The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  ‘But where have you been?’ I said. I was gripping her hard against me, crying into her shoulder. ‘It’s been such a long time. Where did you go?’

  Wings

  Child’s fairy wings, 55 x 42 cm, white, wire and mesh fabric with silver glitter, bought Hamley’s late 1980s. Made in China. Small hole.

  The year I was five was dedicated mainly to experiments in human flight. I had a pair of white gauze fairy wings and, though I had not yet succeeded, I was convinced that the answer to flying lay merely in a certain tensing of the limbs, the unique propulsion of the torso at the moment you jumped. The arm of the sofa was my launch pad. I would teeter on the edge of it, poised, bending my knees, before leaping forward in breaststroke motion in an attempt to swim through the air. These attempts continued throughout the summer we came to the moth house, as my mother lay upstairs, listless on the mattress, her vitality dissipated by the heat and the self-inflicted tragedy of separation. Her love of frivolity was all played out.

  Mine, however, remained intact. When I wasn’t trying to solve the mystery of human flight, the only thing I viewed with any real seriousness, I spent my days adventuring, discovering new lands in the wild meadows of the garden, or sliding down the steep mountainside of the banisters. I’d make funny faces out of the vegetables piled up on the kitchen table, plunge my small chubby hands into the sacks of lentils in the pantry. Sometimes I would go up to the attic and sit as Fleur and Rufus mixed new tracks, or dance for them as they laughed. Despite my mother’s baffling distance, I was never short of friends in that house, though their faces and names have long gone astray.

  It’s strange, what falls between the cracks of life, those things that slip, silken down the drain only to reappear as you stand, off your face and bawling, in front of a stranger at a party. A girl with red hair in cut off shorts, laughing, with milky white feet. How could I forget her? And who was she?

  It hadn’t been her, of course. She would be old now. But the party guest resembled the young woman enough that in my mushroom-addled brain neurons snapped and crackled, and a long-abandoned memory came to light. There had been a young woman in the house, and that young woman had been my friend, maybe even had loved me. The thought gave me comfort, not just because it led me to reassess that unsettling summer in which my solitary childhood stood in sharp relief, but because my sudden memory of her meant that there could be an answer nestling amongst my wayward thoughts. Events were as recalcitrant as ever, but at least now I felt that an ordering, a cataloguing impulse had started to kick in. Though I was far from a stage where I could place these scenes neatly in an album on a shelf and continue on with the business of living, at least my mind was starting to obey.

  For as Josh shepherded me out of the party, as I sobbed and babbled in the manner of a deranged hysteric from a Victorian novel, arms flailing like Kate Bush, it was remembering my attempts to fly that finally broke through the stubborn mental barriers I had created.

  I had been in the living room, as usual, on the sofa. It must have only been a few days after we arrived at the house, because some of our boxes were still in the hall, which was visible through the large, doorless arch adjoining the two rooms. Bright sun streamed through the windows, though the glass was so murky the light was imbued with a slightly polluted quality, and beams of dust shot through the air at jaunty angles, bisecting the space and providing me with visible targets from where I stood, poised, ready for my first proper flight.

  This time, I decided, I would do it. I had made several unsuccessful attempts, failures, I suspected, because the muscles in my arms had not been sufficiently taut. The key was to stretch both arms and legs at the same time, as you jumped, belly-first, in the direction of the soft rug. Though I hadn’t quite mastered the jump, I felt confident this would be the time. It was merely a question of will. My parents had told me I could do anything I wanted to do and be anything I wanted to be, provided that I wanted it hard enough. Why should flying be any different?

  It took a few moments to dawn on me that they had betrayed me, because I was unconscious. I had overshot my target, banging my head on the side of a bookcase as I fell, belly-first, towards the floor. My left foot glanced a sturdy trunk that was being used as a coffee table, and several mugs and saucers had fallen to the floor and smashed. The almighty crash must have reached the furthest reaches of the house, because when I came to and my vision cleared, there she was, right up close, all anxious big eyes, telling me not to move. ‘Oh, Harmony,’ she said, her accent strange. ‘My little darling, my sweetheart.’ And then she drew me to her breast and rocked me from side to side as I cried over the bump on my head, and for my mother, far away yet just upstairs, and for my bedroom at home at the cottage, snug and safe and peppered in the gold stars she had made with stencils cut from cereal boxes.

  This twenty-year-old memory, a vivid recollection of the young woman and how she had embraced me in the living room after I had fallen returned to me as clear as water as I woke up from my eventual, shroom-addled sleep. The trip lasted about six hours and, after Josh took me home, I finally crashed in the mid-afternoon, unconscious for almost an entire day. In retrospect it was obvious that I had confused some poor, harmless girl at the party with someone I once knew, a previous resident of the commune whom I had long forgotten. The laughing woman near the spider’s web.

  ‘You gave me a hell of a fright,’ said Josh, when I surfaced in search of a coffee. ‘You were like a wild thing. I could barely keep you still. Thank God there was hardly anyone on the bus, they would have thought I was abducting you the way you kept screaming.’

  ‘I can’t really remember that bit. I was quite drunk as well. I remember being in the garden, and then seeing the girl, and then barely anything.’

  ‘It was a pretty bad trip,’ Josh said. ‘You were touching her face. I think she was amused at first but then she started looking freaked out. You were talking about the trees outside, and you kept pointing towards her feet – this was on the dancefloor – and then, for like, no reason at all, you just started hollering. As though you had seen the most horrific thing it was possible to see. You were screaming and screaming, and hyperventilating. It seemed like a panic attack.’

  ‘I’ve had those before.’ I looked away from his face.

  ‘Me too, when I smoke too much weed, but this was full on. I thought I was going to have to take you to A&E to have you sedated. You would barely hold still. You kept yelling about blood. Then the next minute you looked completely blissed out and kept talking about how much you wanted to fly. It’ll be a miracle if you don’t get flashbacks.’

  ‘I’m fine, really. Thank you for looking after me.’

  ‘It’s cool. That party was shit, anyway. I was bored. I’m just glad you’re ok. Come here.’

  He drew me towards him in a hug. His chest felt solid. I rested my cheek against it for a moment and then raised my eyes to look up at him. His hand was in my hair.

  ‘I worry about you, you know.’ His voice was quiet. I could barely hear it over the hiss of the kettle.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ I said into his jumper. ‘I’m not on the dole, I’m making rent, I’m healthy. It’s all good.’

  ‘You just seem so sad sometimes. Why is that?’

  I didn’t know how to respond. Moments such as this, when I felt that he really saw me, only added to my affection for him. I wanted nothing more in the world to be the sort of girl he needed, but sadness rarely tallies with attraction. At least, not for decent men.

  ‘Aren’t we all? I don’t know. I just have days like that I guess. Days where I know I’m not going to be able to get out of bed, and so I just . . . don’t. The mistake is trying to push through it, to get up anyway, to go to work. That’s how you end up weeping in the toilets or hyperventilating in a store cupboard or screaming at a stranger in the supermarket. So I just stay under the duvet.’

  ‘So you’re depressed? Or anxious? Have you seen a doctor? Tried medication?’

&nbs
p; ‘I wouldn’t say I was depressed, really.’ I walked over to the window and looked out at the snarl of Coral’s garden. ‘It was suggested that I try Prozac, or beta blockers. Everyone seems to be on those now, but I don’t think that’s right for me. It seems a bit. I don’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I suppose I feel that I’d be dulling what is ultimately a justifiable sadness, you know? It’s common to feel sad. It’s a logical reaction to the way the world is. Why would I try and mute it? It’s not as though it’s affecting my life in any big way.’

  ‘You dropped out of uni, Harmony.’

  In many ways, I thought, university had been the saddest place of all. Almost everybody was depressed. A battered copy of The Bell Jar sat in every chunky knit-wearing female student’s pristine leather satchel. And then you had the poetry. Later, after graduation, one of these girls would put her head in a plastic bag and fill it with helium in a bathroom in Berlin, thereby giving the others permission to shrug off their own undergraduate sadness. Things hadn’t been so bad.

  ‘Yeah, well. University’s not for everyone. I’m ok, you know. I have bad dreams and sometimes I feel a bit low, but who doesn’t? Anyway, I need to get ready for work.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to piss you off. You just seem lost to me. And you’re so weirdly reticent. You’ve hardly told me anything about where you grew up or how or what it involved.’

  What to tell him? My mother’s peripatetic inability to settle meant an upheaval every few months. For years we zigzagged up and down the country as she followed a series of boyfriends with hair and politics of varying levels of ridiculousness. Curiously, her avowed feminism never prevented her from believing that men, ultimately, held all the answers. These boyfriends were rarely unpleasant, eccentric yet predictable in their attire (hemp hareem pants, skullcaps dotted with little mirrors, collarless shirts) and usually stoned. I didn’t show much interest in them beyond realising that their flippant entry into our lives would signal an inevitable move and the usual shedding of things. With every man she met, whether at a drumming workshop or an organic farm collective, it was a case of serendipity, but to me, it spelled disruption – a new school and a new, scratchy uniform bought with vouchers from the council. Not to mention the things left behind – not just the Japanese lampshades and potted plants, the jam jars of beans and spices filled from the health food shop, the flotsam and jetsam of our improvised household, but my things, too. We would only ever take as much as would fit in the bus, the car, or whatever the latest man drove, and even these got lost as soon as summer came around and they embarked on their inevitable summer trips to Tuscany, Massachusetts or Morocco and I was dropped off at my grandmother’s house for safekeeping. I liked it there – it was tidy, and cosy, and normal. She would tut and fret over me and make me cocoa when I woke crying out in the small hours from night terrors, then read to me until I finally went back to sleep. Hers was a life of Radio 4, cheese and crackers, rose pruning and McVitie’s Gold bars. I loved being with her, but as soon as I got settled I was whisked away again.

  In this, I think, partly lay my reasoning for returning to the London house. Its thick stone walls offered stability, a meaningful link to the belonging and history so many people find in the tangibility of things, that my parents never could.

  Instead I said, ‘There’s not so much to say, honestly Josh. I’m just not a very interesting person.’

  He rolled his eyes, reaching a hand out and using it to cup the back of my head. I turned my face up towards his, but he let go with a grin.

  ‘Now bugger off to work and promise me you won’t do any more hallucinogens for a while.’

  I laughed as far up to my eyes as I could manage, and went to put on some shorts, determined to find out the identity of the young woman who had held me so tenderly. I was going to go downstairs, into the room where a much smaller me had once naively attempted to defy physics and take flight, and I was going to speak to Coral.

  Winter 1984

  I am sitting shivering by the gas fire in my coat when he comes. The potential screw has been hanging in the atmosphere for weeks, building to the point where I think I will go mad if I don’t have him. He has made me an expert archivist. When he’s with me, I file every look and remark away for later when I am alone in my room. He has given me no guarantee and it is this possibility without a promise that has made me desperate. I would have gone to bed with him weeks ago, but he is older and also, married, so he decides when.

  It’s a Tuesday in mid-December. Stella and Coral have gone to get ivy and holly on the Heath, to decorate the house. Mikey is who knows where, the others working or at school. My face is so close to the warmth of the heater that I imagine it has turned red-raw. The ends of my fingers are itchy with chilblains and they struggle to turn the pages of the hardback I have borrowed from the library – a Czech novel about an adulterous surgeon that Stella recommended.

  He says my name and I look up from it. Cold, grey light creeps in from the window leaving the room’s corners in shadow, and he is slightly backlit standing there, in a stiff denim shirt. He’s unshaven so that in the half-light I have to squint to catch his smile.

  I feel as though I am standing on a platform and a perverse urge is telling me to jump in front of the oncoming train.

  He says my name, just once, and holds out his hand. I stand and walk over to him, taking it. He pulls me towards him, so that our lips almost collide, but he doesn’t kiss me. ‘Come upstairs.’ A murmur into my mouth.

  We pass the door of the room in which he sleeps with his wife and continue up to the top of the house. As he climbs the stairs I watch the muscles in his broad back, the curl of his dark hair brushing his collar. I find myself wishing that I had had a drink.

  He strolls into the centre of my big room and stands a few feet from the foot of the bed. It’s lighter in here than it is downstairs. I spent two days last week whitewashing the old psychedelic wallpaper, obscuring its oranges and browns. It still smells of fresh paint.

  He turns to face me, grins. And then without knowing how, I am in front of him and I can hear my breath as he bends down and kisses me not on the neck but on my collarbone, with one hand pulling down the collar of my dress and jumper to present the skin to him, the other in my hair. I make a sound like I’m in pain and feel momentarily embarrassed. He takes my greatcoat by the lapels and pulls it off.

  When I lay on my bed imagining what it would be like it was not like this. I saw us leaping on each other demented. Bryn is infuriatingly slow, deliberate. Holding my coat, he walks over to a chair and folds it over the back. I am shivering. There is no heating in this room and my dress, over which I wear a jumper pocked with holes, is only thin cotton. He walks back towards me and puts his hands on my wrists, raising my arms in the air. As he does this he finally lets my mouth meet his and I make another noise as he chews on my lip, trying to bring my arms down to put around him, but he lifts them up again and then his hands are at the ribbed edging of my jumper, coaxing it over my head, taking the time to smooth the static of my mussed-up hair once he has pulled it off. Again, he walks away and puts the removed garment on the chair.

  I lower my arms, which are pink and stiff with goose pimples, and make to undo the dress buttons at my neckline, which hovers just above my breasts. He shakes his head no, returning his face to my collarbone, his other hand kneading my buttocks. My legs wobble but I continue standing there as he starts to undo the row of buttons on the front of my dress, which reach from just above the bow of my bra to the hem that skims my ankles. He approaches each button one by one, and even when the dress, now undone to the waist and exposing my nipples stiff against the lace that holds my breasts, is loose enough for him to pull it over my head, he kneels so that he continues to undo them with the same seriousness as before.

  By now I am desperate, and the sound of my breathing seems to fill the still, white room. He is approaching the bottom third of the dress, pushing each side of the fabric aw
ay to reveal my body in the centre. At the tops of my thighs he pauses for a moment, then before I have time to react places his hand between my legs as though he is checking something. For a brief moment he moves his thumb there in a circle, grazing the cotton, as I buckle.

  I say, please.

  He takes his hand away, and, once all the buttons are undone, takes my arm through each sleeve and goes to place the dress on the chair. I stand there in my underwear.

  ‘Turn around,’ he says. He unclasps my bra. Again, I wait, with my back still to him. Then I feel his fingers hook under the elastic at the top of my underwear as he pulls it down so it is scrunched below my buttocks, exposing them. He leaves it there for a moment, then bends to pull the knickers to my ankles. I step out of them.

  He manoeuvres me over towards the bed and pushes me downwards, his body heavy on top of mine, kissing me. He traces his fingers over the thin skin on my ribs as he shuffles down my torso past the convex curve of my navel. He places his hands on the bones of my hips, and I know then what he is about to do, though it is not something Pete, or any of the other boys at home, ever did.

  And then, it is happening. I can feel his breath on me, then, his mouth. And as I lie there, my body twisting as I try to be quiet, I envisage Stella standing in the room, still at the foot of the bed. She is watching, her calm eyes taking me in as her husband moves above me.

  I open my eyes to meet hers. And this is when I come.

  Wedding Coat

  Cream stranded mink fur coat, size medium, fully lined in satin. Two pockets, high collar, metal fastenings. Sleeve length (underarm to cuff): 16”; length (shoulder to hem): 32”. Hand-stitched label on interior reads: ‘Estella Young’. Date unknown, though we estimate pre-WWII.