The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  Pocket contains remnants of confetti, crumpled receipt for 1 x bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne (£12) from The King’s Head, 115 Upper Street, Islington N1, 22nd April 1984.

  ‘I knew you’d be back,’ said Coral, who was unexpectedly practising some yoga poses in the middle of the floor, ‘so I bought some cans.’ She walked across the room to the refrigerator and got two. The dressing gown she usually wore – a grotesque, fluffy monstrosity covered in pink hearts and surely intended for no girl older than a teenager – had gone. Instead she wore a pair of pyjama-like batik trousers that hinted at her bohemian past, paired with a stained grey marl T-shirt, which didn’t. She handed me the can with a gap-toothed grimace.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You want to know about your parents. Why else would you be back here? Though I don’t know why you’re asking me. They’re the ones with the answers.’

  ‘I told you,’ I sat down and opened my can. We both listened to the hiss. ‘Stella won’t spill, and I’m not sure I quite trust either of them to tell me the truth about anything.’

  ‘Well you’re not wrong there, lass,’ said Coral. ‘Your ma was always secretive, even when she first came to live with us. Barely out of school, she was.’

  ‘What was it like when you came here?’

  Coral took a breath. Though her face was as static as it usually was – she rarely smiled – she looked a little pleased that I had come around again in the hope of mining her past. Though she would never admit it, I imagined she was very lonely down here in the dingy must of the ground floor, and liked having a visitor. She shuffled over to the window and pulled aside the heavy faded curtains and their net counterparts to let in some much-needed light. It reminded me briefly of how, when I was a teenager and my mother happened to be in one of her more functional spells, she would come over all maternal and march peremptorily into whichever bedroom I had at the time and throw open all the curtains, saying, ‘Let’s shed some light on the situation, shall we?’

  ‘When I broke in through that front door this street was half squats and half normal working families,’ said Coral, pressing her finger against the cold of the pane.

  ‘Now, see that house there?’ Like the one we stood in, it was grey stone and white stucco, a natural counterpoint, the only difference being that it was double-fronted.

  I nodded.

  ‘Old couple sold it last year for £2.5 million.’

  She gave a low whistle in the absence of mine.

  ‘These houses were crumbling, lass. No one wanted anything to do with them. So we occupied. By the late seventies, squatting had become a movement, though the counter-culture was mostly dead. The seventies felt like one long hangover.’

  ‘I thought people said that the sixties only really happened to most people in the seventies?’

  ‘You could say that, but it masks an inconvenient truth, which is that most people abandoned the dream of alternative living pretty soon after it got started. Now, idealists like your dad would argue that it was because it got co-opted by the mainstream. I always liked that about him. Thinks the best of everyone. He’s innocent, Bryn. But really, the commitment was never there.’

  I wondered momentarily if Coral had once had a thing for – or even with – my father. Certainly her vehemence towards Stella seemed to excuse him completely of any wrongdoing, although to me it was patently clear that the entire commune project had been his idea from the beginning.

  ‘But your commitment was there.’

  ‘It was, yeah. It’s why we petrified. You remember this house from your early childhood, what, twenty years after I first came here? It had hardly changed, I can tell you. The clothes a bit, and the music definitely, but everything else was mostly the same. Once a hippy, always a hippy, I suppose. The newspapers used to call us herbivores.’

  ‘What happened to everyone else?’

  ‘Dinner parties. There were lots of dinner parties at that time. Vegetable gardening. People bought up and renovated, rediscovered monogamy and nuclear families. The setup your ma always wanted really. Picked their causes from the broadsheets. Moved to the country. You know, like your parents.’

  Coral made a suggestive face and I thought I might as well say it.

  ‘So this free love stuff you were talking about last time – were they involved in that?’

  She laughed a dry, dirty laugh, and winked.

  ‘Your mother was always a priss. Even before they got married. I was there, you know.’

  ‘At the wedding?’

  ‘Yeah. Your gran and grandpa were there too. She looked like she’d sucked on a lemon. Your ma wouldn’t even wear a dress. Had on this silk jumpsuit and a huge, white fur coat.’

  ‘I remember the pictures.’ My mother had looked as happy as I have ever seen her, her eyes framed by deep, beautiful laughter lines as she stared up at my father on the steps of the registry office. I used to love that coat. Her ‘wedding coat’, she called it. Sometimes, when I was little and she went out at night, leaving me with a boyfriend or a babysitter, I put it on and got back into bed, pulling the long, soft tufts of fur against my nose and face, until I fell asleep.

  ‘The thing about your ma was . . . ’ Coral stopped to light a cigarette, then exhaled roughly. ‘She always dressed the part but it never quite rang true. She looked incredible but her heart was never in it. I think she always felt a slight regret at the life she chose when she ran off with your father.’

  He’d been wearing a suede waistcoat and paisley scarf. I remembered her telling me that. She’d come down with some school friends, they’d bunked off sixth form for the day, and there he was. Leaning on a statue with a joint. Bearded, older (he was thirty-four), off his tits on drugs, and wearing a waistcoat.

  ‘He seemed like he knew things,’ Stella had said once. ‘I wanted him to teach me everything, to show me a different way of living and being.’

  ‘You never answered my question about the free love,’ I said.

  Coral kissed her teeth. ‘We were all into it, before Stella came. Your mother wasn’t. She insisted on monogamy. Your da’ found that somewhat difficult, but he agreed. They used to argue like nothing I’ve seen before, and then they used to screw like nothing I’ve heard before. Your mother was a screamer, in both senses of the word.’

  ‘So they didn’t see other people after they got married?’

  ‘Well, that’s a long story, love.’ She looked taken aback, for a moment, at the sudden term of endearment.

  ‘I want to know. I want to know why it all went wrong and why we had to leave for good. Why I can’t remember anything about why. What did Stella do that was so bad?’

  I thought of that last day, at the end of the summer. Being rushed into the back of the car with only a few things. She had driven almost to the bottom of the hill before she had pulled over and let out a long howl.

  ‘I’m not surprised you blocked it out, to be honest. It was awful for all of us.’ Coral took a swig of her can.

  ‘She never talks about it, you know. I’ve asked her over and over what went on but she says it’s better that I can’t really remember. I think she feels responsible . . . ’

  ‘As she should.’

  ‘I need to know, Coral.’

  ‘It’s difficult to talk about.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’m not sure it’d be good for you, either. To you I probably seem like this messed-up, bitter old crone. But I know you. Cared for you. I’ve known you since you were wee. And you’re doing all right. In many ways that is a miracle. I have a responsibility.’ Coral walked across the room to the window and looked out again. I was struck by how light it was out there compared to the gloom inside, where it was dark and almost cold despite the thirty-degree temperatures we’d been having. Silence, then:

  ‘Will you do something for me, Harmony?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want you to go and visit someone in hospital. As you’ve probably guessed, I don�
�t much like to go outside. But there’s someone I promised I’d check up on, and I’d like you to go and see him and tell me how he’s doing. Will you do that for me? And in return, I’ll tell you everything from the beginning. Though we may need something stronger to drink next time.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘His name’s Mick. Mikey. He used to live here, too, until he lost the plot. If nothing else, it’ll be a lesson for you in why you should never experiment with hallucinogens.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ I said, and explained what had happened at the party, and about my sudden memory of the red-headed girl. ‘It was really weird,’ I was in the process of saying, but I stopped when I realised that Coral’s face had gone hard, the plaster of her features set.

  ‘Are you ok?’

  ‘I’m fine. But it’s time you went.’

  She scrawled down the address of the local psychiatric hospital and told me to ring them to arrange a visit. At the door I paused.

  ‘Do you miss it? How it was before I mean?’

  ‘I miss the people. Well, some, not others.’

  I turned to leave but she spoke again. ‘I wouldn’t worry about what happened with the mushrooms. Weird trip at the best of times, without what you went through.’

  She gave me a look bordering on compassion.

  ‘Besides, we’ve all seen faces of the dead in those of the living.’

  Bathing Suit

  Child’s swimming costume (label reads: ‘4–5 years’). White nylon with red heart pattern. Frilled skirt attached.

  Mid-morning, and already the air had taken on a lethargic thickness; it was like moving through soup. One of those days where all you could really do was lie naked in a dark room, twisted under sheets that have been run under the tap, moaning. Instead, we sought each other’s company, and the three of us were sprawled across the living room, forcing mugs of hot tea down our dry throats; Lucia stretching and twisting on her back against the carpet like a restless cat.

  ‘Let’s do something,’ she said, with sudden vigour. ‘We can’t just sit around all day.’

  ‘I’m up for that,’ said Josh, ‘but it needs to be this side of the Cally Road. Don’t want to bump into anyone.’ He had called in sick that morning, after a night of heavy drinking. He looked tired. A couple of days’ worth of thick stubble coated his jawline, and there were bags under his bloodshot eyes. He was holding one of the many novelty mugs that various transient flatmates had left behind when they departed. This one was a particularly bad example; a naked Greek-looking eighties Adonis with rippled muscles, cheaply photographed, whose penis became erect when hot water was poured in. Josh hated it and usually pushed it to the back of the cupboard, where we would retrieve it and move it to the front. He hadn’t noticed.

  Lou, whose mug bore the legend ‘I pretend to work, and they pretend to pay me’, sat up.

  ‘The bathing ponds, on the Heath?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Josh, standing up. ‘I’ll get me trunks.’

  ‘Have you been, Harmony?’

  I nodded. I hadn’t, but I disliked feeling like the non-Londoner amongst them. I felt such a fierce sense of home in this small triangle of city, but my territorial familiarity sometimes failed to stand up to in-depth scrutiny. I think I wanted to feel as though I belonged there more than I really did.

  I threw a bikini on and a sundress over it and tied my hair in a messy bun above my head. It was too hot to make much of an effort, and I knew that once the dress came off there would be nowhere to hide. I stared into the mirror, holding a pinch of stomach fat between my thumb and forefinger. The skin around my collarbone was pink and mottled from the heat. I felt the unexpected hope that Josh would like my body when he saw it.

  This was not an insecurity that I had usually felt with men. The academic, whose persistent late-night messages I had begun to ignore, could take it or leave it. It made no odds. There’s a liberating element to a relationship that consists of sex and nothing more, I’ve always found. The only validation you need is that of your body being used as it’s designed to be.

  ‘Ready?’ said Lou, when I walked into the living room. She was wearing a black and white striped short jumpsuit, a wide-brimmed white straw hat, espadrilles and a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. As Josh eyed her from the corner, I looked down at my faded floral button-through dress and mentally declared myself a frump. Lou adjusted her hat to reveal a smooth, white expanse of armpit, and I felt every prickle of my stubby short hairs.

  The chill in the stairwell was welcome relief after the torpor of the flat. As we paused outside Coral’s door while Lou flicked through the post – ‘I’m waiting on a cheque’ – I felt a guilty prod about the errand she had set me, and which I had yet to fulfil. It occurred to me that her weak, alcoholic heart could die of heat in there.

  We bought cider in bottles from the corner shop and walked over Parliament Hill to the Hampstead side of the heath, too hot and panting and desperate for a drink to pause at the top to watch the glittering skyscrapers going up amidst a haze of smog and cranes. It was only upon arrival we realised we had neglected to bring a bottle opener. Josh struggled to open his using a lighter but eventually managed, before placing his hand over my drink. His skin felt rough against my knuckles. ‘It’s a question of leverage,’ he said, as he sliced the side of his finger open and winced.

  It was a weekday, and the school holidays had not yet started, so the yellowed grass was empty of the usual picnickers. We spread out a blanket and sat down, Josh sucking his finger. I looked up at the expanse of bright blue through the unruffled leaves and held the cool of the bottle against my forehead. I felt sticky and unfeminine, coated in a thin film of sweat that I could feel in the follicles on my scalp, matting my hair which would soon inevitably curl, though not attractively. I felt the acute, embarrassed pain of being a girl, these minute flaws we amplify when in the presence of someone whose body we crave. I wanted him, I realised, not only for his tall good looks, indisputable though they were, but for his kindness. I’ll admit it was not a quality to which I had ever paid much attention in a man. All of a sudden it had become compulsory.

  ‘Toke?’

  I took the joint from him and noted the amber inner circles of his irises. In the preceding days I had become acutely aware of the proximity of our bodies in that house. Just knowing he was there, in his room, less than five metres away from mine – bar one sturdy Victorian wall – made concentrating impossible. When we sat talking in the kitchen I found myself absorbed, unable to move my eyes from his face. One night I had a dream – a welcome respite from the endless nightmares – in which he quietly wound the crook of his little finger around mine, no more than that, and I woke up longing to launch myself upon him. Instead, in an attempt to hide my feelings, I became more circumspect, sarcastic even. I wished him luck when he went out with other women, I made loaded references to my exes. I even brought a man back, one evening, and laughed loudly at all his jokes in the hope that he would hear.

  But there he was, in my thoughts, to the extent that it had become almost irritating, like the two lines of a song you just can’t shake. In order to combat this, I was stand-offish, sometimes even rude. Another symptom was that I often became incapable of speech around him. This was a side effect I was unfamiliar with until we held a party, and I ended up nose to chest with him in the packed kitchen, and due to some terrifying combination of alcohol, THC, cocaine and pheromones, was unable to utter a single word. Instead I stood and laughed, laughed right in his face, because it just seemed ridiculous – to want someone that much. I remember my grandfather telling me once that seeing my grandmother for the first time felt like being hit by a tsunami. This didn’t feel like that. It felt like floating on the stillest and deadest of seas. This suspended body felt unrecognisable as my own. It would not obey. There was something wrong with it.

  Lucia yawned. It was too hot to talk, so we sat for a while, dreaming. After some time had passed, she stood up; the stre
tching of her slender arms and the tautness of her muscles drew your eye to her raised chest. All of Lou’s gestures were like this; not mannered, exactly, but somehow theatrical. The movements of her body demanded that you look at her, while remaining at the same time entirely natural seeming. She was completely at ease, whether you looked at her or not.

  In contrast, I cultivated a studied indifference, especially in the presence of men I desired (and even ones I didn’t). I would manufacture nonchalance, ignoring them entirely if I could get away with it. But every movement, every utterance, every slight mannerism was performative, devised entirely for whichever man was present, as though I existed only through their eyes.

  ‘Aren’t we dull? I’m going for a dip.’ Lou shimmied out of her jumpsuit to reveal a plain black swimming costume beneath, cut slightly low on the thigh in a fifties style. As she stretched her pale body she was all angles, her black hair an oil slick on a slab of snow. She saw me staring at it and giggled.

  ‘I nearly forgot,’ she said, rummaging in her bag until she triumphantly produced a white, frilly swimming cap. She put it on. On anyone else, it would have looked absurd, but Lou’s aristocratic air lent her vintage mania and rejection of modern technology a precise authenticity. She was surprisingly tenacious when it came to avoiding the trappings of digital life – no social media, and for photographs, she used disposable cameras which lay gathering dust in her room for weeks until she took them in ten at a time to be developed and our overexposed faces with their blurred features were fashionably revealed. The only way of getting hold of her was via the rotary telephone she had plugged into our landline, or hoping that this would be the week she happened to look at her email. The rotary telephone had been particularly problematic because most companies have electronic menus necessitating the use of a touch-tone phone. Lou got around this by ceasing to check her bank balance.

  ‘Coming?’