The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  I remember Bryn speaking once about growing up in the aftermath of the conflict, of how the older generation crushed their offspring with the weight of their anticipated gratitude. ‘You were expected to feel grateful to them, all the time. It was this constant, stifling expectation,’ he said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘They had salvaged civilisation, they had saved us, and anything you did that was remotely counter-cultural and rebellious, even the act of having long hair or flamboyant clothes, was deemed a desecration of their sacrifice.’

  ‘But wasn’t freedom what they had fought for?’ I said. This was how we talked, on the rare occasions we saw each other, as though we were sitting around a seminar table. At times his interest in me, his only child, seemed purely intellectual, but then he would astonish me with a comment so emotionally perceptive that I felt a surge of love for him, and guilt at having misjudged his capacity for empathy. Then he would start talking about Marx’s dialectics, and the moment would pass.

  ‘They were traumatised, that generation, I think. They wouldn’t talk to their children, as I do to you, now. Not about anything significant, anyway. I felt like a cardboard cut-out at home.’

  The words stayed with me. I had felt a similar flatness that university term, a time when I responded to everything with the woodenness of a bad actor. I was an automaton in a ratty fur coat and tight jeans, just going through the motions, laughing at boys’ jokes as I took drags of their cigarettes, lying naked on their grubby sheets not knowing how I could even begin to love them. There was a lot of politics going on, but passionate though I felt, even taking part in protests felt like an act being carried out by someone else. No wonder it all came to a head that night at the party. Every day, it felt like another part of me was snapping off.

  That winter we spent hours kettled by the police into submission, once on Westminster Bridge with the freezing, churning Thames below our only means of escape. This disappointing boy and I huddled together out of no bigger a desire than to keep ourselves warm. I felt an acute sense of outrage at being kept there. Never before had my freedom of movement been so brutally curtailed. It was fury-inducing at first, but by the time dusk fell a palpable feeling of submission emerged. By that time, everyone just wanted to be at home in a blanket. Perhaps that is why the students took their political protests indoors, into the warmth of one another’s company. Ensconced in their ivory quads they were safe from the flying glass of angrily lobbed bottles, impervious to the temptations of deliberately placed police vans. There, these brocialists and manarchists, these pale aesthetes with even paler politics did not have to pretend they had anything in common with the kids livid at the loss of their EMA, to whom smashing up a bus stop felt like creating something.

  This boy I was seeing had appointed himself one of the ringleaders of a small group of students who were occupying the admin corridor at the university in protest at the rise in student fees, and was behaving exactly as you’d expect someone with a privileged upbringing and a copy of Das Kapital poking out of the back of his skinny jeans to behave. At the time I thought the so-called ‘solidarity’ this group claimed to feel with low-income students was laughable – their presence in the admin corridor meant I couldn’t pick up my hardship fund cheque, for starters, and they were so frightened of repercussions that they did all their graffiti work in chalk.

  A couple of weeks into the occupation, I was on the way back from yet another failed mission to get my hands on some cash when I decided to see for myself what these armchair anarchists had achieved in their struggle against our neoliberal overlords. They had succeeded in creating a working community of sorts, though absolutely every decision had to be passed by complete consensus, which made their nightly meeting mind-numbingly long. They even had a kitchen. ‘Your mum doesn’t work here, so clean up after yourself,’ a sign read, and under ‘mum’ some smartarse had added ‘dad/guardian/carer’. I didn’t know who these students thought they represented, but it wasn’t me or really, anyone else I knew. How perfectly and exhaustingly right on they were in every way. They proudly paraded their virtuous courage, but any fool could see how terrified they were of tripping up by expressing the wrong opinion.

  As for our dear Leader – he was becoming more and more obnoxious by the day. The whole situation reached its unbearable nadir when they held an evening poetry slam and, during the course of a maudlin poem that invoked a lot of heavily vaginal sexual imagery, it slowly dawned on me that the girl in the black turtleneck on the stage was reciting an emotional missive about the boy I had been sleeping with. She was bitterly imagining us in bed together, via the metaphor of an avocado. ‘She is / a stone / wrapped tightly in your bearded flesh,’ I think it went. I made my excuses and left for the pub, alone.

  I stopped going in, after that. I suppose I felt disillusioned with the whole performance, and there was the issue of my hardship fund, too. It was nearly the Christmas break by the time I got my cheque, only for it to slip out of the pocket of my coat somewhere on Upper Street. The coat itself fell apart, mid-escalator, only a few weeks later. It was too late in the term to go and have a replacement cheque made out, and after the holidays, over which I decided that university wasn’t really for me, I just didn’t bother. The nightmares were already drawing me back to the house, which, despite its unremarkable appearance, burned like a balefire in my memory. The nuances of structuralism (or, in my own opinion, a lack thereof) were of little interest in comparison. I had a job in a pub as a waitress and had inherited a small amount of money from a distant aunt of my father’s, a stage actress who had died the year before in an Equity nursing home with a proper cocktail bar and a grand piano; a real live peacock in the grounds kind of place. So I had enough to get by, and to put a deposit on the room in the house, once it came up. I hadn’t really thought much beyond that.

  My initial introduction to Lou after moving into the flat at Longhope was entirely aural: the second night I spent in the flat was spent listening to her orgasm through the wall. Unlike other flatmates I had had, however, Lou’s gasps and screams were not ostentatious attempts to treat sex as a theatrical performance; there was no real concept of audience. She had a lack of awareness of those around her, and their needs, that was entirely innocent and this, coupled with an admirably untroubled love of sex, always drew people to her. The roster of partners, both male and female, that passed through her room betrayed a refusal to accept any kind of stigma when it came to her own pleasure, but at the same time lacked the self-consciousness of the self-styled polyamorists I had avoided at university.

  ‘Morning darling,’ she said, yawning as she heaped coffee into a rather dirty looking cafetière. ‘I haven’t had even a moment of sleep, so do excuse the unkempt appearance.’

  She looked like a fashion plate. Her black bob was hardly ruffled, and she wore the kind of Victorian nightgown that would have made anyone else resemble a crazed Bertha Mason, but somehow its voluminous nature only lent the sharpness of her figure more definition. Despite the nonchalance of her gestures, Lou’s body had a fragility to it that bordered on shocking, betraying as it did a fraught relationship with food (I had known enough private school girls by this time to discern this), and a young adulthood privileged in its access to cocaine. On that morning and every other morning I have seen her since, she ate nothing. At other times she picked daintily at her food, like a bird.

  Our first conversations were tentative. I was aware that she was attempting, very subtly, to get the measure of me, and I was determined that she would not. Despite the fact of my being a waitress, I suspected Lou thought I was rich, like her, though I realise now, like all wealthy people, she was probably just too polite to ask and knew exactly where to place me. University had stamped any trace of an accent out, and we never discussed money, except vaguely once, when she told me she’d been at Bedales. I pretended to know what she was on about and then looked it up in secret later. I wasn’t actually sure what Lou did for a living – something loosely thespian, or to do with the
art world. She never talked about it and never seemed to be at work, except when she was guzzling sparkling wine at friends’ openings, straddling the social scenes of Mayfair and Shoreditch like the ‘society slut’ she proudly proclaimed herself to be. Francis Bacon once described his early years in London as having been spent ‘between the gutter and the Ritz’, and Lou wished to cultivate a similar impression. She was drawn to the putrid glamour of the down-at-heel as she was anything alluringly transgressive, but, like a good little rich girl she would always, eventually, be led back to the comfortable salons of her childhood, even if she was smart enough to proclaim them odious (when we did finally visit the Ritz, for cocktails, she declared the decor as resembling ‘the inside of a tart’s handbag’).

  One topic we did discuss, however, was that of our parents. In contrast to my own wry forbearance, her guileless zealotry for their bohemianism was almost embarrassing. ‘Daddy dropped out of Westminster in the sixties after being hospitalised for taking too much acid on Parliament Hill,’ she said, one evening early on, as we made our way through most of two bottles of red wine. ‘His father was furious, though it was a serious breakdown you know. After that they weren’t on great terms so he moved in with his friend Freddy who lived in a gypsy caravan and they formed a folk ensemble. They spent the next few years travelling around England. Quite romantic really.’

  ‘And what about her? Your mother I mean?’ I had learned that asking Lucia lots of questions about herself meant that my own family background, namely the bizarre catastrophe that was Bryn and Stella’s marriage, was left relatively unmined. Lou took a drag on her super slim menthol.

  ‘Oh, she used to model for British Vogue, so never did much of anything. And then she met Daddy, who by that point had sent Grandfather to his early grave and inherited the Hampstead house, and soon after they had disappointing little me who absolutely ruined all their fun.’

  Others would have found Lou’s knowing, cartoonish self-deprecation irritating, but I couldn’t help but warm to her, seeing it as I did as her way of acknowledging the subtle ordeals of privilege; her sadness and her skinniness, the faded scars along her arms, the directionless nature of her ambition. Her rent got paid like clockwork every month, though certainly not by Lou. I couldn’t understand why she had decided upon a shabby flat in an unfashionable part of North London. It certainly wasn’t from necessity. All the friends she ran around in her little 2CV seemed to be writing screenplays or books of autobiographical essays or running pop-feminist cultural criticism blogs and art collectives (‘I’m a waitress,’ I said, when I was asked what it was I did by one of her drag queen hangers on. ‘A waitress and what?’ asked the drag queen, yelling above the disco beat. ‘You can’t just be a waitress. Everyone’s “—and something”.’ ‘Just a waitress,’ I said.). They were all like that. I remember a conversation with another one of her friends particularly vividly.

  ‘I’m working on a new idea for a blog at the moment,’ she told me, late one night as we sat on the carpet next to Lou’s record player, smoking a spliff. ‘I think it’ll be huge.’

  ‘What’s it involve?’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s like, a fashion blog. Basically I hang around outside Archway jobcentre and take photographs of the people after they come out from signing on. It’s called “dole queue fashion”. I think it’s, like, a really good way of showing that well-dressed people sign on too, you know. Like, everyone is signing on now because of this fucking government, even cool people.’

  I made eye contact with Josh.

  ‘And have people been . . . receptive?’

  ‘Not really. Like, I got chased once, and I have to stand across the street or the staff come out and yell at me. Also some of the people look so sad. But I think it could be really cool, provided I get enough black people on it.’

  I focused hard on her face as she was speaking, but from the corner of my eye I could see that Josh was holding one of Lou’s satin cushions up to his face and that his shoulders were shaking.

  I spent most of the time when I wasn’t working at Longhope. I was barely sleeping, and my absconding from university had removed me from the outer peripheries of my old social circle.

  Lou and her friends went out six nights a week, loved MDMA, and thought of themselves as London’s new bright young things. Left-leaning but politically complacent, they looked down on the start-up nerds on the Old Street roundabout and the advertising boys with their thought pods and their brightly-coloured American Apparel hoodies, but they weren’t so different in their tastes and values. They lived in a London whiter than I could ever envisage, never mixing, rarely leaving the comfort of their suites and cars and parties. It was as though they inhabited a series of closed-off rooms, all adjoined so that those that walked within them never had to feel the cold of the outside air, never had to make conversation at a bus stop or see the peach-coloured vomit that dotted the pavement of the Cally Road in splatters every Saturday dawn (ketchup). Their money was old, as were their friends, made in childhood. As cordial as they would be to you when mixing you a drink or rolling you a joint they were, ultimately, unreachable.

  Josh, in contrast, worked in the social housing department at the council and rolled out of bed each morning at eight-thirty, a habit he learned during his first job with Morgan Stanley. ‘I was one of those blokes on the news walking out of the office with a cardboard box,’ he told me, with a grimace, when we met. Lou used to joke that he was single-handedly responsible for the financial crash, in the kind of voice that showed she was fond of him but she didn’t entirely approve. He had grown up in a normal, working class family in Manchester, with normal parents, meaning that his mum had never given head to Keith Richards and his dad had never injected himself with a combination of heroin and cocaine for a laugh. He was five years older than we were, and from what I could tell regarded the pair of us with a mixture of superiority, bafflement and lust. He thought our conversations pretentious and idiotic, our fixation with the past strange, and our clothes wildly eccentric, but he also looked at our tits while we stood smoking in our slips late at night at the window. Josh wore jeans and T-shirts, read music biographies and went to the pub with his friends. He had a normal, ‘boy’ haircut and he did not read fiction or enter cocktail bars, and because of this Lou had ruled him out as a sexual prospect entirely; he would never join the parade of lovers entering and exiting her room at all times of the day or night. Not that she would have had much chance had she wanted it. Lou was beautiful, but could also be astonishingly shallow. According to Josh’s mate Jamie from work, who had tried unsuccessfully to sleep with her, she was ‘all mouth and no knickers’. ‘She’s like a frozen pie, bruv,’ he told Josh as he sat in the kitchen one night. ‘You get the packaging off and you feel you’ve been mugged off, you get me? Then you notice the small print says “serving suggestion” and that nice tasty meal you were expecting is just a frozen slab. The actual product’s bland as fuck.’

  ‘I was drunk’, reported Lou, ‘and then suddenly I was sober, and calling time on his slobbering tongue.’

  Josh was also out almost every night, though unlike Lou (who could reliably be found tearing up a dancefloor in Dalston while wearing a headpiece made from found objects) he was most likely circling some secretaries in an All Bar One while doing the white man’s overbite, gel in his hair. When he wasn’t out, there was usually a girl in his room, and she usually had highlights, the sort Lou would describe as a ‘belt-through-the-loops’ kind of girl. You’d hear these women giggling sometimes through the wall in high-pitched, little girl voices, the way they’d been taught, the way men like it. He’d often sneak them out in the early hours, before either of us was up, and would then sit at the table drinking tea and waiting for us to wake up so we could conduct the post-mortem. How was it? we’d say. ‘All right. I bought her some chips from Chicken Cottage and one thing led to another. Terrible chat, though’ – they always had terrible chat – ‘She asked me what tog my duvet was.’ At f
irst, I credited myself with seeing through this affected carelessness, but then I realised that he genuinely didn’t give a toss.

  As a result of my flatmates’ nocturnal habits, and my equally nocturnal job in the pub, I didn’t see all that much of them. Having made it to Longhope, I was unsure what I was supposed to do next. I hadn’t thought beyond getting there, and once I was installed, the calm I had hoped would wash over me failed to materialise. My nights were as disrupted as before, but I felt more awake than ever. My skin tingled, and every nerve within me seemed to be on high alert, flinching at the slightest noise.

  I still hadn’t met the downstairs neighbour, even after a month in the house, and I was curious about her. Once, when I had gone down to the cellar to try and scope out some extra furniture (no such luck, though I did come across an eerie Victorian pram before I retreated rapidly up the stairs), I caught a glimpse of a tatty dressing gown disappearing into her flat, the door slamming hard. I hadn’t heard the early morning howling again, though I did sometimes hear her voice through the floor, or two voices, hers and another, shouting. Hers was deep and gravelly, almost like a man’s, scratched raw from years of fags and arguments. Even less often I saw her cat (or traces of its shit in any case). Being apparently incapable of using bin bags, she left traces of herself in the garden: cat food, fag ends, loo roll, rotting takeaway meals, little plastic drug baggies and empty cans of Fosters, and, once, a used sanitary towel. Part of me pitied her – she clearly had problems – but I also hated her a little for making me face how squalid people can be. She barely seemed to venture outside and yet there were fetid signs of her sad existence everywhere.