Another doctor came in and told us that Lou’s levels were dangerously high and that she would need to be put on an IV drip containing a reversal agent for forty-eight hours. Stella started to cry, but when I returned from getting coffee Josh had his hand on her shoulder and she was smiling weakly, and I saw that his gruff, northern tenderness had charmed her. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said, ‘just you see.’
‘You’ve got a good one there,’ she said, sotto voce.
Hours passed. He fell asleep and I sat there, counting his eyelashes, wondering what Lou was thinking, if she was thinking at all. They wouldn’t let us see her. Quentin and Cecilia arrived, the latter fraught. I noted Stella’s empathy when comforting her and, when Lou’s parents went in to talk to the consultant, I hugged her tight. Odd though it may be for an adult to admit, but the softness of her breasts against my cheek felt like a homecoming.
Eventually, they let us in to see her. She thanked Stella weakly. ‘You gave us all a fright,’ she said, brushing Lou’s sweaty fringe from her face in a maternal fashion.
We brought her a bear, from the gift shop, the sticking plaster above its eye a cheap pastiche of illness that made her laugh, us all thinking if only things were so simple.
‘They’re sending over the psych team,’ said Lucia, after Stella had left the room. ‘Perhaps they’ll put me in a straitjacket and bundle me into the back of a van.’
An odd picture of my ex clutching a giant butterfly net flitted through my mind, and I smiled. No one could ever mothball Lou and put her in a case.
‘I feel like a complete twat,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t worked out at all’.
‘The killing yourself part?’
‘Well, obviously that. Don’t hate me, but I wanted it to be glamorous. You’d come home and find me draped across the bed like a leggy fashion model, and my note, an empty bottle of red, and a Leonard Cohen record playing. Instead I took it all and then thought, oh shit. I don’t want to die. Rookie mistake, when you’re trying to kill yourself, bottling it. Almost as amateur as cutting horizontally. What a fool.’
All I said was, ‘Lou.’
‘Sorry, it’s too soon to joke, isn’t it? No wonder they think I’m a headcase.’
‘It’s me who should be sorry. I should have noticed how bad things have got, instead of being so wrapped up in my new boyfriend.’
She reached for my hand. ‘You’re in love. It’s spectacular to see. I’d like that for myself, one day. But all the men I ever seem to meet are bores, or rapists.’
We were silent, both aware of the significance, the naming of it.
‘I’m so angry with him, Harmony. I loved sex, it was what I did best. I loved the feeling of new skin, and lips, and hair. New bodies against mine. The fucker took that away from me.’
‘You’ll get it back.’
‘Who knows if I will? You know, sometimes I felt like I only existed when I was being looked at. I liked to be wanted, by women, but especially by men. There was power in their wanting. Until that moment, in bed, when I realised that actually I hadn’t any power at all, that his wanting was a tyrant, and I this bleak, broken thing for him to use.’
She choked.
‘I hate it. I hate them. A victim. It doesn’t suit me.’
‘They’ll get you the help that you need, I’m sure of it. You’ll see. They’ll mend your head just as they did the bear.’
She laughed, her fingertips pressing into the side of my hand.
‘Thank you for helping me,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you found me. Really. I didn’t want to die, not even a little bit. Not when it came down to it.’
She came home two days later, undeterred by pleas from her parents that she go to live with them for a while (‘I’m already mad enough’). As a compromise, they forked out for a new Harley Street therapist, whom she began seeing immediately, three times a week. She had the frail look of someone who has just wandered dazed from a bomb site and is clutching the side of a building to steady themselves, but she was joking more, and sleeping less, which meant a marked improvement.
Several days later – or at least I think that’s how long it was, it is hard to tell because of the cloud of booze and drugs that engulfed us in those days – Amy died. I know it was not long after Lou’s botched overdose, because we were nagged by the unpleasant feeling that it so easily could have been another girl from only slightly further up the Kentish Town Road, with amazing hair and a set of problems of her own. But it wasn’t, it was Amy.
Lucia was the one who broke it to me, walking into the lounge the morning after. ‘Amy Winehouse is dead.’ She was crying, for the snuffed-out sparkler that was Amy, of course, but also for her own lucky escape. It felt personal, this death, not only because we knew the words of this woman’s heartache as though we had written them ourselves, but because it took us back to a time, five or six years earlier. We didn’t know each other then, but it turns out we were both slumming it around Camden, and were loosely part of the same scene. You’d see Amy a lot back then, hanging around the pool table of the Good Mixer on Inverness Street, a hole of a pub that probably isn’t even open any more, though if it were it would smell of shit as much as ever. Or she’d be there, stumbling out of the Hawley Arms with a man in skinny jeans, skipping down the high street. She was famous already, but that didn’t stop her being Camden’s girl. You’d see her bleeding in the Sun one moment and having a fag on the corner the next, as though she had stepped out of the pages and been made real. It was a similar feeling when I saw Pete Doherty queuing in a branch of the Camden NatWest around the same time. I’d assumed he kept his money in his mattress.
We didn’t know her, this was not our tragedy, but nonetheless we went down to the square where her fans had gathered outside her house, and held each other and wept at the awful sadness of it as people laid flowers and lit candles and did all those things that you do because you can’t bear to think of the nothingness of it. Some people had left fags and glasses of wine, a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, a can of Carlsberg. Tasteless perhaps, but who were we to judge? These were the offerings of those who had also been attendant at the party – whether with her, or near her. It didn’t matter.
We gave our alms and scrawled our names, along with many others, on the covered street sign, ducking under the police sign, and left, walking home through the dusk, reminiscing about our younger years. We were older now, and Camden, with its Spanish teenagers and its sunglasses in cheap neon, had lost its sheen for us; it was all about the East.
It’s funny how the mind creates patterns in retrospect, so tempting and easy to say tritely that Amy’s death for us meant the party was finally over, that the lights had come up, and we didn’t like what we saw. But it wasn’t like that; we carried on drinking, and smoking, and snorting, though perhaps with less carelessness than before. It had occurred to me that Lou might not be the only one who needed help. The nightmares and flashbacks had stopped since hearing of Harmony’s death and my presence at it, but I was left with a residual feeling of nausea. I had begged Stella not to disclose my past at Longhope, feeling that I needed to tell Josh and Lou without her there, and she had kept her promise and treated the place with the deference of a guest.
She and Coral had not made amends, exactly, but they parted with Coral hating her a little less. Like it or not their pasts were entwined, and their time at the commune, or co-op, or however you want to categorise that odd assortment of hippies and misfits and grubby-faced children who had spun their lives around that house, had created the lost older women they were today. Both had failed to inhabit any of the roles society had stood ready for them with: as mothers, as employees, as wives or girlfriends. Stella told me once that after she married Bryn, something she had been desperate to do, she had heard someone refer to her as his wife and had physically recoiled. But she had fought for a traditional set-up, dragging Bryn far away from Harmony and any other potential lovers, and so was required to make it work. That’s the thing about nuclear
families: they leave you nowhere to hide.
Card
Card showing rainbow, clouds and sun with face. Holes where a badge would have been affixed (missing). Reverse of card shows number 4081, reads: ‘Nickel City Buttons, Printed by Sunrise Publications under licence to Nickel City Buttons Inc. © 1986.’
Some things my father likes:
Eastern religions
Macrobiotic cookery
The I-Ching
Foucault
The Isle of Wight Festival
Anarchism
Marijuana
Lentil curry
Shamanism
Statues of the Buddha
The Guardian
Spider plants
Vegetable gardening
Folk music
Chunky knitwear
The Ecologist
Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, the inner flyleaf of which contains a sheet of rice paper the ideal dimensions for the rolling of a joint
Patchouli
Yoruba beads
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Kabbalah
Drumming
Jam
I took the train north, and then waited near the border as a diesel engine was affixed to the front of the train, which pootled at its own pace along the coast until the scenery turned from green to grey. That day the sea was flat and still like molten silver, but I imagined it could be wild, that the spray could splash the windows leaving a salty residue that made them hazy and blurred as the carriages jerked and wheezed. I don’t know what I thought about, if anything at all. I know that I felt a sense of relief following the conversation I had had with Josh and Lucia that morning.
‘I’m just going to come out and say this’, I said, taking a big breath, ‘and I know you’re both going to think I am completely unhinged. But I lived here before, as a child. With my parents. And a lot of other people. You see, it was this commune . . . ’
Of course they were surprised, and a little alarmed, but both admitted that my reticence had been a source of curiosity, and on Josh’s face, there was a flickering of understanding. ‘I wondered why you were spending so much time with her downstairs,’ he said. ‘I thought it was odd, and you were so secretive about it, but I could sometimes hear you going in and out.’
When I told them about Coral’s primal screaming, they both just stared. Then I explained about Harmony’s suicide, and Lucia came over and put her arms around my neck.
‘How awful for you,’ she said. ‘How traumatic. You were just a baby.’
‘You could have told me,’ Josh said, quietly. ‘I could have helped.’
‘The thing is,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really know myself. Or rather, I knew there was something: the nightmares, and feeling sad. This weird feeling of dislocation from the world, sometimes, like I was separate. But I just thought maybe it would go away on its own.’
It hadn’t. And it wouldn’t. Such things take time, if you can ever really get over them. But I knew that a part of trying involved having to go and see my father, with whom I’d barely had any contact from one year to the next. I had lost his telephone number, Stella hadn’t spoken to him for over a decade, my grandparents were dead and his sister estranged, but I knew the name of the closest village to where he lived, and figured that, as it was so small and rural, someone would be able to direct me from there.
The station was shabby, looking more as though it belonged in the former USSR than a coastal town in Wales. The ticket office was closed, the paint on its hatch peeling. A few wilted hanging baskets were the only nod towards aesthetics. As I walked outside my cheeks were misted with rain. The air was damp and cool. After weeks of clear blue skies it felt very much like another country.
I took a small green bus from outside the station, whose route seemed to incorporate every village in the surrounding area whether it was easily accessible or not. I was the only passenger, and very unsure of where I was. The roads were narrow and winding, bordered by overgrown hedgerows. We stopped several times for sheep. Every time we began to mount steadily into the drizzle, I would wonder if we had nearly arrived, only for us to reach a dead end where we would turn around and descend, down past the curved-up mountainsides, pocked with giant holes spewing out mounds of purplish slate hundreds of feet high. This happened four or five times in an hour, until the white dots of cottages and the solemn grey spires of isolated chapels became denser, and we passed signs of more close-knit habitation: a red telephone box, a church yard, a village post office, though boarded up. There was a static, depressed air to the place. It seemed abandoned except for kids in baseball caps on bikes, and the odd elderly lady shuffling up the street with a shopping bag. Perhaps it was the weather; I could see the place was beautiful.
The driver came to a halt at the edge of a narrow road that had no bus-stop sign, not a usual stopping place. When I had got on, I had haltingly pronounced the name of the place, and he had corrected my pronunciation gruffly but kindly. ‘Just down there,’ he nodded now towards a single dirt track bordered by bent over trees, ‘for about a mile’.
Within seconds, I was wet through with the rain. There was little in the way of scenery to keep me occupied, just trees and fields, though the lie of the land, it’s sharp drops and curves, made me aware that I was in a forest on the edge of one of the mountains. About halfway along I passed an old abandoned car through which a mass of weeds grew. They poked through the windows and around the bonnet like tentacles, and with a start I realised that it was the old yellow Datsun, the one Stella had put me in when she drove us away from him and back to Longhope. I wondered how long it had been there, whether her tape would somehow magically still be in the slot of the cassette player, her Afghan coat draped across the back seat so I could use it as a blanket, as though we’d only just popped out for twenty minutes, not twenty years.
At the end of the track I came to a typical stone Welsh cottage, squat but sprawling, with many additional outbuildings dotted around a garden of drenched wallflowers. I took a deep breath, and knocked on the door.
‘Harmony.’ It was Mokomo who answered the door, and she did not look best pleased. Her arms were crossed around herself defensively as she held the silk dressing gown she was wearing close to her body, but nonetheless it was clear that she was naked underneath. When she used one hand to trip the latch I saw a glimpse of a full, pale breast, almost perfectly round, like in a drawing. She can’t have been more than four years older than me, so it was difficult to treat her with the deference of a stepdaughter and impossible to approach her with the warm familiarity of a friend. In the end I settled for a light kiss on the cheek.
‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘Lost the number,’ I said. ‘Do you mind if I sit down? I’m knackered. Where’s Dad?’
‘Bryn’s just meditating in the yurt,’ said Mokomo, with a straight face, as she beckoned me into the kitchen to fetch a floral teapot and fill an old-fashioned metal kettle for the hob. It was so chilly in there, with its slate floor tiles and its bare stone walls, that they had a fire burning in the grate. ‘Best not to disturb him. He’ll be in in half an hour or so. I wish we had known you were coming. I would have tidied up. Though as you know with your father that’s a losing battle.’
She was not wrong. Bryn’s hoarding problem – a neurosis he had developed as he got older – seemed to be as bad as ever. Every single surface was piled with books, papers and miscellaneous objects. While Stella moved from place to place shedding material things like dead skin, Bryn would bed down somewhere for several years and, somewhat ironically for someone who sought to free himself from the binds created by possessions, spent that time accumulating. It wasn’t a mental illness as such, but it was a problem. You struggled to get him to throw anything out, including things like old newspapers and broken ornaments and used train tickets. Everything that had passed through his house was imbued with a powerful but inexplicable sentimentality that was exasperating for those around hi
m, and none of us had ever known what to do about it. So more stuff piled up.
I made stilted small talk with Mokomo as the kettle hissed on the stove, the steam rising towards the bare beams of the ceiling, the windows becoming misty with condensation and the room filling with that smell of warm, wet fabric as it dried off. I had resorted to asking her about her yoga teaching by the time Bryn walked into the room, his face breaking out into a big smile when he saw me.
‘Darling,’ he said, his arms outstretched. I hugged him, feeling like a little girl again, as I always did whenever he was close, wanting so powerfully for him to approve of me. As we embraced and I breathed in his earthy cloth smell, I found myself wondering if this was how the other Harmony felt, whether her desire to be loved by him outweighed the value of her own self to such an extent that she only felt she existed when he was there, lending her tangibility with the prize of his approval.
The Tyranny of Lost Things Page 22