The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  The smells are less tangible. I know in theory what it should smell like, a nineties childhood: Impulse body spray and Matey bubble bath, and too much Lynx (clinging to the skins and clothes of boys who wanted us to want them while at the same time hating and fearing us and our strange bodies) but I can’t raise any of these memories. The only smell I recall is the one which, all summer, emanated from the utility room. We’d spent a day at the beach – a secret beach, I had called it, because along with my mum’s friend Susan and her daughter we had driven for miles through windy country lanes, eventually parking next to a bank of sand dunes. From there we had walked for what seemed like miles, across the dunes, until we reached a stretch of unblemished sand. I can still see it now: the sea sparkling in the sun as I ran towards it, seven.

  But the smell wasn’t the sea, not quite. On the long trudge back to the car across the dunes that hundreds of rabbits had made their home, Sue’s daughter lagged behind, pausing to pick things up and dropping them in her bright red bucket. It wasn’t until we got home that we realised she’d been collecting bones. The bucket was full to the brim with little rabbit bones, bleached white by the sun but browning at the edges. There was even a skull, beaky and bird-like without its distinctive ears. Later, after tea, Susan’s daughter got in the car and forgot them, leaving them to rot over August in the utility room, producing a smell that I could only describe as decaying seawater. So there it is: my childhood smells like a bucketful of rabbit bones. It’s not ideal. Strange, though: I cried when my mother threw these precious found objects away.

  ‘Do you ever feel an overwhelming sense of sadness that you’ll never be a child again?’ I once asked Lou, after I had been at Longhope Crescent for a month or so and had got to know her better. I was thinking of the denim jacket, which I was wearing, and how, instead of making me look fondly back on my teenage years like someone older, wiser, thinner, it just made me feel sad for the things I had lost.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Lou, smoking a fag out of the window. ‘It’s normal, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I thought there was something quite feeble about it.’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Like sometimes, when I was a teenager, and even now when I’m being particularly negative, I sort of wish I could just check into a hospital, maybe a psychiatric ward, maybe for exhaustion, and just be looked after for a bit, or possibly forever. Then I wouldn’t have to think any more, and people would feel sorry for me, and visit. It’s pathetic.’

  Lou looked at me. ‘I’d say that’s pretty normal, darling. Maybe you’re having a quarter-life crisis.’ She waved her hand at a pile of newspaper supplements lying haphazardly on the kitchen table. ‘Aspiration-fuelled anxiety. Call up the papers, they’d be all over it. The “lost generation”, that’s us. Or what was it one of them said? The “fuck it” generation. Fucked. We’re fucked.’ She said this almost jubilantly, carefully enunciating every letter of the word with pleasure, but mixed with a hint of derision that implied that to have any kind of crisis whatsoever was unbecoming.

  ‘Ha.’ I walked over to the window.

  ‘It’s the boomers, of course, bringing us up to think we’re such special fucking snowflakes. And they sneer at us. We were raised by people who were never hugged as children. Our grandparents’ generation were practically Victorians. Why else did they have the sexual revolution, the summer of love? They wanted the affection they never had as kids, ergo they were all nailing each other. The boomers are a generation of casualties.’

  ‘I was hugged as a child,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you were. We all were. Probably too much. That’s the point, isn’t it? They didn’t want to make the same mistakes that their parents did, so they smothered us with love and attention and told us we could be whatever we wanted to be. And now they say we’re entitled and idealistic and they resent us. They resent us for having the love that they never had, even though they were the ones giving it. Well, I resent them.’

  She put her fag out, as I did a rapid mental audit of how much I had told her during those first, fast-talking coked up nights in the kitchen, when she told the story of her childhood and I skimmed the surface of mine. That my parents were self-styled bohemians, that we had lived in a commune, though not that it was in this house, and that they had divorced. Nothing, as far as I remember, about all the pain that had played out within these very walls, Stella’s removed sadness as a result of it, the wounds it had left on me. ‘Where did you go after the commune?’ Lou had asked. ‘Everywhere,’ I said. ‘Stella never settled.’ I told her nothing about how we had left, had tried to be a family, only for my mother to flee back to Longhope, taking me with her for those few short months that ended in horror. I didn’t even know where to begin to talk about that summer.

  ‘Spare me the pop psychology,’ I said. But Lou’s talk of Victorian parenting brought to mind my stern, sullen grandfather, a man I had met perhaps twice, and one time barely counted because he had come to try to persuade Stella to ‘rejoin society’ as he saw it, and my mother hadn’t let him past the doorstep.

  ‘Sometimes I think you girls are obsessed with your parents,’ said Josh, from the doorway. ‘It’s all you ever talk about. Why not live your own lives?’

  They made it impossible, I wanted to say. Or at least, mine did. The myth of their wild youth muffled everything else, and because of that I barely know myself. Beyond the walls of this house, and all it stands for, I am a curious outlander. The only clues are to be found here. Instead I said nothing.

  ‘How can we not be?’ said Lou. ‘They played us their music, endlessly. They reminisce fondly about Astral Weeks, and get maudlin over Polaroid photographs. They watch BBC4 documentaries about the sixties and every other weekend is the anniversary of something, some momentous, history-changing occasion: John Lennon taking a dump, or whatever. And they’re surprised when we fetishise vinyl and put little nostalgic filters on our photos? Is it any wonder we talk about them? It’s the last time anything was tangible. All our shit is in a cloud.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Josh. ‘You say you hate it, but you love it. You know all the words to all eight minutes of ‘American Pie’. I’ve seen you in the kitchen, dancing to the Stones, looking at pictures of your mum from her modelling days and going on and on about how your dad once got off with Nico, as though back then it was so great and there were no power cuts or unemployment or bombed-out bloody buildings all over the shop. Things are better now.’

  He sat down at the table. They often had arguments like this, in which Lou would argue flamboyantly and dramatically while Josh would play the part of the no-nonsense, straight-talking northerner. He seemed to consider it his task to rile her up and calm her down again, while he acted as a vessel for her class-based frustrations and her vague sense of embarrassment at her own privilege.

  ‘Things are better now? Things are better now? They had it so bloody good, Josh, with their free education and their massive houses that cost a piece of piss and are worth millions now . . . ’

  ‘My parents bought their council house,’ Josh said, or tried to, but was drowned out.

  ‘Even the drugs were better back then. That weed I picked up last week was shocking. You smoked it; you know what I’m saying. No one laughs when they’re high anymore, have you noticed that? I hate them. I hate them for doing everything first, and for free, and then destroying it for us. I hate them but I want to be them. Don’t you?’

  Throughout this exchange Lou had been waving her hands about and the kimono that she used as a smoking outfit (and which, of course, like almost everything else she owned that wasn’t digital, had once belonged to her mother) had fallen open to reveal the cream perk of her breasts. But Josh was still looking at her face. It was taking some effort.

  ‘It’s obvious you want to be them. I mean, look at you Lucia,’ he said. ‘That hair.’

  Lou lit another cigarette. ‘You think things are better now?’ she inhaled. ‘Whe
n everything is a version of something else? Every fashion trend is recycled, and every song is sampled? And every plot’s already been done a thousand times?’

  ‘I just think you live in the past to avoid having to think about what’s going on now,’ said Josh. ‘And that’s also why you dress like a grandma.’

  ‘Harmony?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to back me on this?’ They both looked at me, but who was I to mock the idea of living in the past? Josh was right, to an extent. I revelled in the lives that they had led.

  I stayed silent. My parents met at a CND rally. They were everything Josh talked about, and more besides. Their nostalgia weighed more than my own ever had.

  Summer 1984

  I know from the moment I meet the house that this is where I want to be. I like how grand and looming it is, compared to the squat, grey buildings at home. I am too tall for those houses. The air in them doesn’t circulate. Cooking smells and fag smoke linger in the net curtains, our drawn faces reflected in too many mirrors, put up years ago to give the illusion of space.

  When we arrive, we are shown to a room in the top of the house, by a slight blonde-haired woman, older than me, who introduces herself as Coral and is trying to hide her pity in welcome flustering. She’s dressed in the sort of way that would get you looks, where I’m from. The beads and bangles jangle in an offbeat rhythm as she moves her hands expressively, directing us towards bathrooms and towels and the hot water tank. Though it’s June, as she talks and talks all I can think of is a scalding bath. The chill of hunger seems to have entered my bones.

  The other doors are all open, hinting at helter-skelter lives within. Bare floorboards, piles of books, the few pieces of furniture draped in colourful clothes, mattresses on the floor. From somewhere upstairs I hear strains of London Calling, an LP I heard once at a friend’s party, brought along by a boyfriend from Newcastle. We don’t normally listen to that kind of thing. Truth be told, we haven’t listened to much in recent months.

  I can tell that Mark is on edge because of the way he has squared his shoulders. He’s hiding how uncomfortable he is with cockiness, like he always does. He thinks it gives him authority but it just reminds me of the spiky lad he was at school who’d always take things the wrong way. When he sees the Buddha in a nook between the second and third floor landings, he gives a low whistle and raises his eyebrow at me. He flashes his watch and, passing the hall mirror, grabs the stiff collar of his shirt with two thumbs to pull it upward in a rapid motion.

  My own clothes feel wrong here, my hair like something from a hairdresser’s window. Mark’s showing off in front of these kind people who have offered us a bed seeking nothing in return, bores and embarrasses me. I want to wriggle out of myself, shed this sterile skin, and start all over again, like a newborn yanked into a foreign, dazzling world.

  Dolls

  Worry dolls (6), 2cm in height, made from wire and colourful cotton and yarn, in yellow oval hand-painted box made from reeds, handmade in Guatemala mid-1980s.

  Accompanying paper slip reads: ‘According to legend,Guatemalan children tell one worry to each doll when they go to bed at night and place the dolls under their pillow. In the morning the dolls have taken their worries away.’

  Trauma is a strange thing. It can lie dormant and then resurface years or even decades later, the cells of it multiplying until it takes you over. Its return can be prompted by the most random of occurrences: the way the light flickers through a window, the smallest and most imperceptible of movements, the smell of must, and fear, or the faintest imprint of a long-forgotten tune. You’ll find such things will goose at you, forcing regression to a long-suppressed horror. It was twenty years since we had left that house for the final time, but it and the serene complacence of the people in its thrall had made me a puny, fractured thing. The residue of what I had witnessed prodded me each night when I slept, leaving me jumpy and strung out. I didn’t know this then, of course, merely that I had to come back, that something of me lingered in that house, somewhere in its darkest corners.

  I was born into Longhope. Legally, the product of my two parents, but emotionally, at least in my early years, raised by a collective. This arrangement – an urban commune of sorts – eventually proved too unconventional for my mother, who took me and my father away when I was four. We returned a year later, Stella and I, during the summer in which she left my father for the first time. It is a period we do not talk about, the prohibited topic of my childhood. Yet it had its echoes in my mother’s torpor, her wall-staring; in my own childish desire for asylum. My return was prompted not only by a desire to know more, but because of a need for structure and stability. The house was the only place that felt like home. Its walls felt solid.

  I had given up all hope of ever living there again by the time Josh and Lou accepted me as their new flatmate. I’d had a Google Alert set up on the place for months without much luck and had begun looking at other flatshares when the room finally became available. The house was not only much changed, but it also seemed smaller. I could remember standing in the cavernous hall as a child on the day we ran away, my small, moonlike face turned upwards in wonder at the winding spiral of the continuous stairs. I stared up through the hole in the middle and marvelled at the ceiling’s height.

  Lou’s furniture, bequeathed by her mother the year before when she had renounced all worldly goods and moved into a Buddhist centre up north, may have had something to do with it (‘She lasted three months before running back to Quentin,’ Lou sniffed, ‘but by that time he’d bought new things.’). It certainly added to the air of bohemian poverty that she was no doubt cultivating. The carpets were tangerine, while the textured wallpaper in the hallways was a jarring salmon pink, scuffed and peeling in places, but the pieces themselves were stylish. It’s funny, I had always assumed my parents’ taste, with their spider plants and their arty clutter and their mismatched antiques, was somehow unique to them, because everyone else’s homes appeared so different. Then I moved to North London, and got into the habit of peering wistfully through other people’s windows at night as I trampled home, only to see the places, with their built-in bookcases and Victorian fireplaces, all resembled each other.

  The flat wasn’t especially clean. Old milk flaked off the shelves of the fridge like nail polish, there were cobwebs on the cracked cornicing, and the wallpaper in my room puckered with mildew. When it was quiet enough you could hear the fluttering of tiny moths, so many you might think them native to that part of North London. Lou blamed all the Turkish rug shops on the Highgate Road.

  As a child I had padded around that same building and squashed them against the walls with my fingertips, leaving dark smudged traces of moth-guts all along the magnolia. It was a habit that I retained as an adult, much to Josh’s disgust. Resuming the ritual had reminded me of a long-buried childhood nickname I’d had for the place. I had called Longhope the Moth House, to differentiate it from the Northumberland cottage we had left behind, but also to annoy my mother, who, in the same way one feels about a relative, was happy enough to complain herself about the house, with its dust and its damp, but was vehemently intolerant of anyone else’s remarks – however mild – if they could be construed as negative. After that, whenever I mentioned it, a twist of discomfort would pass across her face that, unaware of her remorse, I perceived as embarrassment, and she would most often say nothing, or change the subject with false lightness.

  When Stella and I returned to Longhope, in the summer of 1991, it had taken me a while to settle back in. The house and its transient, eccentric inhabitants had been a poor replacement for the comfort of living with a mother and a father, as other children did. I was too young to know that many of them were also on a desperate hunt for a stable surrogate family.

  Children need routine, and in Northumberland, I had had that. Picking peas in the vegetable garden, and shelling them in the stone-walled kitchen afterwards with Stella. Running along the windy coastline as my father’s calls to slow
down drifted in the distance, the fronds of my hair flapping at my cheeks as I turned around and jumped into his arms, his beard scratchy on my cold skin as he tickled me. Cosy nights curled up with them both under a blanket, watching the flames flicker in the fireplace, and the smell of woodsmoke. My father reading to me in a soft voice – hard to believe now.

  Watching from the top of the stairs as they swayed together to the scratch of a record. The way he made her laugh, her face delighted at the revelation that she could, as though his ability to make her happy were a magic trick.

  ‘He really tried,’ she said to me, once, and I believe her. The most vivid images of my dad are hosted in that period in the cottage, when I saw his clownish, loving side come out in silly games and stories, and he touched me all the time, giving me cuddles and Eskimo kisses, swinging me around the room by my arms or holding me upside down by my feet, or waltzing me around as I stood on the tops of his shoes. We’d take daddy–daughter trips to the supermarket, to give Stella some quiet time when she went for a ‘lie down’, and I would skip behind the trolley with joy as he tossed strange and wonderful things into it. Years and years of chickpeas and lentils later, I can still recall that feeling of being held up at the waist at the deli counter to take the little paper ticket knowing I could choose whatever I wanted.