Signs of Life (15 page)

My sister came over this evening, with a nicer than usual bottle of wine.

Look what I found, she said, bringing a tatty cardboard folder out of her bag. Inside the folder was a homemade book called ‘Horses and Ponies’ that I wrote when I was six. I had
forgotten how much my younger self wanted a pony. There are twenty-two pages, hardly any words. Emily insists on holding the book, and pauses at pages that she finds particularly amusing, like the
labelled drawings showing the different physical varieties of horse faces:

At first, I am mildly put out at her laughing at me, and I want to hold the book and look at my own pace, but I know, we both know, that we are making up from our quarrel over the lemon tree.
Emily laughs hardest at a page of labelled, disembodied legs.

I have decided that I should include my own base actions and low words, those that are relevant. I am thinking in particular of something I said to Carl when he was standing on
the roof threatening to throw himself off, and something I did while I was trying to break up with him. The material is already so compromised. It has been edited once, by memory, then again by
substances – both processes I recognize but can’t know the extent of – and now I am editing again, to shape events into a story. I want the story to be true, and I see that if I
leave out certain things I said and did, I am taking away from that. This is not to say that I am going back to the attempt to include everything: there has to be some boundaries. But the boundary
between the relevant and the irrelevant has moved.

On the roof, he said, I’m ending all of it, and I didn’t catch his meaning, so I said,
I’ve
just ended it, haven’t I? No, he said, annoyed, and repeated, with
different emphasis: I’m ending
all
of it. I understood, and instantly dismissed, the possibility that he was going to jump to his death. I knew he would not jump. I remember the huge
contempt I felt towards him. More than contempt, it was a transforming force. It had fire in it. It contained cruelty. There was a very strong impulse in me and in that moment, I wanted to push him
off the roof. Instead, I said something mean. Here are the low words: Go on, then.

His failure to jump made everything worse; I think he felt he had humiliated himself and that seemed to make him angrier. In the long period of unpleasantness afterwards, Carl and I had to go
away on business and stay overnight in a hotel. He was angry; this was a tense trip. We had a room with three single beds in it. It was all we could get. He said, I’ll sleep in the car. Then
he changed his mind. I’m not sleeping in the fucking car; you sleep in the fucking car. Well, I wasn’t going to sleep in the car. This was a car we’d fucked in anyway. We went out
for dinner; we drove to the restaurant because we were in the middle of nowhere. The meal was appalling, not the food, the tension, he was seething. During the meal, Carl said: I hope whoever you
marry beats you and beats your children. There are many things I have forgotten, half remember, misremember, but I remember the exact words and the way his face looked and the way his voice sounded
when he uttered this curse. His eyes seemed to darken and shrink, his voice too – he spoke in a harsh whisper – everything retracted into concentrated fury. When he drove back to the
hotel, he drove dangerously, on purpose, to scare me. And I was scared. The room was very dark because the hotel was in the countryside. We each got into a single bed, with the spare one between
us. Here is the base action: during the night I let him into my bed and had sex with him and the sex was very dark too.

It is quite difficult to write about. Immediately afterwards, Carl punched the wall next to my head, a hard, fast punch, like a continuation of his orgasm – excess passion or aggression he
had to shoot into the ground like lightning.

There are other writers I owe a debt. It’s not just Joan Didion I have taken from/been inspired by. Absorb, borrow, celebrate, decorate, distort, echo, mirror, pay
homage, pay tribute, recycle, rework . . . Steal?

All of these.

Short of outright plagiarism, surely there is a line between inspiration and theft? If the difference is intention, are we talking about conscious or unconscious intent, and where do we draw
that
line?

Sitting on his mother’s vast pink bed, Carl played me what he said was her favourite song, ‘Only You’ by The Platters. I knew the song, and even if I
hadn’t heard the tune I would have recognized the story, because it is universal: everyone knows it; everyone wants it to be true. Cities have been built and torn down on this myth, wars
started, great art created, lives shattered. But I still love the song.

And Carl said, This song is not just my mum’s favourite, it’s also true, for me, about you: only you can make me feel all right. He said, I feel so alone sometimes, all the time
really, just more or less aware of the loneliness: it’s not that you make me forget, but when I’m with you, and only when I’m with you, I can know that I’m alone, and not
mind. It’s better than forgetting. You make it better. Only you.

One night, playing a gig with his band, Carl was drumming so hard and the crowd was so into it that Carl threw his drumsticks out to the crowd and continued to play with his
bare hands until someone brought him another set of drumsticks. This aliveness – he just
boomed
– was one of the best things about him.

Carl was convinced that his anger was my fault and, to begin with, I was too. But when he told me about punching the man to the bottom of the escalator, whether that was true
or not, I began to see that he was in a state of anger that far exceeded me. He was as sure of this rage as he had been of his love for me. I realized – with a mixture of relief and
disappointment – if the anger wasn’t all about me then neither was the passion.

I don’t know where the line is between passion and obsession but I think obsession is passion that gets stuck.

Perhaps boundaries are like horizons; not fixed, they move as you move, like the end of the rainbow. It’s like trying to see when water turns to steam – you can never find that
precise moment.

I have found the most wonderful shop, called Vera’s, and there is a real life Vera who runs it. What caught my eye was a dress in the window. On the hanger it looked
elegant; dark paisley print, darts, tiny buttons at the wrist, like something Vita Sackville West or Virginia Woolf might have worn, but it looked like a dressing gown on me. (If I ever got another
cat I would call her Vita.) Browsing around I found things I need for the flat, but what I like most are the hand written labels: ‘Lovely Repro Butter Dish’, ‘Sweet Little Green
“Woods” Jug’, ‘Two Pretty Vintage Plates’, and my favourite – ‘Very Old Vermeer Print’.

When I showed Delilah my haul, she rewrote the labels, verbally: ‘Was Cheaper First Time Round’, ‘Bit Of Old Tat’, ‘Chipped and Faded Plates’, ‘Fake
Grand Master’. She never has seen the charm in secondhand things (unless they’re French).

The Vermeer is small and not a terribly good print, which is why it only cost £8.50, but I love it. I have it propped up against the anglepoise lamp on my desk. It’s called
‘View of Delft’ and shows a line of buildings by a canal, a few tiny people, darkly dressed, but mainly sky and water. I love the faded gold frame, and the proportion of sky, and the
soft reflection of the houses on the canal, the way the glass adds reflections of my room into the picture.

After Johnny left, ‘our’ home did not become ‘my’ home. The flat looked different because Johnny had taken all his stuff with him and that included
pieces of furniture. There were marks on the walls where this furniture had stood for five years, outlines like echoes of the shout I kept hearing in my head: ‘HE’S GONE, gone, gone,
gone.’ Because the rooms were emptier, the walls seemed to stand farther apart than they had before, as if they didn’t want to be near me. There was too much space around my clothes in
the wardrobe and around my books on the shelf.

I was grateful for Molly’s company. She neither approved nor disapproved of me and her evenness was a comfort. After she came back that first time, I began to leave the window open day and
night and she came and went as she pleased. I didn’t tell Carl, of course. I did away with the litter tray and I never once used the red velvet collar and lead. I buried them in a box of old
boots in a cupboard but I didn’t dare to throw them out. If I happened to be in the kitchen when Molly made an entrance or exit, I was thrilled, as if by the sighting of a much wilder animal.
I loved how she appeared silently on the windowsill and then picked her dainty way onto the counter, and it was wonderful to see her leap from the sill into the garden, wash herself in the sun or
run over the dry grass and jump to the top of the wall and disappear over the garage roofs beyond. Her jumps were not jumps, exactly, because they didn’t have a start or finish, no obvious
effort, they were simply part of her flow.

Molly began to hunt. I found little corpses in the garden, occasionally a dead mouse brought into the house. I didn’t know what to do with these – it seemed disrespectful to put them
in the bin. Disrespectful to Molly, I mean. Once, I saw her get a bird. I glanced out of the French doors and saw her crouched, taut, the chubby bird twittering about on the grass. Molly crept
forward, concentration like a laser fixed her victim to the spot and seemingly had the same effect on me because I did nothing to stop her. She destroyed the bird swiftly using only a fraction of
the power I sensed when she was poised on the grass. I was impressed, but I shouldn’t have been – cats are predators, predators kill easily. That evening I was in the kitchen, leaning
against the counter and eating a bowl of cereal for dinner, Molly came purring, winding herself round me like fabric. I finished the cereal and put the bowl on the counter for Molly to lap the
extra milk and as I watched her, I thought, I know you – you are not a kitty.

Seeing Molly discover her own cat-ness gave me another reason to be angry with Carl for having kept her locked up in that high tower block. It seemed such a strange thing to do. Was he jealous
of her? Climbing is quite cat-like and Carl was good at climbing but he was carrying anger and maybe because his anger came from an old wound it didn’t seem to fire him but rather to weigh
him down. Perhaps that’s what bitterness is – old anger. Even the places Carl went to practise – roofs and walls, alleyways between houses – were cat territory.

The other day, sitting here at my desk, I saw a flash of black rush across a rooftop and it made my stomach lurch because I thought of Molly. Of course it was not Molly. It was
right at the very edge of my vision so I can’t even be sure it was a cat. I haven’t seen any cats around here. Probably what I saw was the wing of a crow landing, or taking
flight.

A memory of Johnny: undressed, lying on our bed after we’d made love one Saturday afternoon, he is looking at raindrops making wobbly tracks down the dirty window, I am
lying with my head on his chest, his arm over me, and I am looking up at him, loving him. Why do moments like this pass so quietly? It’s not until afterwards that you see them for what they
really were; not the times you thought you’d remember, nor the ones you thought you’d miss most, but the ones in which you were truly open. Sometimes, listening to the words of a song
or watching a scene in a film, I have a mini epiphany: Oh! I’ve had moments like that and I didn’t realize they were important. It’s as though the song or film has framed an
episode in your own life so that you see it for the first time, but just as the moment is shown to you, you remember it’s already gone.

Sometimes I still wonder: What on Earth made me choose Carl over Johnny? Whatever could it be that brought me to that loss? I bring myself the closest I can to an answer and
feel something inside me turn away, to another planet.

I decided to paint the walls white, to cover the marks where Johnny’s furniture had been and because I couldn’t bear the carnival colours any more. When we first
moved in, I wanted bold, rich colours, so I chose a golden yellow for the bedroom, with deep pink woodwork, emerald green walls with pale grey in the sitting room, and kingfisher blue in the
kitchen, and then I glossed the whole lot with shiny varnish. It was oppressive, like a funfair when everyone has gone home. Redecorating was a lot of work because I had to do three coats on each
wall and all the woodwork, but I embraced it as a penance. The dark brown floors were stripped and sanded and stained white (doing the floors was even more work, so I had someone in to do it
– my guilt wasn’t bottomless). Around the same time I got new blonde highlights in my hair. I wanted to strip everything away, dip my life in bleach and start new. White walls, blank
page – but
tabula rasa
is a myth, of course.

I realize I am confused about beds. I thought that the bed in the dingy hotel where Carl and I first had sex was vast and pink, but I also remember the bed in his
mother’s room as being vast and pink. Could there be two vast pink beds in this story? I did not have sex with Carl on his mother’s bed, but now the notion of Carl’s mother and
her bed has mingled with the image of Carl and me having sex on that cheap hotel bed; a difficult enough memory on its own, without having his mother mixed up in it.