The Cost of Living

by Deborah Levy

  I started to call them The Corridors of Love.

  Anyone making a delivery to the flat for the first time (there were over a hundred flats) looked slightly panicked and disorientated when I opened the front door. If we squeezed our eyes half shut we could pretend the corridors were a version of Don Draper’s Manhattan residence in Mad Men – after a minor catastrophe had occurred. Perhaps not an earthquake, but an earth tremor, in which the new inhabitants of the building could glimpse what it used to be like in the old days. Yet, once we were inside the flat itself, it was light and airy after our dark Victorian family house. We were living with the sky from dawn to dusk, its silver mists and moving clouds and shape-shifting moons.

  Sometimes at night the faraway stars seemed very close when I wrote on the tiny balcony, wrapped in a coat. I had swapped the book-lined study of my former life for a starry winter night sky. It was the first time I enjoyed a British winter.

  I had been given two small flowering strawberry trees and they liked living on the balcony. How did this evergreen plant manage to produce scarlet berries in November? Apparently it was a plant that had evolved before the last Ice Age, so maybe it liked the cold. Some nights I wrote in my bedroom like a student, but without the beer, spliffs and crisps. In my old life, I used to write early in the morning, but now I had become a morning and a night person. I’m not sure what happened to sleep in this phase. After all the heavy lifting, it was a shock to be figuring out how to land the cadence of one single sentence. Three days after the move, in the early hours towards dawn, a giant sleepy bee landed on my computer screen. At the same time, I could hear buzzing around the bulb in my lamp. When I looked up, there were five bees in my room, more energetic than the plump czarina dozing on my screen. I have always had encounters with bees in my life and often wondered why the main protagonists in fairy tales set in woods and forests are rarely bitten and stung by insects. When Little Red Riding Hood made her way through the spruce and beech trees of the woods to deliver bread to her grandmother, her shins would have been devoured by mosquitoes long before the wolf threatened to eat her up. And what about the ants, spiders, ticks and horseflies with which she and we share our living? Where had these London winter bees come from? Perhaps they had flown in after visiting the strawberry trees. It seemed like a good omen that the bees were happy to live with me in my happiness and misery. How was I to live with them? I switched off the lamp, then my laptop and left the room. As I stretched out on the sofa in the living room, twelve unpacked boxes still stacked against the walls, an Emily Dickinson poem came to mind. I could say it flew into my mind from nowhere, but there is no such thing as nowhere. All my Dickinson books were getting damp in the boxes of books mouldering in the garage. They had been on my mind.

  Fame is a bee.

  It has a song –

  It has a sting –

  Ah, too, it has a wing.

  I wished that fame had given Emily Dickinson a wing when she was alive. I knew what it felt like to be undermined, and how, as she told us, hope is the thing with feathers that never stops singing, despite discouragement and neglect. Emily Dickinson had become a recluse. Maybe she was punishing herself for her bid for freedom, her bid not to be mastered? Another of her poems came in from nowhere, which is always somewhere, and it had the word wife in it. I could only remember the first line:

  I’m ‘wife’ – I’ve finished that –

  I wondered what it was that she had finished, and then I fell asleep in my jeans and boots, like a cowgirl, except the sky was my prairie.

  That winter, my daughter and I liked to eat oranges for breakfast. We peeled and sliced the fruit the night before, made a syrup from water and honey and chilled them in the fridge. We became more experimental, adding cardamom seeds and rose water, but decided it was like eating blossom too early in the morning. The bees would have liked it, but I did not want them to take over the joint. I had bought one of those clocks that have a different bird sing every hour. In the morning at seven the wren made its call to the real birds singing in the dark winter trees. At 4pm it was dark again when the great spotted woodpecker began to drill and drum. Returning home at night I could sometimes hear the nightingale as I walked through the grey Corridors of Love.

  While my older daughter was at university, we had shrunk from a family of four to a family of two. It was hard to get used to the empty table and lack of shouting. So I borrowed another family I knew from down the road and invited them to lunch most Sundays. That made six of us, and our tiny family became a bigger, noisier affair. They were a clever family, this lot down the road. They knew that I wanted to extend my own family, but they never said that to me, in a hushed conspiratorial way. They arrived in a good mood or a bad mood, depending on who had lost their trainers or door key or phone. We got stuck into lunch, drank a lot of wine and they laughed at my bird clock. As they usually arrived at one o’clock they were serenaded by the chaffinch. By the time they left, the barn owl had begun its call.

  When I wasn’t writing and teaching and unpacking boxes, my attention was on mending the blocked pipes under the basin in the bathroom. This involved unscrewing all the parts, placing a bucket under the pipes and not knowing what to do next. I had borrowed a mysterious machine from the cardiologist who lived downstairs. It was like a Hoover except it had wires which were then inserted into the tube. It was early morning and I was wearing what is sometimes called a French postman’s jacket over my nightdress. It was not a deliberate decision to wear a blue postman’s jacket for a plumbing job, not at all, it just happened to be hanging on the hook in the bathroom and it kept me warm. The clash between the thick utilitarian cotton of the jacket and the flimsy nightdress seemed to sum everything up for me, but I was not sure what the final sum equalled. Now that I was no longer married to society, I was transitioning into something or someone else. What and who would that be? How could I describe this odd feeling of dissolving and recomposing? Words have to open the mind. When words close the mind, we can be sure that someone has been reduced to nothingness.

  To amuse myself (there was no one else around) I began to think about the genre of the female nightdress in relation to plumbing. The one I was wearing was black silk and I suppose quite sensual in a generic way. I could promenade in it and I could masquerade in it, given that femininity was a masquerade anyway. I could see that black silk was a classic in the female nightwear genre. To add to the mix, I was also wearing what my daughters called my ‘shaman slippers’. They were black suede ankle boots trimmed with abundant, queasily realistic fake furs, one of which hung like a small tail, whipping my ankles as I walked around the flat looking for a gadget called a Master Plunger. The slippers were a gift from my best male friend, who thought I needed some ‘insulation’, as he put it – which might be a plumbing term for covering up something that is exposed and raw. I appreciated the fur boots with their comforting warmth and magical properties (I suppose my phantasy was that I had skinned the animals myself) and the postman’s jacket seemed to be a counterpoint to the black silk nightdress.

  I was the man. I was the woman.

  Perhaps I was the shaman?

  That was a dimension I wished to explore further. The male shaman often wore female clothing. They had the top temple job. I had heard that in Korea, a female shaman is permitted to wear male clothing so as to receive a masculine presence into her body. Would that be my blue postman’s jacket? The shaman has to journey to other worlds, just as I had to journey into the interior of the system under the basin to see how it was connected to the blocked pipes near the bath. My hands started to tingle, perhaps to give me strength for the DIY battles ahead. What came up through the pipes after much excavation with the help of the mysterious machine and the Master Plunger was a thick, slimy knot of human hair. Plumbing was like archaeology. The hair was a human artefact, dredged up from the depths. The Master Plunger was an object of beauty and function. When the water ran freely down the plughole again, I whirled the clump of hair i
n lonely victory. I began to think I could not only excavate ancient Rome, but plumb it too. I knew I would have to get a mysterious machine of my own. The cardiologist had invited me to join him for a glass of wine after I returned his tools. I might one day risk falling in love again, but I was not going to lose my heart to the cardiologist.

  That same day I made a garden in the bathroom. I planted a tall cactus and other succulents and placed them on the shelf next to the bath. They were spiky, some of them covered in sharp white thorns. The steam from the hot water seemed to send them into an erotic frenzy because the succulents began to grow at an accelerated pace.

  As everything in my new home became literally smaller (except for the succulents), my life became bigger. At this difficult time, I took every job offered to me and winced when the bills flew through the letterbox. I began to realize that what I needed was enough of the right things. The light and sky and balcony were the right things. My children finding their way through the new story, starting to shape it and make it their own and being in close contact with their father, all of these were right things. A flat full of singing teenagers when my youngest daughter brought her friends back after school was the right thing. Not having a calm place to write was the wrong thing. Not living with animals was the wrong thing. But how could we live with an animal in a flat on the sixth floor? We talked about a goldfish but decided it was better off in a pond. My daughter said she would get a mouse, but it didn’t happen. We talked about a parrot, but that didn’t happen either. At one point she talked about capturing a squirrel from the park and bringing it home.

  Did that happen? Did she groom its tail every morning before she went off to school? It was what she wanted, but it didn’t happen. Instead she lay in bed and read The Great Gatsby, then told me that F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t a very good writer. Sometimes an animal is more consoling than a book.

  My friend Gemma said to me, ‘You have to get your bedroom working for you. Build a desk. Build shelves. Bring up the boxes from the garage and unpack your books. Have a go at living with colour.’ By this she meant painting the walls a colour that was not white. ‘Yellow would be good for you,’ she insisted. ‘It clears up emotions and gives us a bigger sense of things.’ When she said that, I remembered painting the bedroom ceiling in the family house with a colour called English Skylight. The ceiling looked like a dull leaden sky. Even when the sun was shining outside, it was raining inside. Every day and every night.

  In my new life I was going to commit to living with colour.

  I painted the walls in my bedroom yellow. I bought sumptuous orange silk curtains in a charity shop. I put up an African shield made from chicken feathers that had been dyed pink. It was two foot wide and looked like a large full-blown flower. The shield was stitched together in a way that allowed it to open and close. Yet nailed to the wall it was always open at a time when I was emotionally closed. I needed a shield to defend myself from the rage of my old life. I suppose I could say that I was now shielded by a flower.

  A heroine of mine was the eighty-one-year-old South African artist Esther Mahlangu, who taught herself to become an artist at the age of ten by watching her mother and grandmother paint with chicken feathers. She herself was a work of art – the beading on her clothes, the bangles on her hands, neck and feet. I wanted to speak to her, but I did not know what I wanted to say.

  Esther, I don’t know how to live in yellow. I don’t know how to live in my life.

  The yellow walls were driving me mad. The orange silk curtains were like waking up to a rash.

  I took down the shield and painted all but one wall white again. I replaced the shield with a framed screen-print of Oscar Wilde. Then I went off to tackle the moths in the kitchen. They were like something out of a García Márquez novel, flying around like tiny blind demons, satiated on the self-raising flour and oats that lured them to my cupboards.

  The moths seemed to like landing on the two photographs I had stuck on to the fridge door with magnets. One was of the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, age sixty, a carving tool in her hand, leaning into the giant sphere of wood she was shaping. She had burst solid form open to make a pierced form, a hole, after the birth of her first child in 1931. Hepworth described sculpture as ‘the three-dimensional realization of an idea’.

  The other photograph was of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, age ninety, an iron carving tool in her hand, leaning over a white sculptural sphere that came to her waist. In the photograph she was wearing a chiffon blouse under a black tunic, her silver hair pulled into a bun, small gold hoops in her ears. Bourgeois had unfashionably declared that she made art because her emotions were bigger than herself.

  Yes, it is sometimes agonizing to feel things. I had spent the last few months trying not to feel anything at all. Bourgeois had learned to sew at an early age in her parents’ tapestry business. She thought of the needle as an object of psychological repair – and what she wanted to repair, she said, was the past.

  We either die of the past or we become an artist.

  Proust had reached for this same thought and came up with something that better suited this phase in my life:

  Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.

  As I battled with the moths and various griefs and the past, all of which returned every day to torment me, I glanced again at these two artists placed askew on the fridge door. To my eyes, the particular quality of their attention as they calmly shaped the forms they were inventing gave them beauty without measure. That kind of beauty was all that mattered to me. At this uncertain time, writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next. An idea presented itself, came my way, perhaps hatched from a grief, but I did not know if it would survive my free-floating attention, never mind my more focused attention. To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life. But I had nowhere to write.

  FIVE

  GRAVITY

  Celia came to the rescue. She was an actor and book-seller in her early eighties. One evening in her kitchen in late January, she started to sing something to me in Welsh. I told her I didn’t understand Welsh.

  ‘Well, I was born in Wales and you weren’t, but what I was thinking while I was singing is that you need a place to write.’

  She pointed towards the shed at the back of her garden. It was where her husband, the late, great poet Adrian Mitchell, had sometimes written in the spring and summer. It was built under an apple tree. In three seconds flat, I agreed to rent it from her. Celia knew I was financially supporting ‘quite a crowd’, as she put it, so we sealed a manageable deal over a glass of the Havana rum she had a liking for, and which she preferred to mix with Coke. Every time she drank Havana rum, she raised her glass to toast the miracle of the high literacy rate in Cuba. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘next time the communal boiler is on the blink in your flat, you’d better all come over for a hot bath.’

  Everyone deserves a guardian angel like Celia.

  It was not a posh shed. The lawnmower would have felt at home in it, but it did have four windows looking out on to the garden, a writing desk that had belonged to Adrian with a green leather top, and some Formica bookshelves built across the back wall. I was also to live with the ashes of the golden Labrador, known to many of Adrian’s readers as Daisy the Dog of Peace.

  Celia said, ‘Well, you can get a lot of books on those shelves but I’m not going to unsettle Daisy.’ In fact, she had acquired a new one-eyed dog from a rescue home. This tiny hound barked ferociously every time I walked into the house. Celia, who was a lifelong pacifist, wondered if I should be armed with a water pistol to teach her dog to lay off me. She went out and bought a set of three plastic pistols from the 99p shop, but in the end I started to use the garden door at the side of the house to get to the shed. Celia unde
rstood that I would be writing at all hours, and introduced me to her many friends as She Who Lurks in the Garden. No one was allowed to interrupt me on her watch; to knock on the door and solicit a conversation (the weather, the news, the arrival of cake) or even to convey an urgent message from the Mistress of the House. To be valued and respected in this way, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, was a new experience. I did not know it then, but I would go on to write three books in that shed, including the one you are reading now. It was there that I would begin to write in the first person, using an I that is close to myself and yet is not myself.

  My guardian angel, who was fierce and loved to shout at everyone – when she wasn’t shouting at a demonstration to save the National Health Service – insisted on keeping her extra freezer in the shed. There were times when the only things in that freezer, which came up to my waist, were twenty plastic tubs of quartered apples, gathered from the tree in autumn. It was Celia’s pleasure to bake apple crumble throughout the year, while Myvy the One-Eyed Dog of War leaned against her ankles in total devotion. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that scruffy hound started to sing in Welsh.

  I told Celia that Freud was intrigued by how in dreams it was his patients most invested in appearing to be rational who were happiest when a dog quoted a line of poetry. She said that if Myvy was ever going to recite poetry, it would have to be written by Adrian. Apparently, Myvy’s full Welsh name was Myfanwy, meaning My Dearest, though it could also mean My Rare One, My Woman, or My Beloved. I thought it best not to throw more of Freud her way while she had a knife in her hand.

  Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations.