The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  ‘I’m starting to think she’s a ghost,’ I said to Josh, one evening in the kitchen. We were always in the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah, a ghost who snorted coke off this table,’ he said. He was fiddling with a discarded rizla, rolling it into a tiny ball between his fingers.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘She used to come up here, before Lou moved in. My old flatmate Trish used to have her round. They’d rack up lines together.’

  ‘Really? What’s she like?’

  ‘Weird,’ said Josh. ‘What do you want me to say? She’s odd. She lives in a flat with no furniture. I saw it once when I first moved in and knocked on the door to borrow a hammer.’

  ‘She never seems to go out,’ I said.

  ‘I think she’s agoraphobic,’ said Josh. It made sense. Sometimes, when I entered the hall through the front door I got the sense that someone had just been there but, on hearing my key in the lock, had made a hasty exit. There wasn’t much evidence to support this feeling apart from the fact that, when you enter a room that has just been vacated, that recently departed person leaves a trace. That entire house was full of traces.

  ‘She went to Woodstock once, you know,’ said Josh.

  ‘Everyone that age says they went to Woodstock,’ I said.

  Summer 1984

  After the march we return to the house to drink, spent but elated. Mark was hit by a copper and nearly got nicked. A bruise on his cheek now blooms purple. We sit in the candlelit living room, huddled around gas heaters that click metallically at unpredictable intervals. There are lots of us, about twenty, making it hard to tell who lives here and who is a hanger-on. They are all friendly, but I can sense their unease with our poverty. The men of the house talk proudly about signing on and Thatcher, wearing their politics like a pantomime costume, its flimsiness obvious from their vowels.

  The women talk amongst themselves, but I sit with Mark, who is listening quietly to a man called Bryn speaking passionately of socialism and the workers’ struggle, dropping in words like dialectic and materialism, words he turns to me and explains as though I have never read a book before. His young wife watches from the corner of the room, darting her glance sideways as she conducts her own conversation, with an expression that could be weariness or could be fondness. She is hard to read, but it’s obvious that she has heard this speech before, many times. Her obvious boredom makes me bristle.

  ‘Why’s he dressed like a poofter?’ asked Mark, when we arrived. Yet despite this pompous tone and his odd clothes I am drawn to Bryn. He seems happy. His conversation may be earnest in a way I am not used to – back home, it’s not good to take yourself too seriously – but his eyes are laughing when he looks at me as he passes me a joint, the first of my life. It makes me feel calm and dreamy, and I lean back against the arm of the sofa, cross-legged on the carpet, and look upwards at the plaster ceiling rose, which is moulded into an extravagant arrangement of floral swirls, reminding me of the peaks and points of stiff egg whites as they are beaten into meringue.

  I stare at it for a long time, until the flowers become faces, the shapes resembling open-mouthed devils in a ring, performing a ritual dance around the globe of cheap paper lantern, their arms raised about their horned heads. The voices and the music drift in and out. I am somewhere else for a long time, only reviving at the feeling of a soft hand placed on the bare skin above my knee.

  ‘Everyone has gone to bed,’ Bryn says. ‘Time to call it a night, I think.’ He helps me up, and I am struck by the bulk of him, the breadth of his chest and shoulders contrasted against my half-starved frame. Although I am now standing, he keeps hold of my slender wrist, his thumb and middle finger forming a bracelet around it. I am surprised to find that the room is empty apart from the two of us, though an imprint of the night remains from the hiss and drone of a record that has reached its conclusion.

  ‘You’re so thin,’ he says, almost with reverence.

  ‘Thank you for letting us stay.’ My voice is hoarse from the smoke. ‘I love your house.’

  We stand and listen to the hum and fuzz from the speakers for a moment, not looking at each other, and then he slowly removes his hand, reaches across, and tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear.

  ‘It’s ludicrous how beautiful you are,’ he says.

  Fruit

  12 x loquat (‘Eriobotrya japonica’) fruit in plastic supermarket bag, petrified. Harvested 2011. Not for consumption.

  It was a hot early summer, the year I dropped out. I spent much of it lying on my bed, dozing off the late shifts, the large sash windows all wide open, the gauzy curtains barely rustling in the stagnant air. The sky outside required no filter, you couldn’t see without squinting. At the height of the heatwave a news crew had successfully fried an egg on the pavement. In the garden, a man with a ponytail burned rubbish in a can and the smell of melted plastic found its way into the upholstery and walls. People paddled in the fountains and lay in parks half-dressed, kissing. Old people died. Teenagers became restless; political dissent bubbled wirelessly through the stagnant air on networks not hidden from but little understood by the authorities. An incentive to rebel delivered in emoticons, building, but yet to explode. It was too hot.

  Outside, in the front garden, the tree was bearing small, strange fruit. About the size of an apricot, and orangey yellow, we did not know their provenance. But others did, and they came with carrier bags. Some would knock on the door and ask to harvest, others didn’t. I recall particularly a little boy, plump and olive-skinned, standing shyly on the doorstep. At the end of the path was a stationary black cab. ‘Can we pick your fruit?’ asked his father, the cabby. ‘We were driving past. We haven’t seen them since we moved here. They taste of home. He is so excited.’ Smiling, the child handed me some and showed me how to peel them. ‘Sheseq,’ he said. Loquats. ‘You must eat them right away,’ his father said. ‘They perish in a matter of hours.’ They tasted sickly sweet, sticky. I imagined the boy and his dad returning to their kitchen, devouring them, telling stories about the old country. I liked them.

  Less so, the woman I found up the tree as I left the house one balmy evening in early June. She was right up in the highest branches, armed with plastic bags and watched fretfully by a younger relative, a son, perhaps, from the pavement below. ‘That’s our tree,’ I said, standing there in my cocktail dress. I had just dip-dyed my blonde hair pink and had a cigarette in one hand. There was a bottle of wine tucked into my armpit. He looked embarrassed. From behind the leaves, in a foreign tongue, the woman let out a stream of what I assumed from her tone was abuse.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in heavily accented English. ‘She says that it is her tree.’

  ‘I live here,’ I said. ‘It’s my tree. I don’t mind, but I wish you had asked. I could have been naked up there.’ I gestured at my bedroom window, which, to her, was eye-level.

  The woman shouted some more, her words unfurling rapidly like a party streamer.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Take them.’

  ‘She used to live here,’ he said. ‘Her father planted this tree. She says it is her tree.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Fifty years ago.’

  It was possible, I concluded. This house had histories that predate that of my parents.

  Afterwards, I wished I had not been so harsh towards the woman, but I have to admit that my thoughts did not linger on the subject for long. I went to a house party in a tatty ex-council in Whitechapel and drank warm rosé, danced to all the songs we loved as teenagers. The nineties: a nostalgic night of remembrance for people who were barely adults. Sitting next to a girl in a high ponytail in an upstairs bedroom, I dabbed MDMA into my gums to the tinny sounds of a laptop, and then moved so much and for so long that the pink pigment in my hair mingled with the sweat pouring down my face and coated me in a fluorescent sheen. Outside, I kissed a boy on the patio and when I pulled away it was all around his mouth in a clown-like smirk. Time to go, but it was three night bus
es home and I had misplaced my oyster card. Inside the holder I had tucked a note from my father, giving details of his new address and telephone number. The phone was as modern as he got, on the communications front.

  It was nearly dawn when I stumbled up the path, barefoot and swearing, my heels dangling from a finger as I rummaged one-handedly for my keys. As I finally located them at the bottom of my handbag, I heard a crash and realised, with the slow reaction speed of an extremely inebriated person, that our downstairs neighbour was amongst the recycling bins and struggling to regain her footing.

  ‘I’m your new neighbour,’ I said, helping her up as she swore.

  ‘I know who you are.’ Voice thick with special brew, a suggestion of Irish, via Archway.

  Inside, the hall light was broken again. Her words were barely a croak, coming somewhere to my left. ‘I know what you’re all thinking, up there. Judging me,’ she said. Slurred.

  ‘Why would we be judging you?’ I said, judging her. In the gloom I could make out a face puffy from alcoholism, framed by greying hair straggled and too long for her age. I couldn’t see her teeth but they were probably crooked and yellow. I swayed on my feet as she began to cry softly.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, reaching out to catch her sleeve. And then just like that, I was holding her as she wept into my shoulder. Despite her fleshy countenance, she was all bone. ‘We’re not judging you.’

  She broke away and pushed open her front door as I stood, wobbly and confused, in the dark hall. She was about to shut it completely when I saw her face appear in the black gap. It shone bright and hollow, like a skull.

  ‘You look just like your mother,’ she said, and for a moment, I found I could not breathe. She slammed the door.

  Photographs

  Job lot miscellaneous photographs, subjects unknown (majority feature a man, c.35 years, Caucasian, shoulder-length dark hair, beard, and a woman, also Caucasian, c.20 years, waist-length dark hair, though several unposed group shots also included featuring persons unknown), colour (Kodak instamatic film), black and white (Ilford 35mm HP5 plus 400, taken using Nikon EM SLR). Taken circa late 1970s-early 1980s.

  I suppose she was right; I do look like my mother. In my favourite picture of Stella, she is in her mid-twenties and standing on the street. She’s wearing high-waisted drainpipe jeans, probably black, although it’s hard to tell in greyscale. Her hair is long and unstyled, thick. Black and white striped waistcoat, leather jacket, boots, cigarette. A slight smile that shows on only half her face. Huge eyes rimmed with black eyeliner. She looks beautiful in this photograph; all the best parts of me and none of the worst. While I am blonde and washed-out, less vivid, she is dark, unreadable. In the background, you are just able to glimpse the house.

  ‘Your mother was a trophy wife,’ my father said once. A strange thing for a self-confessed male feminist to say, and about a woman who, when she was up, was so much more than the most beautiful woman in the room. She was the only one who you wanted to talk to: charming, and quick to laugh, with a self-taught intelligence. At these times, she was barely recognisable as the red-eyed, dirty-haired wild woman at home who periodically gobbled up my mother. She would wear her sadness so lightly that the only hint of it was manifested in a deep and encouraging sympathy. I’ve seen her do it. Some stranger will tell her all his sorrows and her hand will grasp his arm as her eyes widen and fill with tears at whatever misfortune has befallen him. I don’t mean to imply that this is by design: it’s authentic. It’s just that at the same time she’s already plaiting the strands together to create the story. She’s addicted to stories, my mother, and she loves to tell them. When she does, she captivates. It’s one of the things my father fell in love with. ‘She was so young,’ he said, of the schoolgirl he had taken from her parents. ‘But she was full of all these tales.’

  In the photograph, he’s standing next to her, offsetting her smile with a brooding expression. Despite it being the mid-eighties, he is still wearing flares; corduroy, from the look of it. You cannot tell from the picture but I know that they were lime green; my mother told me, laughing, how embarrassed she was. Everyone else had moved onto punk by then, and there he is, his hair far gone past the point of touching his collar as a delayed rebellion against his schoolmasters, and a collarless shirt accessorised with a ridiculously long hand-knitted Doctor Who scarf, knitted for him by Stella. I used to love that scarf, scratchy and moth-eaten though it was. When I wound its knitted stripes around me, it would almost conceal my entire body, and I would roam about the house with my arms out in front of me, a stripy scarf mummy.

  I was five when Stella decided that the conventional family life that she had tried to build with Bryn on leaving the commune was intolerable, and she and I went back to Longhope less than a year after having left. I remember standing alone in the checkered hallway surrounded by boxes, as she sought out her old friends somewhere in the depths of the house. She had had enough of living the hippy countryside dream, she told me later. ‘You can’t imagine the boredom, darling,’ she said. ‘There we were, way up in this isolated cottage on this mountainside, miles from anywhere. I had to get out before one of us did a murder–suicide.’

  The night my mother left him, she told me that she made him the most beautiful salad. She had been supposed to prepare a meal for both of them, but she was alive with a calm hungerless anger and so only laid out one plate. Then she set about carefully arranging the ingredients; the grilled courgettes in concentric circles, dotted with perfectly symmetrical slices of tomato and perfect little new potatoes. Asparagus positioned to form a star, and the centrepiece: a flower formed of slices of boiled egg. ‘Your dinner is ready,’ she had said to him, and she had walked out of the room and out of the door, putting me and our stuff into the old yellow Datsun and driving four hundred miles back down to London, blasting Elvis Costello and the Attractions all the way and smoking roll-ups out of the window. In a final act of defiance against years of imposed vegetarianism, we stopped at Wimpy for a burger.

  I once asked her what the catalyst had been, and as was typical of her she said that she didn’t really know, only that the fact of the perfect salad seemed to her an affront. Her guilty desire to furnish my father with this perfectly ordered, balanced meal was so reminiscent of the life that she had tried to escape that she felt she had no choice but to flee immediately. ‘Everything I didn’t want was on that plate in front of me,’ she said. ‘So I gave it to him, like a good wife, and then I scarpered.’

  This was the first of many road trips we took together; Stella was never able to stay settled for long. Throughout my childhood, usually during a manic upsweep, she would come across someplace and become convinced that this was it, this was where real life would begin for both of us, and she would truly believe it, even though there was often a man waiting conveniently in the wings.

  ‘We’ll grow vegetables!’ she would declare, as we stood on the edge of an overgrown patch of land that, having discerned a wonky ‘for sale’ sign in the rear-view mirror, she had pulled over to examine. ‘We shall open a farm shop!’

  Another time: ‘I will establish a studio that restores antique furniture, and we shall become rich because wealthy people with taste will come to buy it from miles around.’

  And another: ‘It may look decrepit to you, but soon this will be transformed into a highly desirable relaxation and yoga retreat.’

  She was always full of these schemes: a health food shop, an art gallery, a community theatre. My childhood is littered with discarded grand plans, and though the failure of them would always hit her hard, their inception was part of what made her fun. As I grew older, I began to recognise the symptoms of her restlessness purely from noticing a certain look in her eye, and though it would frighten me (usually I would have just settled at school, or made friends, established a routine), her enthusiasm was catching. That’s the thing about Stella – she is capricious, unstable and deeply unreliable, but she also has a charm that you see rarely in life. If y
ou were a stranger lucky enough to meet her, she would make you feel privileged by the very fact that she was drawing you into the story of her life. There was little concession made to the truth, granted; it was always the telling of it that mattered. If you let her wrap you up in all her twists and turns, it can feel almost like love.

  Though I can barely remember the journey back to London, I do recall finally arriving and staring up at the imposing staircase in our new (old) home. The ceiling seemed to stretch for miles above my head. Suspended from it was a grubby chandelier that hinted, jarringly, at one of the place’s many past lives as a home for wealthy Victorians. The doors and windows were thrown open, as they so often were, and the breeze caused it to swing back and forth in ways that were not entirely unthreatening. Such a theatrical centrepiece didn’t exactly fit amongst the Indian batik wall hangings, the strong cooking smells and the spider plants whose dust-covered leaves my mother would wash on Sundays with soapy water. The place felt enormous, too big even for the eleven adults, two teenagers and four cats living there at the time.

  At the rear of the hallway there was a large kitchen that smelled perpetually of curry. This was where the adults would congregate and cook while the teenagers, both dropouts from the local comprehensive and living at the top of the house, would blast out jungle music from the attic. Fleur, an exercise in heroin chic and the girlfriend of Rufus, who headed the DJ collective and was the only guy I’d seen in real life with high top fade hair. He didn’t seem to mind the fact that she lived with her parents – not just her parents, but also her mum’s new boyfriend and her dad’s new girlfriend. Then again, they both spent most of the time stoned. As a five-year-old I was unaware of the complex sexual dynamics in the house, or even who belonged to whom, just as I couldn’t really understand what my daddy had done that was so terrible we had had to go away and leave him in the countryside. My memories of that time are mottled, and it’s difficult to know which parts I can actually recall and which are the consequence of years’ worth of family legends, fictions that have built up like limescale, no longer brittle enough to be scraped away.