Because I read the stories over and over again, the collection itself became a talisman. This book has been in many bags and opened so often that the spine is frayed at each end and the cover has worn soft at the edges, torn a little in places.
I especially remember reading the stories on holiday by the sea. Quite early each morning Delilah and I would leave our hotel; she wanted to get established on the beach in one of her four bikinis, I wanted my two cups of black coffee. Every morning I would stop at the beachfront cafe, sit for an hour or so, drink my coffee, look out over the ocean and read a story.
All I have is my feeling for the story; a feeling about what belongs and what goes where. Writing starts with a feeling. This feeling lives in the ruins at the back of my head, among other wild creatures. I have to coax it out, invite it to show itself. It is necessary to be quiet and open, and to listen as I try to bring it forward. As it comes, it changes. There is something in its mouth. The creature comes almost into view, drops whatever it was carrying and leaps back into the dark.
We are writing this up as an accident, said the police, as if the way they wrote it – the very fact of their writing it that way – changed or determined or set what actually happened, a substitute for certainty.
The police and the hospital decided I should be released. I don’t know why these two big institutions acted at the same time – you’d think, maybe, that the police could have decided first and the hospital could have released me later, preferably not on the same day. But that is not how it happened. The judgements arrived at once. You are free to go, they said, and then they said: You are free to go.
The flat opposite is finished; the builders are gone. They have done a good job, from what I can see. I should finish too but it is hard to let go. Elegance has to do with holding things lightly, it means stopping at sufficiency; doing no more than is required, saying no more than is required.
You are free to go.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following people for helping me find my way in writing this book.
Nancy Rawlinson, who encouraged me right from the start, always had great suggestions on process as well as content, cheered me on through some of the most difficult stages of writing and who, right at the end, spotted something important.
Catherine Janson, who realized I was a writer before I did, who read about thirteen iterations, managing to be enthusiastic each time, and for her faith that I could do it.
Maggie Gee, for her generosity, insight and advice.
Jenny Turner, Anna Wilson and Jane Campbell for many consoling and inspiring conversations about writing, and life.
Tim Gordon and Zoe Pagnamenta for their sparky interest and helpful introductions.
Paul McDermott for taking me seriously, helping me see what it was I was writing about and his precise observations.
Lila Cecil and Joy Parisi for creating Paragraph, a wonderful writers’ space in New York where I finished the first draft.
Donald Winchester, for his kindness.
Thomas Ueberhoff for loving the book and saying so.
Paul Baggaley, Emma Bravo, Nicholas Blake, Jonathan Pelham, Kris Doyle, Sandra Taylor for their enthusiasm.
Georgia Garrett, who responded with warmth and sensitivity to the manuscript and to me, who saw what was missing from the first draft and who championed certain aspects when I wasn’t brave enough to.
Kate Harvey, who showed such care and close attention, inspired structural changes as well as fine tuning, who nurtured me with lots of time and who ensured safe transition from manuscript to book.
PERMISSIONS
The publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
Hart Crane, ‘Voyages I’ from Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Deborah Garrison, ‘I Answer Your Question with a Question’, from A Working Girl Can’t Win and Other Poems by Deborah Garrison, copyright © 1998 by Deborah Garrison. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
William H. Gass, from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 1968 by William H. Gass. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Alison Jarvis, from ‘Elegy For A Drummer’ by Alison Jarvis.
Sarah Kane, ‘4.48 Psychosis’ © Sarah Kane 2000, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Medbh McGuckian, from ‘Venus and the Rain’ (1994) by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press www.gallerypress.com.
Georgia O’Keeffe, from Georgia O’Keeffe – Copyright © 1976 by Georgia O’Keeffe. Published by The Viking Press. All rights reserved.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper, by Permission of the Estate of James MacGibbon.
Daniel Stern, The Suicide Academy, copyright © 1968 by Daniel Stern. Reprinted by permissions of George Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the author.
Francesca Woodman, Notebook 6 and Journals, courtesy George and Betty Woodman
Virginia Woolf, Diary 3: 7, by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.
First published 2012 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-4472-0435-0
Copyright © Anna Raverat 2012
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