The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  ‘Publishing,’ Toni says. And her face creases with a smile so wide it is as if she has peeled the foil from a cheap chocolate egg and found Fabergé instead.

  ‘What’s that?’ you demand.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. But copy-editing, proofing, publicity, I expect.’

  ‘So not reading?’ I say, suspicious.

  ‘Yes, reading,’ Toni replies. ‘But with a purpose.’

  I bristle, throw a quote back at her. ‘All reading has a purpose,’ I say.

  Toni looks at you. You try to pull a don’t blame me look. It falls flat, for we both, of course, blame you fully. ‘But this would mean you could read as a job,’ she says then.

  And that is the line that wins her the argument, and will, eventually, win me a place on an NVQ at Anglia in Cambridge, a slim ten miles away, meaning I don’t even have to leave home, leave you to the wolves, or the black dog I know still comes calling – a fact I both pity and resent you for. At least now, though, I have an escape, a new world to play in; and then, for the first time in over a decade, I allow myself to paint the first few brushstrokes, block out the opening scenes of an alternative, adult utopia. Away from the bell jar that our lives have become.

  Until, two weeks before I start the course, you insinuate yourself into the picture, and feeble, foolish me, I can do nothing to stop you.

  You are lying on the chaise longue, poring over the prospectus with an interest I have rarely seen roused outside the borderline pornographic.

  ‘Have you seen their studios?’ you coo. ‘Bloody fabulous.’

  I glance at the photographs of vertiginous sculptures, strange ceramic heads, canvases that stretch two men high and a room wide. ‘I don’t do art,’ I point out, a silent How many times? added on for good measure.

  ‘I know,’ you say. And then you fix me with a look that is usually reserved for menace and magic, for going to town dressed as warlocks, or scrumping apples from Mr Hegarty’s house. And I feel the sharp prick of a pin to a bubble before the words even leave your lips. ‘But I do.’

  The words hang, tangible, touchable things in the stale air between us, before I swipe at them, try to make them disappear.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Deadly.’

  And I can see from the set of your jaw and the wildness in your eyes that you are. You have come up with a spell, spun gold from straw, and now you are going to seize it, regardless of who might get harmed by your magic.

  ‘But this . . . this is my life,’ I protest, words – the very thing I am supposed to excel at – failing me, as if to prove your point. ‘You can’t just – just glom on.’

  ‘I’m not “glomming”. That’s not even a bloody word.’

  ‘Like you’d know.’

  ‘Oh, please. Because I’m so old?’

  ‘You’re nearly forty,’ I point out.

  ‘Exactly.’ You wave a hand triumphantly. ‘So it’s high time I went back and finished what I started. While I’m still in my prime. I don’t want to be bloody Gauguin, waiting till I’m dead. Or – or Van Gogh, having to top myself to be appreciated. What’s the point in that?’

  ‘Well, you’ve already fucked that one up.’

  You raise an eyebrow, and I can’t tell if this is in disgust or appreciation that I’ve finally been able to mention it, the elephant that has kept us both trapped in this room, this house. But I am not apologizing. And I am not backing down.

  ‘Who says you’ll even get in?’ I say, clutching at cruel straws.

  ‘Well, thank you for the vote of confidence.’ But you’re not backing down either. ‘If I do get in, I’m going.’

  And that, it seems, is your last word on the subject, so I stamp upstairs to lock myself in my room, all the while incanting a secret prayer that you are actually shit after all, or that the course is full, or that you are deemed too oddball even for an art department.

  But of course there is no genie, and none of my wishes come true. And so, on 5 September 1991, you drive us both to the campus off East Road, park your brand-new secondhand bright-yellow Beetle haphazardly and illegally in the staff car park, and then stand at the foot of the entrance wearing false eyelashes, dungarees and a lurex boob tube, while I wear black Gap, and an air of resignation as heavy as my reading list.

  ‘Isn’t this marvellous?’ you gush.

  ‘The cat’s pyjamas,’ I lie.

  But if you know I am mocking, you ignore it. Instead, to my complete mortification, and the confounded and dumbfounded looks of our peers, you link your arm in mine.

  ‘We’ll be the Queens,’ you say.

  ‘Of what?’

  You look at me then as if I must be mad, or stupid, or both. ‘Of Bloody Everything, Di,’ you say. ‘Of Bloody Everything.’

  The Runaway

  December 1992

  I expected a bang, a car crash; a year of embarrassment, tantrums and absurd entanglements that I would have to somehow extricate you from. But instead the twelve months pass with, if not a whimper, then at least remarkably less drama than I know you are capable of creating.

  There were moments, of course.

  The time you told a girl on my course that my father was the Aga Khan and she – all goggle-eyes and high hopes – believed you.

  The time you turned up to collect me from a Hills Road house party, but instead of waiting outside as instructed, as begged, waltzed in and got hot-knife high with a boy I had kissed out of boredom in the downstairs bathroom just an hour before.

  The time you posed nude in the refectory for some kind of guerrilla life drawing class, itself a level of pretension, of ‘look at me, look at me’ that I had come to expect and abhor from the art department, but now with the added awkwardness of listening to whispers about your arse, your tits, the slits on your wrists that, instead of hiding under beads or bangles, you bared as some kind of badge of honour.

  But Toni was right, college has been good for both of us. We find new things out about ourselves, new talents. For you, a loathing of landscape, a love of sculpture; an affinity with and ability to handle clay that your tutor declares instinctive and inspired. While I find that I have an exceptional ability to copy-edit; to correct and corral the words of others. Control I feel I lack in every other aspect of my life can be exercised in the policing of punctuation marks and the balancing of poorly weighted sentences. I learn the rules of grammar: the horror of comma splicing and split infinitives. I learn the skills of rhetoric: the delicious thrill of anaphora and assonance, the satisfying click, click, click of tricolon. I learn the arcane language of typesetters: of widows and orphans, and galleys and rags. My love of books has a purpose now, no longer a mere pastime, a whimsy, a way to dream myself into another world more picturesque, more picaresque than this one. All that reading has made me, it appears, employable.

  And, as we manage to make it through three terms without breaking up, or falling apart, I learn that life – albeit altered, awkward – goes on. I graduate in July with impeccable grades, a three-month unpaid placement at the university press, and a dose of chlamydia from a goth called Niall, a disease that I know now has consequences, but which, at the time, was no more irritating than a mild itch that I put down to nylon knickers and your inability, or refusal, to use the right quantity of Persil.

  By Christmas, though, I am, as you predicted, climbing the walls.

  My placement over, I am back in my pinafore and back stacking shelves for the season. A job made all the more unbearable by poorly worded packaging and the rogue apostrophes that taunt me from the staffroom noticeboard. At home my irritation only increases, and it is me, now, who needs her paws buttered, as I wander aimlessly from room to room, picking up porcelain ornaments and replacing them repeatedly elsewhere, as unable to settle on a mantelpiece arrangement as I am to sit on the sofa and read a book. I haven’t abandoned story – far from it – but the tales I tell myself now take place in bigger towns, in brasher cities.

  Here I am – will al
ways be – Dildo, the weird kid, daughter of the drunk. Here my life is bound to yours by the strings of an apron you refuse to admit to wearing, and I am eyeing the scissor drawer with increasing ardour and regularity.

  And there is another reason to flee.

  Before, I had the promise of escape, of a different life, just yards away down a garden path and through a door. But there is no Narnia now, no Wonderland any more. That is London, I tell myself. Where the streets are paved, if not with gold, then at least with enough for a double room in a shared house in Zone 2.

  And so, after a week of lunch hours spent in the library with a new notepad and a sharpened pencil and an out-of-date copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, I make a list of publishers, ranked by location, name, and whether or not they have rights to any of my preferred authors, and I send them a letter offering excellent references and my dedicated services.

  I get thirty-seven rejections.

  And one offer of an interview, at 11 a.m. on Christmas Eve.

  The editor is called Jude, whom I imagine as some incarnation of Hardy’s stonemason-turned-scholar, only more successful, and less incestuous, and it is him I think of as I call in sick to work, not even flinching as frog-faced Margaret shouts down the line, demanding if I know what day it is; it is him I think of as I pin my hair, and put on pearls – one of the few affectations I admit to borrowing from you.

  ‘He’s probably gay,’ you say. ‘Toni says every man in publishing is gay. Or a massive twat.’

  I grit my teeth. ‘I don’t care if he’s gay or a twat. I just want him to give me a job.’

  ‘And anyway, you might hate it,’ you continue. Then, pointedly, ‘Or they’ll hate you.’

  I don’t rise to it, know what you are trying to do anyway. And it won’t work. I am doing this, I am leaving, escaping. Or attempting to. You are better now – as better as you will ever be, anyway – and I do not need to – cannot – nursemaid you any more.

  And Jude – a woman, as it turns out – doesn’t hate me. And I don’t hate it. The job – at a small house off the Strand – pays peanuts, but it has a literary imprint and a dedicated children’s division, and a vacancy in the wake of a pregnancy that became full-time motherhood.

  ‘You’re not planning children yet, are you?’ Jude asks, leaning on the paper-strewn desk and peering at me from under a polished bob and over the top of expensive and elaborate tortoiseshell frames.

  ‘Never,’ I say.

  She raises an eyebrow. ‘They all say that.’

  ‘I mean it,’ I say. And it isn’t a lie. I swallow my Marvelon every morning along with the vitamins you begrudgingly bought me, so there’s no chance of accidents. No chance of fooling around then fucking up like you did. I am different, I tell myself. And this new life, this new job, will prove it.

  Jude calls within an hour of me clip-clopping painfully through our door on my Dolcis heels, asking if I can start on 4 January. I accept with the same enthusiasm and speed as I accepted that embossed Christmas Eve invitation all those years ago.

  That was my ticket into this small town. This – this is my ticket out. And, to your credit, you manage to swallow your pride down with two glasses of schnapps and offer me your congratulations.

  ‘So I suppose I’ll only see you at Christmas now,’ you say, as we sit pretending to watch a repeat of a repeat of a Two Ronnies special. ‘And birthdays.’

  I could lie. I could say I’ll be back at weekends, that I’ll catch lifts with Toni and spend Sunday in the studio while you carve my bust or plaster my hands or mould me in clay, improbably perfect, and conveniently small. But I don’t want to come back here. Not at Christmas, not at all.

  Instead I manage only a barely truthful, ‘I suppose.’

  Then, a week later, the spare key to Toni’s sister’s flat in Clapton on a ribbon around my neck, I pack my life up into two suitcases and four black bin bags, and myself into the front seat of our car.

  ‘We should do a grand tour!’ you suggest delightedly, as if struck by the same divine inspiration that has you modelling monstrous buttocks at four in the morning. ‘You know, like the Queen? You could wave at everyone. Or give them the finger.’

  I jolt at that, not at your flippant suggestion but at the memory of the back seat of a Daimler, my gloved hand waggling back and forth at the war memorial, at dog walkers, at a woman with a dead turkey in her hands.

  ‘You’re all right,’ I say. ‘I’d rather just go.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ you mutter, and sputter the engine into life.

  There is only one place I want to see, to say goodbye to. And we are compelled to drive past it anyway, sitting, as it does, as a gatekeeper’s lodge to our small world, and the last post to the wider one. But as we turn the corner, I feel my pulse quicken and my eyes prickle and I cannot look.

  You reach out then, place a hand on my leg, as if a sudden need to reassure me has been woken in you. But for all the accord we have brokered, you remain unforgiven and I stiffen, then shake it off.

  That’s why I did it, Edie. Why I was so eager to leave, why I refused to return. It wasn’t just for me, so I could escape what you’d done, what I’d lost. It was for us. Because without this, I told myself, there was no way of moving on, or forward at all. That’s why I didn’t call back when you said you’d locked yourself out and left the gas on.

  Why I didn’t come home when you turned the house into a vinyl paradise when you turned forty-five.

  Why I made you meet me in cafes in obscure parts of the city, inconvenient for both of us, but far enough away from work or my home that you couldn’t easily insinuate yourself into either and beg to be shown round, to stay the night, to meet, and then steal, my friends.

  I did it for us, Edie.

  I blocked that small town from my life with the same determination I had managed to shut out thoughts of Tom. There could be no half-measures or methadone alternative. It was all or nothing.

  And I chose nothing.

  The Treasure Seekers

  May 1997

  There are some people, some places, we lose from our lives without regret or even a glance in the rear-view mirror, discarding them as easily as outgrown shoes or yesterday’s newspapers. The playground peers, the chemistry partners, the boy we once shared a tent, a spliff, a kiss with at a music festival – all of them slip-slide out of our lives with the same unmarked ease with which they entered.

  But others we cling to, hoard in our hearts like treasures in a suitcase. Even when warned to keep our distance we are drawn like moths, all too willing to get our wings burned for the sake of a moment dancing in their bright flames. And, however hard I tried, Tom was, is – will always be – treasure.

  It is April 1997 and I am a coiled spring. The country is poised, primed for newness, brilliance, and I am buoyed along by its boundless optimism and self-belief: about to be promoted, about to open a payslip that will open the door to a one-bedroom flat off the Caledonian Road, about to leave behind the world of shared showers, name-tagged cereal boxes and washing-up rotas. For I love publishing and it loves me. I love the work, I love the purpose, and, more than anything, I love getting lost in the land of story. Every new manuscript is full of promise to me, every front page a step through the wardrobe into what might be a new Narnia. Most, of course, are nothing so majestic; they are derivative, amateurish, riddled with adverbs and an astonishing lack of self-awareness: the belief that anyone can do it. They are chips of pavement mica, nothing more. But every so often there is a gem, Jude tells me, a thing so startlingly original, so wide in scope and accomplishment, so diamond-bright, that it makes up for the hours, the days lost to copycat elves and cloned wizards. And I, treasure seeker that I am, want desperately to be the one to find the Next Big Thing.

  Even in Essex, something strange is afoot; an unnameable electricity prances down the narrow streets and catches on the cobbles. You crackle with it, phone calls to me filled with fine art: finished pieces, a public view
ing, a private commission. And when we meet for morning tea in the Tate you are high on it, so vertiginous I wonder what else you are on, or off.

  ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ I ask cagily. ‘A Bloody Mary?’

  ‘Coffee and cigarettes,’ you say, kissing me on both cheeks. ‘Oh ye of little faith.’

  I pull a face and pull out a chair.

  ‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ you continue, a hand flapping at what could be the waiter, the white-painted walls or the world itself.

  ‘Probably,’ I say.

  ‘Oh God, Di, cheer up, would you?’

  ‘I am bloody cheered,’ I say. ‘I’m ecstatic.’ And it’s not a lie, just that next to you my emotions seem to pale – pastels or watercolours compared to your vivid ink.

  You shake your hair, bright with henna, dismiss my insistence. ‘I was listening to him on some Radio 4 thing last night.’

  ‘You were listening to Radio 4?’ My belief you must have torn up your prescription and dropped something else instead only increases with this improbability. ‘I thought that was for old people.’

  ‘It’s surprisingly eclectic,’ you say. ‘And besides, the telly died.’

  I manage not to roll my eyes.

  ‘Anyway, I was listening to him—’ you continue.

  ‘To who?’

  ‘Bloody hell. Blair. Keep up.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘And he actually talked about the arts. About art. I think it’s going to happen, I really do. There’s something in the air.’