‘We haven’t got long,’ she whispered, and he saw that she was naked, her skin glowing bronze, and he became excited. She lowered herself on to him and they made love for the last time, his god sperm meeting her goddess egg. Because no magic, no power was strong enough to undo what Seth had done. Once Osiris had laid his hands on his wife’s lovely stomach and felt the life that was growing within it, his head dropped back and he breathed his last earth-bound breath. Osiris was now consigned to the underworld, but his presence was still on the earth, in the form of the new god that he and Isis had made, Horus, their son, who would rule above while his father ruled below.
It’s an extraordinary tale. And the most extraordinary thing about it is that the Egyptians were afraid to tell it. The story of Isis and Osiris was one of the foundation myths of their society, a violent tale of death, love and rebirth, but the Egyptians thought it so powerful and terrifying that they did not like to write it down or to speak it. They thought that the magic act of remembering the story might enable it to happen again. They would not talk about it.
I was once scared of my story. I didn’t want to speak the words, not because I literally believed that speaking would make everything happen again, not in the real world, but in my head. And that was bad enough.
But in order to find Candy, in order to start living and stop surviving, in order to feel love, I had to feel grief, I had to start remembering and telling.
I might not have found a cache of hidden memories during that process, a pop-up book of a person that was hidden in the depths of my subconscious, all complete and waiting for me to open it, but I have found other things. I have brought Candy to life in a different way. I have gathered all the pieces of her and put them together so that now I know her once more. I have my sister. She lives inside of me, in my bones and my blood, just as she is in my children. And the crazy thing is that she was here all along, waiting, impatient, I just had to look at the world in a different way to find her. Just as my other sister, Maranda, was always here, waiting, impatient. All I had to do was unlock myself, allow myself to feel again, to leave that hotel room in Tunisia, walk down the long strange corridor, out of the lonely darkness and into the sunshine.
Epilogue
2019, London
It is spring. Our garden is filled with abundant life, blossom and primroses, unfurling fresh foliage, buzzing pollinators and floating pollen. My children are bouncing on the tree-shaded trampoline in our back garden, shouting and laughing. Minna lies on the trampoline so that she will be bounced while Hebe jumps. I watch them from the kitchen window. It looks like a kind of paradise out there.
I have often wondered who I might have been were it not for my childhood. Who was that little girl before she started understanding that her world was not safe, before she began making the psychological adjustments that understanding required (I have read books that suggest these adjustments begin in the womb). There have been times when I have grieved for that innocent girl, the one who trusted the world, the version of me that has been lost.
One of the emotions that I associate most strongly with my father is disappointment. He never stopped disappointing me. I think this is a feeling that most children of addicts will understand. We forgive, we hope, we are disappointed, again and again, until disappointment becomes an emotion that is woven into our psyche.
My father continues to disappointment me. The more I think about the things he did, the long impact of his actions, not just on my life, but on those of the other people, the more I condemn him. He damaged people and that damage lives on even though he is gone. I cannot change that, even though I wish so much that I could. And it was only once he was gone that I was able to start thinking about his behaviour properly. Finally grieving for my sister also required me to face up to hard truths about my father. I am trying not to let those truths crush me. I hope I will succeed.
Disappointment is an interesting emotion – flip it on its head and you find something different. Hope. We are only ever disappointed because we were hopeful that something good was going to happen, because we believed that things would be better next time, even though life keeps showing us that that is unlikely, again and again. This may be blind, insane, irrational, but it is also essential for survival.
I am an optimist, always have been. That is what I share with the girl I was before; that is the part of me which could not be changed by experience. The certainty that somehow, some way, things would turn out all right.
My optimism could not be unlearnt. Whoever I was before (whenever that was), one thing is certain: I was the kind of child, the kind of individual, who would be able to deal with the life that she was given. That is who I was. That is who I am. She is not lost. She is me.
My mum, Jan Hodge (or Jan Burdette, as she was known then), when she was a model. Here posing on a Citroen DS. Early seventies.
Mum and Dad, Gavin Hodge, on their wedding day. Dad had forgotten to buy Mum a birthday present, so he married her as a surprise treat at the Chelsea Registry office on the Kings Road. July 1975.
Mum and me outside our local pub in the World’s End, Chelsea. Summer, 1975.
Dad in Marbella. He’d gone there to attempt to stop taking heroin. He succeeded, but it didn’t last long. Summer 1979.
Me and Mum in the flat in Chelsea, before Candy was born. Mum told me that she and Dad were so out of it most of the time that they were surprised to discover they were pregnant a second time. Late seventies.
Me, Maranda and baby Candy at my Hodge grandparents’ house in Chislehurst. 1979.
Me, Maranda and Dad at the flat in Battersea. As a child and a young woman Maranda always felt rejected by Dad. Early eighties.
My mum and Maranda’s mum, Kerstin Widlund, both blonde models, both alcoholics. My dad clearly had a type. Late seventies.
Me and my mum, while she was still modelling (attempts were made to make me a child model, which failed). Late seventies.
Candy Hodge, posing. Early eighties.
Me, Dad and Candy in Jamaica. Dad paid for this luxury trip by selling his life story to the News of the World. The series was called ‘The Shampoo Seducer’ and in it he claimed to have slept with 1,000 women in one busy year. Summer 1980.
Me, Mum, Candy and Candy’s godfather, Andy Pierce, in the flat in Battersea. This is the living room where the junkies would congregate most evenings. Early eighties.
Me and Candy in sunny Chislehurst, where my Hodge grandparents lived in suburban splendour. Early eighties.
Me, Candy and my half-sister, Maranda Widlund, during one of Maranda’s rare trips to the UK. According to my mum, Maranda was the one who decked us out in tinsel, showing an early flair for fashion and hair styling. Early eighties.
Me, aged about eight, in the white nightie I used to wear to sit with the junkies in the sitting room after dark, in my parents’ bedroom in the flat in Battersea. Early eighties.
Candy on a camel ride in Tunisia. This is one of the last photographs we have of her. She died that night. April 1989.
Me, aged fourteen, in Tunisia. After five years of relative normality I was doing well and thriving at school, but that was all about to come to an abrupt end. April 1989.
Me, aged sixteen, just two years later, after Candy had died. I was going to Dad’s basement salon in Knightsbridge after school most evenings to take drugs and drink away the sadness and confusion. 1991.
Me and Dad at Pucci Pizza restaurant on the King’s Road, where we spent many a drunken and druggie night. Early nineties.
Me and Dad outside the pub on Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge, where we would go drinking. Early nineties.
Me and Dad on my wedding day in Devon. Dad did my hair, got very stoned and delivered a speech that had the whole marquee laughing. September 2006.
Me in the Hanover Square offices of Tatler magazine, where I worked as deputy editor and acting editor for five years. This picture was taken as publicity for the BBC documentary Posh People: Inside Tatler. 201
4.
Me, Maranda, her daughter Biba and her friend, the actress Britt Ekland, taken at a launch party for a photography exhibition in Los Angeles. February 2017.
Biba and Hebe, cousins and firm friends. Here they are on Biba’s first English summer holiday, enjoying the slot machines on the pier at Southwold, Suffolk. August 2017.
Mike, Hebe and Minna. February 2020.
Some of the contents of Candy’s box, containing all the precious things that my parents could not bear to throw away after she died in 1989, opened again for the first time by me and my mum in 2019.
Author’s Note
This is a book about memory and trauma. Memory informs who we are, how we think and how we act. It is essentially an evolutionary process: we remember so we know how to behave next time; we forget so that we are not stuck in the past, so we can move on. In that sense memory is about the future.
And then we turn our memories into ‘stories’. We all do this, as individuals and as families. The stories we tell about ourselves, again and again, are the threads that knit us together. The processes that move incident to memory to story are alchemical and transformative, tracking forwards and backwards. Each time we tell a story about a moment in our lives, each time we write it down, or talk it through with a therapist, our memory of that moment is subtly altered.
Memory is not static or fixed: it moves through our bodies like liquid; it changes as we change; often it is beyond our control. The way I remember my sister’s death now, over thirty years after the event, is different to the way I remembered it days after it happened. Different people who were in the same place on the same day watching the same thing happen remember it differently. Who we are affects how we see.
One of the most interesting consequences of writing this book was the conversation I had with my mother after she read it. It was hard to write this book, and it was hard for my mother to read it. She did it slowly, taking it in small chunks, and I would call every few days to make sure she was OK. She made notes on the manuscript and many of the comments that she made have been integrated into the book – what I wore on the day of my sister’s funeral, for instance, or the fact it was she, and not my father, who paid for the extravagant dinner in Vale do Lobo. But there were other discrepancies in our recollections which I have left in the text because I find it interesting that our memories diverge: I remember the policeman pulling Candy’s teddy bear apart during the raid; my mother said he removed her dolls’ hats. In another divergence, my mother says that on the holiday in Portugal she found the letter from Julia, along with a necklace belonging to her. She says she tore up the letter, broke the necklace, left these on my father’s bed (according to her they did not share a bedroom during this trip), and waited until the next day to confront him. But I have a powerful memory of finding her sitting there, reading the letter and asking me to fetch him. The ‘truth’, I imagine, is somewhere between our two recollections.
A couple of incidents have been conflated (mostly the drunken, druggie evenings, which all tend to merge into one in my head). I have left out some people who were present at dinners and on holidays, because I wanted to focus on my family. Some names and identifying details have been changed to preserve anonymity. The rest is as I remember it.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my agent Lizzy Kremer for her huge empathy and intelligence, and for giving me the confidence to do it; thank you to my editor Fenella Bates, who is both incredibly clever and incredibly kind. Thank you to Louise Moore for believing in this book; to Laura Nicol, Jennifer Breslin, Rachel Myers and the rest of the team at Michael Joseph, who have been brilliant throughout
Thank you to all the friends who have read this book at various points in its creation, and who have given me the advice and encouragement I needed: Tanya Brett, Julia Churchill, Hermione Eyre, Tonia George, Zoe King, Imogen Martineau, Harriet Moore, Victoria Moore, Kate Pakenham, Clementine Pillai, Annabel Rivkin, Naomi Rokotnitz, Sasha Slater, Therese Steele, Matthew Sweet, Stuart Williams, Andrew Wilson and Angharad Wood. Thank you to Clare Bennett for spotting my mistake about The Iliad, and to Kate Reardon for pointing out that San Lorenzo’s did not take credit cards. Thank you to Emilie McMeekan who read EVERY SINGLE version of the book and somehow managed to maintain her enthusiasm when even I had lost mine. Thank you to Ross Barr, Laura Jones and Fiona McKinney for maintaining my sanity. Thank you to John Vial and Debbie Bhowmik for looking after the daughter of a hairdresser who lost her dad.
Thank you to Maranda for being my fabulous and indomitable sister – what adventures we will have! Thank you to my mother for her boundless love and care, and for being so open-hearted and brave. Thank you to Hebe, Minna and Mike, for making me feel safe enough, and loved enough, to write this story.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published 2020
Copyright © Gavanndra Hodge, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Picture credits: plate section page 1, top left, Alamy; centre left, Topfoto; page 7, top, Dan Burn-Forti
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ISBN: 978-1-405-94323-9
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The Consequences of Love Page 23
