Though not an autobiography, this book contains an account of my life. Small details have been changed to protect the privacy of others. I have also played the biographer, re-imagined other people’s imaginings, conjectured alternative lives, and wandered into fiction. It is an exhibition of kinds.
Oxford, June 2018
— 1988 —
When I wake up in the morning, love
Bill Withers, ‘Lovely Day’
Death, for me, smells like summer and commodes, and sounds like pop.
It was September of 1988, and I’d already spent most of the holidays in my bedroom with my purple radio cassette player, waiting for my father to die. Guns N’ Roses were slipping back down the charts, and the highest climber was Jason Donovan with ‘Nothing Can Divide Us’. Kylie Minogue and Belinda Carlisle and Big Fun had a strong showing. I clung to the upbeat of Yazz and the Plastic Population, and the sunshine mix of Bill Withers. Term had started and nothing changed. I had a flute exam coming up. New in at 37 was ‘Revolution Baby’ from Transvision Vamp. He was still dying. Anthrax had gone down a spot with ‘Make Me Laugh’.
I was woken by a noise. I could tell from the volume that my mother was standing somewhere near the airing cupboard, the one with the copper cistern wrapped in a red life jacket. The baby, my sister, started crying, too. I got out of bed. As a short, flat-chested thirteen-year-old with unfeasibly large feet, I spent a great deal of time thinking that I had nothing to wear. But that particular morning, I felt it more distinctly than usual. Neither Just Seventeen nor Good Housekeeping’s ‘A Look for a Lifestyle’ had covered the matter of what to wear on the day your father dies – painfully and messily, before his time – when you have a day of corpse-viewing ahead of you.
In the end, I put on the skirt that I wore for choir, with panels that swirled on the bias, a three-quarter-length navy sweatshirt with an ersatz-Victorian plasticised picture of a floral bouquet on it, and my best electric blue loafers. The black tights were a mistake. It was going to be a lovely day.
— 2016 —
It’s no use pretending that it hasn’t happened because it has
Noël Coward, Brief Encounter
I am sitting at the back of the train, near the loo, two hundred and eighty minutes from home. For the next few hours I will look out of the window at Gilberdyke and Goole and Derby and nobody will sit on my lap. As we move, I can see the edges of Paragon land, the scrubby waste and half-slant new builds, and the warehouses and lorry parks around Hessle Road.
You knew this landscape well.
There’s a moment, today, where our lines will cross. I know you’re out there, as I make my way south. Out there, hanging in there. Longitudes. I press a hand against the glass and look at the imprint – a trace map. The acres of purple sky and scrap metal give way to green. This is as close as I can get.
It began as a game. I was single, in my best coat, with half a job. You were married and owned the room. Lanyarded, we stood at the conference buffet, spiking mini fish balls on cocktail sticks. I asked if I could write to you. For work. An interview about your last exhibition. You looked at my face and I could see. Something crossed your mind. You wrote your number down in my notebook, and you wished me luck.
I played it cool to start with, even with myself. I kept losing the notebook, as if it were all down to a lucky dip. If it turned up, I would call. I could let chance choose if we ever met again. And then I phoned. When I did, after that, it was you who called most, and we spoke late into the night. Soon, I knew where you were sitting when we spoke, at your desk, with the film reels and cameras around you, and the blinds half shuttering out the grey city air. Once you wrote down the other number, with instructions about when I could use it and when I must destroy it. The betrayal of your other life – your betrayal, my complicity, our betrayal – was something I rarely felt, but then it struck me clearly in the surprisingly delicate precision of your light blue biro.
You used to call me and stay on the line for ages, sometimes so quiet that we could hear each other breathe. I’ve never liked phone calls. I do not like the act of dialling out, the being called. But with you I didn’t mind. It was one of our ways of being together. Being on the line. There was no line of course.
I still dream about you. We are at a Christmas party. In a lift. Eating a pizza on a bench in Battersea. (We are an unlikely couple, even in dream world.) An older man with a camera bag and a newspaper. A not young, but younger, woman, wearing a leopard print top. I wake and hope to dream again.
It’s nine years since I’ve seen your face. Or heard your voice. I don’t have either of your numbers any more, and if I did, I wouldn’t call. But the other day I tried to find you again, circling the streets of your city on my computer screen in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin. Then closer up, zooming in on the house numbers as if I might, if I looked hard enough, catch sight of you through the window, walking away.
Not that your face was much to write home about. Not that I could write home about it in any case. Happily married women don’t write home about other men’s faces.
There’s a flash of names beneath the bindweed. Shipham Valves. Wan Hai. Atlas Leisure Homes. Then levelling out to follow the motorway, chasing the cars past the Humber. The light changes, turns brighter, over the stretch of brown with its drag of sand. I open my bag to look for my book. In a week, my students will get back and my lectures are still unwritten. They’ll have their own copies of different books, and most will remember to bring them. Some of these books will be well-read, well-thumbed, decorated with lines of tiny Post-it notes like stiff fluorescent tongues. Others will look more like mine – almost brand new, with an uncreased spine and a shine to its cover. This is the fourth Anna Karenina I have bought. I have a habit of losing anything I am trying to work on, of leaving it in a cupboard or a suitcase or a plastic bag. Somewhere, back home, there are three other books like this. Each has its own cover, its own bends and creases, and corners rubbed with wear. They will turn up in the end, among piles of paperwork or under the bed. Eventually, I will group them all together on a shelf, and they will stand there, reproachful relatives, as if I should have stuck to one of them. I turn the title page. All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
That’s not the real first line of course, but I have no Russian. I close the book and look out of the window. The train goes over a metal bridge with a whistling sound, then past the endless backs of houses. We are stopping and starting now, slowly enough to peer into other people’s conservatories, at their laundry and sheds and swing sets and greenhouses and statues of frogs on toadstools, and upturned trampolines, then out to the fields lined with yellow rapeseed, and the crowd of wind turbines, circling like alien gymnasts. I press my finger against the glass again and try to write.
Someone I nearly loved is dying.
The