by Deborah Levy
An announcement was made in English and then in French to tell us we were about to enter the tunnel. There was more information in two languages. We would be travelling under the sea for twenty-four miles and it would take fourteen minutes.
In we go. We are travelling through what was once an ocean of chaos and darkness. Low tides. High tides. Plankton. Coral. We are 150 feet under the seabed.
The Eurostar was really a submarine. I closed my eyes and drifted into a light sleep that was haunted with footsteps. First the tap tap of the raised medical shoes that shackled the unnamed wife. These footsteps became softer in the general whooshing thick sound of the tunnel under the sea, softer, softer, barely there, but I heard footsteps all the same. Were migrants walking on the roof of the train? No. It was the sound of bare feet on tarmac. Who do the footsteps belong to? Do footsteps belong to someone? Yes, they belong to her.
She is nine years old and she is crossing the tarmac of the Holloway Road.
Her mother, who is now dead, has cut her fringe crooked with nail scissors. She is myself and she is walking in the rain towards my family house, towards my old life. My married life. The address is written on her arm, which is still tanned, although she has lived in England for two months. She is wearing a summer dress and she is barefoot. She has stopped obediently at the red robot, which she has learned is called a traffic light in England, just as tomato sauce is called ketchup, and a potato chip is a crisp. She asks for directions and her accent is strange. People are kind. She smiles all the time, she is charming and pretty. Her eyes are green, her eyebrows are black. There are enough kind people around to point her in the right direction. A few of them are surprised she is not wearing shoes, but she never wears shoes if she can get away with it. She finds the street just off the Holloway Road near Whittington Park. She is looking for the Victorian house where her middle-aged self, now in her forties, has made a home for her family.
When she knocks on the door of the Victorian semi, a woman shouts, Who are you? Her accent is English, her voice is deep.
I am you, the girl shouts back in a thick South African accent.
The rain continues to fall on the child stranded outside the door of her assimilated more or less English older self, who is cowering on the other side of the door. What will happen if she invites this nine-year-old into the house with its Victorian plumbing and her English daughters, one age twelve, the other six, both of them watching The Great British Bake Off on the TV in the living room?
The foreign girl is stubborn and won’t go away. She smells of another place. Of plants that have grown in the African soil, the hot cement pavements after a rainstorm, of peeling the rough skin off lychees. She has sunshine in the tips of her hair, she has only swum in oceans in which nets have been laid out to deter sharks, she has cried at the sight of the postbox where she posted letters to her father. During the four years he was a political prisoner in the struggle for democracy in southern Africa, she was practically mute for a year of her life, but now she is boldly hammering at the door. When it eventually opens, she steps in. Her wet, bare feet make a trail in the corridor. She turns left into the living room and jumps on to the sofa with the English children. These are the daughters she will give birth to in her thirties.
Mary Berry tastes a sponge cake. Paul Hollywood is breaking a slice apart with his big hands to test it is moist and feather-light. It seems the South African child is happy to concentrate on the pleasures of baking. Her middle-aged self watches this child warily. She does not want her to make trouble for her daughters and tell them to get some real problems when they complain about not having the right brand of trainers for school. She has never wanted her own children to have to be brave. Brave like the children on leaking boats fleeing wars. How many medals does a child need pinned on to her pyjamas? Nothing had taught her that having to summon an abundance of courage, far more than anyone should have to bear, is healthy for a child. She had witnessed the courage of the African children in her country of birth who lost their parents in the struggle for human rights like other children lost their milk teeth.
She watches her nine-year-old self agree with the English kids that the cake on the left is the best because the jam is evenly distributed and it’s not too sweet and she cheers when the judges agree with her. She is pleased the foreign girl seems to feel at home in her home. To make a family home needs time, dedication and, above all, empathy. To be hospitable to strangers is the point of having a home, although this child is not exactly a stranger.
And then they all turn their heads. A man has walked into the room with a beer in his right hand. The child who is not exactly a stranger does not know this is the English man she will marry twenty-five years later. He can’t see her either. He will meet her in Cambridge, where she will be living in a set of rooms opposite Wittgenstein’s rooms.
You get tragedy when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
They will live with each other for over two decades in this house. And then their marriage, instead of bending, will break. They will pack up all the baking tins and take the clock off the kitchen wall.
At the Gare du Nord my editor met me at the gates and escorted me to the breakfast interview. The first question I was asked was the meaning of these lines, which I wrote in that house off the Holloway Road.
Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.
TWELVE
THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING
My best male friend was now married for the third time. He had insisted on buying the yellow jacket to wear at his wedding and I now referred to it as his Yellow Wallpaper. In the book of the same title by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a wife tries to escape from her husband and from her life through the yellow wallpaper of the family home.
One night my best male friend arrived, uninvited, at my flat at eleven in the evening wearing this jacket, which peculiarly still had the safety pin that had attached the wedding nosegay of blue cornflowers to its lapel. He did not seem to want to go home. At around midnight we were standing on the balcony of my crumbling apartment block on the hill when we saw something flying towards us through the sky. At first we could not work out what it was, but then we saw it was not one thing but three things. They were birds. When they landed on the railings of the balcony, he started to cough, quite a hacking cough, but it did not seem to frighten them. The birds had turned their heads to the side, as if they were looking elsewhere, but we knew they were gazing at us. When we leaned in closer to look at their crest feathers, we thought they might be parrots. They did not like being stared at so bluntly, in fact this seemed to disturb them more than the sound of his hacking cough. The thinnest bird began to tug and pull at its feathers, which made us uneasy, so we decided to go back inside and look them up on the Internet.
As I took out my laptop we confessed that when we first saw the birds heading towards us, our minds had gone all over the place. We thought they might be drones or even missiles. I opened my laptop and started to google the parrots. He sat next to me, elbows on the table, pouring more wine, our eyes on the screen.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘this year has been full of birds. I don’t know what’s going on. It all started with my bird clock.’
Apparently there were colonies of feral parrots living wild in London. We decided that the birds looked more like cockatoos. They liked to eat small lizards, seeds, fruit, roots and vegetables.
We returned to the balcony to have another look at them. The bird at the end of the line, the thin one that had been pulling out its feathers, had now changed places with the plumper bird in the middle. The yellow feathers on their wings sort of matched the photograph of the cockatoos we’d just studied on the screen. We thought we should feed them, so we cut up an apple and a banana and laid the fruit on the small round table positioned under the railings. They did not seem interested so we turned our backs on them and walked inside to finish off the bottle of wine.
He raised
his glass. ‘Here’s to knowing each other all these years and to our long friendship.’
I clinked my glass with his glass.
‘To when we were fifteen and immortal,’ he continued. ‘And to our poor parents who we made so anxious all the time. And to recovering from the knocks of the past few years. We are no longer merely grazed. In fact we are hurt.’
His phone was pinging.
‘That will be Nadia,’ I said.
‘No, it’s not my wife,’ he insisted. ‘It’s a robot selling me insurance. Nadia doesn’t care where I am. I bore Nadia, nothing I say interests her. She apparently knows what I am about to say and resents having to live through the time of me saying it. In fact she can barely look at me, she’s got a lot on and she seems to be repulsed by my body as well.’
‘You should go home,’ I said.
‘No,’ he was shouting now, ‘you’re not listening. I no longer feel welcome in my own home.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ his fingers tore at what was left of his hair, ‘ “I love her and that is the beginning of everything.” ’
He told me that was a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.
‘I am not really that great a person, but I’m not the worst catch either. Do you agree?’
I said that I did agree. And that as far as I was concerned he was a major character in my life.
‘How do you mean, character? I’m not a character.’
I told him about how I had been asked to make a list of minor and major characters by the film executives.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘you are a minor major character.’
‘What? I’ve been demoted?’
‘Yes.’
I could see him and Nadia in a parody of a Jean-Luc Godard movie, both of them whispering in a café next to a train station, taking it in turns to convey to the camera (in fragmented voice-over) how it was all so impossible and how their failure to communicate their love only deepened their solitude and how they felt crushed by each other’s contempt.
I’m unhappy with you and I’m unhappy alone.
The problem from a scriptwriter’s point of view was that he could never be a major Godard character because his teeth were too white and he wasn’t reflective enough to deliver a long internal monologue.
‘I’m not that clever, it’s true,’ he said. ‘Nadia finds me intellectually deficient as well. She’s much cleverer than I am. But any way,’ he reached for my hand and kissed it like an old-fashioned gigolo, ‘I don’t want to rub salt into the wound, but being alone doesn’t suit you nearly as much as you think it does.’
I made Turkish coffee and poured it into two small cups.
Was it true that being alone did not suit me? In my old life I sometimes felt unreal to myself. What did unreal mean?
If I ever felt free enough to write my life as I felt it, would the point be to feel more real? What was it that I was reaching for? Not for more reality, that was for sure. I certainly did not want to write the major female character that has always been written for Her. I was more interested in a major unwritten female character.
We could hear the birds through the walls when his phone pinged again.
This time he reckoned it was his Uber receipt coming through.
‘You came here in an Uber?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you go home in an Uber?’
‘I’ll call a minicab.’
He took off his yellow jacket and lay flat out on his back on the floor, hands behind his neck, staring at the ceiling. I lay on the sofa, kicked off my shoes and stretched out my legs. It was convivial to laze around with someone at the end of the day. To not have to speak or ask each other to take out the garbage or mend something that was broken or to discuss our children (though we often did) and to know that we truly wished the best for each other – and not the worst. I must have dozed off, because I was woken by something fluttering against my cheek. At first I thought the birds had flown inside, but it was just a loose thread from the sofa. The doorbell, which was now fixed, was ringing. It turned out to be Nadia, tall and majestic, wrapped in a heavy winter coat.
‘Is he here?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s four o’clock in the morning,’ she said. ‘He is supposed to be picking up my father from Heathrow at eight.’
I showed her in and she glanced at her husband, who was asleep on the floor. She tapped his stomach with the toe of her boot and prodded the leather hard into his stomach until he opened his eyes.
‘Hello Nadia.’ He reached out his arms so she could help pull him up from the floor. She did not take up his invitation and he was left stranded with his arms outstretched, while her hands remained in the pockets of her big winter coat.
The image stayed with me for a long time.
I invited her to look at the birds.
The loudest cockatoo was circling a chunk of bruised apple it had found on the table. Nadia wanted to know where they came from.
I told her I didn’t know. They had arrived just after midnight in a pack of three.
Nadia raised her eyes towards the sky and shuddered, as if it was hiding in its grey infinity any number of exotic winged creatures waiting to land.
‘Look at the fog,’ she said, ‘where has it come from? The flights into Heathrow might be delayed. He can drive and I’ll sleep on the back seat until we get to Terminal 3.’
When they left they were still not really speaking to each other, but I thought they were in love all the same. I drank a glass of cool water and then I poured some of the water into a small bowl for the birds and carried it to the balcony. The fog had not yet lifted, but I could see the plump cockatoo perched in the middle of the line. It had raised its crested head and was shaking itself from the core of its being. A fine white powder rose from the depths of its feathers and fell like salt at its feet.
THIRTEEN
THE MILKY WAY
I talk to my mother for the first time since her death. She is listening. I am listening. That makes a change. I tell her I am writing a novel about a mother and daughter. There is a long silence. How are you, mother of mine, wherever you are? I hope there are owls close by. You always loved owls. Do you know that a few days after your death, when I was browsing in a department store on Oxford Street, I saw a pair of owl earrings with green glass eyes. I was suddenly flooded with inexplicable happiness. I’ll buy these earrings for my mother.
I carried them to the counter to pay, but as the shop assistant took them from my hand, I realized you were dead.
Oh No No No No
When I uttered these words out loud, I sounded mad and tragic, as if I was from some other century altogether. I walked away, leaving the little jewelled owls in her hands. At that moment, I came too close to understanding the way Hamlet speaks Shakespeare’s most sorrowful words. I mean, not just the actual words, but how he might sound when he says them.
They do not sound pretty, that’s for sure. I couldn’t get out of that shop fast enough.
Oh No No No No
Sorrow does not have a century.
I began to wonder for the first time how it was that Shakespeare’s pen had moved the lips of Hamlet to open and close and open again to speak the struggling words that so accurately described the way my mind could not accept your death. And then I read that he wrote Hamlet in the year his father died. The line that means the most to me in the entire play is Hamlet’s reply when asked what it is he is reading.
Words, words, words.
I think he is trying to say that he is inconsolable.
Words can cover up everything that matters.
I don’t see ghosts but I can hear you listening.
The war is over for you.
Here’s some news from the living. I have been visited by birds all this year, in one way or another. Some of them are real and some of them are less real.
But your owls are true. I have stopped thinking
about why I am obsessed with birds, but it might be something to do with death and renewal. In the autumn, I made a new garden in the bathroom. The tall cactus had been on its way out for a long time, then it shrivelled and turned brown. I stood in the bath and heaved it off the shelf. I kept the smaller silver cactus but this time I potted jasmine and lilies and ferns. Do you know that jasmine, like orange blossom, has a scent that is otherworldly but it can sometimes smell like drains? The fern hangs over the bath; the lilies make their adjustments to the light. The small silver cactus with its arms pointing towards the ceiling looks like it is praying for rain.
And so am I. Every day is hard.
And I love the rain.
Thank you for teaching me how to swim and how to row a boat. Thank you for the typing jobs that put food in the fridge. As for myself, I have things to do in the world and have to get on with them and be more ruthless than you were.
FOURTEEN
GOOD TIDINGS
I met with the father of my children to discuss Christmas Day. It was the second Christmas since we had separated, though we had walked side by side, together but apart, for many years. We talked about the menu and who would cook what on the day, and shared ideas for our daughters’ presents. We were in a chain coffee bar, sitting on brown leather armchairs facing each other. A Joni Mitchell song was playing through the speakers. It was about hating and loving someone, but we pretended not to notice.
We discussed the news and talked about the weather. Not once did we mention the tempest that had sunk the boat. We were both still angry with each other, but we were calm and I was certainly bewildered by how I never found him boring. It was as if we had made a pact, from the moment we met, to know less about each other rather than more. I accepted this was the fatal flaw that tore us apart, and hoped that we would do better in this respect with other people.
