by Olivia Laing
That was the morning that white people finally realised the President of the United States was a white supremacist, he’d as good as said so, there was a cartoon in the Guardian of the White House with a Klan hood over the roof. Why were people surprised, weren’t they listening to anything? Kathy read some threads from people on the far left, hysterical over weapons caches in Charlottesville. Here’s something you need to know: Caches of weapons were found throughout Rwanda after the genocide. This wasn’t about the CSA statue, but a test run for a militia takeover of a small city. I am sorry to bring you this tonight. There’s a bigger plan at work here. Please don’t doubt that. Take nothing for granted.
People weren’t sane anymore, which didn’t mean they were wrong. Some sort of cord between action and consequence had been severed. Things still happened, but not in any sensible order, it was hard to talk about truth because some bits were hidden, the result or maybe the cause, and anyway the space between them was full of misleading data, nonsense and lies. It was very dizzying, you wasted a lot of time figuring it out. Had decisions really once led plainly to things happening, in a way you could report on? She remembered it but distantly. A lot had changed this year. The people who opposed it were often annoying but that didn’t make them wrong. Think how many annoyingly right people the Nazis had killed, people who said inconvenient or paranoid things that turned out to be true. They were dead and so were the cynical ironic people and the people who had refused to engage, the people who fought street battles and the people who closed their doors and came inside and preserved culture instead. Kathy wasn’t sure what she would do if it came down to it. Back in the day she’d done her time in the black bloc, she’d jostled to the front, shoulder to shoulder with the bandana boys, the brick-throwers, but then she’d decided she hated them, that the whole thing was dogmatic and foolish, a game on both sides. Hard to tell now. Depends where you’re standing. Like inside a synagogue, like in a headscarf at the airport. What the fuck had happened. She can see two books out of the corner of her eye. Mother Country and Cruel Optimism. Maybe she should read them.
*
Days are a ladder. The wedding cake is in two halves on the kitchen worktop. She is training herself to do cat eyes, she has purchased liquid eyeliner but her hands are shaky. Perhaps cat eyes are the province of the young and smooth-skinned. In the magnifying mirror her eyes vanish beneath deep gouges. Her body is not quite the body she would wish for. It’s been all downhill since puberty, her real body is the body of an androgynous eleven-year-old, lanky and lean, built for speed. She tries on her wedding dress. There is something about it that reminds her of a dinosaur, probably a stegosaurus, a sort of inutile frill, not that any frill was exactly utile, but this one was exceptionally pointless, like a dinosaur’s spine. Well, there it was: she’d marry in a dinosaur suit with uneven eyes. The house smells of coffee and new paint. The sick chestnut tree is a small conflagration on the skyline. A train horn blows. 29 hours.
She dreamt of Sébastien, she dreamt he was on a beach with Tracey Emin and then she dreamt that she was showing him an angry letter she had written to someone else, another unwilling boyfriend, and it was only afterwards that it dawned on her he would think that she was in the habit of producing these things, that she had a talent for them. Which was true, she did. Yesterday, in the car back from Waitrose she had screamed at her husband, literally just screamed, a noise without words, she was frustrated and distressed beyond language, what had it even been about? I hate you, you’re stupid, she’d said over and over again, neither of which was remotely true. He was the cleverest nicest most lovable man she’d met but she was like a feral animal, she had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn’t have a clue. All day she worried that he might have a heart attack, like Hemingway’s wife Pauline, who died after an argument by phone, years after they’d divorced. Why couldn’t she be calm like water. I want to kill you, she’d said that, her throat had hurt all afternoon. He hated shouting, he hated all sudden noises, a dropped fork would make him flinch, if he broke a glass he felt bad all day. He wasn’t fragile exactly, he was just transparent, transparently hurt or scared, closing up around himself like a starfish, a sea anemone. It was her responsibility, she was about to vow to protect him, literally sign her name to it & vice versa. Please Kathy, do this right. She’d also dreamt about a stately home, a pile of silk and linen in a garden, dusty pink and beige. There were four magpies in the birch, the same four magpies that had been fighting all week. There was a 30% chance of rain, the garden was immaculate. Four magpies and a crow, palpably irritated.
Was everything okay, was everything okay. On Twitter she wrote My inescapable paranoia, your love for yoghurt, paraphrasing Frank O’Hara. She meant it as a confession. You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don’t, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You’re selfish and rigid and absorbed, you’re like an infant. Kathy’s hair is standing up in a cowlick, Kathy is basically naked, Kathy is getting married in 7½ hours.
SWIMMING IN THE AIR
It was like a year had gone by in a single day. 18 August 2017. First Mary’s dog had been attacked and had to go to hospital, then there was an accident on the A14. Everyone was late, it was intolerable, she was so nervous, her body was an inhospitable territory she could never get out of. She breathed in various places. That was what you do, you breathe. The dog’s skin had been torn off on his flank, right where his leg joined his body, it was a bad wound, he’d be fine but right now he was scared and sore and about to be given general anaesthetic. Kathy loved that dog, he was pretty much her favourite person. She’d wanted him as a witness to her wedding, even if confined to a car boot and not actually able to view proceedings. Anyway she painted her eyelids with black lines that flicked at the rim. Anyway there was thunder, lightning, a biblical downpour, anyway she put hazel leaves around a china platter that had once belonged to Doris Lessing. They iced the cakes together, bickering. They stuck strawberries on, Kathy was competitive even on her wedding day.
She wore an orange coat and sunglasses, it wasn’t raining, fuck it. Lime sandals. Her husband wore seersucker, also sunglasses, they looked sharp, scissored keenly against the sky. They were stressed and then all of a sudden, in the car park, they were ecstatic. NO EXIT it said in big white letters, but they didn’t care, they loved it, permanence was what they were here for, they didn’t want to get out. She’d forgotten her bouquet, Al said she’d get one and she did, she vanished for ten minutes and came back with ten sweetheart roses creamy pink, tied with straw, God knows how. In the meantime they’d had passport photos taken, just to get fully into the bureaucratic vibe, they looked squashed and plump and a bit glazed. There was a bell with a sign sellotaped above it saying BELL, they were all getting a bit hysterical, it was never a good idea putting her and Sarah in a room together, they’d cackle for years. Then they were off, marching to Maria Callas, I do and hereby and turn and face and forsaking all others till death. It was actually an openish marriage but yes she meant it. No one on earth could possibly be so nice.
They spent a long time pretending to sign a register with a pen that didn’t have ink, she wasn’t clear why. Then they did sign, then they were done. Her husband danced out the door, a cross between a cancan and a gavotte. They drank Le Mesnil, they got deeply involved in the cake, it started raining again, the doorbell rang and rang, they accumulated pink flowers and white flowers, the floor filled up with damp plants and umbrellas, they ate melon and chicken, Al had her own cake. The dog survived his surgery, that was okay. Sarah’s cats had been in the wars too, especially Helix who in the end after weeks had been
found to have a long stem of grass stuck up his nose. In the breaks between storms she and Leo stood in the garden and discussed the paedophile, who was maybe going to be kept on, not even kept on given a plum of a job. Leo was angry, she was angry. Back inside, they were eating more cake when someone shouted Steve Bannon’s resigned. They all checked their phones. Bruce Forsyth had also died, he was older than Anne Frank, but the main news was Bannon. It had literally just happened, no one quite knew why, great wedding present she muttered to no one in particular. Confederate statues were being pulled down all over America, often in the night, mayors were just sending out orders and ripping them down. Perhaps we need a monument that lists the names of every enslaved person we can identify, in the tradition of the Vietnam War memorial the other Sarah said the next day on Twitter. Everything was hotting up, going faster and faster. At 8:30 she fell asleep on the sofa, she was going to love and honour, everywhere, indiscriminately, those would be her watchwords from now on.
They began married life by lying in bed with tea as per. Kathy was zoning out, her husband was fiddling with his phone. He was chatting away, sort of to her, sort of just keeping himself verbal company. Startup-grind is following me, I wonder why. He agitated gently over the censorship of a journal of Chinese scholarship, it’s quite wrong he said and read out most of an article about it in the Guardian. He seemed to know all the participants. Then he found an auction catalogue and got stuck in. Little box things, little silver things, who cares. EPNS coffee pot, no thanks. Come in number 6 your time is up, Ooh I think that’s an early Julia Ball, yes it is, look an early Julia Ball! Really there was nothing they liked, it wasn’t their thing, miserable nineteenth-century landscapes and lithographs of cockerels. He drove out to get her breakfast, she got them both jam, plum and apricot, it was a Saturday morning, they were more actual, more legitimate, they’d bartered something, swapped one territory for another, which already seemed brighter and better, more roomy. He was at home, he knew it well, but she was all fresh, she’d been uneasy for weeks, like a person on a liner, but now she was finally here she loved it, she honestly did.
They didn’t have a honeymoon, they screwed it up, partly because of the injured dog they ended up in various houses in Suffolk or travelling in between with their bags in the boot, a growing confusion of CDs, maps and auction catalogues in the footwell. There was a carnival, tea, short walks, roast meat. They went to a locally famous rural auction, walked through room after room of desperate furniture, lawnmowers, mildewed prints, china vases and sagging chairs, sneezing as they went. She wanted to buy a ceramic tiger, he refused. Things in circulation, garage and attic goods, drifting miserably between lives. They drove away before the bids began.
That night, 21 August 2017, they stayed in a friend’s cottage. There was crab for dinner but no tools to eat it with. Lara vanished and returned with an orange Ikea DIY set and a claw hammer. They took it in turns to smash their crabs. Kathy Googled how to eat a crab, and reported back on the zones to avoid. They were drunk. Dead man’s fingers. Apparently crabs aren’t poisonous anymore or obviously never were, but anyway, she was wary. She put the claws on the table and hit them hard. It was brilliant, she would have been happy to smash many more things. She hit the back of the crab as hard as she could. Nothing happened. She hit it again. A network of cracks appeared. She pried at it with her fingers, tearing out small white chunks of flesh.
All night the combines worked in the fields. When she woke at dawn, the greyish wheat was gone and the stubble was gold, the straw organised in shining lines. Walking that afternoon had felt like swimming, the air blood-warm, the apples falling on untended ground. When the combine passed the chaff poured out unstintingly, the thick dust drifting through the air like woodsmoke. The hinge of the year, picking blackberries, not knowing where to go from here. They talked about Crete, maybe a plane to Chania, maybe a bus, maybe a taxi. They wanted to prolong it, they didn’t want September, they had seen a tiny hole in the sky, not the eclipse, a different one, but they hadn’t been fast enough and now depressingly it was back to business as usual. Which was what, just turning words, just talking, just eating cereal, the same each day. She was bored, she wanted novelty and heat, she wanted to unhook herself.
There was a photograph doing the rounds of Trump staring directly at the sun, moments before or maybe after the eclipse. She didn’t like anything about him whatsoever, but she did understand why you might just want to look at the sun eye to eye. If anyone called her Mrs she’d hit them. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed. She dreamt she’d dropped something, she dreamt she’d got keys to the wrong flat, she kept apologising. It was too fast and too slow at the same time, the low sun throwing small sharp shadows behind each clod of turned soil. Marriage hadn’t solved anything, if by anything you mean Kathy herself, basic dukkha, the unfulfilling nature of existence, it hadn’t stopped time, it was still all going on around her. I like to look at your breasts her husband said and she didn’t speak to him again all the way home.
Back in her study, she wasted several hours looking at the comparative virtues of flying vs getting the train from DC to New York, then dowsing for an Airbnb rental in the East Village. The one she picked was one street away from her own old apartment, where she had lived in shabby splendour for many years. The bath had been in the kitchen, there was always a mild possibility of a gas leak, the internet never worked, the neighbours were obnoxious, she slept on a platform bed, spent hours of her life just corpsed there, gazing at the ceiling & scribbling down elements of her dreams. Three quarters of these bums’re black or Puerto Rican. The concrete stinks of piss much more than the surrounding streets smell. She said in an essay that was St Petersburg, but she’d never even been to St Petersburg, it was New York, it was the 14x6 streets recently rebranded as Alphabet City.
Now, sitting on her sofa, she wrote: how did America begin. To defeat America she had to learn who America is. She wrote: Trump, a minor factor in nature, no longer existed. She wrote: what are the myths of the beginning of America. She was beginning to excite herself. She wrote: the desire for religious intolerance made America or Freedom. Someone was pounding on the door. The hammer, smashing the crab’s back. She wanted to be cracked open, that was the thing, only on her own terms and within preordained limits. There were rules, she changed them. I love you rat paws, she said to her husband, and placed a pillow between them.
The next day, on a whim, she cut her own hair in the bathroom mirror, really just snipping at random. A boy’s crop, somewhere between Charles and Diana, who in the one of the photos reproduced everywhere that week looked like a schoolboy, distinctly faggy, the prettiest in the year, with a Roman nose and wide hooded eyes, not far off Cary Elwes in Another Country. Kathy liked Diana, she liked hysterics and also stoics, she liked thinking of her prowling around Kensington Palace, carrying her phone in one hand, stepping carefully over the cord, maybe a glass of Chardonnay in the other. Talking to Freddie Mercury, darling I’m so bored you can’t imagine, come over, okay shall I come round. Making a play of it, not Marie Antoinette at all, not even that spoiled, just needy and painful and uncontained. When she decided to leak her story she couldn’t believe it wasn’t possible for the book to be printed the next day, that’s pretty funny but also understandable, thought Kathy, who had also railed over publishing lead times. Hungry people, puking up meringue in the palace loo, what’s not to like. It was levelling, which is maybe why everyone went so mad when she died. Personally Kathy had been bombed on heroin that day, after buying an unwise bag of cut speed, but she recalled the sense of fever, the sweaty heat of it, everyone ruffled and unwise, caught up, a little sickly. Not that long ago Kathy had walked around the Diana Memorial with a poet she knew, not on purpose, they just happened to be there, and they had both been struck by how slippery and lethal it seemed vis-à-vis the many small children racing slickly through the channels. Later or maybe earlier they went swimming in the Serpentine, a first on both sides. The water was black a
nd composed mostly of duck shit. The poet said I’m going to be a real boy now and broke away from her in a showy crawl. She watched the buildings, grey on the horizon, sad old London, diminished in the particulate plane-pollen air. There were no showers. She didn’t mind, she washed in a basin but the poet, who had a date later, did. It was possible Kathy had cut one side of her hair shorter than the other. She wasn’t really bothered about that either, she wondered sometimes when her polished self would emerge, elegant and capable, immaculately groomed, she was pretty composed, she’d travelled a lot, you get a sheen after a while, but still, groomed she was not.