For a moment, especially in twilight, it can have a brief magic.
This evening, as we sit out in the garden waiting for his other guests, I tell Bernard:
‘The door in the wall was an icon beloved by late Victorian and Edwardian alike. The symbol of lost opportunity, or of opportunities not fully taken. If you pass through the door, the story goes, you cannot be anything less than changed. If you don’t pass through it, you still cannot be anything less than changed.
‘Choice, here, offers a fifth major compass point, an unnamed direction or plane. It’s the plane of nostalgia, and of nostalgia’s inverse, a kind of weightless but abiding regret.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Bernard says. ‘I bet you can’t repeat that.’
‘Don’t tease each other you two,’ his wife tells us. ‘The children are bad enough.’
Her three older girls are in bed, but she is having a problem with the youngest. ‘Ella, if you can stop crying now,’ she says patiently, ‘Ella, if you can really get control and stop crying, I’ll give you a big bottle of milk. But if you don’t I’ll only give you half a bottle. All right, Ella?’
‘If I was Ella,’ Bernard whispers, ‘I’d be pretending to get control now and take revenge later.’
‘Bide her time then get revenge on all adults,’ I agree.
‘Don’t be so bloody horrible,’ warns Ella’s mother.
All afternoon the children have worked hard to personalise the gate, surrounding it with art of their own, bold, determined representations of people and stars in unmodified poster reds and yellows, done directly on to opened-out cardboard boxes left over from their recent move from Europe. They have propped their pictures up around the door in the wall like mirror portals, entrances to quite different kinds of imaginary worlds – lively, jarring and expressionistic. Ella’s efforts are particularly determined. Later I will write, ‘These worlds of hers are not alternatives to anything. Instead they are real, explosive acts of creation.’
The air is warm and soft. The other guests arrive. We talk, we laugh. We eat beautifully cooked garlic fish.
Trompe l’oeil is a con, and not much of one really. Everyone who sits in Bernard’s garden that evening is grown up enough to relish this. They would never call the view the other side of the door a ‘world’ or insist that, to function as art or even as a mild joke, it must successfully suspend their disbelief. After the youngest child has gone at last to bed, the adults smile and stretch and help clear away the supper things. They go to the end of the garden and gently collect up the children’s art to protect it from the dew. ‘Aren’t these wonderful? Aren’t they so energetic?’
Then they yawn and smile, and say goodnight to one another, and one by one pass through the gate, under the unpainted transom with its moulded flowers.
For a moment I watch them run away into the trees, calling and laughing softly. I leave them to it. In the harbour the tide is down, there’s dark algae on the surface of the mud. A swan sleeps amid the yellowing fibreglass litter between the moored boats. I look back at the hill and, parked round its base, all the wrecked cars. Before each one ends its working life, it has already become so patched and repaired that every panel is a different colour. Pea green. Talbot blue. Maroon. Rich yellow of city sunlight. Their wheels are gone. Their seats are long gone. They are held together with bits of string or leather belts, and full of obsolete TVs, hat boxes, bales of clothes, paper sacks of cement!
I don’t know anyone called Bernard. I never did. I have friends who live in the ‘alphabet ladder’ off Fulham Palace Road. They own a little garden that ends in a trompe l’oeil gateway. But their lives are not like this.
On the morning of my last day over there I packed the three manuscripts in a carry-on bag, crossed the river by the new metal footbridge and walked to the airport. The river was muddy and agitated. I saw an old fashioned boat, painted white. I saw fruit bats hanging in a tree like oily leather bags. I looked into the sunlight where it dissolved the sidestreets and made the world seem both ended and endless. There were fretted shadows and dry brown palm fronds everywhere underfoot. I felt free. I felt ready to write whatever I saw. I saw the red and yellow tuk tuks, the children walking to school along the railway tracks, the soldiers with their assault rifles hanging from a webbing loop. In the suburbs the sun was all over the humid morning air; but in the town the streets were still dark and chilly. A whole quarter smelled of petrol, and every street I looked down seemed more interesting than the one I was on. I stood for a moment or two in a cul-de-sac with fallen-down walls. A cat came out on to the rubble-strewn cobbles in the sun to say hello.
My return flight on the 787 ‘Dreamliner’ was via Paris. I remember the slow, measured descent into Charles de Gaulle; brown fields, long shadows, low sun on autumn trees; a graveyard experienced as a pocket of greater density in the city viewed from above – smaller objects of the same type, crushed into a smaller space. We hurried through the airport, only to find we had missed our connection. I hate to travel in groups. Other people are less a comfort than you expect. You catch their anxieties. They edge their way into your head.
There are two classes of memories: the ones you keep and the ones you don’t. Which of them constructs you best? The second account I brought back with me ended, ‘I’ve lived with a lot less intensity since I arrived here. You might say that was age, but I would have to call it self-preservation. If I felt things as much as I used to – if I allowed things to take their proper space inside me – I’d be in trouble.’ The third account, which I read on the short flight between De Gaulle and Heathrow, seemed to take up from this proposition –
I didn’t have much, for most of that year in the city, but I liked what I had. I could look up from my worktable and see a wooden chair, a small chest of drawers painted green, some paper flowers full of dust. Each of these objects became valuable because it crystalised a feeling, an event, a memory of my time there; I allowed them space into which they could comfortably leak their meanings.
But towards the end of my assignment I became involved with another expatriot who immediately began filling my rooms with things of her own. She dragged bits of furniture across the city – tables, sidetables, occasional tables, folding tables. Cardboard boxes of old clothes, old records, old books. Childhood books, and books from other people’s childhoods. I put them behind a folding screen. Piles of newspapers and magazines gathered on the tables, then underneath them. Sometimes she would place five or six newspapers in a plastic bag, twist the ends of the bag together in a loose knot, and put that in a corner. She brought me these things but she wouldn’t stay with me. Sometimes I didn’t see her for days. Instead she sent an email.
‘According to this map I found,’ she wrote, ‘we’re in The World. Did we plan on that?’
She gave me a chess set. She gave me an old shirt of her father’s; it came down to my knees but the collar wouldn’t fasten. I couldn’t help trying to interpret these gifts. When I asked, ‘Why have you brought me this?’ or, ‘What part of your life do these things come from?’, she would look confused for a moment then carry on doing whatever she was doing. She wanted to answer but here was a check between what she knew about herself and what she wanted me to know.
Once or twice a week I was compelled to take a tuk tuk across town to the harbour where she lived. When I got out to pay the driver, I found only the usual tangled mess of receipts, keys, change and low-denomination notes in the narrow upper pockets of my jacket. Half-sunken warships lay rusting in the hot evening light. The harbour streets, wide and empty yet at the same time maze-like, stretched into the dusty hinterland in a confused dream of sagging telephone wires and heatstruck dogs. That was where I visited her, in a long house in the local style, with a single corridor running past every room. The corridor had no windows; the rooms overlooked the harbour. Some were dilapidated, with holes in the floors, collapsed ceilings and an air of abandonment. Others were traditionally occupied by western journalists. She had live
d there three years, she said, but it was always like the first day of college or university. ‘I can never find my room.’ We walked up and down the corridor for fifteen minutes, trying door after door. We stepped over the caretakers who sprawled unconcernedly on the floor, drinking arak, involved in their own conversation.
When we found it her room was almost empty of furniture. It was empty of almost everything except a pile of newspapers, a mattress, a Turkish cat asleep on the computer keyboard. ‘We should have some tea,’ she said. We drank it from faded old china cups with a silver rim and a rose motif so worn away you seemed to be seeing it through a mist, while she read to me from the advertisements in the newspapers. ‘The sky is the limit for Rhino Roofing!’ ‘Elephant House Ice Cream.’ ‘Try something from our sandwich menu, fast and quick.’ Immediately outside her window lay a slough of black mud-thickened water, the remains of a system of sluices and culverts which had once conducted the river to the harbour. It looked rusty and poisonous. When I tried to embrace her she pointed out of the window and said –
‘We can go swimming if I get the caretakers to open the sluice!’
‘I’m not swimming in that,’ I said.
The caretakers opened the sluice. She jumped in vertically, her arms stiff by her sides, and went straight under. When she bobbed up again the water looked clearer and shallower and fresher, with sunshine falling on to it; but it remained cold, and I was still reluctant. My friend seemed to have forgotten me. She was off! She was sliding down a sort of steep shallow pebbly stream like a waterslide, towards the main body of water. The harbour, such a feature of the view, had receded to the horizon, where I caught glimpses of its massive stone moles and cranes like a tiny heat mirage. My friend was already in the distance, shouting and laughing.
‘Come on,’ she called. ‘Come on!’
Sometimes we had sex on the mattress, but not today. I picked up the cat and put it down. When I looked out of the window again, she was already out of sight. I didn’t know what would happen next, so I left. The following day I received an email which read: ‘This city is pure freedom in the neoliberal sense. It’s all freedom to exploit and no freedom from being exploited. All you can be here is a tourist or a businessman. Better still, something that combines both.’
‘If you don’t want to live with me,’ I emailed in return, ‘why are you bringing me all your furniture? I feel you are weighing me down with things.’ I looked round my room and added: ‘I’m leaving soon, anyway.’
She knocked on my door late that night. ‘We often swim in there,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss.’
For months after my return I still felt exhausted. I felt as if I was still over there. I stored my belongings in Hackney; then, as if I couldn’t wait to get away from them, moved almost immediately to a rented four-storey house in West London. There, I tried to put my memories in order. That failing, I ignored them. After perhaps a year I had the following dream:
I was back over there, unpacking my things in a room on the top floor of the two-hundred-dollar-a-night Colonial Hotel. I had arrived after a ten-hour flight, about an hour before dawn. I was looking forward to an hour or two’s sleep before my first meeting. I could hear the surf on the hotel beach; the crows waking up in the palm trees. On the warm air was that smell you never get used to, dried fish, faeces, rotten papaya, exhaust fumes. It fills the world, I thought, while you smell it – dry, dusty, organic, aggressive. It won’t let you think of anything else. It might be the smell of vomit. If you did vomit, it would be the smell of that forever after, the smell associated with a stroke or a brain disease, the smell of an irreversible transformation. While I was thinking this, and wondering if I had brought enough shirts, I noticed some activity in the street below.
The reflections of flashing blue lights flickered across the walls of my room. Three or four of the old and mismatched appliances you see in every fire station over there had pulled up in front of the hotel, and a wooden ladder was already leaning against the window ledge. I thought: ‘I didn’t know the place was on fire.’ Then a fireman who was literally a child, very chubby and a bit like a spoiled boy actor in a Bollywood film, appeared at the window. By now I could see that the back wall of my room was glowing red and sagging, though I felt very little heat or sense of urgency. We chatted about this and that. I wondered how he was going to rescue me, being so small. But I still wasn’t worried. After a moment he asked me for a cup of tea.
While he was drinking it he admitted that he didn’t know how he would rescue me, either: ‘You’re a bit big to carry.’
I couldn’t imagine myself on his little shoulder as he swayed and tottered back down the ladder. But I still felt a perfectly steady sense of optimism and good will. I said, ‘Oh, never mind mate, I’ve got my climbing rope here. I’ll just tie it off and abseil out.’ Then I remembered there was no rope anywhere in my luggage.
I woke up from this dream with a tremendous sense of happiness and energy which lasted for two or three hours.
The things I brought back remain in storage. The fee goes out by standing order every month. Every two or three years an adjustment has to be made, to the fee or the contractual terms. I sign something. At the time I stored it, that stuff had value for me, even if I wasn’t sure why. Now I never think about it and I’m not sure I could find my way back there without the paperwork and an A-to-Z. Perhaps, before I’m tempted to try, I’ll store the paperwork, too, at the bottom of a box of unrelated papers, in the cheapest self storage I can find in West London.
A Web
Deep cold air. Triangular spiderweb, curved like a sail, attached at two points to the house and at the third to an old dry poppy-head in a pot on the balcony. Most of it invisible, but the edges and all the rigging picked out with frost. One patch of frost, about three inches in from the leading edge, minutely cross-hatched in the shape of a section through an ammonite; I can’t see if the spider’s part of that little structure. The effect is of a journey in a regime different to ours. Whatever medium is inflating the sail – whatever medium, conversely, is rushing past it – is not a property of our universe and cannot be defined by our way of relating to things. That’s why we have a duty of care to the spider. She’s sailing into an idea of winter we can’t have. Her perceptions, acted out as this structure of hers, are a valuable resource. I’ve watched her mother and her grandmother make webs here, and their mothers and grandmothers, right back to the historical times. They all built ships but none of them built quite like this.
Back to the Island
Last night I was in Autotelia again, in the town I have decided to call ‘the provincial capital’. In the garden, I found the elephant still chained to the tree where I had left it, its small eye full of knowledge. All the animals seemed amused by their own humiliation. Despite a good night’s sleep – despite two or three good nights’ sleep – on our side of things, I was tired by eight in the evening. Whatever was happening to me had taken another turn for the worse. But I felt happy, not anxious or afraid or ill. Only warm and tired and, now I had got back there, full of the deep Eros of the island. Fireflies began to gather in the corner of the summer house from which, later, the voice I had grown to love would comment on the intimate events of my life in a matter-of-fact whisper.
Cave & Julia
When Cave met Julia Vicente, she was living quietly in one of the four storey houses on the hill which overlooks the harbour.
People still gave her space. They knew her founding narrative – the loss of her brother and the subsequent prosecution for manslaughter. They knew more about those two events than the life that had followed – the long struggle to adjust to self-imposed exile on our side of things, the bouts of post traumatic stress which made her work difficult, the disastrous marriages to bankers and minor celebrities, the failed film career, the eventual return to Autotelia to live quietly in a postindustrial port which, though it reminded her daily of her tragedy, seemed at a safe remove from som
e other concept that frightened her more. She was a gaunt woman by then, tallish, full of an energy that rarely showed. A heavy smoker. She liked to walk in the gentrified dockyards, where art galleries were replacing ships, and restaurants the old dock furniture. She had a daughter, three or four years old, from her third marriage.
Cave, a cultural journalist with a broad remit, took her to restaurants she claimed she was no longer able to afford. In return she showed him the town’s prized possessions: a collection of early Doul Kiminic watercolours of eviscerated horses and grieving women; and the municipal crematorium, the curious truncated cylinder of which was decorated on the outside with a wrap-around mural like a 1920s woodcut, showing the dead silhouetted by the invisible sun of the afterlife.
‘This is awful,’ Cave said.
‘Isn’t it?’
They got on well together. Then one morning she telephoned him and said: ‘You don’t ask me about my life.’
She was known to be difficult, and Cave had come to Autotelia to write a piece about someone else. He didn’t want complications; he wanted his relationship with Julia to remain personal. More importantly, perhaps, he felt emotionally disqualified by the central event of her history. He felt he had nothing to offer. All of this made him wary, so he replied:
‘No one likes to pry.’
‘Are you dishonest, or only naive?’ she asked, and hung up.
Perhaps an hour later he called her back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He thought she would put the phone down again but instead she said:
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 18
