by Sarah Moss
Rose had spellings to learn but we ignored them. I diced pork belly and stir-fried it brown before adding a lot of green peppers and onions with dried black beans and not-too-much-chilli. Rice steamed, and the smells filled the house.
Dad peered over my shoulder. ‘Pork.’
‘Are you not eating it at the moment?’
His Judaism comes and goes. Well, no, his Judaism runs in his veins, inescapable. His mother was Jewish and therefore he is Jewish, as surely as my mother was not and therefore I am not. His observance comes and goes.
‘It looks delicious. Of course I’ll eat it.’
I always have tahini and tinned chickpeas. There was pitta in the freezer. I could have made hummus for him, which is what I do when I’m feeling accommodating and Rose decides five minutes before I put dinner on the table that she doesn’t like the main dish. I didn’t offer.
I turned the heat up a little. Real food, again, after all the grey and beige hospital slops. Anatomically identifiable meat and eye-watering onions, peppers that crunched between Rose’s teeth when she came down to help and found a few still on the chopping board. You didn’t cook for me, she said, all the time Miriam was gone you didn’t cook for me, and beans on toast doesn’t count. I didn’t cook for anyone, I said, over the hiss of the wok. But I’m cooking now. Can you tell Mimi it’s nearly ready? She’s reading, Rose said, just sitting on her bedroom floor reading and reading and it’s very boring. Well, I said, it’s dinner time now, she’ll have to stop for a bit.
We had to move the sofa to fit an extra chair for Dad at the table. I stopped myself telling Miriam not to exert herself as we lifted it, and almost stopped myself thinking of larger houses. There is probably no very direct correlation between the floor area of a person’s house and his happiness, assuming happiness to be measurable. Rose said that since the pork recipe came from the Chinese cookbook, we should use chopsticks to eat, and then, glancing at Miriam, took out the patterned lacquer chopsticks that sit in the drawer from one month to the next, partly because the last time we’d used them Miriam had said that we were being pretentious at best and racist at worst, that it was ridiculous for an English family in England to sit at their table on their chairs and play at being Chinese because the person who wrote the cookbook had been to China before doing so. But they’re pretty, Rose had said, I like the gold patterns. Yeah, said Mimi, so did Elgin like the pretty patterns on the Parthenon. But – I’d said – but Mim, you can’t say – that doesn’t work—
This time she didn’t say. She just sat there with her hands in her lap and her eyes lowered like a Victorian girl waiting to get married, or maybe like someone with neurological impairment following oxygen deprivation.
places where our feet cannot walk
I didn’t want her to close her bedroom door. I didn’t want her to go to sleep up there alone in the dark, where no-one would hear if she – if she became unwell. I propped our bedroom door wide open, as if smaller sounds could come through a bigger gap, as if you can’t in this house hear people turning over in bed on the floor above however the doors are arranged. I know, said Emma, I kind of want to sit outside her door all night, but you do know that it’s actually silence we’re listening for, that a respiratory arrest isn’t going to make a lot of noise? You’d go mad, Adam, listening for silence, you have to trust her to keep breathing.
Emma took off her trousers and then the clip that was holding her hair in a knot on the back of her head.
I did, I thought, trust her to keep breathing, it never crossed my mind that she would stop breathing, and I was wrong. I was wrong and we were lucky and we might not be lucky again. I stood in the doorway, listening. I thought I heard a page turn in the room above.
Do we still have the baby monitor, I asked. They make higher-tech ones now, I did not say, with breathing monitors you can attach to a mattress, one of the school-gate mums was talking about hers.
No, said Emma, I gave it to Siobhan when she was having Jonny, and anyway you can’t do that, Adam. She’s fifteen. She’s going to be going to university in three years. She knows what the signs are now, she knows what to do, and even if there are allergens in her room she’s not going to be exerting herself at night. Go up and say good night, tell her to turn that light off and go to sleep, and then come to bed. It’s the new normal, remember?
No, I thought, I don’t care, I don’t want the new normal, I want the old one back, or if I can’t have that I want Mim on the monitors for the rest of her life or at least the rest of mine and she is not going away in three years, she can live here with us where I can listen to her breathing and she can attend one of the five excellent universities within an hour’s journey, to which I will happily drive her, outside whose lecture theatres I will happily wait. I need to go running, I thought, I need to go now, but I can’t leave Mim because Emma’s going to go to sleep and she won’t know if Mim needs her and anyway if she needs to take Mim to A and E what about Rose, there wouldn’t be room for all three of them in an ambulance so Mim would have to go alone.
Adam, said Emma, this is the new reality, love. This is what we live with now. We have to live with it, and we have to let Mim and Rose live with it. Don’t make things worse for the girls than they have to be.
I know, I said, I’m sorry, I know. I think I’m going to go do a bit of work on the project, I don’t feel like going to bed.
She folded her work trousers over the chair, which was already piled high with clothes that she’ll wear again before washing but doesn’t want to return to the wardrobe with the clean stuff. All right, she said, do what you need to do, but stay downstairs, OK? Don’t go and sit outside Mim’s door.
I know, I said, I did think about it but I wasn’t going to do it.
Good, she said, don’t stay up too late.
There were ghost cathedrals, never to be built, the first one imagined before the end of the war, even before the last bombs fell on Coventry in 1944. The Provost and the new bishop wanted a cathedral that would symbolise or even enact the imagined post-war Church of England’s commitment to social justice. Bishop Gorton had in mind something that would bring the rising generation back to church, ‘a People’s Cathedral’. He didn’t want anything invoking ‘Gothic memory’, no decoration or fuss, but a building in conversation with Coventry’s industrial present and modern future. It’s hard to imagine what material forms he saw in his mind, but whatever they were, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the appointed architect, rebuilder of the House of Commons in its Gothic form, failed to realise them. Scott departed, remarking presciently that ‘you will find that it is not the extremists (who are always more vocal) who will decide the amount of financial support, but the older people, who have more money’.
Seven years passed in appointing committees, canvassing public opinion and arguing about the wording of the brief for an open competition for a new architect. During those seven years, the war ended and the rebuilding of Britain began. My father remembers that the rebuilding was incomplete when he first arrived in England, drifting across the Atlantic with my mother, away from conscription to the new war in Vietnam. Twenty years after the end of the war, he said, there were still holes in all the cities, and he recalled that my mother had believed as a child, growing up with her parents’ stories of The War and her grandparents’ stories of The Great War, that every generation had to flatten the cities of its forefathers. It occurs to me now, reading about the dilemma of post-war building, that some of my father’s ‘holes’ may have been ruins deliberately left as memorials, as the ghosts of what was no longer there. Argument rumbled for years: as ever in this country, it seems that most people wanted a sentimental bodge of old and new architecture, being too conservative to tolerate innovation but not conservative enough to live with the inconveniences of the past. It is tradition that the English embrace, not history.
In 1950 the Reconstruction Committee issued the conditions of the competition to design and build a new Coventry Cathedral. The building h
ad to accommodate an altar at the liturgical East; a bishop’s throne; twenty-four stalls for clergy; the usual pulpit, lectern and font; a Lady Chapel, a Guild Chapel, a Children’s Chapel and a chapel for private prayer. There had to be a Chapel of Christian Unity, to be shared with other denominations and not part of the central building but somehow, umbilically, attached. There had to be space for a congregation of 1,250, and the surviving tower and two medieval crypts had to be retained. Apart from that, anything could happen.
Two hundred and nineteen designs appeared, two hundred and nineteen imagined cathedrals. Most of those entries are now lost, and almost all of the minds that conjured them are now also gone. There should be a book, many books, of buildings not built. One was entirely underground, intended to work as a shelter in the event of nuclear war. Several tented the ruins in curving glass. Most used concrete. My favourite is Alison and Peter Smithson’s, a concrete square with a white marble roof rising from west to east, the whole building floating above ground-level on a podium. Critics accused them of wanting to sweep away all the ruins, to obliterate both the historic past and recent trauma, but they were only distinguishing now – their now, ours is less exciting – from then. The medieval crypt was there, glassed-in, exposed like an open sea-shell. The ruined apse and graveyard were there, as graveyards are always there: places of remembrance, places where our feet cannot walk as if everything were all right. It should have been built.
object constancy
Miriam was still there in the morning, still breathing, her bedroom again smelling of shampoo and sleep as well as clean sheets and dirty tights. No need to wake her. We will need, her headteacher had said, an Individual School Health Plan. We will need a photo of her, for the board in the staff-room, so that everyone knows who she is. We will need a meeting with the School Health Team. We will need staff training. None of that sounded like the kind of thing that happens quickly, and for now, for just a few days, I wanted to let it ride, let it float. I wanted my daughter at home, her presence our benediction. As if I could no longer distinguish between an absent child and a lost one, as if I had lost what in babies is called object constancy, meaning the knowledge that something absent continues to exist out of sight and hearing. The acquisition of object constancy is said to be an important developmental stage: Mummy is not gone but elsewhere. Teddy is under the cot. The problem, it seemed to me in those days, is that object constancy is one of those lies we tell ourselves to make it possible to live. Important things may cease to exist when you look away. I rested my hand on her hair a moment and then went to wake Rose, the antidote to sentiment.
Rose used to wake at five every morning, regardless of how late we kept her up at night, and Miriam taught her how to tell the time at the age of four so she could be bribed not to demand attention at unconscionable hours. We shouldn’t have worried, we should have just enjoyed her company while we had it. Now I have to wake her every morning. She had rolled herself up in her duvet and her face and pillow were damp with sweat.
‘Good morning, Rose. Time to get up now. I’ll make a special breakfast if you’re quick.’
She sat up, still cocooned in the duvet, and eyed me as if she’d never seen me before. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Can we have a cat?’
‘No. Would you like French toast for breakfast? There’s time.’
‘Joey says his mum says the cat’s no trouble.’
‘French toast? You could have it with honey, Grandpa brought some from his neighbour.’
‘Everyone else in my class has a cat. Well, some of them have dogs but nearly everyone has a cat.’
‘It’s PE today, right? I can’t find your plimsolls, might you have left them at school?’
‘It’s not fair. Mum had loads of animals when she was little. Mum even had a horse.’
‘Mum also had a field in which to put a horse. If you had a horse in our back garden, you wouldn’t be able to get the back door open. Which would be particularly difficult because the only way of getting the horse there in the first place would be through the house.’
‘That’s why it would be better if we got a cat.’
‘Time to get up, Rose. Get through the bathroom before Mimi needs it, OK?’
She emerged from her cocoon. ‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that she’s back. Can I have chocolate spread on the French toast?’
‘No,’ I said.
Downstairs, Emma had the radio on. Another new disease, or a new mutation of an old disease, had been identified in central Africa. A few hundred people had died. What, the radio asked, was the risk of it coming to Europe? How soon should we expect British deaths? How long would it take to develop a vaccine? For heaven’s sake, said Emma, it’s transmitted in body fluids as long as they stay warm, it’s December and when people get that sick here they go to hospitals where there is an apparently unlimited supply of gloves, gel, soap and water. If they want to worry about British healthcare, I can give them a list and if they want to worry about mortality rates in central Africa I know other people who can give them a list but let’s stop it with the racist scaremongering, no? I’m not here for the racist scaremongering, I said, I just wanted a cup of tea and I’m making French toast for the girls, do you want some?
I emptied the dishwasher while the bread sat in its egg-and-milk, gave the teapot a proper wash before I made the tea, kept my hands busy so I didn’t go up to check on Miriam again, and before I’d flipped the French toast I was rewarded by footsteps on the stairs. She’d reverted to her old blue cotton pyjama bottoms worn with a T-shirt in which she’s not allowed to leave the house because it says across her bosom ‘Because the patriarchy’s not going to fuck itself.’ No, Mim, Emma says, we’re not censoring your feminist views and if you’re worried about your freedom of speech, look higher than your parents, but you may not walk around town with the word ‘fuck’ on your front. Yes, we do say it occasionally, given due provocation, yes, it is just an old word for sex, no, we don’t think sex is obscene or unspeakable and no, you are not leaving the house wearing that T-shirt. It is a battle to which Miriam still occasionally reverts when her mood or developmental instincts dictate a fight and there is no more immediate conflict to hand and to that extent at least, the T-shirt is useful.
‘Morning, Mim. Did you sleep well?’
She leant in the doorway. ‘Yeah. Think so. I kept waking up wondering why I couldn’t hear the monitors but I went back to sleep. Am I going back to school today?’
I put down the mug I’d just lifted. Emma’s spoon hovered over her muesli.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Did you forget? We talked about it.’
Cognitive impairment. Brain damage.
‘Did we? Oh yeah, they need to fill in forms.’
‘Yes. So it’ll be a few more days.’ I glanced at Emma. ‘Gives you time to get back into the right timezone and remember where everything is.’
‘I know where everything is. Unless you’ve been moving my stuff around.’
‘No-one’s touched your stuff, sweetie. Have some breakfast. Grandpa’s coming over soon.’
‘Oh good. He’s still here.’
I looked at Emma again. Leave it, her eyes said, don’t panic, don’t frighten her.
‘We might go for a walk,’ I said. ‘You and me and my dad. Mum’s going into work for a bit, while Rose is at school.’
Miriam sat down. ‘I’m going to text Charlotte and Sophie. See if they want to come round after school.’
They might bring allergens, I thought. We never really got to the bottom of that cereal bar. They might have been touching animals or eating peanuts, although I had myself watched the soft skin on Miriam’s forearm resolutely oblivious to the application of peanuts, and there was no suggestion that there had been animals present at her collapse. It is not fair, I cannot lose my daughter as well as my mother, I thought, although God knows, the radio was as I thought this reminding me, thousands do, and they live on somehow. And anyway I had not lost my daughter.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Good idea.’
another half-millennium
I was working sitting on our bed with the laptop balanced on my crossed legs, because my father was downstairs with Miriam and despite his encouragement I hadn’t felt like going out to a café. We’ll be fine, he said, she’ll be fine, I don’t think you’ve been anywhere on your own for weeks. Adam, he’d said privately, when Miriam went to the loo, she’ll be back at school soon, you need to practise letting go, this is understandable but it won’t help either of you in the long run. It’s not the long run, I said, it’s three days since she left hospital, and I’d gone off to my room as if I were the teenager.
Basil Spence lived and worked in Edinburgh then, in the canyons of Victorian tenements under the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Since the war, he had been deep in the architecture of the big exhibitions, Britain Can Make It, Sea and Ships at the South Bank, the Festival of Britain, building the narratives of national resurrection. Glass skins on metal buildings. A form of architectural journalism, he said, ephemeral. The first Coventry Cathedral had been built around 1043 by Lady Godiva and Earl Leofric and demolished by order of Henry VIII in 1539; bits of it can still be seen as the cornerstones and lintels of shops and restaurants in the one surviving sixteenth-century street. What became the second cathedral was originally a parish church built beside the first cathedral in 1433. The new cathedral, the third chance, should be designed to stand for another half-millennium (hubris, in 1950, or optimism?). The conditions for the competition began with a prayer: ‘The Cathedral is to speak to us and to generations to come of the Majesty, the Eternity and the Glory of God. God, therefore, direct you.’
