by Olivia Laing
Fortunately she had other treats up her sleeve. She’d booked a table at the River Café. They dressed up properly, eyes, jackets, better shoes. The train went through blueness, golden fields, the swag of autumn laid out on both sides. On the outskirts of London the clouds began rolling in. They had coffee at the British Library, too strong. On the tube a young mother with a wonderful expressive face was talking to a small boy. Is it night? No, we’re just underground. No, I don’t think this is the Highgate Tunnel, I think that’s closed. At Paddington the train rose up into the air and almost everyone got off.
After Ladbroke Grove she looked out and saw the blackened skeleton of Grenfell Tower. Somehow she had not realised how many houses and flats were nearby, how many people must have watched the children at their windows. It was the anniversary of Diana’s death, it was the last day of summer, everyone was talking about what they had been doing twenty years ago, that was how you defined eras, by death and dismemberment. 2017, fire and fascism, she’d never forget it, the first season of marriage, awaking into her adult life so late, just as the world was shutting up shop.
Maybe it wasn’t, a last rose here and there on the road to the Thames Path, the different eras of London Corporation housing, with residents’ gardens and curved deco windows. She held his hand, she had her wallet in her bag, she was capable, they both would die. That was the essence of the birthday, the oncoming inevitability of loss, she tried to mask it, that’s where alcohol was so useful, such a reliable friend. She’d actually given up drinking but she made an exception today. The food kept coming, white peach bellini, squid with chilli, a plate of raw sea bass scattered with pansies, rabbit pappardelle, blue beef, panna cotta like a severed breast, a hazelnut cake, white wine, red wine, espresso. They walked home, hand in hand, kissing by the swans. They were wrapped up in five-pound notes, in their mutual wealth and good fortune, which had arrived out of nowhere, from very unpromising conditions. You cannot be immune to downfall, loss and dirt, Kathy knew, but sometimes an afternoon is separate, its own gold sphere. She got home, felt abruptly nauseous and spent the rest of the evening crouching over the toilet bowl, vomiting everything.
Death, theirs and everyone else’s, was beginning to seem more likely by the day. At some point over the course of the weekend, North Korea detonated its sixth nuclear bomb. People knew because it seemed like an earthquake had happened in Seoul, China, Japan, but actually it was an atomic bomb going off underground. How did you detonate a bomb underground? What kind of space did you need, how did it not destroy everything? These were homemade bombs, a few months ago they were supposed to be impossible for the regime to achieve but now there would apparently be no end to them. The Guardian had six possible scenarios, none of which sounded great, especially considering neither of the two men most likely to press the button were exactly talky, exactly diplomatic, exactly sane. Kathy was in a state of despair, not just for her own life but for all the lovely creatures, humans included, and how honestly nice life could be.
They had gone to the country. It was Sunday morning, she was reading the paper on paper, with coffee, by a fire. There was a deer park outside, maybe 100 little deer with spots on their sides, exactly like Bambi except tick-infested and real, engaging in play antler-wrestling and trotting races and kneeling down to chew and all kinds of other extremely interesting and distinctive deer behaviour. Oaks too, an impeccable landscape that in itself at once depended on and concealed all kinds of colonial atrocities, seemingly natural but totally false, anyway it was beautiful and she was in it and newly awake and disinclined to have to grapple with the potential end of all life. 2017 was turning into a bumper year, a real doozy, everything arse about tit.
In the hotel sitting room the previous night, Kathy had lain on a sofa reading Christopher and His Kind with a carafe of red wine. It was one of her favourite books, she loved little Christopher zipping back and forward between the present day I and the Chris of I am a Camera and 1920s Berlin, reprimanding his younger self and thus subtly burnishing his witty and insightful present-day being. But she kept being distracted by a conversation in the adjoining room. She suggested by mime that her husband close the door, but it wasn’t closable and so instead they sat there, the unwilling audience to an invisible and disheartening play. There were two people, a man and a woman. They didn’t know each other, they appeared to have been drawn into conversation over dinner. The woman was doing most of the talking. She was Scottish, he was Irish, she said, they were soulmates already. He coughed a little laugh, possibly because she had the most piercing English accent Kathy had ever heard. It was impossible not to listen, her voice went echoing through the rooms, you could probably hear it from space, certainly the deer park. She was talking about Japan, how she went to a restaurant in Hiroshima, a very unfrequented restaurant down an alley, no tourists ever went there, the whole menu was in Japanese and when they left all the staff came out of the kitchen to wave them off, it was so sweet. I thought you were her agent, the man said. Her body language seemed so dead, I thought it must be a business relationship. No, said the woman, evidently stung, no, that’s mothers and daughters for you, that’s how they are. I don’t know if you have family (ARE YOU GAY ARE YOU GAY) I don’t know if you have family, children, parents, cousins, but they don’t always like you very much, they think you’re a fool, and you just have to take it on the chin. Her daughter was called Nadia, her daughter was not happy, not to invade her privacy but her daughter wasn’t happy at all, she had a great job in marketing, a terrific job, it was more that she wasn’t happy with her life.
Kathy very much wanted to be back with Christopher and Wystan, picking up boys in Berlin, she wanted shambling Stephen Spender, with his poppy-red face and his demonic little camera, but instead she was being nailed to the wall by this woman’s unhappiness, it was like a juggernaut, it might never stop. It was funny, but also it wasn’t, it was so miserable and fraught. Outside the moon was like milk, the deer chewed steadily, the illusion held, but this was the thing with people, they went at each other and missed, or just as bad collided and stuck. The wreckage was awful. Kathy looked at her husband. She never wanted to say another bad word, though she did twice most days, especially when hungry or tired. Could you learn to be peaceful?
Later, in the car, they were talking about three wishes, just messing around, and she said she wished everyone in the world would be gentle, that was your forties for you, losing your edge, and he said it wasn’t possible. Over the course of the weekend they’d talked about the Terror and whether violence was ever justified, he’d told her about how the Republicans used to have mass-drownings in Royalist villages in France – purity, it was lethal, you had to just let people be. She wanted to do it anyway, find little spaces inside herself and ease them open.
They stopped on the way home to buy roadside flowers, yellow and pink, they had bags of cracked Georgian china wrapped in newspaper, purchased from a dear man with a wobbling head who’d once mended china at the V&A, a job he’d been given because he rescued a cat from a bramble bush in which it had become trapped, and the owner wanted, could this really have been true, to express his gratitude and happened to be the director and thus in a position to gift a job. It had been a good weekend, was the thing, infinite white beaches, infinite blue and grey-green swims, they’d held hands, she’d relaxed, it had felt like something tender and well-worn. Then they got home and saw the deck, painted an unexpected brown, and she’d screamed and screamed. Gentle humans, a new sad dream. It didn’t matter if she made the tea, it didn’t matter how many vases of flowers she arranged, she hurt him, she didn’t have enough self-control, she was moody, nearly insane. She’d never known exactly what she wanted, but now, 3 September 2017, it seemed clear that peace was the only thing. She put the china on the shelf. Just let it all go on. Don’t die. Just let me learn that love is more than me.
*
Knowing is tenuous as a swamp. When Kathy wrote that she was very sick. Her breasts were gone, she
had cancer in six lymph nodes, they were all removed. I’m in the middle of dirt, she’d written. The bodies are thrown in the water. I’m with a girlfriend in a real building. I want to do more than just see. The more flights, the more forgotten.
Death: she’d been in its room, which was somehow also a NatWest bank, and then a large empty space under the ground. In the chambers on either side, other girls, with dirt in their mouths. Dead girls, girls with very white skin, girls who had bled out from razor cuts in the soles of their feet. Kathy used to live inside a fairy tale. Not now. Now she inhabits the upper air, where moods are painful to sustain. The language will be arriving later, she misreads. Language = luggage, baggage, the sadness of rain. Ashbery has died, comma, Ashbery has died.
In the paper she reads about life in a Russian prison. It is like one of her own dreams, the women standing in the cold, forbidden to wear enough clothes, sewing nametags into their coats, dressed in a sickly green, like the nurses in Eurydice. They are woken before dawn, they queue endlessly in the snow, waiting for punishment, watched by cameras, they mustn’t fall asleep. All women are Eurydice, she thinks. The Underworld is always available. One of the women in the piece can hardly walk. Her legs are rotting. She is or rather has been a krokodil addict. Kathy looks up krokodil, a drug invented after her own first-hand knowledge of drugs. A murky yellow liquid that mimics the effect of heroin. But addicts pay dearly for krokodil’s cheap high. Wherever on the body a user injects the drug, blood vessels burst and surrounding tissue dies, sometimes falling off the bone in chunks. Sometimes people say Kathy is not a realistic writer, that she is gratuitous in her effects, but she can’t help feeling they are walking with their eyes closed. She didn’t make the dead girls up. Or the prisons.
*
The era of the private pool has ended. Kathy has returned to the democratic republic of verruca, the damp Daffy Duck plaster in the changing room. Since Kathy, happy, is also fat, Kathy has decided she’d better reacquaint herself with exercise. It has always been a passion, physical transformation. She has tried many sorts, starvation, body-building, she has been ripped, emaciated, carved and pumped. The protruding bone thing worked when she was younger, but what she would like to manifest now is total health. Death is passé, there is too much death in the air, she’d rather reek of well-being. At the pool, which is an echoing glass box parked at the intersection of two streets, she walks across slippery tiles, assessing lanes. Regular is fine. It’s a regular day, in regularly damp September. The bombs are a little more likely but she has closed her mind to that. Down the steps, briskly. It is Kathy’s experience that there is always a man in the pool and the man will always wait until you have almost reached where he stands, adjusting his goggles and staring blankly, and then he will take off, kicking hard, giving you an eyeful of chlorine and feet and then proceed down the lane in erratic crawl, not letting you pass. There are exceptions, of course. Today, each time the man gets out another man gets in. They pass each other on the steps as she ploughs determinedly up and down, cutting her furrows, a screw-kick tilting her leftwards beat after beat. She tightens her abs, she makes herself a line that flies, she watches the clock, drives herself on. It’s raining, outside, but she isn’t really anywhere, losing herself in repetition, in muscular effort. She swims a kilometre and gets out, not panting at all, even though she nearly had an asthma attack that morning running up two flights of stairs. Maybe swimming isn’t really exercise. It’s the boys’ bodies she likes, the twinks in goggles with long legs and triangular backs. She cruises idly, a disaffected shark.
On her way home, Kathy crosses several roads, waiting if there’s a car, running if there’s room. Halfway home, she is startled to discover that a car, instead of braking slightly to let her by, has instead accelerated. She runs but he keeps driving, steering straight at her. For a second they make eye contact. A white man, 50s, glasses. You fucking twat, she screams. Another man says something, but she is ten paces away before she realises it was take his number plate, and by then it’s too late. Kathy’s husband is standing in the street when she gets home but he is not interested in her story, not solicitous and alarmed as she’d expected. She was planning on playing it cool, but since he is unbothered she finds herself underlining the danger she was in, an exchange which is unsatisfactory on both sides. Bye bad love, he says to her as he leaves. She suspects he’s going deaf but he denies it, he is absolutely and completely certain that it’s just he can’t hear her through the wall/over the tap/the tumble dryer/the washing machine, and anyway doesn’t she know she speaks quietly and very fast. What, she says and puts her hands over his ears. I can’t hear you, what did you say?
She forgot her goggles so she had to hold her neck up so now it hurt. Cause and effect, quite simple. People were told Brexit would be good so they voted for Brexit and now all the EU citizens would be sent home, according to a leaked document. Apparently Jacob Rees-Mogg would be the next Prime Minister, he went on Good Morning Britain and explained pleasantly that he thought abortion should be illegal even for rape and that he would like to ban gay marriage. Kathy hated everything, her head hurt even after two coffees, she couldn’t abide smiling men policing women’s bodies, smiling men deporting immigrants, smiling men telling smiling lies on daytime television, it was all so tawdry, the endless malice of the polite right. Her back hurt, her spine hurt. At the weekend she was going to a party with people who had openly praised Enoch Powell, at the weekend she was going to a party with people who had said of refugees crossing to Greece, it’s ridiculous, they should just bomb the boats. That was when she knew Trump was going to win, that was when she knew the country would vote Leave. Her head was breaking into pieces, she lay down, got up, was violently sick and subsided into a gentle, unexpected sleep.
The headaches lasted days. The left side of her body felt separate from the right, maybe she was having a stroke, maybe a tumour had activated in her brain. What she knew about illness was that it went on mostly beneath the waterline, you didn’t really know the extent of damage until it was too late. The interior of her pelvis was a mess of scars, anything could be travelling through her lymph, accumulating, coalescing, bent on its own malignant work. Anyway she went to London, nauseous and wobbly. She couldn’t find her sunglasses, she had to face the world bare-eyed. The orange socks were a compensation, they made her feel safe. At King’s Cross she took the Metropolitan line to the Barbican, dark into light, a scattering of rain, and walked through the underpass to the cinema.
Outside she met an estate agent in a denim shirt and expensive plimsolls, with dark floppy hair. I’m not really an estate agent, he told her, I studied geography. Five people in our office went to the Courtauld. I’m a real Barbican geek. Kathy was also a real Barbican geek. She loved that building. It was the future and the past entwined. She couldn’t afford the flat, not really, but she knew it was supposed to belong to her. It was on the third floor, they went up in an elevator, no piss, everything was concrete and groovy, neither sleek nor decayed, just there and amiable and impassive. The flat was perfect, a peach. One single room, with an enormous window opening onto a concrete balcony full of plants. There was a school beyond, the first or maybe second day back children racing in circles and screaming. Kathy could live with that, also basketball courts and towers, she was a fan of dense and segmented out-in-public lives. There was a bed tucked discreetly in a corner, fine, and a kitchen that can’t have been touched since the day the builders moved out. F2A, the estate agent’s particulars said, with an original Brooke Marine kitchen, fitted for a yacht. Everything shipshape, with the abundant pleasures of the needful and compact. There were cupboards by the front door, you opened one and found your post, you opened the other and deposited your trash, which was swiftly removed. Kathy had always wanted to live in a Heath Robinson house, she was frantic to have it, even the taps were dotable and dear, little stainless-steel rabbit ears.
All the rest of the day she added up numbers in her head. They couldn’t afford
it, or they could afford it but not if anything happened, like interest rates or illness or a compelling holiday. Anyway she was wary of disrupting their happiness, capsizing contentment, scuppering the perfectly adequate ship of their current house in which they both generally spent every night. Would it be strange to part so soon? Kathy always claimed she wanted a home, but actually she had a mania a genuine addiction for dividing her life between two places, she couldn’t help it, it was how she was built. A migrant bird, she was compelled to fly from town to town, wheelie case in tow, always lacking one or another essential implement, a charger, jacket, umbrella, scarf.
On her way home she met Charlie for tea at the BL. Just before he arrived – oh my God, I’m 127 seconds late – the estate agent’s particulars got whisked up in a little breeze and were swept across the plaza. A passing man trapped them impressively between his knees. I saw the whole drama Charlie said, and kissed her in a cloud of patchouli. Charlie’s patchouli was made by nuns, it was very exclusive. He and her husband and Joseph were the best-smelling men she knew, no one else came close. Furthermore Charlie had a very covetable umbrella, orange with a bamboo handle. When she finally got home some hours later she realised her husband had the same model but in black, lurking invisibly in the umbrella well in the hall. Her phone, which never ever rang, had rung perhaps a hundred times. Mercury must have been in acceleration, she thought, people she hadn’t heard from in months were suddenly frantic to be in touch. So r u married now, Lili asked. You canny coo, Stuart said. She told everyone about the flat. Lili’s son wanted sneakers for his birthday, he loved Vans, she promised to source rare ones at Dover Street Market. She was experiencing one of those occasional upswells of love, when she suddenly felt satiated on a neurological and also soulful level, enough and not too much pleasant information saturating the synapses in her brain. Kathy in the autumn, Kathy midway, Kathy who has come home, who has enough to be going along with and who must now decide how to spend the small remaining days.
