The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  Here he was a joker, a playmate, a friend, my idol. I watched him constantly, Stella said, my little face tilted towards him in awe as though his ebullience were the only guiding shimmer on a starless night. That’s the thing about fathers. They sprinkle you with enough love early on that you’ll know forever what you’re missing.

  Having known him this way made the Bryn I came to accept a preoccupied, distant man whom I rarely saw and whose interest in me seemed mostly academic, an even starker contrast as I got older. ‘Now you know how I felt,’ Stella would say, during our heart-to-hearts. Even years later, she often brought up the divorce, explaining her reasons as a way, I think, of justifying her decision to leave him. We would drink wine and reminisce, and I would play the part assigned to me: exempting her through empathy. ‘I understand,’ I would say. ‘Of course I understand.’

  Now, here I was, an adult, settling in once more, having actively sought it out. It took several weeks to unpack, and even then suitcases remained on the floor due to lack of wardrobe space. I had accumulated a lot of clothes, probably more than anyone I knew, and was sentimental about them, as I am with almost all material things. I’d always had trouble throwing things out; objects were, are, important to me, and I like to surround myself with them. It makes me feel safe. I was always an anxious child, even before that summer. I worried all the time. When I was a toddler I’m told I talked a lot, asking incessant questions of all the adults in the house (‘Why is the sky blue?’ ‘What is time?’ ‘Why don’t fish die when lightning hits the sea?’) until my mother learnt to simply respond with ‘I don’t know’ and taught them all to do the same. I had to know everything, but once I knew, I would only go and worry about it. This was how she protected me. Perhaps Josh is right and we are obsessed with our parents. They’re the only people we struggle to see as fully human, to admit are flawed, and sometimes craven.

  Yet another thing I found when I was unpacking – my talismans. My parents bought me worry dolls. You know those dolls, little ethnic things, the size of a thumbnail, and they all have different costumes and live in a little yellow box made of rushes, a tiny box, painted yellow, with strange symbols in primary colours. And I would write my worries down, on notepaper, my worries and my wishes, and then roll it up and put it in the box, and sleep with it under my pillow, to try and magic it all away.

  And did it work? I can hear the hypothetical therapist’s voice now. Not that I ever had one – apart from the university counsellor I went to see, once, after the freak-out at the party. She told me it had been a panic attack, then asked me lots of questions about my parents. There was something in her demeanour I disliked. Pity, I think. So I lied and said I had a normal family, but I think she knew I wasn’t telling the truth. I didn’t go back.

  We’re more of a self-help book kind of family. My mother has hundreds, ranging from organic cookery to Reiki healing to Feng Shui to past life regression. Potatoes not Prozac; The Highly Sensitive Person; Five Minute Meditation. There’s a whole bestselling subgenre regarding messages from angels that I won’t even go into. No one approaches cod psychology with such verve as boomers. The fervour of a generation who think they discovered self-analysis. They seek the path to enlightenment and then use everything they have found out about the vagaries of the unconscious to market products back to themselves.

  I know people who have spent five years in analysis at the behest of their parents, but not me. There was never any money and, in any case, we had books. There was a point in the second year of university where it seemed like everyone I met had some kind of mental health issue. The corridors practically echoed with self-aware choruses of ‘my therapist says . . . ’, ‘According to my therapist . . . ’.They always said ‘therapist’ even to describe a weekly one-to-one session with a counsellor funded by the NHS – it sounded glamorous, I suppose. Less mental health crisis on a budget, more Woody Allen.

  From late childhood onwards, I began to receive self-help book after self-help book, usually as presents from my mother, who, in hindsight, was probably concerned about the impact of events at Longhope upon my fragile psyche. I’ve accumulated quite a library. I never read them, but couldn’t bear to throw them out. The dolls, however, were some comfort. I could have done with them now to soothe away my nightmares.

  I used to be obsessed with things that went missing. I still am. Objects take on a strange significance, and when they become lost I made lists, and I pasted them up in the kitchen as though they were missing persons, and ticked them off as the things were found. Here’s an example: I remember bouncing a ball in the kitchen downstairs at Longhope, in what became the basement flat, below the one I moved into decades later. It was a super bouncy ball, the sort you get from corner shops, and I can picture it vividly, it was half purple, half blue, and about the size of a small tangerine. We were about to leave. There were boxes everywhere, and I stood in the kitchen and I bounced this ball, and it bounced higher, and higher again, and then vanished. Literally vanished. My mother helped me search, in vain, for it. ‘Oh well,’ she said, lightly, after some time. ‘Perhaps it’s gone over to the other side,’ and I wondered if that was someplace where all the lost socks went, too.

  The same thing happened the other day in the kitchen when I was unpacking the shopping. I dropped a lime, bought for making margaritas, and it bounced away from me, and then: nothing, gone. The thing with the ball still bothers me. Shortly after I moved in with Josh and Lou I went out into the garden to look for it, though I didn’t admit to myself that that was what I was doing. It was as overgrown as it had ever been, though a few more mattresses had been added to the collection. What could you expect, after eighteen years of heavy bodies on springs? Perhaps the ball was there somewhere, amidst the brambles, like the motorbike we had discovered buried, in some mimicking of a prehistoric grave, by its sentimental owner underneath the mound of the lilac tree. But as soon as I started searching, I realised that I didn’t really care. I had lost so many things since.

  I suppose to an extent we’re all fanatical about losing things. It’s not the ones we keep that stay in the mind – they blend mundanely into the background of our lives – but the things we lose along the way: the time the car was broken into, the antique ring left by the sink, the burglary all those years ago, the photograph from the wallet. So maybe I am not so different after all.

  My parents always tried to lessen my anxiety through objects. When I was little I would pick at scabs until they bled, and it was somehow comforting to see the crimson trickle run down my leg from an insect bite, to feel the sting of alcohol from my mother’s antiseptic. ‘Don’t do that darling.’ It felt almost enjoyable, the pain. To break the habit they gave me worry beads, teal-turquoise ceramic, looking like a Catholic rosary, the idea being that I would fiddle with those instead of picking apart my own skin. I had dreamcatchers to catch the frequent nightmares; a block of rose quartz to bring me love; crystals and amethysts. It makes them sound like hippies, which let’s face it, they were. But also I think they realised that I set a lot of store in things. I treasured their solidity and their defined margins, because, while I could reassure myself of my limits – ‘I begin here, at the tips of my fingers, at the surface of my skin’ – the fact remained that I had periods of feeling outside myself, unreal, as though I lacked the materiality of the rest of the world. I was very young when I first experienced this vague, dreamlike feeling of being in third person. It was terrifying. I no longer belonged to myself.

  I outgrew these things eventually. But sometimes, when I am walking down some steep stairs, or a train flashes past, or I am standing on the balcony of a tall building, I will put my hand in my pocket in search of some solid thing to hold. In these moments it strikes me how fragile we are, how feet can trip up, can stumble, and that heads can hit concrete and bones can be crushed, and that skin and ribs and guts can come apart like soft bread torn between the hands.

  Cheque

  Cheque for £600 (paper), 3.5” x 7”
(8.9 cm x 17.8 cm). NatWest, made out to one Harmony Brown by University of London student welfare office. Some water damage.

  I hadn’t known either Josh or Lucia before I moved into the house, though I had found out their names several months before they knew mine. Just in case you thought my background wasn’t eccentric enough already, then there you have it, Harmony, a classic, hippie-parents name. Still, it could have been worse: Crystal or Moonbeam or something like that, and at least the explanation for their choice was level-headed enough. None of that guff about planetary alignments; I was named for a friend of theirs who died tragically young. An asthma attack, they said.

  One morning, the February before the May that I moved in, I was walking past number 26 Longhope Crescent as had become my habit, and saw that someone had left the door ajar. Slipping into the musty hallway, I breathed the air of that place for the first time in almost two decades. I did not want to risk the chance of being caught so I only lingered long enough to notice that someone had carpeted over the lovely black and white floor tiles with some brown monstrosity. That and the post, lying on the side table. Having their names made things easier. Pre-internet, I would have had to scour the back pages of the Evening Standard. It could have taken years to get back in.

  I am not surprised that my new flatmates thought me friendless. Despite being a student, which I still was, then, at least officially, I hadn’t really collected many close friends. I spent a lot of time in the British Museum, not just because it was relevant to my course but because it was one of the few places that made me feel calm. The neatly organised and catalogued objects were soothing when contrasted with the slapdash chaos of my own life, and I used to wander between artefacts, imagining the people to whom they had once belonged, what they would think if they could see their treasured keepsakes on display. Once, shortly before I dropped out for good, I stumbled across an exhibition about death rites. I was especially struck by the tribeswomen of Papua New Guinea. When a loved one or relative dies, they enter a period of mourning where they cover themselves all over, including their faces, with thick clay. The clay stays on for several months, cracking and stinging in the sunlight, giving them physical pain instead of the grief that they are unable to express themselves. That is how I felt. I felt wrapped up in clay.

  I was not entirely alone. I had had superficial friendships with several girls at university, but when I wasn’t out drinking with them I generally ran solo and preferred things that way. We certainly didn’t take baths together or plait each other’s hair, things popular culture would have you believe such female friendships involved. Instead, we took coke in the toilets of richer people’s houses and smoked fags out of kitchen windows and danced, and said crass things like ‘honestly, my vagina was in such a state I thought he’d run home crying.’ We tried on terrible clothes in charity shops and, one memorable time, a low-rate wedding dress boutique. We laughed at most things and discussed nothing of importance, and it was wonderful most of the time, but none of us wanted to live together, not after the last flat we’d all been in, which had ended in a disastrous eviction following a series of noise complaints. If we did we might never come down.

  And as for men, well. Earlier that year (my third year, it was supposed to be, though by the time I moved into the house I had stopped going in) I had slept with two or three undergraduates, having fiercely avoided doing so throughout the rest of my time there. I preferred to pick my men up randomly, which was not without its own set of problems. They were all fairly nice middle-class boys, what you’d expect. They divided into two camps: when they graduated, they either wanted to write for Vice or to work for the Foreign Office, both ambitions of such crushingly dull predictability that I struggled to find the energy to even engage in conversation with them. Not that much talking was required, and not only because of their tendency to sexually objectify me (I’m not complaining – I did the same to them), but also because of the kind of dates they took you on, which were, respectively: electro nights and lectures at the LSE.

  I’d never been virginal; I didn’t understand the decision to wait. Every man I slept with offered up a different quality, a different part of themselves, for me to sample. No two were ever remotely the same, and I relished this opportunity for discovery, especially in terms of what they could do to my body. Then again, I could be surprisingly prudish. ‘How many people have you slept with?’ I asked my mother once, when we were drunk. We had had a lot of wine, and for some reason she was sitting on the floor in the living room. It was at times like these, when we drank and talked candidly of the past with exuberant, piss-taking scorn, that I felt closest to her. Perhaps other daughters of single mothers feel something similar. There’s a fierce power to your relationship that sometimes manifests in a charge so negative it can threaten to overwhelm you, but then, at times like this, you feel a defiant, hilarious camaraderie in having both somehow survived.

  She considered the question, and I watched, giggling on the sofa, as she counted on her hands for what seemed like an age.

  ‘Thirty-three,’ she slurred, finally.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘You lost your virginity when you were sixteen, and you met Dad when you were eighteen. You’ve been with two people since you got divorced. That means you slept with thirty-one people in the space of three years?’

  ‘Are you terribly shocked? An average of ten people a year is hardly the last days of Rome. And it was pre-AIDS, darling.’

  I stared at her. Little did I know then about what had gone on in the house, about how their political principles when it came to ownership had extended to people, too – what a shame that they failed to follow the same rules. How disappointing it must have been for my parents, the realisation that the desire to possess could override a utopian ideal and worse, could hurt the very people it was designed to liberate so profoundly that that hurt became ravenously destructive.

  When I joked with people that I was born into an urban commune, I could see in their faces what they wanted to ask, but my mother was uncharacteristically reticent about that period of her life. All I knew is that I seemed to have an awful lot of unofficial aunts and uncles. When I probed more, she’d get that look, a pained grimace laced with stormlike warning, and I’d know it was better to pipe down for the sake of a more peaceful home life.

  I will admit I found her disclosure unexpectedly startling. It’s not that I thought she was a slag. I was used to these kinds of revelations (‘When I first met your dad, he was speedballing.’). I once met a girl who boasted proudly that she had the most liberal parents in North London. ‘So your dad’s done smack too?’ I said, innocently. I think I was just relieved to have found someone whose parents did not inhabit the static, semi-detached worlds I had grown up both fearing and secretly desiring. The look she gave me. Wrong kind of liberal, as always.

  In fact, I was faintly impressed by my mother’s sleeping around, which was undoubtedly the reaction she was going for. She must have endured an awful lot of boring conversation, unless people were more interesting in the seventies, which I doubt. Parents would have you believe this, but it was patently not the case.

  My own sex life, in comparison, was deathly dull. By the time the student protests came around, in November of that year, I had all but had enough. The previous week a boy – for that’s what they all were, boys – had quoted Nietzsche at me, after sex. He followed this up by informing me that ‘love does not exist, it is merely a question of chemicals’, typical university stuff. I hadn’t been expecting a lecture, nor did I especially like the assumption inherent in his words: that he was pre-empting some kind of tedious and cumbersome hormonal attachment on my part from which he would have to extricate himself.

  ‘What about your parents?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think they’ve ever loved each other, either,’ he said, taking a self-conscious toke on his rolly.

  The next morning, we had gone down to Camden to get the morning after pill, together. ‘We can go halv
es,’ he said, and being skint as per usual, I consented. As I handed over the £25, the cashier asked me if I had a Boots Advantage Card. ‘Slut points,’ my charming companion commented. I think he wanted me to be upset, to embark on a feminist rant. Instead I just popped the tiny pill onto my tongue, stuck it out, then dry swallowed. ‘Thanks for the memories,’ I said, and headed off towards the Lock. ‘I need a burrito.’ Modern narratives would have this obligatory morning after trip to the chemists as representing something profound and meaningful about youth and loveless sex, but in fact it’s just an errand, an insignificant interval in your day that makes you feel a bit dizzy afterwards. You take the pill, it dissolves the miniscule cluster of cells, life (yours at least) goes on. It may sound flippant, but there it is.

  Though it was clear, after that interlude, that I had absolutely nothing in common with this self-professed Übermensch, we still marched alongside each other down to Millbank, yelling ‘No ifs, no buts, no education cuts’, him a parody in a khaki donkey jacket. He held my hand as some kids in black balaclavas smashed their way in to Conservative Party HQ. There were raised plummy voices as around the back a group of befuddled civil servants tried to negotiate rationally with the righteous anger of the young, left-wing and newly politicised. The words ‘capitalist hegemony’ were mentioned. A red-faced middle-aged man in a trench coat, overweight and balding, tried to articulate to a group of eager manarchists how this small skeleton team of admin support staff weren’t the real enemies here. ‘My dad was a miner,’ he said. True Yorkshire. ‘If you only knew what that were like,’ his voice cracked. ‘You kids, you don’t know you’re born.’ He was so angry I thought he might cry. ‘Tory scum!’ yelled a guy in a bandana. We kissed. It was all quite fevered and romantic until some fool threw a fire extinguisher from the roof and we all had to go home. Just what we needed – the pointless endangering of young lives coupled with the flagrant disrespect of the war dead as a millionaire rock star’s son swung from a cenotaph. For kids raised in an era in which every human relationship is mediated by images, they were impressively shit at PR.