Signs of Life (12 page)

I have been up at night and unable to write during the day. It’s June already and extremely hot. July will only be worse and I hate August (such a dead month). The nights
are noisy, full of drunks and people fighting and sirens wailing so I close the doors at night which means the air has no movement. I have tried earplugs, I have tried sleeping with the doors
closed
and
earplugs but it is no use. The slightest noise is an irritation, regardless of how many layers away it is.

I did unwrap my pictures though, and decided where they should go. So now each has a home, and is leaning on the wall below that spot, waiting. I have a drill. I know how to use it. Perhaps
tomorrow.

After that, I went out to check on the garden. It looks a bit tired from this heat, but clearly someone is watering it. I took a cushion out and snapped bubble wrap and drank too much coffee.
One of the builders was leaning out of the top right hand window, smoking. I watched hungrily. From time to time I will trail a smoker in the street.

Carl taught me how to blow smoke rings, which I loved doing. I remember showing Johnny and Juan one night, Johnny sulked because I was smoking but Juan was impressed and told
me that the Yámanas people used smoke signals to communicate and that Magellan saw these fires, which inspired him to name the landscape Tierra del Fuego. Juan also told me about the
Magellanic Clouds, two galaxies visible only in the southern hemisphere. (Imagine – two whole galaxies invisible to half the world!) I teased him: If you milked a Magellanic cloud, would you
get stars?

Each morning I had the same thing for breakfast: two large cups of black filter coffee and two slices of white toast, one with butter, one with butter and marmalade. I ate the
buttered slice first and the slice with marmalade second – for pudding, as it were. I had to have the right cup; a wide-brimmed white cup, and the coffee had to be very hot. I always reheated
the coffee in a pan for the second cup. I used to love the way the steam rose from the coffee, the way the butter melted into the hot toast leaving tiny gold puddles on the plate. Carl noticed my
morning routine; I suppose that’s why, for my birthday, he gave me the proper coffee pot and the cup and saucer with the image of that long limbed woman draped around them. It was thoughtful
of him, but they didn’t fit: I used my breakfast to help me feel like myself in the mornings, the woman on the cup was too languid. After a pint of coffee, I certainly didn’t feel
languid. Whenever Carl was there, I made coffee in the new pot and drank from the cup and saucer he gave me, but if I was alone I reverted to the old plastic filter, ceramic jug and my favourite
white cup.

I had barred myself from approaching my sister for support, first because of her accident and then because after her recovery she had a change in fortune: she landed a new job,
highly paid, and met a smooth new man. She was so smart, all of a sudden, that I felt left behind. I felt sorry for myself: I had first kissed Carl in the aftermath of her accident and because I
was still involved with Carl after she had moved on I seemed to think it was me who bore the scars, not her. It was not that she had become too grand to listen to my problems, but that I now saw
her as too grand to tell them to. Also, I was scared of what she would say. Because she liked Johnny, I assumed she would say I was better off with him and imagined her telling me he was a diamond
and I’d never find another man like him. This is what she actually said: If you really have to leave Johnny, go ahead – but do it by your own strength, not through this other guy; he
sounds like a nightmare.

The other day I complained to her about not sleeping: It would be all right, I think, if I could relax in the day . . . tend to something, or get on with this writing, but I am
not even doing that.

Why not make your own garden, on the roof? she said, brightly.

Instantly I felt even more frustrated because I’d already
had
that idea, it was mine – she just said it first.

On that trip to China, during the flight, I felt as though I was shrinking from fear of going to a place where I didn’t speak the language and couldn’t read the
script. I arrived in Beijing and boarded another flight straight away for a far off province. I decided I would cope by staying in one place, getting to know it little by little, but that
isn’t what I did.

Very early one morning, when it was still dark, I entered a large bus station. There were many buses preparing to leave. There were plenty of signs but none of them in English, and plenty of
people but if any of them spoke English, I didn’t know. An English-speaking teacher I met had helped me buy a ticket the day before, but now I had to find the right bus. The teacher had
written the name of my destination on a piece of paper. Underneath the script, I had written how the name sounded, or at least how it sounded to me when the teacher said it. I went to each bus
stand until I found a sign that matched my piece of paper, then I approached a young woman standing under the sign and showed her my piece of paper, and my ticket, and tried to repeat the name, and
she smiled and nodded, so I got on that bus. The young woman went away, which worried me; I had assumed she was making the same journey and when I saw her turn and walk off I felt a pang of regret
sharper than when Johnny had said goodbye at the airport.

The bus journey was sixteen hours. Most of it was on big smooth roads, and every so often there were road signs, in Mandarin, so I had no way of knowing which towns and cities the bus was
heading for, nor how near or far they were. A nut of anxiety hardened in my stomach each time we passed a sign: Was I on the right bus? Had I made myself clear to the young woman at the bus stand?
Had I pronounced the name well enough? What if I was travelling sixteen hours in the opposite direction? In the grip of these fears, I would turn to my neighbours on the bus and repeat the name of
my destination to them, and produce my piece of paper and my ticket as if they were evidence of my existence. I tried to make a question of the place-name, but I wasn’t exactly sure how
questions sounded in Mandarin, and it occurred to me that, as far as my neighbours were concerned, and possibly as far as the young woman at the bus stand had been concerned, maybe all I was doing
was asserting the existence of a place named Songjiazhuang, without, actually, making it clear that I wanted to go there.

After several panics, I realized – these fears are making me ludicrous! I am on the right bus, I said to myself sternly, and left my neighbours in peace. If someone approaches you in a bus
station, or on a bus, and shows you a ticket and a place name, this means they want to go to that place. And you can indicate if it is the right bus, or not. There is no language barrier involved.
Am I going in the right direction? This is a question that doesn’t always need to be asked, or answered, in words.

I found much of what I needed in books. There were certain passages that I read over and over, because they shed light on my situation and offered a way through. The most
significant time this happened was two weeks after the first kiss with Carl, on a small draughty train across country at dusk. I had been trying to concentrate on Johnny, trying to get Carl out of
my mind, but I found a poem that so thrilled me, I could barely get to the end before I started reading it again, and then I held off from a third visit because I had a sense that if I carried on
hammering this poem with the force of my reading, something might happen. There was a sudden sense of vertigo, and I knew I was on the brink of letting myself fall.

I stared out of the dirty window into the darkening sky for a long time before I dared read it again.

The poem was about the myth of Daphne and Apollo, in which Apollo sees Daphne, and decides he wants her. Daphne turns Apollo down but he pursues her, and she escapes him by transforming herself
into a tree.

In the poem, Daphne gives Apollo the slip; she stays perfect – and regrets it. My own sister urged me to stay away from Carl. But Daphne’s advice to me was
this:

When my train reached the city that night, I phoned Carl from the station to say, I have to see you, then drove miles to see him for five minutes outside his block of flats, with Katie waiting
up in their bed for him, thinking he was putting out the rubbish, and Johnny waiting way across the city for me in ours, thinking my train had been delayed.

What I felt, when I saw Carl waiting for me, was overwhelming gratitude, a surge of something like love. (Could it have been love? What was I grateful for?) Carl stood a little way away from the
deep-set doorway of his apartment block, so that the building offered him no protection against the sharp spring wind. Shoulders slightly hunched in the cold night, fists shoved deep in his two
front pockets. He wore a baggy red T-shirt, no jacket, familiar looking blue jeans and old white trainers. I stopped the car, unfastened my seat belt, opened the door, but before I could get out,
he was in, and we were kissing as though the kissing were a continuation of something that speaking would interrupt. I remember the chill on Carl’s arms, his stubble scraping my face, not in
an unpleasant way, and how warm his mouth was.

This, the second time we kissed, was the only time I went to him. Later, when our affair was going full tilt, he told me that because of what I had said to him the day after the first kiss in
the bar – that it was a mistake and must never happen again – if I hadn’t gone to him, he would have stayed away.

I am beginning to find that I don’t believe in mistakes. They are choices.

Johnny always used to ask me what I had had for lunch, if I hadn’t had lunch with him, and I was pleased to be asked and pleased to tell him, probably because he gave me
the sense he was living my life with me, watching over me, interested in every detail; I suppose it gave me the illusion that I was not alone.

I don’t always notice the ridiculous things I do, but on that bus ride in China, perhaps because it was such a long way and because I didn’t have anyone to talk to,
I saw that even after I had stopped pestering my neighbours I was still looking out for road signs, trying to make out distinct groupings of text that I could assume were place names followed by
the distance in kilometres. I took comfort from that, though it wasn’t anything. I’m on my way, was the comfort I took. And once I noticed that I was watching out for signs that I
didn’t understand, I realized that it was pretty funny, and then I started to enjoy the trip: I was present on the bus, looking out at the long smooth road and the expanse of flat land all
around. It didn’t matter that the landscape was boring. It didn’t even matter that I wasn’t sure of my destination. I felt alive: I am here.

This was the same feeling I got when I was around Carl: I loved what I became, which wasn’t all good but it was fresh and vibrant and not smoothly dull. I felt more real.

Johnny’s mother was grand. At least, she sounded grand. When I first met her, at a smart tearoom in Johnny’s university town, I asked her if she had driven there
and must have looked startled at her reply, which sounded like, Ears, but was, Yes. Another time, I was staying at Johnny’s parents’ house and we were thinking where to go that evening.
Why don’t you take her to Cairns? Johnny’s mother suggested. I was expecting a Scottish restaurant, so I was surprised when it turned out to be Indian: Kahn’s.

But there was an episode that made me wonder if I was as exotic to Carl as Johnny’s mother was to me. When we visited Our Kid, Carl stopped the car just before we reached the house so that
I could buy cigarettes. I went into the newsagents, but they didn’t stock my brand. I came out of the shop and tried the garage over the road: again, no luck. I went back to the car.

What’s up? asked Carl.

They don’t have any Marlboro Lights, I said, can we go somewhere else?

Ha! You won’t get Marlboro fucking Lights round here, he said.

I went back into the newsagents and armed myself with the wrong cigarettes, just enough to last me until I got back to Marlboro country.

Now I see how I used habits to hold myself together, how routine can bind identity. Then, no matter how clearly I saw that the strong black coffee was going to strip the inside
of my mouth and make me parched for the rest of the day, or how the toast would taste of nothing and give me no real nourishment, I had to have them. I couldn’t skip breakfast because it was
my habit to have breakfast and I couldn’t have tried something else because that meant thinking of and then buying other things. Making these changes would have taken something I didn’t
have. So I kept on with the black coffee and toast even though I didn’t really want them.

I once wrote down something Sylvia Plath said, copied it from a newspaper article, which may have been a review of a Ted Hughes book. I can’t find that place in my
notebook now, but I remember what she said almost word for word because it chimed with things I thought. She said something like this: I don’t want to become an uninspired,
self-rationalizing, stay-at-home housewife while my husband grows intellectually and professionally. I don’t want to submerge my biggest aspirations, my embarrassing desires, refuse to face
myself.