Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

by Viv Albertine

  13 HASTINGS HOUSEWIFE REBELS

  2007

  I promise myself I will do two things when we move to the coast:

  1. I will do a class at art college.

  2. I will get fit.

  I sign up for a ceramics course one afternoon a week at Hastings Art School. My husband is annoyed, I don’t understand why. Perhaps he’s jealous. I register him for a life drawing class, so I’m not the only one having fun. I choose ceramics because it fits in with my daughter’s school timetable and, since the cancer treatment, my hands are so shaky I probably can’t draw or paint any more. This is the first time I haven’t agonised over a decision. The other people on the course are a mixture of old and young, un employed, part-timers and loners, like me. I love them. They’re clever and interesting. I love their conversations. They discuss hearing aids and the war. ‘Women used to put a box of Omo washing powder in the window to signal to the American GIs, “Old Man Out”.’ They make me laugh. Coming to this class once a week is healing. I feel relaxed and comfortable for the first time in a decade. Best of all is the teacher, Tony Bennett – When the student is ready, the teacher appears. A good teacher is a gift, they bring a subject alive and that’s what Tony does for me. He watches me for a couple of months, like I’m a nervous animal. He doesn’t get too close. Occasionally he appears behind me – the way art teachers do – and makes a comment about my interpretation of a subject; he never criticises, never picks at my technique, always talks about the emotion in the work, until one day, when we’ve become relaxed with each other, he says gently, ‘Viv, why don’t you try expressing yourself in your work?’

  I’m horrified. I’m surprised at the vehemence of my response. ‘I don’t want to express myself! I’m sick of expressing myself! I’ve expressed myself to death! I just want to make nice brown pots to put in the living room.’

  He lets me blow off steam and leaves it at that. Next week he comes up to me and says, ‘I know why you said that, I heard you on Radio 4 last night, it was a different surname but I recognised your voice, you’re Viv from the Slits.’ (It was a rerun of an old interview.) We talk about the Slits and how hard it was being a girl who forged the way, who took the knocks every day on the street and in the industry and that now I just want to be invisible.

  But he’s sown a seed, something in me changes and I let go. I create my first piece of real work. It’s like the work I used to make at art school when I was seventeen; erotic and a bit funny, combining ancient and modern, fertility symbol and fetish. I take it home. Husband doesn’t like it. He sneers at it, says he won’t have it in the house, ‘Put it in the garden.’ He also says our daughter mustn’t see it because it’s sexual. It’s not sexual, it’s a representation of a naked female. I think children can make the distinction between entertainment, art, humour and real life from a pretty young age. Do all artists who draw life models have to hide them from their children? Of course they don’t. What about artists like Yoko Ono and Louise Bourgeois? They make extreme work and both have children. Not that I would ever call myself an artist. I wouldn’t dare. But I’m not going to hide my real self from my daughter any more. This is what her mother is doing. If she’s got any questions or worries about it, she can come and talk to me. I put the ceramic on the sideboard.

  Husband works all day in the open-plan kitchen/living room, the one room we have apart from the shared bedroom. He still has a studio in London, but won’t ever go to it. He’s becoming very insular and curmudgeonly out here in the country. I’m beginning to wonder if moving was such a good idea.

  My first ceramic, 2007

  I’m craving my own space, so I rent a studio (which I offer to Husband, but he’d rather work at home) in Hastings with a fellow student called Robin, and I go there every day for a couple of hours – after dropping my daughter off at school – to work on my ceramics. I don’t like touching the clay at first. It’s too squelchy, gets under my fingernails and messes up my clothes. It takes a couple of weeks before I can plunge my arms deep into the big clay bins, right up to my elbows, and grab fistfuls of the stuff and slam it onto a bench. I find kneading and pummelling therapeutic – I never would have chosen this medium if it hadn’t been for my circumstances, but now I’ve found it, it’s just what I need. The shaping and moulding, scraping and smoothing are very natural, organic actions, you only have to half concentrate, so a little bit of your brain is unaware of what you’re doing, letting the instinctive, intuitive part come forward. This is good for me, it gives the hamster on the wheel inside my head a rest.

  My daughter comes home from her new school in tears. She came last in the cross-country race. She says she doesn’t mind not coming first, but she can’t bear coming last. I say it’s because you haven’t practised. No one can do anything well if they haven’t practised. Let’s practise together. We run round the field next to our house every evening after school. It’s muddy and lumpy with mole hills; there are boggy patches with reed beds that we have to leap across; startled sheep trundle out of our way; little piles of sheep poo are dotted around like mounds of Maltesers. She trots off, but I can barely walk. My asthma is so severe I have no breath, no lung capacity. My legs are tired after a few steps, she goes round twice to my once. I hate running. After a couple of months my daughter comes third in the cross-country race (subsequently she opts to stay at the back with the cool girls) and I decide to start trying to run along the top of the sea wall, see if it’s a bit easier running on a flat surface. I’m like Rocky at the beginning of the movie, out of breath, falling onto each foot, no control, I remind myself of the pensioners I’ve seen on TV at the end of a marathon. I manage a quarter of a mile but I’m dizzy with lack of oxygen. I lean on a flagpole panting for a few minutes before turning round and half running, half walking back home. Gradually, I improve, the asthma clears up, I can feel my muscles firm up and I start to love running. It’s like a meditation to me, I have to do it; I don’t even notice the effort any more.

  I run in all weathers at all times of day; rain, cold, dark, hot. On one side of the sea wall is a road and flat fields of tall grass. I watch the swans gliding along a little canal, which was built to ferry ammunition up and down the coast on barges during the First and Second World Wars. I wave at the shepherdess driving her tractor, long blonde hair whipping around her brown face, her collie eager and alert on the passenger seat. On the other side of the wall is the sea; the grey waves roll onto the pebbles, gulls squawk and dive, and in the far distance Dungeness power station is lit up like a floating gin palace, perched on the horizon. These days I cruise past the quarter-mile flagpole and after two miles of straight running I reach the beach cafe at the end of the wall – its front door propped open with a tub of margarine – no need to rest now, I turn my face into the wind and head back.

  The paranoia I was left with after the cancer – that I would get ill again – is beginning to lift. For a while I kept going back to the hospital, thought I had this, that and the other. They were very patient and tested me for everything; I swallowed tubes for them to look into my stomach, had loads of blood tests for food allergies, then they stuck a camera up my arse … that one finished me off. I think I almost had a touch of Munchausen’s Syndrome (hospital addiction syndrome); I couldn’t leave the safety of the hospital and all the attention and ritual behind. But a camera up your arse will sort that one out.

  After so long worrying and being fearful, living by the sea and running is giving me the mental space to think creatively again for the first time in years. With the salty wind on my face, feet pounding on the shingle, Kate Bush, The Hounds of Love, on my iPod, new thoughts enter my head. What do I think about that architecture? as I run past a white modernist house: ‘I like the shape of the house but the windows are too small.’ What do I think of the asymmetrical stairs, the sculptures in the garden? ‘Those stairs don’t look right with the house; the sculptures are interesting.’ Who am I now? Am I the same person I was when I was seventeen? The person I was
when I married? Or has my personality been completely eroded and I must start again, creating myself from scratch, like an amnesia victim? It doesn’t matter what the answers to the questions I’m asking myself are, how uncool, how ordinary; they just have to be the truth.

  Each morning I start again with the questions, easy stuff, like colour – I’ve always been drawn to colour. Mum made colour interesting for me, when I was little; she would say, ‘See the colour of that woman’s skirt? That’s called elephant’s breath.’ Or, ‘See that ribbon? It’s mint green, this one’s duck-egg blue, that flower is dusty rose, and that one’s salmon pink.’ I interview myself as a way to discover the new me. What colours do you like? ‘Eau de nil, pale, calm and mysterious; mauve and lilac, delicate, gentle, sensual.’ Why do you like those colours? ‘All I could think about after chemo was the colour purple, I decorated the whole Christmas tree in purple and wrapped every present in purple, it felt healing.’ Good, there’s a story there, a meaningful answer. Make a story out of your experiences.

  I’ve started to laugh again too; mixing with the non-judgemental people at art college, I realise I’m quite playful. I reignite my love of detail in clothes: a puffed sleeve, a side or a front zip on a leather jacket, the shape of a heel or toe of a boot. I’m enjoying looking: I used to look at everything and everyone. I notice marks on a stone, the haggard sea-worn groynes; it doesn’t matter what you like, just be truthful and observant, I tell myself. I don’t let myself off the hook; if I make a statement, I have to justify it.

  Running also helps me accept my body. After all the years of medical intervention, I feel violated. All those unknown men’s hands up me for years. To cope, I reacted like a rape victim, disowning my body, floating above it, not in it whilst it was happening. I would chant to myself, ‘I’m doing this for a baby, I’m doing this for a baby. I’m doing this to get well.’ At last my body is beginning to feel like it belongs to me again and it’s strong and healthy, serving me well instead of constantly letting me down.

  I’m also trying to learn to play tennis. It’s not me, I’m hopeless at it, but I want to fit in with the other mothers. I swing my arm listlessly as the tennis coach lobs me a ball. ‘I wish a man would come into my life to inspire me,’ I say to her. Where did that unfaithful, insurgent little thought come from? I’m shocked at myself. I haven’t strayed, even mentally, in all my fifteen years of marriage. And now it’s occurred to me I need a muse to get me going, someone in my head to make me step up, give me some inspiration. Be careful what you wish for.

  14 BEAUTIFUL FORTRESS

  2007

  In every dream home a heartache.

  Roxy Music

  I go to my doctor, Dr Shah, for a check-up. He says he saw my husband in the surgery last week about a minor complaint. ‘He doesn’t love you, you know,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘He doesn’t care about you. I’ve seen it many times, when the weaker of the two becomes dominant and tries to undermine the stronger one.’ What an extraordinary thing for a doctor to say. I should be shocked and worried, but I’m not. I know my husband loves me. We’re going through a rough patch, that’s all.

  How does anyone make it through marriage and children and remain a whole person? Perhaps it is unavoidable that the individual has to be sacrificed for the unit. Rachel Cusk describes marriage and family as ‘institutionalised dishonesty’, ‘a cult of sentimentality and surfaces’. Robin Wright Penn called it ‘a beautiful fortress’. And Virginia Woolf, never one to hold back: ‘I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me.’ All I know is I wasn’t brought up for this. I was brought up a feminist, a rebel, a creative person. Not a cleaner, cook, pacifier and compromiser. I think I could cope with a bit of each, but not just the domestic side on its own.

  Looking back, I don’t think I could have been a full-time wife and mother without the illness but I had no choice, I wasn’t well enough to work, I did the best I could in the circumstances and I was happy to do it. But even though I’ve willingly put my whole heart into my home life, it’s been difficult. I’ve earned my own money since I was seventeen years old, motherhood is a huge shift in freedom and status. No one ever says, You’re good at this, well done. No one pays you. If you fuck up and drop the baby, then you’ll get some attention, but if you keep your head down and do a ‘good enough’ job, you’re ignored.

  One day during an argument Husband says to me, ‘I own you.’ And it dawns on me: It’s just like the fifties. If you are a full-time mother without a private income, you’re a chattel, a dependant. It’s 2007 and nothing’s changed. Husband wants me to stop dyeing my roots and having my legs waxed, to save money for the school fees – to turn me into a greying, frazzle-haired yeti. But I still have to function in the world, I still have to present myself to people every day, to hold my head up. This is a sacrifice too far for me: ‘If we can’t afford to pay for a couple of leg waxes a year, then we can’t afford to send our daughter to private school,’ I say and I mean it. I’m not going to martyr myself, it’s not healthy. I’ve already started down that road, it’s time to stop or there’ll be no turning back.

  I never look out of the window and appreciate the sea any more. I don’t even glance at it on my way to the kitchen with an empty cup. There it is, spread out across the whole back of the house, undulating like a jewelled cloth forever being shaken out for my delight – and I ignore it. And that’s how my husband and I are becoming: we don’t notice each other enough, we don’t touch each other enough. If you can take something as majestic as the sea for granted, because it’s there every day, what chance does a mere mortal have? The balance between us, the ecological system that was our relationship, has shifted: he used to be my rock, but after having Baby and surviving cancer I’ve become a rock myself. We either have to shuffle about and rebalance together on the raft that is our marriage, or we’re going to topple over the edge and drown. We need to renegotiate our roles – I think you need to keep doing that throughout a marriage. There’s a fine line between a rock and a dead weight. A thin line between love and hate.

  At this point we decide to rebuild our house. Want to know if you’re really suited to someone? Move to the middle of nowhere together, where you don’t know anyone, and then proceed to build a house. That’ll sort it out. There are five Polish builders here all day, starting at eight o’clock in the morning, and Husband is still working from home. He’s doing this to save money, so we can afford to pay the builders, but it’s taking a toll on our marriage. We have one large open-plan living area and one loft-style bedroom. ‘You must have a very strong marriage,’ say the other mothers doubtfully when they hear how Husband works in the middle of our home every day. He constantly comments on the state of the house: what’s (not) in the fridge, crumbs left on the bread board, washing up not done, the sheets, the bathroom, where I’ve been, who I’m emailing, what I’ve bought, why am I making another appointment for a leg wax, ‘Again? Didn’t you have your legs waxed last month?’ ‘Any chance of a coffee? What’s for lunch?’ Now he doesn’t go to London to work at his studio any more, home is his only domain, and he’s becoming obsessed with it. I recognise that feeling only too well from my Year on the Sofa, and of course it will never come up to scratch, it can never be perfect. He has the disgruntled air of someone who’s saddled with an incompetent employee and thinks they’ve made a big mistake hiring them. I get the feeling he wishes he could sack me, would sack me if he didn’t have to pay me off.

  I often sit in the car outside our house and cry. I don’t want to go in because I have no space, nowhere to go once I’m in there, there’s no kitchen, no living room – that’s become the office – Husband, Baby and me all sleep in the upstairs bedroom, which, because of the works, we reach by a ladder. The contractor is inept, so time and again the building work is delayed. I sit in the car after doing the shopping or dropping our daughter at school to put off going inside for as long as possible
. It doesn’t feel like a home any more. I watch as the slow and painful rebuilding of the house slowly and painfully demolishes our marriage.

  15 THE LETTER

  2007

  Every human encounter is an adventure.

  Tony Bennett (not that Tony Bennett;

  my ceramics tutor at Hastings Art School)

  I lie on our white king-sized bed, in our minimal white bedroom, inside our gleaming modernist glass box beach house, and look up through the skylight at the clouds drifting by. I can hear seagulls shriek and scuffle on the roof as they take off to dive over the Channel, and sheep bleating outside in the fields. Dozing here on the cool cotton bedcover like Lady Muck, whilst a young, fit local fireman called Dan is down in the garden building a fence made from reclaimed railway sleepers, I think, Things aren’t so bad. We’ve made it through the hard times. Dan’s stripped to the waist, tanned and sweating, with a little brown cheroot dangling from the corner of his mouth. He’s hot, but he doesn’t interest me. I hum quietly to myself, challenging the gods: