The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a columnist, feature writer and editor for the Guardian newspaper. In 2012 she co-founded The Vagenda, a feminist blog which was published in book form by Vintage. In 2014 Rhiannon was short-listed for a press award for young journalist of the year. As a freelancer she has written for publications as wide ranging as Elle, Stylist, the New Statesman, The Independent and Time. She has extensive radio experience, having appeared on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and the Today programme. She was born in Islington, grew up in Wales, spent time living in France and Italy, and has now returned to her birthplace. This is her first novel.

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express

  written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett 2018

  The moral right of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett to be recognised as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland

  towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-912240-14-2

  ISBNe: 978-1-912240-15-9

  Cover design by David Wardle

  Ebook Compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to all those who championed this book and helped to bring it into the world, especially Diana Beaumont, my agent, Moira Forsyth, my editor, and everyone at Sandstone Press. You have all been so enthusiastic and supportive and I so appreciate it. Also I owe a huge debt to my early readers Holly, Sarah, Natalie, Kate, Ed, Siân and Simone not only for their thoughtful comments and suggestions but also for their tolerance of my neurotic cross-examination afterwards. Jessica, thank you for your support and your guidance on the ins and outs of the publishing industry. My friends in the writing group at Shakespeare & Co in 2005-2006 made me believe that one day I might just be able to do this – thank you. I am also grateful to my parents, who are thankfully nothing like the parents in this book and have always showered me with love and encouraged me to write. And most of all, to Tim, my husband, for all you’ve done, including all the times you have allowed me to use “I have a book to finish” as an excuse, and for the few small things that you graciously let me borrow.

  For all of the flatmates, especially the one I married.

  ‘Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present.’

  – George Orwell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Bones

  Summer 1984

  Dolls

  Cheque

  Summer 1984

  Fruit

  Photographs

  Summer 1984

  Slip

  Spider

  Summer 1984

  China Lady

  Harmonica

  Autumn 1984

  'Desiderata'

  Wings

  Winter 1984

  Wedding Coat

  Bathing Suit

  Spring 1986

  Boule

  Book

  Autumn 1987

  Cement

  Sheets

  Spring 1990

  Mirror

  Butterflies

  Summer 1991

  Note

  Blackberry Wine

  Sosmix

  Bear

  Card

  Epilogue

  Landing, in the small hours. The boy man who brought me vanished somewhere, to take or to pick up can’t remember which. Lean against the woodchip, bobbles grazing the softness of my exposed back. Cheap ass party dress, polyester static sticking. Sweat on the back of my neck from other bodies, familiar strangers glimpsed in cloisters and plaster corridors; arts and humanities, history, languages. Their conversations rambling, pretentious: T. S. Eliot capitalism electro ketamine Derrida, chunky jumpers and trilling voices. Music shakes the stairs, a spiral curl like the wet ends of my hair, stained carpets rumble. Hot smoke.

  Then, from nothing, volume set to low. But mouths and limbs keep moving, a silent film on getting wasted. Then, high-pitched whining. Sharp skull dig of almost separate pain. The edges where I end liquesce. Tingling fingertips grab the banister, solid. Sudden, paralysing fear. Nausea. A child tap dancing on my chest, banging out every beat. The tightness of suffocation.

  Sit on the floor that’s what Mum always says. Are you ok? Is she ok I think she needs a doctor. Her eyes are rolling lie her down is there a medic here, no we never invite those twats. What did she take was it some of Johnny’s stuff where is he go find him. Oh Christ she’s being sick now.

  Another drunk girl at a party.

  I’m not her, I’m not. This is terror. I am dying, plunging down the black hole in the middle of the snail shell of the stairs. Drowning in its well of ink. On and on and on for miles and miles, like Alice into her underworld. I dreamed it, the nee naw nee naw of sirens come too late. I know how it ends. I’m ready for it. The sharp intake of breath like a heart patient shocked back to life. The solid, inevitable crunch of ground. The splintering of bone shattering to a fine, dusty powder. Dissolving, like salt.

  Bones

  Beach bucket, red plastic, 16 cm x 16 cm x 16 cm,castle-shaped. Made in China c.1994.

  Assorted rabbit bones (28).

  The scream, if that’s what you could call it, sounded like a cat dying. Or, to be correct: it sounded like the idea of a cat dying (when our cat died, ancient and dribbling, it bolted silently behind the horsehair sofa and would not come out). It was a horrible sound, too protracted to be foxes mating, a noise any Londoner is familiar with. It echoed through the still summer dawn, bouncing and ululating across the half-stuccoed terraces that stand gravely, like balding wedding cakes, along what is, apart from our crumbling black sheep of a building, a very respectable middle-class street. Longhope Crescent was populated by retired newspaper editors, Marxist university professors and one former Labour Party leader – not the kind of people who make such noises, normally. It certainly wasn’t an animal, I was sure about that, but as I came to in a strange bed on my first morning in that house, my mind groping for clarity like fingers in the dark, it occurred to me sleepily that I had heard such a noise before, a long time ago.

  The kitchen, later that first morning. I was making a pot of coffee and Josh, my new flatmate, was putting on his trainers, about to run out the door to work. He was – I would learn later – habitually late, waiting until the last possible moment to roll out of bed and often not even showering before he went. Apparently it’s quite difficult to get sacked from local government, even if you have poor personal hygiene. Especially if you’re in the union.

  I hadn’t seen him since I had moved into the house on Longhope Crescent the afternoon before, but from the stumbling sounds and muffled swearing coming from the hall in the early hours, I gathered it had been a late one. Hungover and in the process of removing a pallid, not-quite-cooked potato waffle from the toaster, he didn’t seem in the mood to talk. But the strange howling sound had unnerved me, though not as much as the answer he gave me did.

  ‘Did you hear that, this morning? What the hell was it?’

  ‘It’s her downstairs,’ he said. ‘Sometimes her dad comes over and shags her.’

  I gawked at hi
m. His accent – northern, scratchy – made the statement sound even more uninterested than his casual delivery, but I suspect he enjoyed shocking me.

  ‘She’s had a hard life, let’s put it that way,’ he said, and went.

  At this point, having just moved in, I had not met any of our neighbours. I knew that they were not ‘like us’, being, we were told by the agency who managed our flat, local authority tenants (if that sounds snobbish, it’s not meant to be, I’m merely stating the facts). Upstairs was a Womanist lesbian with a vegetarian cat who complained about the smell of bacon wafting through the kitchen door (Josh said we were not to give the cat, which he nicknamed Chairman Meow, tuna lest it be sick in the hall again and cause another row) and downstairs was ‘The Screamer’. Our privately rented flat was sandwiched between them and let out for a sum much closer to the market rate, but it had retained something of the institutional ambience that the housing association had created in the years since it had taken over the property – woodchip wallpaper and strip lighting, a Victorian conversion butchered and divided, all false ceilings and that clear, checked glass in the doors that looks like the transparent paper pages of a maths book. Fire door, keep shut. Like I said, a terrible conversion, a tragedy, really. If aesthetics are important to you. If you can afford for them to be, which I can’t.

  That the house was a shadow of its former self was a fact that I had almost shared with Josh when he showed me around as a prospective tenant. He walked me from room to room, not realising that I not only knew the building better than he did, but that the house had been a central part of my identity for so long that his attempt to explain it to me seemed presumptuous. Longhope made me. He was only its custodian, until such time as I saw fit to return.

  It was nothing like I remembered. The patch of concrete out front on which I’d played hopscotch was miniscule; the hall was not cavernous and majestic but shabby, the air dead and musty, as though it had been shut up from the moment Stella and I fled it. The wallpaper was a horror of magnolia woodchip, durable enough to withstand the building’s conveyor belt of tenants. Nor was the house the same as when I saw it in my frequent claustrophobic dreams, and in some ways I was affronted. I had experienced a similar feeling when, as a teenager and after much nagging, my godmother had taken me for a drive past the old place in her car. ‘They’ve changed the curtains,’ I said, insulted. In my childish way I had genuinely and innocently wanted that house to be kept as a perpetual mausoleum to my presence there, and was outraged when I saw this was not the case – I had cried for the entire drive back. ‘I shouldn’t have taken you,’ she said, then. ‘Some things are best left alone.’

  I cried this time, too, though after Josh had shut the door. And all because the bathroom suite was no longer blue and there was a pound shop power shower. When he took me on the tour, I had almost mentioned this fact before checking myself in case I ruined my chances of being accepted. Because who does that? Stakes out a house they lived in long ago? A crazy person, no one you would want to live with.

  How clearly I could remember sitting in that blue bath as a little girl, the sting of cheap soap between my legs and in my eyes, my mother tutting and rinsing – a present from Grandma, and God knows how old – war soap. I did not want him to know my reasons for wanting to go back. I knew that being honest about my childhood there would only create unease between us. We are taught from a young age that to live is to be in a state of constant forward momentum. It’s viewed as suspect to dwell on the past; to move back into it, suitcases in hand, is pure insanity. But I needed to feel that I existed somewhere.

  Besides, the reasons for my presence were too nebulous to be articulated. All I had to go on were the furtive, guilty whisperings of my mother Stella, whose departure from the house when I was little had coincided with a breakdown, and who would clam up or worse, go into a frenzy, every time I probed too deeply, until eventually I learned to avoid the topic, and never mentioned the appearance of the house in my dreams, in which I patrolled the building moving from room to room in the wake of whatever it was I sought. I was in pursuit of someone, or something, that remained elusive. Some scrap, some clipping of a memory long dulled, and I reached out for it, but like a child grasping for its mother’s skirts as she is leaving, I found myself alone, abandoned in the hallway as I stared at my empty palm in realisation that I had clutched only air. Above, the chandelier swung and creaked, as I stood waiting for Stella’s inevitable scream to perforate the dead air. ‘Don’t look! Don’t look!’ She dragged me away, a bundle in her arms as the sirens started.

  After these dreams, I woke in a terrified state, startling and gasping for oxygen as though coming up to the surface of the sea. I did not know the reasons for these nightmares. For months I had felt that somehow the house represented unfinished business. The urge to return strengthened as the dreams became more frequent and my sleep more disrupted. This was during the autumn term of 2010, in the second year of my degree in archaeology and museum studies. During my waking hours, I felt constantly restless, as though every cell in my body was buzzing at a higher frequency. A sense of dislocation, which I now know to be the depersonalisation that is so often associated with trauma, pursued me everywhere I went. And then there was the episode at the party. I had been standing on the landing surrounded by people, smoke and noise, and all of a sudden had the horrifying sensation that a part of me was being ripped away, and that I no longer knew who I was. Even after they had picked me up off the carpet and taken me home and put me to bed, to sleep longer and more deeply than I had in years, it seemed to me that normal service had not resumed. I had been splintered into my component parts and I did not know how to reassemble them. And so I went back to Longhope, the only place that had ever felt unshakeable to me, until one awful day it hadn’t.

  In any case, explaining the episode, and these vague urges to return to the house of my young childhood, wouldn’t have changed much as far as my new flatmates’ initial impressions of me were concerned. Later, when we began to speak with more honesty, Josh told me that he had had reservations about me, as a flatmate.

  ‘I thought you might be a potential weirdo,’ he said. ‘But Lou liked you, so that was that.’

  ‘Why did you think I was a weirdo?’ I said. It became a joke eventually, but at the time I was hurt. I had made such concentrated attempts at nonchalance.

  ‘It just all seemed a bit strange – someone of your age, a student. I assumed you’d be in a student house, and wondered why you didn’t seem to have any friends to live with. I said to Lou – be careful of her.’

  What did he think? That I would attack them? That my sleepless nights, spent sitting in the living room wrapped in a blanket, clutching a mug of herbal tea so hot it burned my hands, were signs of a dangerous instability?

  ‘I have friends,’ I said, with a degree of defensiveness. But the truth was, I didn’t have many. The student part wasn’t strictly true, either.

  As I unpacked that first, bright day in early summer, I found my teenage years in the pockets of an old denim jacket, a jacket my father had bought me sometime in the late nineties, when they were briefly fashionable. ‘You’ll wear this for life,’ he had said at the time, in his Tesco jeans and his Paris ‘68 T-shirt and his cherry red Doc Martens (as if he’d know). In fact, the trend had been fleeting and was only just seeing a resurgence. The ‘creatives’ of East London had decided at some point that year (2011) that looking as though you were raised on a New Jersey turnpike was the last word in cool. I had always vaguely aspired to hipsterdom, hence the jacket’s presence now, but I lacked the angular, androgynous face and figure, and despite a diet consisting mainly of toast, cigarettes and instant coffee, my fleshy thighs remained stubbornly together, rubbing when I walked. Ninety-nine per cent of succeeding as a hipster seemed to involve being thin, and I wasn’t. I craved that effortless spindly lightness that men seemed to like (these days I wonder instead about those men, who seem to like girls that are fragile and breakable,
and take up less of their space). Still, the jacket fitted better at twenty-four than it had at eighteen.

  So, emptying those pockets, my Proustian madeleine was a denim scrunchie and an old newsagent’s receipt for Just Seventeen. It was discarded chocolate wrappers, from when I used to have a bar every day on the way home from school, before my weight became a source of shame and worry, and those tiny plastic butterfly clips in pastel colours, run through with glitter. There were the audition guidelines for a school play, the main part in which I had desperately wanted, and had not got, largely because of what I had been unable to accept was a mediocre singing voice. Instead I was a chorus girl in a fur coat and pin curls. ‘You actually look pretty’, a girl in my class had said to me, ‘when you wear make-up.’ I have worn it every day since.

  Looking at the contents spread out on the dusty carpet, the tastes of my childhood came right back to me. I remembered the fluorescent green, acidic tanginess of Hubba Bubba and how it makes your tongue contract. The saccharine peachiness of Campinos from the vending machine. Home, meanwhile, tasted like the lentil stew that my mother had perfected in the London house and had continued to experiment with long after we moved away. We ate a lot of lentil stew. I can still feel the mealiness of it sticking to the inside of my mouth. It was just about the only thing she could make, and she only made it when she wasn’t in one of her ‘blue’ periods. Most of the time it was I who cooked, following vague instructions mumbled from beneath her duvet. Or else we ate sandwiches.

  Lunch tasted of free school meals, the phrase so often used by newspapers as a marker of deprivation. ‘Seventy per cent of the pupils are on free school meals,’ they’ll report, but to us it just meant that your dad didn’t live with you. (I don’t think Bryn ever sent us much money.) They used to have these bacon burgers – imagine, in this superfood-preoccupied era, such a thing as a burger made of reformed bacon. I loved them, not because they tasted of actual bacon, but because they tasted of pretend bacon, like crisps, or in the same way a banana milkshake tastes like an alien chemist trying to replicate the distilled essence of a banana: banana extra, banana concentrate, with added banana. A pretentious acquaintance had a nostalgic dinner party once, when we were students, and only just discovering that there were things to be nostalgic about. We all sat down and consumed huge quantities of mini pizzas and potato smiley faces and Spaghetti Hoops and Angel Delight, and I’d scoured the aisles of Iceland looking for those fondly remembered, umami-ish bacon burgers, but no luck. They have probably been banned. So I came empty handed, and felt uncomfortable at the canteen memories that were less novelty than daily reality for a child whose mother was governed by mysterious forces that swept in like storms to galvanise and then disable her.