The Cost of Living

by Deborah Levy

  Later, when I experienced my first autumn in that shed, the apples would crash from the tree on to the roof. It was an explosive sound. I began to understand why Newton nailed his theory on gravity by watching the way an apple falls so irrevocably. There is no such thing as an apple falling slowly.

  The day I moved into the shed, it was snowing. The freezer wheezed its cold vapours. There were spiderwebs on the roof, dust on everything, leaves and mud on the floor. How was I to make a viable space to write in winter? Writing a novel requires many hours of sitting still, as if on a long-haul flight, final destination unknown, but a route of sorts mapped out. I draped two sheepskin rugs over my writing chair. It looked vaguely Stone Age. I set up my desktop computer, figured out the available plugs in the walls and then brought in the extension leads. While the snow fell on the apple tree, I sat on the floor untangling wires and sorting out the boxes of my journals and books. I wondered what to do with all the paper that accompanies a writer of my generation. There were scripts for theatre and film, poems, stories, libretti for opera, drafts of novels that had been written on a number of technologies – the manual typewriter, the electric typewriter, early computers. Some of my diaries dated back to 1985. One of them was scrawled with a long riff, written when I was twenty-six, featuring the word it.

  It begins with knowing and not knowing, a glass of milk, rain, a reproach, a door slammed shut, a mother’s sharp tongue, a snail, a wish, bitten fingernails, an open window. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is unbearable.

  What was it? I don’t know. But the glass of milk is a clue. It might have been the first beginnings of a novel I was going to write later in this shed, and which I would title Hot Milk. There were two journals that recorded meeting the man I was going to marry and my certainty that we were fated for each other. At the time, I could not see the point of my life without him. I realized when reading these journals that we had almost no life together before we had children. One year into our romance, we were living together and I was pregnant. This was a joyful discovery. We sowed grass seed in the small garden of the house we were renting so that it would grow in time for the arrival of our first daughter.

  In the meanwhile, I had to use all my ingenuity to heat the apartment on the hill when the communal boilers from the 1930s refused to cooperate with the twenty-first century, and I had to heat the shed. Of course I wanted to instal a wood-burning stove in the shed (what was I to do with the freezer?) and live a romantic writer’s life – preferably Lord Byron’s life, writing poetry in a velvet smoking jacket, waiting for inspiration to ravish me as the fragrant wood crackled and popped, etc. Alas, at this financially austere time it was not possible, but as Celia pointed out, ‘Staring into the flames doesn’t help the word count anyway.’ I could see her point. The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life, and a log fire, like everyday life, is never boring.

  It was my great fortune that Celia had become alarmed at the arctic weather and bought herself a portable gas heater in the style of a Provençal wood-burning stove. It was made from thick cast iron and massively heavy, the gas bottle discreetly hidden within its cast-iron body. I think it was supposed to resemble an old-fashioned wood burner in a grand French nineteenth-century farmhouse. Celia had it on full flame in her kitchen, along with the central heating. When she began to come down to lunch in shorts and a T-shirt and felt too limp and faint to shout at anyone, she knew it had to move to the shed. It was a very impractical and possibly dangerous heater for a small shed, what with the freezer rumbling away. At first I thought I would have the Provençal imposter transported up the hill to my flat, but the communal boilers were now on the mend.

  The climate in the shed began to resemble a humid coastal resort in the tropics. I brought in a flask of tea and sipped it through the day as the blue flames flickered and snow fell on the apple tree. The appeal of writing, as I understood it, was an invitation to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure, to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living. ‘Ecology’ from the Greek for house or for living relations. It doesn’t take more than three months of living to discover that we are all connected to each other’s cruelty and to each other’s kindness.

  The stylish heater reminded me of the uglier gas fires we used to heat the draughty rehearsal rooms in the days I wrote plays. We rehearsed long hours, chain-smoked, drank instant coffee, then stumbled home late at night with a blinding headache. When we were rehearsing a play I had written, titled Macbeth False Memories, we had a dinosaur gas heater on the go. The director had made the leading actor repeat one particular monologue at least twelve times. He was playing the part of an Italian entrepreneur, Lavelli, who was an avatar for many of the themes that I was going to push into my fiction. Lavelli was in the business of detecting forged banknotes and credit cards. He was later murdered by his colleague, a depressed, emotionally numb man called Bennet.

  Lavelli: Mr Bennet, show me a credit card and I will tell you in seconds if it is a forgery. The artist may correct his canvas fifty times, but the forger, if he is good, corrects his imitation only twice. He has to paint in the manner of the original. And I have some respect for him. Those of us who cannot imitate lack imagination. We cannot see outside our own manner … we are nasty little nationalists. The foreigner, the stranger, he too must learn to make a forgery of himself. He must imitate the host culture. We are supposed to value originality, but the truth is we want to be like each other. We even want our differences to be the same differences. You still with me, Bennet?

  Bennet: Um, Yes.

  By the time Bennet said, ‘Um, yes,’ everyone in the rehearsal room was more or less asphyxiated from the gas fumes. I had learned that an actor can convey a great deal with just two words. Lavelli was a clever and reflective trickster, a man at ease with language. He was tormenting Bennet, who, as the audience knew, was completely out of his depth.

  It was calm and silent and dark in my shed. I had let go of the life I had planned and was probably out of my depth every day. It’s hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there’s nothing to work with. I had decided to take ten key books with me to the shed, including the poetry of Apollinaire, Éluard, Plath and Emily Dickinson (whose spirit flew to me that night via the bees), a book on the anatomy of the human body, and Robert Graves on myth. This meant the bookshelves were mostly empty, but I did not want to recreate a version of my orderly former study in the dusty shed.

  Was it a shed or a hut? The philosopher Martin Heidegger had called his shed die Hütte. I looked it up on Google and gazed at a photograph of him sitting thoughtfully on a bench in his three-roomed hut. It was built in the Black Forest mountains of southern Germany. His wife, Elfride Heidegger, a former economics student, stood bent over two cooking pots on the stove. They both looked joyless, grey and grim. Apparently, many of Heidegger’s great works of philosophy were written in the hut, including Being and Time, published in 1927. It was one of the books I had brought with me to the shed. I had made a bracket in red felt tip to hold this sentence: ‘Everyone is the other and no one is himself.’ Um. Yes. In a sense, it is what Lavelli was trying to convey to Bennet in my early script. Every time I read Heidegger in my hut, I realized that I was Bennet.

  At the end of the day I would begin the long walk up one of the highest hills in London to cook supper for my daughter. Sometimes I stopped to get my breath back by the gates of the local cemetery. It was such a long walk in the dark. The night smelt of moss and the wet marble of the gravestones. I did not feel safe or unsafe, but somewhere in-between, liminal, passing from one life to another.

  SIX

  THE BODY ELECTRIC

  I bought an electric bicycle to help me get up the hill. It was heavy, a tank of a bike, but with the wind behind me I could over
take a moped. My e-bike was the best thing that had happened to me in a long while. I could zip from one place to another in no time at all. I rode it fast. I cursed and shouted at drivers when they opened their front doors in a way that toppled me on to the road. I had road rage. Yes, I had graduated to road rage on my electric bicycle. That is to say, I had a lot of rage from my old life and it expressed itself on the road. I would cycle up the hill with heavy bags of groceries and a box of fruit on the back rack. With the help of my electric bike I began to feel as if I was on a mini vacation from the melancholy of the last few months. As I cycled fast down the long Holloway Road, for some reason the stretch of tarmac reminded me of the dark brooding Adriatic Sea in Trieste. Perhaps it was a sense that something dangerous lurked beneath it, but I figured that the crash had already happened when the boat that was my marriage hit the rocks, and anyway, why not stop thinking about it and concentrate on the idea that the Holloway Road, with its bus lanes and traffic jams, could also be the Adriatic Sea.

  I usually locked up my bike in the back car park of my crumbling apartment block. Other residents parked their motorbikes there. On the days I lugged home many bags of shopping, I would park the bike behind a tree in the front car park to unload the bags. I would then carry the bags into the lobby and leave them outside the lift. Then I would ride the bike to the back car park, lock it and walk back to the front car park to load the groceries into the lift and take them to the sixth floor. A middle-aged resident of my apartment block, a woman called Jean, insisted I could not park my bike in the front car park.

  Not even behind a tree. Not even for two minutes. She had a sweet, high-pitched voice. The voice of a wolf softening its rough feral voice to trick the baby goats into opening the door so she could eat them up. Where was their mother? Probably at work earning a living. Jean had made it her mission to always be standing by my bike in her colourful cardigan on the very days I unloaded my groceries. There she was, leaning on the handlebars, smiling while she said nasty things in her sweet voice. It was important to Jean to convey that it was more in sorrow than in anger that she made my life even more difficult.

  On one occasion, when I was unloading the groceries in a rush, Jean suddenly appeared from behind the tree, like a scene in an Ealing comedy. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you are always in such a hurry. Busy busy busy all the time.’

  Jean had too much time on her hands. She was hysterically happy and I was calmly miserable. As she stood watching me lift six bags, the string of pearls I wore round my neck burst apart and fell to the ground, bouncing towards Joan’s sensible shoes.

  ‘Oh dear,’ her lips parted to show an abundance of little white teeth, ‘Tuesday is not your day, is it?’

  On a Tuesday some years ago, I had gone to the cinema with the father of my children to see the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg. We sat next to each other in the dark, close but separate. The film was about a robot boy made in a laboratory who was special because he was programmed to be able to love. His adopted mother grew frightened of her robot son’s affection and abandoned him in the woods. Thousands of years later, the robot boy is discovered at the bottom of a frozen river by strange and beautiful creatures that are artificial life. They have tall, thin bodies, similar to the figures in early cave paintings, and they are very respectful to the boy robot. They realize he is their last contact with human beings because it was a human who programmed him. It was during that film that I knew our marriage was over. We also needed to find the robot boy because he was programmed to love. He had something inside him that we needed to be inside us.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said to Jean, ‘Tuesday is not my day.’

  When I told Celia about Jean, she said, ‘Next time she hassles you, tell her that you’re not getting any younger.’ I was slightly shocked when she said that. When I left her kitchen that night after the usual small glass of best Havana rum, I heard her whisper to one of her friends, ‘I don’t understand why she wears pearls to write in that dusty old shed anyway.’ My best male friend, who was about to get married for the third time, could not understand why I did not tell Jean to fuck off. I asked him what he was going to wear to his third wedding? He was apparently tempted to splash out on a bright yellow jacket he had spotted in a designer shop in Carnaby Street.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ I said, ‘steer away from yellow.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘I’ll ask my wife what she thinks. By the way, how’s it going? Have they fixed The Corridors of Love yet?’

  ‘No, the corridors are still waiting to be restored. Apart from that, I enjoy every day. My life is full of my daughters and their friends. There’s lots of shouting and hormonal stormy weather all round and doors slamming regularly and many bills. By the way, does your new wife have a name?’

  ‘You know her name is Nadia,’ he said.

  He made us both an omelette and then, as a serial husband, wanted to know more about why I did not swim back to the leaking boat that was my marriage.

  ‘Well, why would I swim back to a boat that is going to crash and sink?’ I asked.

  ‘It offers symbolic protection,’ he said, glancing through the prongs of his fork at the band of gold on his finger.

  The next time Jean stopped me on my bike, I smiled right back at her.

  ‘You know, it is very heavy to carry all this stuff up from the back car park and I am not getting any younger.’ I couldn’t believe I had said those words in that nice understanding tone. Jean blinked and mentally swallowed another five jars of honey. Then she said, ‘Well, as you’re busy busy busy, have you thought of getting the supermarket to deliver your shopping?’

  There was something that made me resist the supermarket delivering my shopping. It was a slog to carry it up the hill on my bike, but I enjoyed the slog. I wanted to choose my fish and herbs and winter vegetables and also I was very proud of something my father had taught me, which was a way of checking that certain kinds of fruit, such as melon or papaya, were ripe. This involved, he said, pressing my fingertips into both ends of the fruit, very lightly so as not to bruise the flesh, and if it was ripe the extremities of the fruit would have the texture of a firm earlobe. It never failed. No, I did not want my fruit delivered in a refrigerated van. Could I ask the driver to compare the fruit I had bought online to the human ear?

  Those words ‘I am not getting any younger’ had calmed Jean down. Yet there was a part of me that wondered if it would have been calming to explain to her that I had a full professional life and a full mothering life and a minor plumbing life. What was it that needed calming in Jean? Why all that strained smiling? It was as if she felt ashamed to be living alone and was transmitting a portion of that shame to me. If she had reluctantly stepped outside the societal story that offered her symbolic protection, how was she to protect herself? The newspaper she read every day had no respect for her, in fact it hated her, but she was addicted to being hated.

  What is a woman for? What should a woman be? What was it that Jean needed me to be? Or not to be? That was the question I had no time to ask her. As she had told me, more in anger than in sorrow, I was busy earning a living, even on sad Tuesdays.

  I became obsessed with my electric bicycle. I had wheels. One night I rode it to a party at least twenty miles away. I whizzed along the roads with my dress flying in the wind behind me. It was hard not to whoop. Perhaps my children and my e-bike were my only happiness. When I walked into the party, a tall man with silver hair came to talk to me. He told me he wrote military biographies, mostly about the First World War, and asked me to pass him a canapé.

  I was unlacing my trainers to swap for the more glamorous shoes I had brought with me, and ignored his request, although lifting a canapé off the silver tray would have been a breeze after all the usual heavy lifting.

  He was tall and thin, possibly in his late sixties, and seemed to desire my company. He talked about his books for a while and how his wife (no name) was unwell at home. He did not ask me one s
ingle question, not even my name. It seemed that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side to acquire his canapés for him and who understood that he was entirely the subject. What with his silver hair and silver eyebrows, I started to think of him as the Big Silver. If he stepped out of character and asked me a few questions, what would I actually say to the Big Silver? If he asked the obligatory ‘So what do you do?’ I suppose I could see him off by telling the truth.

  ‘As you’ve asked, I spent today engaged with the difficulties of writing in the immediate present tense. It’s hard to remain interested in one person’s subjectivity. There are tricks to insert other subjectivities into this tense but it’s a challenge.’

  No, I would never begin that kind of conversation with the Big Silver. I was re-reading the early novels and various essays and interviews by James Baldwin, and his title, Nobody Knows My Name, helped me understand why I objected to my male walking companion never remembering the names of women – same with my best male friend (also known as Bluebeard), whose wives were never referred to by their names until he divorced them. In an interview with Studs Terkel in the 1960s, Baldwin, talking about race in America, had laid down a challenge: ‘in order to learn your name you are going to have to learn mine’. Yes, I thought, what I should really say to the Big Silver is something like, ‘You are going to have to learn my name so that I can learn yours.’ He would be mystified. To be frank, I was mystified. It was mysterious. Simone de Beauvoir described The Second Sex as an exposition of ‘the pervasiveness and intensity and mysteriousness of the history of women’s oppression’.

  It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time. Anyway, like James Baldwin had taught me, I had to decide who I was and then convince everyone at the party that was who I was, but unfortunately in this phase, I was whistling in the dark. I had to survive my losses and find some rituals to celebrate them.