Vertigo (3 page)

Some women take power in a country by souveniring. I try to imitate them, look only for what I can buy, but my heart’s not in it. The bargain is the thing to treasure: the leap of possession, of which the keepsake is only the echo. And maybe for you it has been the act of stealing. I can’t tell you not to take the stone; it is so beautiful. Your eyes have allowed you to see it out of place already, on your desk perhaps, a shelf. Now, even if you put it back, it would not be where it was before. I have been tempted, seen one carving balanced on another behind the rope, about to fall—an acanthus leaf detaching from its finial—but I couldn’t have taken it. Happy with a tourist’s herded pleasures, really I’m helpless without you. Could I ask for anything more? Yes, but only what you don’t see within these safe parameters, and secretly. To enjoy the smallest allowed thing, to take these pleasures privately—is this an act of rebellion?

It is something I can take away that you cannot.

We’ve been invited to transgress, in any case, continually: to cross inefficient barriers, to enter without paying, not to pay for the children, or to offer the smaller price for them because that was demanded last time.

How big is a find, anyway? Yours is pretty big. Other pieces that look like nothing may also be finds—pebbles with no carvings may be equally missing from the whole. And, if you leave it, someone else will take it, of course …

I say nothing. I think you take nothing. As we go, I think we leave: a lolly stick, some peanut shells. They will biodegrade.

In the car park of the ruin, no other tourists, only a man loading into his car brightly colored squat plastic horses for children to ride. They are beautiful! Or not. On holiday it is so difficult to judge. Should the ornamentation on the fire hydrant be admired like the ornamentation on the finial? It is very similar. But is it authentic/typical of the region/linked to a social/political/cultural event/unique/historic, or is it found everywhere?

In the car, I drive, he speaks:

“What did you enjoy most?” he asks the children.

They weigh only the things he suggests.

As for me, I enjoyed the people, ate them up. I do not say it; no one else saw me do it. There are three of them, now, farmwomen, stooping in the furrows behind the tractor, as though looking for dropped change. Then a man kneeling by his motorbike in a lay-by. Here no one will help. You have to fix it yourself, or push the bike a long way.

TUNA PREFABRIK homes rise up, pink as tinned salmon. The cliffs remain as unimaginable as a picture. The restaurant we passed said, OPEN ALL THE YEARS.

The drive up the mountain now consists of stretches of road that have been memorized, can be linked together, until almost every meter of the road is expected—and as it becomes expected vertigo decreases.

Last journey up. How much of my fear is put on? To give you some perspective, my teeth feel like cliffs to my tongue.

The man in the row of seats in front says, SHIT. He does not look or sound like the sort of man who says SHIT often, and I am shocked to hear the word come out in his pleasant sixty-year-old voice. He is arguing with the airline stewardess about exchange rates while paying for coffee. The stewardess says she will check the exchange rate for him. I do not know whether the exchange rate is SHIT, or the coffee.

The man’s t-shirt. Khaki. Between the seats, a glimpse: across the back just by the neck, a small logo, LIFE IS GOOD.

She realized she was happy and it was terrible to be happy with anything so ordinary. It was like looking down from a height on nothing in particular, only the feeling of being able to see it all at once, and the feeling of falling, which was not falling, and the irritation at being provoked to that feeling by nothing in particular. She swatted it away but the happiness would not leave. She was surprised to find things went on just the same beside the happiness, which did nothing practical, like make the stewardess arrive sooner, or the children behave better.

A pregnant child passes along the plane. No, she is a woman. I am used to the coarse skin of those my own age. Even the very old begin to seem normal.

The stewardess. No, I am not hungry. I will deny it very quickly, almost as soon as I feel it, or rather as soon as I feel the not being hungry, which is not the same as feeling nothing. I will deny it out loud so I don’t feel it, or rather so that I feel what I say—which is an absence, or rather an absence of the absence that is hunger: so that I
don’t
feel the absence. And, no, I am not one of those women who has learned how not to eat, only how not to want. And it is not food only.

She said when the children were small she was not happy, but the children had already escaped what they were, made away with the evidence. All she had left was the declaration. So why continue to be unhappy? It was almost impossible to be unhappy now. To hold onto the unhappiness would be absurd. But to let it go …

Children who are bigger than their parents are folded into the seats behind, their limbs bent in all the wrong directions, a padded girl (fifteen?) clutching a fat cushion decorated with the photo of a pug sitting on a drawing of a heart.

When she tried to brush the happiness away, it buzzed back around her. In her son’s drawings she could see how complexity might develop and, from it, how the
Book of Kells
was made, Icelandic woodcarvings, those tiles in the Blue Mosque. It seemed masculine, this pursuit of pattern, or she ascribed it to masculinity because it was something she did not do herself.

Geological faults. From the plane we look down on things that would do us harm were we to encounter them.
She felt no vertigo although she could have dropped a hairpin onto the canopy of cloud and it would have fallen through as though there had been nothing there, which there was not. On the other side of the window, ice particles kissed the glass, which was not glass but was made from the same material as her kitchen blender that broke, even though it was made from the same material as aircraft windows.

The third person. There was no sign of this happiness on the outside, she knew. She was bored by this happiness that seemed out of place, impatient to get rid of it. The feeling was less pleasurable than she had imagined it might have been, less well-defined, and when she felt along its strings she found it was not easily traced or attached to the objects she thought it might have been attached to. Perhaps it was not attached to anything at all.

Could her husband have been the cause of her happiness? She thought of him but her thoughts refused to alight on one feature that might anchor that feeling. She tried the physical: his eyes, his forearms, his cock and balls … they all seemed much as they had been, she could think of any with equanimity. Perhaps it was something he did, some quality of mind? No, none of these.

How long does a thought take to form? Years sometimes. But how long to think it? And once thought it’s impossible to go back. How long does it take to cross an hour? The plane crosses the map so slowly, though it goes at how-many-kilometers-per-second. The plane desires, as its passengers desire—hoping the luster below might be the sea—to come to an end, but its desires draw it across the land only by inches.

If we were flying from Paris we would just have left. The flight would be short.
She tried to persuade herself to forget the hours of flight already passed, so it would be as though the plane had just left the runway, but it was impossible. Why was it impossible to forget what had happened, impossible to look at time only one way?

Holidays are about returning, losing. You
should
come back lighter than you went. I know some people think different, collecting fat and souvenirs, but I have lost something.
Why was it important, this having to get back? She had forgotten already. The objects that returned with her would be happier, she knew, when she reached the end of her journey. The tweezers would return to a place in which they knew their place, or one of their many places. The clothes would fall back on their cycle of washing and ironing, would breathe a sigh of relief.

When he gets up, something in his back pocket traces a square along the lines worn by his wallet. It may be his wallet; it may be the piece of stone. I do not ask. He does not volunteer. He withholds its power. I allow him to.

The land tips away from the plane. No vertigo. Too high.

And, after the third descent, the departure of the idea of anything bad happening.

It’s not so much that we were young, because some of us were already old, old enough for gray hairs. It’s more that our children had made us young. Already in the youth of our young motherhood our children had given birth to our function. We hardly knew we were born of them, before we were named: Connor’s mum or Casey’s mum but never Juliet, or Nell, or Amanda, not for years anyhow, by which time we had skipped the remains of adulthood and were only old.

But for a while we were young. You could tell because we acquired new things made from young materials. Our things were smooth, plastic, round-cornered, safe: clearly designed to be used by the very young. It was necessary that we did not hurt ourselves, we young mothers, though the temptation was so very great. We were needed, and the plastic things were needed so we mothers, who had become our own children, did not hurt ourselves. See how patiently we taught ourselves to use the new things. You could call it nurturing.

It had not started there, at our birth: our youth went further back. Pregnant, we already wore dresses for massive two year olds: flopping collars balancing our joke-shop bellies, stretchmarked with polka dots. After we were born into our new young motherhood our trousers sprouted many pockets for practicality. Khaki was good (grass-stains, tea-stains). You could put them through the rinser. Fleece was warm and stretchy for growing bodies. Shoes were flat for running, playing. Colors were bright, so our children did not lose us, so we could not lose each other, or ourselves, no matter how hard we tried.

See how we looked after our young selves, awarding ourselves little treats—cakes, glasses of juice, or wine—never too much. If we noticed ourselves crying in a corner, we went to comfort ourselves. Sometimes we left ourselves alone to toughen up a little, but always with a watchful eye. Truly we were well cared for. Look how carefully we introduced ourselves to new environments: on our first day at playgroup we may have been reluctant, tearful even, to be herded together by virtue of situation and approximate age, but we remembered the manners we had taught ourselves: a good grounding. Seeing ourselves shyly approach each other we looked on with approval, breathed a sigh of relief.

Then we had to remember how to play.

We young mothers sang nursery rhymes. We had not sung in years. It came hard to us, sitting on the floor cross-legged in colored tops and practical trousers, singing about crocodiles all together, toddlers flopped in our laps. We had nothing else to sing. You would have thought we could have invented, for this fresh generation, the newness it deserved. But we were tired.

You might have thought we could have done it, but we were so poor.

At the end of each day when our men came home we young mothers were already tired. We were younger than our children: the children that had birthed us. Our men wondered how they could be married to such children. Bedtime approached, and the men settle down to something adult on the television. We mothers were terrified, did not want to go once more into the interrupted dark. Distracted by noises, bewitched by things that sparkled, we lulled ourselves to sleep, overtired, tearful, telling ourselves tomorrow it would be okay.

In the playground the next day, we watched older mothers bring lunch boxes and spare sweaters to children who might not have wanted this kind of mothering. They made sure the kids were still kids. And the children, ignoring them politely, went on letting the mothers be mothers, for who knows what ends.

I have had some good times in this body like right now, looking out of the window. Opposite the window is another window, and through that window, another. The window frames are dark brown and made, perhaps, of metal. They come in pairs, one frame inside another, the inner located in the top right corner of the outer. The smaller frame might open, but none of the windows is open. This might be because it is raining. Through the window opposite is a white wall with a doorframe and, through that, a window that looks onto another white wall. Sometimes people pass between the brown frames and the white walls, and their colors look shabby.