by Olivia Laing
She went to the pool and swam hard. There was quite a lot of grit in the corner by the steps. It was possible indeed likely that this was her fault, since she had been continually disobeying the rule about washing feet before entering the water, along with the rule about not swimming before 8 in the morning or after 7 at night. She swam when she liked, and at night she didn’t bother with a swimsuit either. Fuck the rich, she waved her small white bottom like a flag against them.
It struck Kathy that she was not unevasive herself. Take her novels. She liked to steal other people’s stories, just lift them wholesale. I am Toulouse Lautrec, I’m a totally hideous monster. I’m too ugly to go out into the world. I am Laure the schoolgirl, I thought you didn’t notice me because I’m so invisible. I’m born poor St Helen’s Isle of Wight. 1790. As a child I have hardly any food to eat. Behind her an Australian girl was on the phone to her mother. It’s an eleventh-century village, it’s not very baby-friendly, it’s beautiful, no it’s beautiful here. She had silver flatforms and Kathy hated her because the previous day she’d stolen her sunlounger, literally just lifted her towel and books off it and dumped them on the ground. I read an article about how self-soothing is good for babies, I’m a bit worried Laura’s going to believe in that shit. Yep she said eleven times. Exactly. Oh fuck, now she was talking about her breast enlargements. It should take four months for the swelling to go down, if in four months they’re still too big for my liking I can have a one-night operation a very non-invasive procedure. We think we want to build a house rather than buy a house. What was she, twenty-four. We might fly to Mexico on 21 September. Well, nothing’s set in stone. Jamaica, would you be okay with Jamaica? It was all the same thing, it was the world talking. You couldn’t hate it, or you did but that was just more of the same, another opinionated little voice in an indecently augmented chorus.
KNOTS
Kathy did not have a happy time in Rome. It was too hot, the taxi driver’s air conditioning had broken on Friday, it was now Sunday 6 August 2017, the taxi was its own ecosystem of damp woolly air. She and her husband lay naked on their hotel bed and panted. Then they went for a walk which accidentally transitioned into going to mass. Kathy hadn’t been to mass since some time in the 1980s, she forgot to genuflect and then crossed herself with the wrong hand. There were two nuns in the front with lovely gauzy veils. The priest gave a sermon in Italian in which the word WhatsApp was frequently discernible. Kathy felt moved and then hot and then irritable and then absolutely claustrophobic. They had a dinner reservation, she didn’t have time for this. She got up and edged her way to the door. Children were gallivanting in the aisle, it wasn’t like St Joseph’s circa 1983.
In the restaurant Kathy and her husband had an enormous fight. It started because she put two of his prosciutto and fig ciabattas on her plate. He had four, they were enormous doughy pillows, the same unpleasant temperature as the room. Her husband was furious but Kathy’s fury as ever was larger and less ambiguous. She maintained it at the same pitch for several hours, hissing and eye-rolling, the whole works. She had a vicious stomach ache, she might plausibly faint, there was a full moon but her husband couldn’t even follow the bouncing blue dot on Google Maps, craning over his phone with his mouth hanging open. She hated him, she hated any kind of warmth or dependency, she wanted to take up residence as an ice cube in a long glass of aqua frizzante. Anyway they sorted it out, after she’d banished him to the lobby and sweated alone for 45 minutes, examining the world by way of her scrying glass, Twitter.
Now they were in the air, Italy like a cauliflower protruding beneath them, extending into a really blue luminous expanse of sea, a green hem by the beaches like boiled glass. A small white plane moved rapidly through a different shelf of air. At the airport Kathy had become a connoisseur of T-shirts. I Only like Positive People. Hello darling Happy Spring. The best T-shirt she’d ever seen was in the ready-meal aisle in Brighton Waitrose, well it ain’t going to suck itself. A Brazilian boy had once come up to Kathy in there, hands shaking, whole body trembling, and asked if she’d sleep with him. She’d just swum round the ruins of the West Pier, she was giving off some kind of wild energy, a person who didn’t give a fuck about personal safety or concealed dangers. She still remembered how it felt to reach open water, the way her body was tugged and slammed, the sense she’d had of a vast metal skeleton just below the surface, girders poking up like fork prongs. Beneath her the sea, beneath her a mountain range with its own armada of creamy cloud.
Sometimes I drag my lover into the shade of soto-portego, inside a dark corte, I steal a voluptuous embrace. Back home, back in England, Kathy was reading about Venice. She also read a humorous article about make up for vaginas and the beginning and end of an essay in the London Review of Books about young men escaping Mosul. I never saw such terrified people in my life as a group of young men who had run away from Mosul waiting to be vetted by Iraqi security to see if they were former IS fighters. Two men of military age went into a tent for questioning. They were carried to the camp hospital on stretchers two hours later covered in blood. There was currently, Kathy thought, a problem with putting things together. It had always been a problem but the blind spot had been bigger. Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own. Now, perhaps because of the internet, it was like the blind spot had got very small, and motionful like a marble. You couldn’t rely on it. You could go on holiday but you knew corpses washed up there, if not now then then, or later.
There is no away to throw things to, that was an environmental slogan Kathy had internalised several decades ago, which was why she was having to find homes for the several dozen almost empty bottles, tins and spray-cans of cleaning products she’d hoarded in her various cupboards, believing it was better if she did her share of custodianship rather than dumping everything in the landfill in which they’d all soon be living.
She was moving house, she was finally and unequivocally moving in with her husband. She’d been living for nearly a year now in his much larger substantially more desirable house, but she’d kept on her own, first because of her abnormal need for solitude/escape hatches, then because she had to have somewhere to fuck Sébastien. That’s an expensive trick pad, Joseph had told her when she unpacked the whole thing for him on Avenue A. They were in a diner they liked called Yucca. Every time she returned to New York she walked down A in terror lest Yucca be shuttered. It was holding out for now, unlike Gracefully or French Roast or the willow outside the Avenue C version of 9th St Espresso. They sat outside always, once they’d been verbally attacked there by a Ukrainian witch, an event Joseph perpetually tried to spin into a blessing. Anyway it was a nice place, the huevos rancheros were notably yolky. And Joseph was right, it was an expensive trick pad and since the trick had flown it was time to do without it.
Kathy had removed all the things she actually liked and was surprised at how little attachment she now felt to what had been her cherished and longish-term home. She put things in a bag, she put the bag in the bin, she wheeled the bin outside the house. They weren’t curable, she didn’t need them, they were broken and hopeless. 6% of her possessions had already gone to one of three charity shops, she was purging and experiencing a little of the pure light-headed ecstasy she habitually felt after being violently sick. Saintly, even. Divested of mismatched socks, old bottles of nail varnish remover, bags of soda crystals someone else had abandoned. The soda crystals were unopened. She snatched them back and put them in the car.
A funny thing: she’d begun hearing voices. It had happened now three times in maybe six days, that she’d find she’d tuned into a frequency in which a human voice was whispering, just below the threshold of actual words, a sort of impassioned mumble, a communicative withholding tone. Eventually the line would sever. It had happened once when she was lying on her lounger with the breast augmentation woman behind her. That time the voice was incan
tatory and not a little malevolent; for a minute she genuinely thought the woman was cursing her, before she realised she was wearing earbuds that might plausibly be leaking. The next time, also in Italy, she’d distinctly heard her husband muttering something, which woke her abruptly up, only he wasn’t in the room and indeed when questioned had been in the pool. Sometimes Kathy’s mind ran too fast, it was very pleasurable and almost invariably was the prelude to a migraine. She wasn’t worried about the voices. They were just the uninvited accompaniment to a change in her way of life, an auditory elevator between floors.
It rained substantially, it rained like something was being emptied from a bucket. Kathy packed up her house and ran back and forth to the car, carrying her possessions. The sky was green and flickering. Driving home, her husband told her that when he got his own flat in the 1990s, after the drawn-out end of his first marriage, he sat among the unopened boxes for days, feeling utterly miserable. Why, she asked, but he wasn’t sure. The water was hitting the roof so hard it was ricocheting upwards, the air was full of water moving rapidly in many directions, causing small white explosions.
Kathy was ecstatic to be able to sleep alone again, she loved travelling through dreams in her big white bed. I’m born crazy in the Barbican, she writes in her notebook, propped on her duvet. I’m crazy as a bedbug. I could lead more of my double sexual life in SF etc. She dreams of huts, a tree which is the world which is her back.
The next morning the senior sales negotiator of an estate agent emails her. He offers her a flat on the Golden Lane estate in London, England. She looks at the photographs. The flat is a single room, in which there is a double bed, a yellow chair, possibly Eames, and a G-Plan sideboard. Reflected in the mirror is a small desk. From the bed she can see the Barbican, its distinctive upturned balconies. Its Brutalist architectural theme has now made the Golden Lane an icon in its own right, the email informs her, benefitting from simple designs, clean lines and wide windows. The estate was named after Golden Lane which dates back to the thirteenth century taking the name of a Street on the original site. There is a pink print of a shopping trolley on the wall. 30 square metres, terrazzo panelling and sliding doors. She considers buying it.
What Kathy would like is to escape herself. Abundant amounts of storage, direct access to four of London’s International Airports. When she was anorexic in the aughts like everyone she was conducting an assault on gravity, she was the apple that would go upwards, that simple. How nice to astonish the philosophers, to go off like a firecracker in all their faces. She wishes her history would go away, leaving holes. There is no story, she writes, I’m going crazy. It’s a cry.
*
It was beginning to seem like the world might be about to end. Enjoy August she read on a site she’d only opened to read a book review: conspiracy theorists say it might be your last month on Earth. Beneath it, in a column titled Most Popular, was a headline in red: Woman liveblogged her rape on Instagram. A New Yorker travelling in South Africa. She’d kissed the man and then shared a hot shower with him. It was almost an intuitive thing, she told Marie Claire. I was still in the bathroom – in the crime scene. I don’t even think I’d stood up. I just typed and typed. The hashtags on her Instagram pictures included two iterations of her own name, along with africa, survivor, humanitarian and victimblaming. At one of Joseph’s birthday parties there’d been an almost-fight about how many times people had been raped. I’ve been raped three times Gerry said and someone replied sweetly well you know what they say, three times a lady. The first time Kathy met Gerry, and in fact the second and third, she believed Gerry was a drag queen and kept calling her he. It was right at the beginning of pronouns, and she was a little irritated when Joseph kept correcting her. Eventually the truth dawned, though truly Gerry was a priestess and beyond gender, the oldest and most glitzy club kid in town.
What was more worrying was Trump and North Korea. People said nothing was going to happen, but since people by which she meant pundits had wholly and absolutely failed to predict any of the carnage of the past year, she doubted their reliability. She decided to look at his Twitter, to check it out. It was worse than she’d expected. He was retweeting Fox News about jets in Guam that could fight tonight, but he was also taking time out to trashtalk the FailingNewYorkTimes. My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before . . . . . . Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world! When? When had he done that? She missed Obama. Everyone missed Obama. She missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn’t like living in the permanent present of the id.
If the world was about to end was there anything she should be doing? She was getting married in nine days, she was doing a studio visit for an artist who made fruitful annihilating porcelain sculptures out of bodies that were morphing into flowers and flowers that were morphing into bodies. She loved them, they looked like charnel pits and also decorations for expensive cakes, like synchronised swimmers in the pit of the damned. She might as well do that as anything else, she might as well have chicken for Lauren’s birthday and file a review, she might as well continue with her small and cultivated life, pick the dahlias, stake the ones that had fallen down, she’d always known whatever it was wasn’t going to last for long.
Kathy wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, though Kathy was fairly paranoid she didn’t like subscribing to anything, but all the same she was fairly sure someone was moving pieces somewhere out of view. Someone was getting rich on all this, she knew they were. Food insecurity, water insecurity, the collapse of the state, sick desperate people, it was an excellent way to make a buck, to make what Gary Indiana once described as the Freudian faecal pile. Anxious, uneasy, with a small persistent pain in her left knee, Kathy began to itemise the things that were sitting on her table, a blanket box that had previously belonged, like the room itself, to her husband’s previous wife, a famous writer who had died the previous year. Flexitol heel balm, Comme des Garçons wallet, almost empty bottle of green mineral water from Sainsbury’s. Moth trap, sunglasses, Pantone 7461 mug of pens, ten stones, an unattractive ring she’d bought in a car boot sale several maybe even ten years before. There were no moths in the moth trap, just one small fly. Would they die? They would most certainly die. There was also her phone, a prehistoric Nokia given to her by her friend Matt, and her diary, mustard-coloured, given to her by her half-sister, Wendy, who was a comedy agent, soon to be a partner, extremely high-flying. Burns, shock waves, radiation, that was how it went, then obviously other more secondary things like associated violence, or lack of food or something quite random. Everything was so intricate, it was amazing how much of it sustained from day to day. The city panics, she writes. Bombers terrorists’re going to take over! She writes down the worst things she can imagine, she puts herself in a small room and lets herself be raped and beaten, it doesn’t lessen the anxiety, the world so blue, gone in a moment, up in smoke.
Maybe you’re dying and you don’t care anymore. You don’t have anything more to say. In the nothingness, the gray, islands almost disappear into the water. She’s writing down the plot of Key Largo, making it as depressing as she can, sketching out a landscape for the end of the world. Every piece of meat, every cunt. Is she getting repetitive? There were things you could do once that you can’t do anymore, short skirts but in sentences-form. The reason she liked tattoos was that she liked something getting under her skin and staying there, it was pretty much the only experience of permanence she had. Oh Kathy, nobody wanted you. Oh Kathy, now they do.
*
10 August 2017. She arrives at her old house 4 seconds before the movers. Moving day, a neighbour she’s never seen before shouts. I didn’t know you were getting married. Inside, she explains to a man called Alan that the kitchen door needs to be taken off its hinges to get the bed down the stairs. Then she unlocks her bike, un
used for a year and covered in a thick smock of cobwebs, and walks away.