The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  Also: I had a boyfriend of sorts, a rekindled university fling who had strolled into the pub on a boiling afternoon that month after a ramble on the Heath. He was an academic. Eastern European, Jewish, older. The genre of well-educated, liberal, North London-based person who had taken to frequenting the pub since it had been done up and the manager had advertised for nice, well-spoken, polite staff fluent in English – hence my new job. Rumour had it that the pub had been bought by the manager Mattie’s mother for the sum of one million pounds and, as is the way with rich people, she and her son had turned it into the exact place that their kind would frequent. Never mind the regulars and the loss of their local. What the poshos wanted was somewhere dog friendly that has guinea fowl and bowls of quails’ eggs on the menu, and suppers just like nanny used to make. The kind of place that reminds them of the little tavern on the fringes of the country estates they grew up on, but not so far from Hampstead. Good luck getting a bag of scampi fries, in other words.

  I suspect they chose to employ me, with my hint of a London accent, to give some local flavour. A month after opening we were still getting the cockneys coming in and asking what the hell had happened to the slotties, and where was the picture of the old Queen that used to be behind the bar. Mattie’s prices had put a lot of them off (the staff couldn’t afford to eat there either) but there were a few stragglers tenaciously holding on, refusing to leave, stubbornly doing lines in the toilet like they had every Friday and Saturday nights for years. Sometimes, when I wasn’t on the bar or being made to accompany my boss to Sainsbury’s to buy ingredients we had run out of (Mattie had smoked too much weed at Durham and now had a terror of crowded spaces), I would join them and they would say that I was not like the others. It sounds stupid, but crowding into that Farrow & Ball-painted cubicle with Kev the painter–decorator while we chopped up coke on the reclaimed Victorian tiles is the closest I’d ever really felt to belonging anywhere. ‘Of course you’re one of us, you were born in the Whitty,’ he said, using the nickname for our local hospital, his wrinkled hand resting on the back of my neck as I bent over and switched nostrils.

  It’s true I was born there, unusually for my mother’s natural birthing crowd. ‘Have you signed her up for YTS yet?’ said my father, on seeing me that first time, pink and new and most importantly, unlike the newborn daughter of the Orthodox Jewish woman in the bed next door, a much-wanted girl.

  A barmaid. It was as good as anything else that was going. You can’t be too choosy in the middle of a recession, though I think the academic was surprised when I turned around and poured him an Addlestones. ‘Harmony,’ he said, in that peremptory tone of voice he had. ‘You work here now.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just here. I’m not a waitress-and.’

  If he had no idea what I was talking about, he didn’t let on. He just smiled his dirty smile, and raised his glass to my tits.

  God, he was beautiful. I had never thought that word about a man before, but there simply wasn’t another for what he was. I could try to describe him, to mix and match the adjectives to try and make a picture of him in your mind, but it would be by the very nature of its mode of creation blurred and indistinct. It would be easier to mould his slender but muscular body out of plasticine. I knew its every tendon and crevice, the weight of it, the tautness of his stomach, how it tightened when he was trying to hold back. Just looking at his bare arms made me crazy. If I had to sum up the effect he had on me, I’d say he made me want to miss a flight.

  The rare power he had, the way he seemed to peel back the rind of me so that what was left was slutty and compliant, had made him difficult to give up; it was also the reason why I had. It felt electrically cheap to be so willing, and now, seeing him in front of me meant I could no longer remember why I had ever thought to stop.

  We stood looking at each other. It was a busy afternoon and the pub was filling up with sweaty families who were staggering off the Heath in search of organic refreshments, so there wasn’t time to talk. But he said he would call me and had done so, and I met him in another bar, in town, late one night after my shift. He was polite and attentive, insistent that he pay, listening carefully to my thoughts about my abandoned course while he shifted his knee so that it sat between my legs, forcing them open.

  ‘Take me somewhere,’ I said, when we had barely finished our first set of drinks, and he smiled as though he had known all along what I would say, that our attempts to talk across a table and be interested in one another’s thoughts on higher education were only play-acting, our way of saying, see, I don’t want you that much, of delaying the moment when our need for each other’s bodies became tacky and obvious.

  Since then we spent the late afternoons at his place, carefully angled away from his curtainless window that looked out onto the next-door neighbour’s garden, in which a child bounced on a large trampoline for hours at a time. We fucked to the rhythm of it and sometimes, he tied me to the bed. It wasn’t and never had been love. In many ways it felt better and easier than that.

  We fucked in parks, too; Finsbury Park particularly. Once, we were nearly caught. It was a particularly hot day, even by the standards of that year, and I had been out for lunch with Lucia, which meant drinking throughout the afternoon. I was wearing a silk dress. The colour was what you’d call ‘nude’, meaning that, if seen from a distance, it looked as though I was naked. It was more of a slip, really. The material was so thin that it stuck to the sweat on the backs of my legs, and as we walked through the park the academic slid his hand up between the fabric and my skin, separating them. The inside of my mouth still tasted like gin and cucumber, he said, but my head had begun to feel tight and sore, and after we kissed a little I fell into a long, deep sleep and he lay next to me, reading.

  When I awoke it was getting dark, and I could only vaguely see his shape over me as he blew cool air on my face. ‘Harmony,’ he said, and there was laughter in his whisper. ‘You look just like a little girl when you sleep.’

  ‘My mother told me that once,’ I said, feeling fuzzy, and hungry, as I always do after a nap. It was still hot, and my skirt had ridden up as I slept, but when I tried to pull it down he placed his hand firmly on my wrist.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ he said, grabbing my other wrist and placing them both above my head. He shifted his hands so that one pinned me down and the other was free, and used it to lift my skirt so that it was entirely around my waist. It occurred to me that the park was empty, but it was still not quite dark, and I could see the look in his eye; his pupils dilating, as he ran his thumb over my nipples, hard through the silk, then placed his hand inside my underwear. It didn’t take me long to come. It was only afterwards that I noticed the headlights. Had he known someone was watching?

  I walked all the way home that evening. The air felt heavy and balmy and there wasn’t much of a breeze as I made my way through the streets of Hornsey and Holloway; a circuitous route, but I was in no hurry to get home. As I walked past the groups of men smoking outside the Turkish restaurants on Green Lanes, they all hissed, and I wondered not for the first time what exactly the sound signified – was it desire or condemnation? And is it wrong that I felt a little bit pleased? As I had many times before, I longed to call their bluff. To turn around and say, ‘come on, then, big boy. Let’s do this.’ Watch them back away, embarrassed.

  I was halfway home when my phone beeped. A text, from him. ‘I want to rape you,’ it said, and immediately it felt as though the spontaneous moment we had shared had become sordid and base. I felt ashamed, as though the words themselves were acts of violence, and I had somehow helped form them, had aided and abetted. I deleted the message without replying.

  It must have been a reminder, because for the rest of the way home I could not stop thinking about the woman in the downstairs flat. The sound of her strange, animal screams would not leave my mind. She is the reason that you should not use such words lightly, I thought, as though my mental admonitions could somehow reach him across t
he park and back in his poky little Stroud Green flat stuffed with books and bongs. I wasn’t angry, but the message was further proof that he was unknowable. It wasn’t just that he was circumspect, although I was sure that there were many things about his life that he kept hidden. It was the fact of his inconsistency. Every line was incongruous, as if, each time, I were meeting a different stranger.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said once, brushing the hair from my eyes like a leading man. Then, two days later, as I dressed: ‘Your arse is getting fat.’

  And, ‘I hate London. The people here are so uncultured. I include you in that, little girl.’

  Followed by: ‘I can’t imagine being anywhere else than here with you.’

  He didn’t seem to care when I slept with other people. He’d be eager to hear all about it, not from jealousy but because it turned him on. He’d ask questions, imploring me to leave no detail out. ‘And then what would he do?’ he would ask, his thumb circling my inner thigh. ‘Did you like that?’

  But later, in bed, he would push my face into the pillow and breathe into my ear that I belonged to him.

  It was all just words. Words which, instead of blending over time to form some sense of a personality, simply sat there, cold and out of context. Each time it felt like a meeting with a different man. That afternoon, for instance, a disturbing desire to rape me, but two weeks later, a hotel room in West Hampstead, an Italian dinner and a declaration of love. None of it made sense, but then everything was disconcerting that summer. I was not completely in my right mind, you could say. Memories long inaccessible were beginning to rise to the surface like scum and were sitting there, waiting to be sifted through.

  When I got back to the house and entered the hallway, I noticed the downstairs neighbour’s door was ajar. The room’s dark interior beckoned.

  Spider

  European garden spider (‘Araneus diadematus’), female, grey with mottled white abdomen. 17 mm.

  Her flat had the same layout as I remembered. There was the kitchen in which I’d lost my treasured bouncy ball, the French windows, the overgrown garden. As Josh had said, there was hardly any furniture, and from the direction of the back door there rose a fetid smell. There was no fridge. Dylan sang from somewhere too indistinctly to make out, a radio probably. I had heard her singing to the radio before, through the ceiling, in her gruff, rasping voice. Motown, Smokey Robinson. Several flies buzzing in time with the strip lighting danced around the unshaded ceiling light bulb, trapped. Though the sunshine outside was still blinding, the interior of these rooms was dark, mould-smelling.

  ‘I knew you’d come eventually,’ she said, and I saw her standing in the corner, then. She was barefoot and wearing a stained nightie with a greeting card teddy bear on it with a heart-shaped nose. Her grey straggled hair reached past her armpits. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked as though she had lost even more teeth since I had seen her face close up, in the hallway. I felt a sudden, dismaying wave of pity, and I think she sensed it, because she pointed at the door. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’ Slurring, drunk as usual and me, as she had said, judging her.

  I looked at the empty pile of bottles next to the overflowing kitchen bin, and had a thought. ‘We have booze,’ I said. ‘In the flat.’

  She said nothing, but I knew her interest was piqued. ‘Shall I go and get it?’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s have a drink together.’

  She bowed her head slightly in acquiescence, and I hurtled upstairs. Josh, naked but for basketball shorts, was in the kitchen smoking a joint. I made a beeline for the sideboard – a great, hulking piece of early twentieth-century furniture that he’d salvaged from the curb. All that was left was the 4am stuff: Cherry B, Crème de Peche, a dash of Cointreau. I grabbed it all. It would have to do.

  ‘On it already?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s for her.’ At the word her, I nodded downstairs.

  ‘I meant to ask you about that, actually,’ said Josh. ‘I swear I heard you both, a couple of weeks ago. Pissed in the hall.’

  ‘Yeah, that was me,’ I said. ‘Christ, I was hammered. You’ll never believe this, but she was going on about us being judgemental of her sad existence and I ended up . . . hugging her.’

  ‘You should be careful.’ He tapped the joint against the side of a teacup, and watched the ash fall.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Letting people like that into your life. She’ll take advantage. She’s mental, you know. All she wants is a slight crack in the door and boom! She’s in. There’ll be no getting rid of her.’

  ‘She seems lonely,’ I said. ‘You’re too cynical.’

  ‘You’re naïve. You mark my words. You’ll be filling in her benefit forms and picking up her coke before you know it.’

  ‘I thought your Albanians delivered to the door?’ I said. ‘See you later.’

  ‘It’s not great,’ I said, as I entered, ‘but it’s better than nothing.’

  She had moved to the centre of the floor and was sitting there cross-legged, smoking a fag, ashing into a Perspex bowl of cigarette butts that was almost overflowing.

  ‘I’ll get us some glasses, shall I?’ I said, when she made no response. I started opening unit doors and rummaging around, eventually settling for a cracked teacup and a ramekin.

  ‘Bottoms up,’ I necked it, the artificial peaches turning sickly in my mouth. I shuffled over onto the floor and sat down next to her, shifting slightly when I realised that the laminate was sticky, sliding a cushion beneath myself. Silence. Dylan croaked on despite the awkwardness. The song was ‘Just Like a Woman’.

  ‘I used to like this one’, I said, ‘when I was a teenager. I liked how cruel he sounded. The disdain in his voice.’ It was true. It had given me a thrill, this song, and not just because of its evocative talk of amphetamines and pearls, the mythology that it had been written about Edie Sedgwick, but because it felt like he truly hated this woman, this debutante, whoever she was.

  ‘Your mother always said it was misogynistic,’ said the neighbour, after we had listened to another verse. ‘But then that’s the type of woman she wanted to be. Parties. Cocktail cigarettes. Touched a nerve.’

  It sounded like Stella. The aspiring middle-class party girl who never could quite wear a kaftan comfortably. My mother had secretly smoked Sobranies the entire time she had been married to my father. I found them once when I was very small and rummaging in her dressing table, opening her silver case with my clumsy fingers to reveal the candy-coloured stripes inside. The smell and, I hate to say it, taste of them is unmistakable. Perhaps you’ve chewed tobacco and so know to an extent what I am talking about, but unless you’ve actually eaten a cigarette in the belief that it’s some kind of sherbet sweet, it’s difficult to convey the level of nausea it elicits.

  She looked at me, expecting a reaction, but what could I say? She may never have worn a bra, but my mother had not been built to be a hippy; it was plain for anyone to see.

  ‘I prefer “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, now,’ I said, taking another swig of Crème de Peche. ‘I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul . . . ’ my reedy voice came out louder than I’d intended in the staleness of the room and I abruptly stopped singing. The neighbour looked at me as though I were the mad one.

  ‘How is the old slag, anyway? Still shagging her way around the West Country with some toy boy, last I heard.’

  I considered contradicting this. No one likes to hear their mother spoken of that way, but to be completely honest, it wasn’t too far off the mark. I presumed she was talking about Ziggy, the latest slightly-useless-but-ultimately-benevolent stoner she had shacked up with in Cornwall, but then it could equally have been River, or Floyd, or even Xavier. It depended how far back you wanted to go.

  I suppose I could have told her about life with Stella; the constant moving, the rows and the rages, the time in the orchard when she had made a half-articulated confession about what had gone on with them in that house. ‘I�
�ll never forgive myself,’ she had said. ‘Or your father.’

  Then another time: ‘There are things in life that are fine to be blasé about. But the hearts of other people are not one of them. I learned that the hard way, and it still haunts me today.’

  But judging by the hatred I could detect in the cadences of this stranger’s voice, I gathered the neighbour knew much more than I did about the whole, messy affair.

  ‘Send her my love.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know your name.’

  ‘It’s Coral. Tell her Coral sends her regards. The old bitch.’

  The fury in her voice threw me. People never normally hated Stella. She was too charismatic, and too talented at making people feel good about themselves, for that. Even my father, despite the baffled wonderment she inspired in him, never said a bad word about her.

  Coral reached for the bottle of Cointreau and lit a cigarette. ‘I have to say, the day you moved in, I thought for a second it was her, gone blonde. I watched you through the net curtains, unloading your stuff out of the car. It was uncanny. Same face. Like she’d come back to wreck it all, all over again.’

  ‘Wreck what?’

  ‘Everything she touched. She was a careless woman, your mother. Careless with money, careless with objects. You couldn’t lend her a dress or a record without her losing it, or breaking it. I remember I lent her my white cheesecloth summer dress once, for a garden party she sneaked off to in Chelsea, with some rich friend of hers. She jumped in an ornamental pond. “It was just so hot,” she said, when she came home dripping, her skirt muddy and covered with weeds, all torn. Ruined. She was careless with people, too.’