2.
Lost
THE FIRST TIME I SAW my daughter, she didn’t have a brain. A neural tube is the term I was given to help me process what exactly I was looking at. It was late December 2012, four days before Christmas, and on the screen in front of me, my daughter was a ribbon of plasticky flex, flapping at one end and knotted at the other. Not a heart, but the inklings of one. Not a spine, but the hint of the spine to come. Not a brain, not yet, but a brain would soon emerge from that knot, untangling neurons reaching out to form nerves that would connect the other parts of her together.
It seems odd even to use the word her in reference to that tube. She was not a daughter that day, but the most basic sketch of one—an outline, an ambition. Yet I loved what I saw on that hospital monitor. I looked at that flapping tube and thought: Yes. There she is. Of course.
Recognition. It had been a quiet night. Things to fix in the new house: cracked walls bubbled with old paint, winter winds treading slowly across the beams of the attic, the sound of dripping from somewhere dark and hollow and hard to pin down. Sarah emerged from the bathroom at around nine looking calm, and this immediately filled me with terror. Calm is the mask she presents to the world when the world itself is starting to shudder around her.
“I’ve had a bleed,” she said.
“Are you having the baby?” I asked too quickly, freshly stupid with the rush of panic. At six weeks, what I meant was: “Are you losing the baby?” But I couldn’t ask that aloud.
We used my phone. The helpline told us to go to the hospital the next morning. The night that followed was so long and restless that I refuse to remember it.
Instead, I remember the following day: the antenatal unit, cluttered with sagging Christmas ornaments, where we traded our identities for our medical circumstances. We were polycystic ovaries, and we joined the queue behind two IVFs and a third-trimester walk-in, feet spread, face not just damp but dripping with the effort of it all. There was no indignity to this new identity of ours, or if there was I didn’t feel it—not that they were my ovaries. I simply appreciated the briskness with which the staff performed triage, cutting away our names to expose our needs, the way a paramedic might slice the clothes around a wound.
Tilt your head and she looked like a wound on the screen: a tiny dark tear in the pulsing, clotted gray fabric of Sarah’s insides. They reach for the fruit and veg when a child is developing: this week they’re the size of a bean, a fig, an orange. You can’t help but feel yourself in the produce aisle, and you take some comfort in the mundane bustle of it all. But on the inside, they do not look like fruit or veg. They look like the secrets of life itself, the greatest of which is this: we are a central nervous system. That is the pared-back truth of us. The nervous system arrives first, and everything else is just collateral, the rusting gantry around an expensive rocket.
That heartbeat! That proto-heartbeat. The ragged, adorable fluttering of the neural tube that was now the bright point at the center of our family. She seemed, what? Not determined. No, she seemed assured. She seemed confident. And maybe I could borrow some of that confidence—and return it later.
Coming home, blown about in the bus as it tackled the coast road just outside of Brighton, Sarah put a hand on my face and told me: “You were so calm.”
“I can handle the big things,” I said. She nodded. She knew. We both knew that the things I couldn’t handle were the little things.
There is a story I often tell people about how my parents got together. I tell it even though nobody ever asks, and even though I have to then follow it up with the news that, by this point, my parents have been divorced far longer than they were ever a couple.
My parents got together in 1969. My dad was a silent-order monk from southern California, hitchhiking his way around Europe in the middle of a crisis of faith. For most of the 1960s he had not spoken or even looked out of the window: his job as a monk was to pray for the world while remaining utterly removed from it. He had not heard popular music since the tail end of the previous decade, until one day a visiting Franciscan smuggled Sgt. Pepper’s into the monastery so my dad could listen to it. He set it going on a record player rigged up in a Divco delivery truck he was meant to be restoring, and suddenly the monastery seemed far too small, and the world seemed like a thing that could not be saved from a careful distance.
My mum, meanwhile, was the teenage mod in the Hillman Imp who picked him up not far from Canterbury on a rainy afternoon. Three weeks later they were married, just days before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
All of us, I think, all of my brothers and sisters, feel a quiet kind of shame about the prosaic ways we met the people we fell in love with. I met Sarah in an office in Brighton. No hitchhiking, no chance transatlantic encounters, nobody walking on the moon. I was temping between writing jobs, and she was the single glimpse of calm and competence and wit and warmth in a vast room filled with undertrained people, each of whom appeared to be seconds away from a calamitous error of some kind.
In deference to my parents, at least we moved fast. We got together and then we got married, all within the space of a year. Neither of us had seriously contemplated marriage before. Neither of us really believed in marriage. And yet it was suddenly what we wanted to do. We got married before we even lived together. At the back of my mind, maybe, there was a slight anxiety: we had met in a rush, Sarah and I, instantly, frighteningly in love from the start. In my experience, this kind of love is almost always unstable. This kind of love cannot last.
I had not counted on Sarah’s input, though. The stability we needed came from her, this dark-haired, dark-eyed girl who walked with her head thrust forward as if battling incessant winds, and who frowned her way through conversations, shuffling in the occasional crooked smile and a hint of that gorgeously wonky incisor of hers, piecing each thought together in the moment.
Before the office job, she had been a nurse, a witness to the body’s hidden mysteries. She had sutured wounds, knocked back energy drinks in the ER, and had stuffed corpses with cotton wool—once a sister had opened a nearby window so the soul could fly away, naturally. She had tended a giant skinhead with a swastika tattoo who, coming around from anesthetic, panicked sweetly about the oven he was sure he had left on at home. She had once stood on a chair in an operating theater so she could look over the surgeon’s head and see into the cavity of another human being to watch the heart wriggling like a bag of worms. Live bait.
“What was surgery like?” I once asked, and sensed immediately that I could not be told. Instead, she described how tired she was when she went home afterward. “The fumes,” she said. “In theater weeks I was drugged out of my mind. The surgeons get used to it.”
Nowadays she worked in health insurance, a job that relied upon her medical knowledge and her love of detail. By contrast, I wrote about video games. I have written about games for ten years and I tell myself that I have stuck with it because, beneath the flim-flam, the job is delicate and interesting. Games are perfect adventures for the timid but curious: bottle worlds where you can experiment endlessly with risk and failure. They also appeal because they seem singularly difficult to talk about. Writing about games involves trying to find words for things that are pretty much made to evade words. It involves diving beneath a game’s surface fiction, and beneath its rules and restrictions and mechanics, until you reach the dim, muddy territory where the effects of all these things come together in the player’s imagination. Down there in the ooze, writing about games has always seemed to me a bit like dredging an old river with a rich history of scuttlings and sinkings. That’s the job, and I would give myself, in the grim shorthand of the review, a four out of ten. That is to say: noble intentions, but it didn’t really come together, did it?
It came together in some ways, though. After a long period as a freelancer, I joined the editorial team of a website in Brighton shortly after Sarah and I got married. After years of floating about and nurturing a growing anxiety
over the state of the freelance world, I suddenly had a bit of security. I had an office in town I could go to if I wanted, and a computer in the corner at home that I could work from if I didn’t fancy the fifteen-minute walk in the morning. As I nosed slowly through my early thirties, I sometimes wondered if I should feel ashamed or deeply lucky that I had managed to preserve something that felt like a student lifestyle. I chose to feel lucky.
So we worked, Sarah and I, living lives that we decided were filled with incident although we rarely left the tangle of central Brighton. If there was a problem, it was one of emerging roles, emerging rituals. I was always worrying, and she was always talking me back to a place of safety.
She had training in this regard. Sarah has a hundred stories about her days working as a nurse. There are funny stories and shocking stories, but underneath these distinctions they are all compassionate and sad and filled with human understanding.
I often think of one story in particular. Long before I met her, Sarah spent six weeks as an intern at the elderly medical ward of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, a long room with the beds down one side, facing high windows and a speckled view of the gray Brighton seafront. Every morning she would rouse the patients from their muttering sleep and get them into their chairs ready for a cup of tea.
Dementia was always hovering, playful and vindictive. As Sarah moved down the line of beds, somebody would inevitably conclude that the thin room with the comfortable seats was the carriage of an old locomotive, chuffing through the countryside, probably during wartime and bound for somewhere exciting. The idea would spread, quickly and with little prompting. As she passed back along the line with the tea urn, she would ask everyone what they wanted for breakfast, and she would gently inform them, one after another, that they were not on a train.
As for me, I was always boarding some imaginary train or another, being whisked away in the wrong carriage, bound, it seemed, for a destination I had not chosen. I was always lost, often aggressively, fearfully lost. Eventually, even Sarah’s brilliance at reorienting me started to make me worry. I worried that I was turning Sarah into my own personal nurse—and it was a kind of nursing that generated no entertaining stories of any kind to enjoy afterward. What I fell for was her independence, that sense of a private life lived in a private world. Could I intrude on that without damaging it?
Still we rushed on. We talked of children, so we would need a house, and the one we were renting between us, which seemed to be almost all staircase, would not do. We saved and we borrowed. The house we eventually bought was a classic example of the easy kind of mistake we were always making. Sarah and I were both late to adulthood, and so we were always running to catch up. We raced into house-hunting, and that swiftly turned into house-buying, because we had found a place and instantly fallen for it.
Sarah liked it even before we set foot inside. She perched on the low fence that ran around the wildflower garden at the center of the green that our estate agent had directed us to and breathed deep. We had ridden the bus for twenty minutes—as far from Brighton itself as we would ever choose to live—and now we were in Saltdean, a secluded art deco suburb built around a concentric set of gently arcing streets. It was bright and cold, a lively July morning, with a playful wind to shuffle the leaves and carry the sound of country and western music drifting from the radio of a distant neighbor. The unfinished road around the green, lumpy and missing its coating of tarmac, was littered with chunks of rock that felt good beneath my shoe. The whole place seemed unfinished really, more like backwater America than subdivided East Sussex. It felt speculative, and it made us feel speculative.
Sarah was in a Huck Finn kind of mood from the start. She plucked a straw from the wild garden and started to chew. I knew she was making up her mind: I love it. We went inside: small rooms, but all of them filled with sunlight. Lots of windows, and not a straight line in the whole place.
The survey, when it came back to us, contained a litany of minor to middling structural offenses. The detailing inside suggested a previous owner whose enthusiasm for DIY was only infrequently matched by competence. The house was extremely cheap for its location, and this was maybe down to the way the plug sockets each settled at distinct heights in the walls, like birds finding their own perches in an old tree. It was maybe down to the way the radiators leaned out on rusted, cobbled-together legs of pipework, as if they were preparing to stagger across the room in the manner of the spindly alien tripods from The War of the Worlds.
None of this mattered, neither did the spreading mold or the fact that the house had been on the market for the best part of a year with no takers. That actually helped bring the price even closer to our feeble range. The estate agent could have warned us of radiation leaks or curses from a wrathful pharaoh and it wouldn’t have mattered.
If Sarah had given into an irrational love, I was not entirely innocent. In its layout, the house told a busy kind of story, starting as a two-room holiday cottage in the 1930s before growing, a room a decade, sometimes more, to form a surprisingly extravagant sprawl for a bungalow. The living room was at the center now, and all the other rooms came off it—no corridors in the whole place. As a result, that living room had nine doors, and that reminded me of a story by Herman Melville, in which the narrator lives in a house built clumsily around an old chimney, with the result that his home is a muddle of converging interiors.
Should you buy a house because of Herman Melville? I asked the question to myself and I heard the reply: Yes. Besides, all those rooms, that motley of doors, had reminded me of something else too. Something a university friend had once told me many years back when we were lounging in the bar, caught in the busy period between failing to hand in one paper and failing to hand in the next.
His name was Matt, and at the time he seemed to be the wisest person I had ever met. In the bar that day, he said: “When I’ve lived enough of my life to have achieved my ambitions—”
“Or,” I added, eager to appear fatalistic, “to have seen those ambitions rendered impossible?”
“When I’ve reached that point,” he said, “I’m going to buy a massive house, and I’m going to live inside it with a tiger. I’m going to just release the tiger into the house.”
“And then?” I asked. You always had to work at it with Matt.
“And then we’re going to live entirely independent lives,” he said. “The tiger and me. And each day will be a bonus day, a day that I will treasure, because I’ll wake up knowing that one morning or afternoon soon, fate will bring me together with the tiger in the same room at the same time.”
“This is going to have to be a big house,” I said. And Matt nodded.
That had stayed with me: life with a tiger as a way to keep yourself in the moment. And occasionally life did feel like that. It felt as if you were being stalked, for your own good, by something wild and honest and far beyond the realm of negotiation. On the day we moved into the house, Sarah told me, amidst boxes and bags and upended chairs, that she was pregnant. She was pregnant. I could handle that quite nicely. I can always handle the big things.
But a house, I was about to find out, is not a big thing. It is a teetering stack of the littlest things imaginable, all of which are eager to fragment and require the involvement of specialized repairmen. Panic started to rise. Maybe a baby was not a big thing either.
We bought that house in July, when it was filled with light and the sweet domestic cooing of distant wood pigeons. When we moved in, however, it was December. Short days and dark. A fog had settled around the garden, the white walls of the living room seemed clammy and gray, and we were woken each morning by alien moans that turned out to be sheep on a nearby hill. Do you even let sheep out in winter? Somebody clearly did.
I sensed now that there were things wrong with this house, things that estate agents had concealed, that nobody else had spotted. Things that only I could see. It was wrong that the guttering was so bowed in front of the kitchen window, so clodded wit
h moss, that it didn’t collect the rain so much as curate it, turning it into a sad Vegas waterfall. It was wrong that shiny black insects would find their way into the strangest places, and that the cats didn’t want to eat them—perhaps because they did not possess the elevated flavor profiles the cats had detected in the insoles of my shoes. It was surely wrong that the pipes in the house had their own bronchial voices, and that they would wheeze and cough all night, a wretched choir tuning up, as I lay fretting about the money it would cost to replace them. A typical story of my early interaction with the house runs like this: one afternoon, rooting around in the attic, I found a walled-off area with a hatch that, once I closed it, turned out to have no handle for opening it again—and a warning note scribbled on the front saying Do Not Close.
That winter, we painted the living room a seaside blue, and the nursery a lurid coral, but still: the house was making me spiky with worry. The whole thing. The entire potential expense of home ownership. A bullying kind of threat I could only counteract by carving my life into maxims.
“Most of the things you should worry about come down to water,” I told Sarah one day, apropos of nothing—maybe a leak beneath the sink, maybe a documentary about the Dam Busters I had caught on TV. I was constructing rules and paradigms of fretfulness. The house had become a machine designed to make me unbearable.
“Do you know about this idea of being relatable?” countered my pregnant wife, who, at the time, was standing on a coffee table with a paintbrush, trying to reach a distant corner of the ceiling, while I was collapsed on the sofa, an arm flung over my face, deep into an impromptu therapy session. “It’s nearly unimaginable that we can afford a house. Most people alive today can’t. Many of your colleagues at work can’t afford a house through no fault of their own, and our children will only dream of this sort of thing,” she said. “This response of yours to extreme good fortune is not relatable.”
The Inward Empire Page 3
