My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  I over-identified with Rosa. Of course, because although she looked like her father, with Nick’s small nose and curly hair, parts of her brain were uncannily like mine. Music, for example. A marvellous surprise. It has proved to be a never-ending groundswell of pleasure that we like exactly the same music. By this I don’t mean certain genres, certain composers, I mean we love the same notes and phrases. The same bar will trigger the same emotions. I can only believe this is coded, somehow, in deep folds of the emotional brain, because the response is so immediate and instinctive. Hearing something together, it speaks to us, and we often touch hands and look away, because a moment of such absolute intimacy has just come upon us. A flash of mirrors from far away, an unreasonable happiness hushing us like shyness (though at other times it makes us dance on the landing). When she sends me music, it is simple bliss.

  And yet, in other ways we’re totally different. Hurray for that! Hurray for difference! Hurray for the things that our children can do that we could never in a lifetime manage! The miracle of the dance of the genes, throwing up unlikeness as much as sameness.

  She is sociable, very, and I am not, has always had a lot of friends, except for a brief puzzling period when she was in Year 2 of her primary school, the local school, one hundred yards down the road. Because my own junior school years had often been miserable and lonely, I had a special reason to be anxious about this.

  One night she said, ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with, today at break time,’ and I said, trying not to show my heart was sinking, ‘I expect you will tomorrow.’ But this refrain became more frequent, usually just as I was leaving her bedroom at night, after reading to her. ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with at break time.’ Of course it is possible that she knew this would halt me in my tracks and bring me back for another ten minutes, but still I know it was genuine. A little stone of misery from my own past arc-ed through the evening and landed in my chest. Rosa would be lonely, as I had been. My own fatal unpopularity, which I had felt deeply as unlikeability, must have somehow been transmitted to her. It was all my fault. I felt wretched, and helpless. My lovely, pretty, laughing girl would be unhappy. The curse had come upon her, she had not escaped.

  In fact, it was just a phase, and soon over. Never before, or since, did Rosa lack friends. I was over-reacting, over-deducing, because I over-identified.

  Recently we reminisced about that time. Perhaps it was that the children were at the age where they started to notice difference, and she was different, one of only three white girls in her class. She said, ‘I got something good out of it, though, because I had to find something to do in the playground, and I worked out how to fly. If you did a leap, and then another leap, and a leap upon that leap, you would fly. And I used to go round the playground trying it out.’ And I said, ‘But that’s just like me! Because I didn’t want anyone to know how lonely I was at the village school, when we moved to Watersfield, I used to walk about the playground very fast, on my own, from one side to another, looking business-like, pretending I was going somewhere.’

  And she said, but laughing, ‘That is sad. Sorry, Mum, you’re not like me.’

  In ways that I don’t, she believes she can fly. She can walk into a room without anxiety. She expects to be liked, and mostly people like her. For that she can thank Nick as well as herself, the luck of his sociable, confident genes.

  Now she has a bewildering number of friends. Somehow she has kept some junior school friends, and all her big group of grammar school friends, and has made a new cast of university friends, and another lot from the time she spent in Paris, and another lot, when she was living in Granada …

  I couldn’t cope with Rosa’s Bacchanalian procession, the constant flashing of electronic signals, texts and messages and flickering face-books, drinks and dances, travelling, feasting, for she’s also become an imaginative cook after years of only eating white bread and pasta, using every kind of vegetable, meat and fish, always trying new dishes on people she loves. Which is sometimes us, so we are lucky. Her life is like a lake I once saw in Uganda, up in the hills, deep water spread with green leaves and pink flowers, entirely covered in water-lilies, a wondrous tangle of youthful faces, bright and specific in the morning light, where one is always opening, another closing.

  (And on them she smiles: but on us she scowls, for we are her parents, and now things have changed, for we are no longer the centre of her universe, the sun and moon of the adoring small child. Now she is big, and we are just the parents. We say boring things, like ‘Have you got any washing?’ or ‘What time is your train?’ or ‘Did you put my jacket back in the cupboard?’ or ‘Stand up straight, darling. Then you’re beautiful.’ Thus do the old parents oppress their offspring, and she fights back, because she can. ‘Are you trying to be funny, Mum?’ ‘BO-ring!!’ or ‘Pressure, pressure, you always give me pressure,’ or ‘It’s none of your business.’ ‘Leave me ALONE!’ The same-sex pair have the harder time, for fathers tend to adore and offer lifts, whereas mothers afflict daughters, and daughters mothers, as they try to find two different ways of being women. Both members of the dyad know the link cannot be broken, but on bad days it feels, to her and to me, as if a heavy mini-me is jammed on our shoulders. Mine stares round into my face, kvetching and complaining. ‘Mum! Mu-u-m!’ ‘Rosa! Rosa!’ She is me, I am her, but we have to be other. And then suddenly my big girl says something funny, or I kiss her cheek, and we are in each other’s arms, she is taller than me but we dance down the hall, and her kisses hit air because I have grown smaller; seconds later, she flies through the door and has vanished.)

  ‘Read a book,’ I say. ‘Do you ever read a book?’ or ‘Do you think you should stay in tonight and sort out your room?’ But secretly I’m pleased that Rosa is so busy.

  Nick and I have—do we?—(we have to say goodbye, because she has to go away into her adult life)—a lovely grownup daughter. She is twenty-two now, and has just been abroad for the third year of her languages degree at Durham. She is tall and strong and beautiful (when she stands up straight)—a jeune fille en fleur, full of jokes and ideas, writing songs and articles, road-running, cooking. But I haven’t stopped worrying: that is the cost. I thought I had mysteriously escaped it, but love extends the surface area of your skin. You can soak up more light, you can be endlessly surprised, but you are also more vulnerable.

  When she was abroad, if she was quiet, had she been abducted? My heart leaped when the Skype symbol flickered at the bottom of my computer screen and her dear, her pixillated face appeared, her laughing mouth and high, wide forehead, or just a Skype message, when the screen didn’t work or she had just got up and didn’t want me to know it, ‘are you there, madre?’ brief, no capitals, but presaging a mutual helter-skelter of words, surreal jokes, gossip, confessions—or I open my email and see the capitals: R RANKIN-GEE. Hurray, hurray.

  I only want her to be all right. If she is all right, and Nick is all right, my basic emotional tripod is steady.

  I posted her parcels of porridge to Spain. ‘Mum don’t worry, I’m fine,’ she said. She throws back smiles, insults, garlands, but like life itself, she has come and gone, my beautiful girl, my heart, my Rosa. We stay where we are, and they go on.

  ‘If the meaning of an animal’s life is movement …’

  The illness passed also, the RSI, the visit of old age with which this chapter began. I was grateful when I could write again, longhand, slowly, and fetch a little shopping, though even one light plastic carrier could bring the pain in my shoulders back. The wonder is, the body tends to get better from everything that will not kill it, and very slowly, I did get better, and movement came back, the joy of movement. I started swimming. I was running again.

  But something had happened to my work. I had taken it for granted, perhaps, my luck, and luck must never be taken for granted. Life was too busy. I grew too busy. Nick was successful, at the BBC, and the price of success was making many features, ambitious features involving travel, and other pro
grammes which, his craftsmanship insisted, could not be made in the time allotted. He had to work evenings, and sometimes weekends. My agent had encouraged me to leave Heinemann in search of more money, and negotiated a sizeable advance, a £75,000 two-book contract, with Jonathan Warner, the young head of HarperCollins’s literary fiction list, Flamingo. Lost Children came out in 1994. Now it was time to write the second. But Jonathan had committed suicide, leaving a wife and daughter, not long after Lost Children was published, a dreadful piece of news that hit everyone hard. The RSI had slowed my production, and Nick couldn’t help with Rosa very often. I was left, in the end, with less than six months to write and deliver the second novel. I went too fast. I rushed it. I fluffed it. The book I delivered, called at that stage The Keeper of the Gate, but eventually The White Family, would one day bring me great satisfaction, but unwisely, I submitted something less than perfect.

  It was unlike me; I am a control freak, and I know that my work is not ordinary, not universally pleasing or lovable, and so needs the armour-plating of technique. Do not let yourself be vulnerable.

  But it’s hopeless advice. We’re all vulnerable. Tread carefully, young writers in the literary jungle.

  My animal luck (vii)

  the literary jungle

  In retrospect, I can see that what happened was a motorway pile-up: too many causes. Two years earlier, researching Lost Children, I made some visits to a centre for the homeless in east London, and sat in on their group therapy sessions. Many of the stories stretched back to childhood; one man had been sexually abused in a Catholic children’s home; one woman abandoned by schizophrenic parents. But more of them had foundered in middle age, when too many things went wrong at once. Within the same few months, a relationship ended, they were made redundant, illness struck, they were declared bankrupt. And they fell through the net. They were worryingly like all the people I knew; they had no special tragic flaw.

  I saw it in theory, then I learned it in practice.

  1995: a watershed. I was forty-six; Rosa was eight. My agent had moved to Canada; I was passed on to the excellent managing director of the same agency, who was known as a good agent, and a gentleman, but the truth was, he had not specifically chosen me, and inheritance did not seem the safest route. (Yet my editor at HarperCollins, too, had inherited me, after the death of the editor who chose me. I should have seen the signs, I should have seen the danger, but I lived day to day, writing, Rosa, Rosa, writing, pell mell, myopic.) I was very ambitious, am ambitious still. It felt as though this was make or break. I was on my way to fifty. I had to get up there.

  It’s hard to recreate all the reasons for the crash. If I had a tragic flaw, it was arrogance, which sounds like ignorance, and came from it. I simply thought I could do what I wanted. If you don’t come from a literary background, perhaps it takes you longer to learn the rules? And I had stayed curiously isolated. Even though I had been one of the ‘Best of Young British’, even though I had been a Booker judge, I had mostly stayed at home with Nick and Rosa, writing books and getting on with my life. I thought that the writing was all you had to do. It seems extraordinary, looking back at it now, but I’d probably been to less than a dozen literary parties, all told. I didn’t see that they were important. I see it now; you get out there and smile, and meet people, and are seen on the circuit, which means you are recognised as ‘one of us’. Moreover, you learn lessons from the group. I should have attended to a stray remark Jonathan Warner made when he paid so well for me: ‘I love your work, but I was surprised, when I asked around the office, some people hadn’t heard of you.’ I wasn’t on the circuit. I remained naïve, and my thought processes don’t bear examination.

  Perhaps, now Jonathan was dead, I should move from HarperCollins, even though I was in the middle of a two-book contract? I had no personal links there any more, and I’d heard of people doing just that. We would get a big advance, and pay them off (yet advances, all round, were too big, in the ’80s. I saw the crest building, I didn’t see the crash.) I had moved before, I could move again (but you can’t keep moving on for ever. Too many moves give you a bad reputation.) Yes, I felt my age meant I had to climb, but I hadn’t considered it was also a drawback. I thought I was still seen as a young contender. At forty-six, it was a dangerous assumption.

  I approached the tallest, and said to be the toughest, agent with a literary reputation. His name had lustre because of his clients, yet the offices were small and uncomfortable and hard to get to, and I never felt at ease. Personally we were ill-assorted; he was too tall, too aristocratic, too dry, too shy, with an amused, conspiratorial manner that meant nothing; he had been very good at making money, and very good at picking clients. Yet he was also known for his love of good writing. From the little we talked, I think this was true; he loved Nabokov, as did I, and I was desperate to believe in him. I sent him my book to see if he liked it, and he said he thought it ‘remarkable’. He read it on some Greek island and left a praising message on my answerphone. What a fool I was; I kept the tape for weeks.

  I went to see the first, and much more simpatico, agent who thought he had inherited me. He sat in his office with my book on his lap, and I saw he did like it, and was slightly hurt when I told him I was probably going to leave, though he had a wealth of clients, and of course soon got over it (why was I so stupid? I liked this first man, instinctively trusted him, could talk to him, yet I opted for the austere unknown because I thought he could magically lift me into the literary stratosphere, with his other clients. I thought I was making the right decision, yet lunch with this second man was empty and uncomfortable, and part of me wondered if his reputation came partly from his height, and his upper-class drawl, for literary agents are not usually so lofty. I should have listened to my animal instincts rather than the vaulting ambition of my brain.)

  Thus bolstered by the good opinions of two agents who had to praise me to represent me—which does not mean they were insincere, but an agent’s job is to hook new names—and my husband’s enthusiasm (he read the book with the doors open on our green garden, as spring came on; he loved me, he loved it, but warm April possibly hazed his senses)—I dispatched the book to HarperCollins. I was mostly buoyant. Now everything would change.

  Yet part of me was anxious. Such a very long novel. It was partly to do with the look of the manuscript. It’s part of the ‘frame’ that, according to psychologists, conditions the greater part of people’s response; what they know, or think they know, before they start reading. The Keeper of the Gate was the first book I had written straight on to computer (Where are the Snows and Lost Children were both drafted longhand). I used a huge font (why?), 14 pt, too many spaces, too many ellipses. In manuscript this novel ran to nearly 500 pages. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to say to the publishing world, ‘This is big, this is a substantial book.’ Probably it just looked long and shapeless.

  My relationship with the new editor at HarperCollins Flamingo was non-existent, so the ground my work fell on was unprepared (always get on with your editor. Sometimes you really do need advice.) He had suggested we meet for a drink at intervals to discuss progress. But I never discussed my works-in-progress. Besides, at first there was no progress: not until the first four months of 1994 did the novel suddenly burst free of chaos. And this book was, to say the least of it, unusual. Not the manuscript to send to the new editor who, it’s cruel to say, but true, was best known for having commissioned a novel inspired by a TV coffee advert.

  Why was my sixth novel unusual? Because it was about race. The germ of it was a racial killing. In April 1993, the black student Stephen Lawrence had been murdered at a bus-stop in south-east London by racist white youths. It was a horrible case, one of the sudden outbreaks of savagery that tells us London isn’t just a great city of endlessly mixing genes and peoples. We were not post-racist, then or now; we merely legislate against it, and rub along together, and marry each other, and hope for the best, which mostly happens—but every so often, so does
the worst.

  My personal experience of the crime sounds trivial. Rosa’s school was in Brent, which had, at the time, the highest proportion of black people in the UK. Naturally Rosa had black friends, naturally I was friends with their mothers, Rochelle’s mother Sandra, Shakira’s mother, a friendship built on shared love of our children. But British black people felt burning indignation over this murder. One of their best, a good student, a boy who should have become a lawyer, had been senselessly killed by white racists. The veil was lifted; their worst fears were true. For a while, all white people stood accused. And I found that my black friends, who I liked and valued, for a while were unable to meet my eyes. A veil had come down, though it didn’t last.

  But I still felt accountable. What had I actually done to dissociate myself from the murderers? In 1982, when American Cruise missiles were about to be sent to Britain, I had written my anti-war novel The Burning Book; in 1988, the murder of eighty-four-year-old antinuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell had inspired my fourth novel, Grace. What was I going to do this time?

  I wanted to protest; as Dickens did against the evils of his day, and Thackeray, and George Eliot—so many great nineteenth-century novelists. It didn’t make them less literary. Many of my literary models are modernist—Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov—but for me the modernist aesthetic breaks down when it isolates the writer from the world. Like the modernists, I love pattern, and try to give each book an overall controlling form, but I also have one eye on reality. I want my books to express the whole of me, politics and jokes as well as love of beauty.

  What kind of country, what kind of family, might produce racists like the five white thugs? This was what I needed to write about. What did it say about my city? For I had become a Londoner, and Stephen Lawrence was one of our own. But so were the thugs, the murderers.

  In Kensal Rise, the subject was everywhere. I heard the things said by the white workmen who came to the flat; they weren’t middle-class, and hadn’t learned to hide it. They seemed to particularly hate Indians, who they were afraid were after their jobs, but they didn’t like Africans and Caribbeans either. The reasons were many: ‘they don’t pay’; ‘you can’t trust them’. Yet for the first time in my life I was living in a world where there were equal numbers of black and white, which in many ways stifled prejudice, for it was simply too tiring to keep noticing colour; there were many families with biracial children, often strikingly beautiful, especially when young, with wild blonde curls and deep cupid’s-bow lips, a new perfection born from difference. Clearly, in many cases, all around me sex and love were overcoming prejudice. But in other ways, there were still two parallel worlds. I saw how people tended not to see one another. How white people turned to white people to ask for directions, or information, and vice versa. How black people looked surprised to be talked to. As a person and as a novelist, it was impossible not to notice (I think we have come some way since then.) Then I made a friend, Hanna Sakyi, who rapidly became important to me. It began as a convenience relationship, for she started an after-school club at Rosa’s school, but I quickly saw how special Hanna was. Rosa loved her at once, and still does. She was Ghanaian, and very black, but then, everything about Hanna was ‘very’. She was very funny, and very sharp, and had a laugh that rolled around a room, and strong self-possession, a sense of herself that made people sit up and take notice; she was very big, and very beautiful, with soulful dark eyes, high cheekbones, dimples, full lips, a short curving upper lip that made her look youthful, and small snowy teeth with a kissing gap. She came to tea, she came to supper. We began talking, and never stopped. At first the one thing we didn’t mention was that she was black and I was white. These taboos are strong, and our fears are great. Then one day we started talking about it, and talked about it, for a while, a lot; after which we got over it, mostly forgot it, and went on with being friends as normal. When Rosa was baptised, aged ten, Hanna was one of her three godmothers, and Nick and I are godparents to her son Robbie. I have other black friends, some of them writers, but Hanna gave me courage to write the book.