by Deborah Levy
Where are we now? Where were we before?
These were not questions the driver could answer. There was no X in his mind’s eye. If the satnav directed him south when I was heading north, that’s what we were going to do. Satnav was his only compass. We were driving at the beginning of Genesis when the earth was formless and empty – apart from the signs on the screen. It seemed to me that satnav had switched off the way that drivers inhabited a city. It made them rootless, ahistorical, unable to trust their memory or senses, to measure the distance between one place and another. The River Thames, referred to by Londoners as the river, was of no geographical significance to the driver. Its brackish water, mostly salt water, flowing for 215 miles, was just one of many abstract rivers flowing through the abstract cities of the world. The river, once the Port of London where apprentices ate salmon fished from its depths, was now just a grammar of digital signs. As I listened to the calm but firm robot voice giving directions, I realized we could be anywhere, so long as the Voice was with us. There were no landmarks. The driver did not look at the Albert Hall when we passed it on the northern edge of South Kensington, he was absent to its physical presence, and instead was existentially alone but together with his satnav. The Albert Hall in Old English was a landmearc, but he worked with digital mearcs – with the bonus of live traffic updates.
Perhaps this time of vertigo was so extreme because I had been severed from my own origins. My mother was my link to Africa and to England. Her body was my first landmearc. It was she who had raised her children and most childhood memories were twinned with her presence on earth. She was my primal satnav, but now the screen had gone blank.
If we were driving through an ancient city guided by a digital Voice, I too was immersed in the handheld devices I carried with me. They had become, in the words of the writer Sherry Turkle, my second self, as I searched for passwords I had forgotten or for something on Google – so many questions to ask, after all.
How do you register a death?
At this time, I became a magnet for other people who were lost in all kinds of ways. I took a ride in a London black cab where the driver absolutely knew the way around his city, but his mind was lost, shattered. His conversation was crazy. He told me he was looking for cashpoints in London, holes in the walls, so that he could communicate with aliens who were waiting for his message. I decided to jump out of his cab before we reached our destination. On balance I preferred the saner drivers who were humbly clueless.
The man who cried at the funeral told me that he also lost his sense of direction after his long-time lover had died. He had a week’s leave off work and offered to be my chauffeur. He advised me to take advantage of his time and suggested that I should also take a week off work. I told him I couldn’t afford it, but in the end I gave in. He more or less knew where he was going. Sometimes his new lover, Geoff, would come along for the ride. Another time, there was a stranger sitting in the car. It was the woman with the long black hair, Clara, who had been sitting on a red velvet sofa at the party. She was his colleague, an academic from South America who was on leave in the UK on a research fellowship. I wasn’t sure why Clara was in the car with us, but she seemed to enjoy the ride. When we were stuck in traffic, she took out her pen and started to write something on a slip of paper. She looked slightly tormented, as if she was attempting to untangle a difficult thought, so I looked over her shoulder to see what she was writing.
tomatoes avocados lemons limes
One day when we were driving down the three kilometres of the Holloway Road, I said to her, ‘This is the Holloway Road. It’s a bit like the Adriatic Sea.’ Clara stared out of the window at the three lanes of traffic. A police car, its siren switched on, was speeding through the bus lane. Beer cans, broken umbrellas and a takeaway carton of discarded chips lay in a heap on the pavement. Clara asked for the English word that described the surface of the road. Geoff, who wore his spectacles on a chain around his neck, lifted them up to his eyes and peered through the lens as if he was at the opera. He asked her if she meant tarmac?
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘under the tarmac, the beach.’
It was like having a holiday in a car with three interesting companions.
The man who cried at the funeral told me that Clara was a distinguished professor and that his students did not turn up on time to her lectures, they arrived early. She was researching popular uprisings against military and bureaucratic elites. It turned out that Clara liked to swim every day. We agreed that we could swim together, but only if we did not speak to each other in the water. We were dropped off at various pools around London and discovered that we had lots to talk about in-between lengths of front crawl. She plaited her hair when she swam. When she lost her turquoise ring in the water she asked the lifeguard to drain the pool. He thought she was joking but she meant it. In the end we found her ring by the side of the pool where she had left it tucked inside her book. Our chauffeur was always there to pick us up afterwards, damp towels rolled under our arms. We went to pubs for lunch and walked in London parks. It was spring and daffodils were pushing through the grass. In a way, having a chauffeur was like having a parent, but without the history.
Clara offered to cook a meal at my flat. I accepted on the condition that my temporary chauffeur and his now permanent lover joined the table. She went off to buy a fish called tilapia but came back with red snappers. I had been instructed to buy limes (not lemons), avocados, tomatoes. She confessed that the communal corridors in the building scared the life out of her.
‘Yes’, I said, ‘I call them The Corridors of Love.’
She began to fry the fish and the kitchen filled with smoke. She was serene and good company. She had also brought with her a bottle of aguardiente, a strong liqueur flavoured with aniseed. She reckoned her firewater was good for bereavement. ‘It is very numbing.’
She told me about her city, her politics and her family. She asked me questions: where, when, where? I told her the first nine years of myself were made in southern Africa; I had made the rest in Britain. While she squeezed limes on to the red snappers, she wondered if I was nostalgic for my childhood in Africa? I told her that I regarded nostalgia as a waste of time. I have never wanted to cover the past in dust sheets to preserve it from change. She told me that the seeds of the future are always planted in the past. Apparently the limes I had bought were the wrong sort of limes. She kept asking me questions. In my long marriage it was a relief to never be asked questions. At the time that suited me very well. There was so much I did not want to talk about.
Clara cooked and asked for utensil directions – ‘Where are your spoons, where is the breadboard, why is there a butterfly in your kitchen?’ I told her it was a moth. We talked about Sundays, dim sum, guava jelly, money, siblings, mosquitoes, the good and bad things about our middle years – which we decided were mostly good. We talked about her research and about my shed, and how Celia was currently reading a book of poems by the Welsh writer Alun Lewis, titled Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets. When Celia was fifteen she had found this book in the school library. She was now reading it out loud to me in her kitchen, age eighty-four. Clara thought my life was la dolce vita.
Yes and No, I replied. ‘Why Yes and No?’ I could barely see her through the smoke. The red fish had now turned black. I explained to her some of what lay between Yes and No. While she chopped an onion with a butter knife, she said, ‘You should open the front door for our friends. Do you know there’s something wrong with your bell?’ When I returned to the kitchen, she was frying onions and chilli in a separate pan from the fish.
I reached through the smoke to pass her the salt.
Clara said, ‘Can I take a photo of you on my phone?’
‘Okay, but you can’t see anything because of the smoke. By the way, there’s a sharper knife in the drawer.’
Flash.
She slipped her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and asked if I ever put sea salt in my bath, ‘It makes the water softer.’ She had no
ticed that the London water coming out of the taps in my sink was hard water. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘the professors at my university here in London tend to watch cricket. Do you like the game?’
I told her I prefer fencing. She scooped up a strand of her long black hair that had come undone and whisked it over her shoulder, away from the high flame on the hob. She told me that she and her brothers used to fight each other with sticks, which was similar to fencing. I had to understand that she was her father’s only daughter because she had seven brothers. It was hard to find a quiet place to study. There were times she did her homework inside the cupboard under the stairs. Her mother had cooked for her family of ten and then sat alone in the kitchen to eat one small bowl of rice. She suddenly jumped away from the frying pan and asked if there was a bird in my house. I explained she had just heard the woodpecker making its call inside my bird clock.
‘You should get rid of those idiot birds,’ she said.
‘It’s funny you say that,’ I replied, ‘because that’s what I said to one of my writing students.’
‘Why do you like the bird clock, anyway?’
I thought about this for a while.
‘The birds keep me company and interrupt sad thoughts.’
‘Yes, I understand.’ She looked quite professorial at that moment, even with a wooden spoon in her hand.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘my mother liked to eat alone in the kitchen because it was the only place she could hear herself think. She had no other place to go. But you have a shed to hear yourself think. Do you have a bird clock in your shed?’
I told her I did not.
‘My mother’s purpose in life was for birthing. She lived for her man and for her children. She did not think that was the worst life she could have. She was not a private person. She was a public person. Everyone in the neighbourhood consulted my mother.’
She told me my daughters would like the local white cheese from where she was from. It was mild and fresh.
‘So,’ she said, ‘can you see yourself living with someone again?’
‘At a distance,’ I replied. ‘Long distance.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘too much happens between departing and arriving to live long distance. The cells in the body change between the space of departing and arriving.’
I asked her to tell me about her turquoise ring.
She chose not to do so.
‘What are those?’ She pointed to my daughters’ childhood fishing nets, which were tucked into the broom cupboard.
I still could not talk about those nets, so I did not reply. They were portals to the past, like flowers, like everything, perhaps like a turquoise ring.
She yanked one of the nets out and inspected it.
‘The cane is too long. It should be shorter so you can move more swiftly to catch the fish.’
At that moment the man who cried at the funeral walked into the smoke with his lover.
‘We are shortening the past,’ Clara said, pointing to the fishing net, ‘but really it is a reactionary desire to silence knowledge.’
ELEVEN
FOOTSTEPS IN THE HOUSE
Where are we now? Where were we before?
I was at St Pancras International station on the Euston Road, waiting to take the Eurostar to Paris for the French publication of Swimming Home. Apparently I had to arrive at the Gare du Nord in time for a breakfast interview. It was 4am and I was gazing at the departure screens, a paper cup of coffee in my hand. Further into the station was a bronze statue of a man and woman entwined in an amorous embrace. Were they arriving or departing?
I was surrounded by all the sounds and signals of travel – people wheeling their suitcases, the last-minute search for various documents, the buying of bottles of water and newspapers. As I listened to announcements of cancellations and arrivals, what came to mind, out of the blue and into the orange London dawn, was the train that my family had boarded just after we arrived at Southampton docks from South Africa in 1968. This train was going to take us to Waterloo station. I had been sitting next to my brother, and in the aisle seats opposite us were our mother and father. We were all looking out of the window at ENGLAND.
I had always told myself that this was a happy train ride. Yes, the story I had told myself was that we were laughing and chatting and eating crisps. I realized that morning at St Pancras International that the train ride to Waterloo had been a terrifying journey. I was nine years old. Where were our things? Where were my clothes? My toys? Where was our stuff? The furniture from our family home? Where were we going to live in England, anyway? Would I go to school somewhere? We had not been chatting and laughing at all. I had anxiously read the name of every station on the way to Waterloo. My mother’s hands were shaking when she showed the conductor our rail tickets. My father was looking out of the window. My mother was looking at her children.
That is where I was before.
By the time I found my carriage and boarded the Eurostar, the newly retrieved sound of my silent, shaken family on that train from Southampton docks was still queasily lingering in my ears. It had taken a long time to hear it. Even longer to feel it. The Eurostar passengers, like myself, were all half asleep. The men had shaved, some of the women wore full make-up. We found our seats, took off our coats, laid our laptops and tablets and smartphones on the tables. The train pulled out of St Pancras, and began its journey towards France, which would take just over two hours.
A young woman sat next to me, perhaps seventeen, her hair dyed blue. She was wired up with earphones attached to her laptop, learning French from a basic language program. It required her to say out loud the words being spoken by a robot voice speaking French. She obviously could not say the words out loud in our carriage, but her lips, which were pierced with a tiny silver ring, were moving as she whispered verbs and nouns. I glanced at her screen on our shared table and saw a note that told her French has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine; a woman was feminine, but so was a chair, while hair was masculine.
She had plaited her own blue hair for the journey, two plaits, the ends tied with bands sewn with tiny pink cotton rosebuds. It was very expressed hair. She had told me that she was from Devon, and when I asked where in Devon, she said, ‘The countryside.’
When the Eurostar arrived at Ashford International, the last stop before we went through the tunnel under the sea, a man in his early seventies sat on the seat opposite us. He asked the teenager if she’d mind moving her computer so that he had more space at the table. She moved it to her lap. This was a small rearrangement of space, but its outcome meant she had entirely removed herself from the table to make space for his newspaper, sandwich and apple.
After a while, he told me he was travelling to Paris to pick up the pair of shoes that his wife had left in their hotel room. Apparently, they had recently spent a weekend in Paris for their wedding anniversary. His wife had told him not to bother to make the journey to retrieve the shoes, but he said he had no choice because he did not trust the post to deliver them safely to their house on the North Downs in Kent. When he lifted the apple to his lips and bit into it, I leaned over to the young woman and said, ‘That apple is feminine … in French.’
‘La pomme,’ she said, frowning, but what she actually said was, ‘La pomme?’, as if she wasn’t too sure that was right, which is why she was frowning.
Meanwhile the man was telling me he certainly did not relish the return journey back from Paris. ‘You know,’ he whispered, ‘migrants and refugees break into the tunnel and climb on to the roof of these trains.’ He pointed to his right ear. ‘You have to be vigilant and listen for the sound of footsteps.’
‘Will you do that?’ I asked him. ‘Will you listen for the sound of footsteps on the roof of the train?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I will hear them.’
I asked him if the shoes his wife had left in Paris were special? After all, he was travelling all the way to Paris to collect them.
B
y this time the blue-haired woman had removed the headphones from her ears, partly because it was too uncomfortable to concentrate on her language program with the computer on her lap.
He told us both that his wife’s shoes were medical shoes. His wife had one leg shorter than the other and so she wore a raised left shoe. This shoe had a heel built into it and had been made to help correct her balance and align her spine.
I wanted to ask him what sort of shoes his wife (no name) had been wearing for the return journey from Paris to Kent. If she had left these vital shoes in their hotel room, did she have a spare pair of medical shoes? It felt intrusive to ask him to elaborate on his wife’s feet, but he did volunteer that ‘without these particular medical shoes, he could not hear her footsteps in the house’. Usually, he knew if she was making her way to the bathroom or if she was walking down the stairs, because the left shoe made a tapping sound on the floor. Now that she was wearing lighter shoes it was hard for him to follow her movement, which, he said, ‘was a bit nerve-racking’.
I asked if he was nervous that she would fall?
No, her balance was stable. In fact the lighter shoes were her preference but he felt urgently compelled to retrieve the medical shoes from Paris so he could hear her footsteps in the house.
He seemed obsessed with footsteps. I wondered if his wife had chosen to leave her shoes in Paris to avoid her husband knowing where she was at all times. Certainly, if there were migrants clinging to the roof of the train, they too were making a bid to slip away. It would seem that he had given himself the job of making sure that no one slipped away on his watch.
Now that he had finished his apple, I suggested to the young woman that she put her laptop back on the table. She did so, but at an odd angle in order to make space for the man’s newspaper, which he had placed in the middle of the table. When I asked him to move the newspaper to make room for her laptop, he asked me to repeat my request twice, as if he had no comprehension of the way I was using the English language. In the end I said, ‘She’s studying,’ and when he did not understand that either, I said, ‘She’s working.’
