The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  ‘Wait . . . did you live here? In this house?’

  ‘Don’t catch on quick, do you, you stupid cow? Granted, you were a child, so I doubt you’d remember much about me, but how else would I have known your cunt of a mother?’

  ‘Don’t talk about her like that.’ Even I have limits. I topped up my drink.

  ‘After what she did, I’ll talk about her any way I want. I imagine I know her better than you do. I’ve lived with her long enough. The world wasn’t formed the moment you walked into it, love.’

  ‘I know that. Believe me, I’m well aware of that.’

  ‘I’ve lived here since the early seventies, way before her time. Helped break into the place myself. I’m the only one left now, obviously, but I was one of the very first. Me and your father, and Rowan and Mikey, and some goggled-eyed groupie whose name I can’t remember, who I think was Swedish. This was before your mam would have had blood in her knickers. I’d been kicked out of my squat in Chalk Farm, so we decided to start a “new model for communal living–”.’ She said ‘communal living’ with real venomous sarcasm ‘–and we broke into this place, which was all boarded up.’

  ‘I knew it had been a squat,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t realise how long for.’

  ‘I’m the last man standing. They not tell you anything?’ Coral said. ‘I suppose your dad was always too busy skinning up and lamenting the death of the counter-culture, the pretentious arse. He was a poser, Bryn, but his heart was in the right place. At least he believed in what he was doing, unlike your ma. You know the first thing we did when we moved in was remove the bathroom doors? Bathroom doors were bourgeois, you see, and why should we feel any shame about nudity, and bodily functions? We weren’t squeamish about sex, either. Gawd, when we first moved in here, no one was allowed to sleep in the same bed – I say bed but it were bleeding mattresses on palettes, nightmare for your back – two nights in a row. You weren’t allowed to own things, let alone people.’

  ‘I had a bed when we came here,’ I said.

  ‘It was the eighties by then. Everyone had calmed down. Still shagging each other like rabbits, of course, not that you’d have known. Do you remember anything about that time? I suppose you don’t.’

  ‘Parts,’ I said. ‘I remember how the house and garden looked, and some things that happened, but it’s all very hazy. We weren’t here for long. I know that it didn’t end well.’

  ‘Oh, you were here long enough,’ said Coral, as she downed the last few drops of liqueur. ‘Speaking of, it’s about time you buggered off. I’ve got someone coming round, or “calling on me” as that posh tart who lives upstairs would say. Do you think you could get her to stop her and her mates braying in the hallway all hours of the day and night? Ridiculous accents. It’s like having Margaret Thatcher in your living room, and eleven years was quite enough.’

  I stood up and made my way to the door. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But do you think you would mind if I visited again? I know there was no love lost between yourself and Stella, but I’m ever so keen to hear more about that time, and about my own childhood. You see, I’m not really sure I know much about it at all. She won’t discuss it. It makes her cry.’

  Coral let out a bitter laugh.

  ‘And I don’t really know any friends of my parents. She’s never mentioned you. My dad lives up in the mountains somewhere in Wales, we don’t really talk, and it would just be so good to hear something about how it was, then. This house is so different now . . . ’

  Tailing off, it occurred to me that I was drunk, and I stood, swaying slightly on her threshold, waiting for her response, but all she said was, ‘Take care’, and closed the door quietly, leaving me alone in the shadowed hall. I wanted a cigarette, but I had smoked them all, and the kitchen was empty. Josh had undoubtedly gone for a nap, and Lou hadn’t been home for several days, so I gave up the search for tobacco and went to lie down on my bed.

  The room was mercifully cool, the window having been open all afternoon and the early evening sun was in the process of disappearing behind the terraced houses opposite. As I scrunched up my pillow to a comfortable consistency, I could hear Coral’s wind chimes gently nudging each other in the garden below. I thought about her strange, furniture-less flat, with its crystals hanging from every window frame but no couch, and I wondered who it was who would visit her and if they wished her well or if, any moment now, the screaming would start. The feathers and teeth of my dream-catcher were shifting slightly in the breeze, and as I watched the sky turn pink through the knotted cells, it occurred to me just how much the netting resembled a spider’s web. I thought of all the spiders’ webs I had ever seen since I was a child, listing them as you might see them in a curator’s catalogue: ‘Robin Hood’s Bay, Gate Post, 1996 (?), medium-sized.’

  As I did this, a recollection began to form itself in my mind. An afternoon of playing in the undergrowth outside, in the garden of that house, that summer, with Gabriel, the first ever boy to hold my hand. His mother, Vita, had been in my mother’s consciousness-raising group, and had stayed with her here at the house during the Brixton riots, before I was born. They moved to Manchester not long after we left Longhope, his father sick of the sus laws, the constant stop and search; not wanting the same biweekly ordeal for his young son once he grew tall and muscular, the overnight leap from child to perceived threat.

  I had seen Vita and Gabriel only once since then, one August when we were older but still easy around one another in that pre-pubescent way, and they had come to the country to visit us. The two of us had been walking through the main village street in the late morning, towels rolled neatly under our arms, on our way to swim, when we heard the high-pitched whooping of an ill-conceived monkey impression. Three children, several years younger than us, followed us all the way to the river, gibbering ceaselessly, and Gabs never said a word, even as they sat above us in the trees as we swam, mocking in their arm gestures as they scratched their armpits. I remember how high he held his head as he walked, and how I had said nothing because I did not have the words, even as we reached the safety of the kitchen and sipped our home-made lemonades, shaken but relishing the sharpness. This was the point at which he tried to raise the topic of what Stella called ‘that awful summer’.

  ‘Do you ever think about it?’ he had asked me. ‘Do you ever think about her?’

  I don’t remember what I said in reply. It was the last time I saw him. My mother stayed in touch with Vita and later told me that he had had a breakdown in his first year of university and had come back to his mother’s house, to lie quietly in his room.

  I have always struggled to think of him as grown. Instead, Gabriel is cemented in the garden of that summer, grinning chubby-faced in the hours we spent lying in the wildflowers, eating them, crushing them between our fat little fingers, splitting their stems to reveal the lurid chlorophyll beneath, our hands linked, giggling while our mothers sat inside drinking herbal tea, and a fat-bodied garden spider spun a web across the entire width of the dark void left by the propped-open French windows. We sang, ‘Daisy, daisy, give me your answer, do.’

  Finally, when it was growing dark and we were called inside, for supper, we stood together looking at the web as it blocked our path, its engorged queen plump and hideous in the centre, and I cried at the sight of it, as Gabs gripped my hand tighter, because when you’re five a spider is enough to make you that scared. Nearly two decades later, drunk, I lay there on my bed thinking of how the first boy to kiss me had also been the gentlest, because he had been afraid of the horrible creature but refused, despite my wailing entreaties, to wreck its home and cut it lose from its translucent thread; we would just have to stay outside and miss our cake and sleep under the stars. And as I wept for him in a half-sleep, I remembered something else, a flicker of a moment that had long been lost: a woman’s face appearing behind the web as she stood there bony in a pair of cut-off denim shorts, red hair long enough to almost reach her waist, and plucked the spider from its we
b delicately between her two fingers, laughing.

  Summer 1984

  Mark is upstairs, packing. I can tell he’s seething, though he was quiet when I told him I was staying here. ‘I’m not coming with you,’ I said, and he clenched his fists, his arms taut by his sides, and in that moment he looked like the little boy I once knew and worshipped, mute with frustration at the shit injustice of our lives. ‘I don’t need you to protect me,’ I wanted to say, but he had already left the room.

  I sat there for a long time, waiting for him to come down. The house was quiet, as it so often is in the daytime, as people sleep off the excesses of the night before with the languor of those who aren’t needed anywhere in daylight hours. When I first came here I wondered how they made their cash, though it seemed rude to ask. Giros, odd jobs, family money, I imagine. How lovely and safe they must feel.

  Mark comes in, holdall in hand. ‘What do I tell Mam and Dad? That you’re shacking up in a squat with a load of punks and hippies and weirdos? They need you. We all need you.’

  ‘There’s nothing for me up there,’ I say. ‘I’ll get a job, send money home.’

  ‘They probably don’t believe in money,’ he says, with bitterness. He hands me a tenner, but does not move any closer. I make a move to embrace him, but he shakes his head.

  ‘It’s your funeral,’ he says.

  I cry a bit after he’s gone, from relief rather than regret. Then I begin to climb the stairs to what is now my new room. When I reach the third landing, Coral strolls out of the bathroom to face me, her beads jangling. She puts a hand on my arm. The amethysts on her bracelet are cold on my goose-pimpled skin.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she says, ‘but you need to be careful.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I widen my eyes. Though I know, and she knows that I know. She’s seen how he looks at me. How she looks at him looking at me.

  ‘Don’t get too mixed up with them. They may be a pretty pair, and they may be very taken with you, but their loyalty is always to one another. Do not forget that.’

  China Lady

  Royal Doulton porcelain shepherdess figurine holding lamb, pale blue frock. Made in England. 20.5 cm high. Modelled by R. J. Tabbenor. Production dates between 1987 and 1988. Significant damage (has been reassembled using superglue).

  They say that arachnophobia is evolutionary; that some primal, atavistic fear of these eight-legged creatures is triggered when we see one crawl across the floor – ‘it’s the way they move’, phobics so often say, as they shudder voluntarily, and for emphasis. My mother has a horror of them, but said it was because her own father did. Spiders, she said, were the only things that frightened him, and as he in turn frightened her the fear was passed down.

  They don’t scare me. As I woke in a beam of almost agonising sunshine, it struck me that they hadn’t done since I had seen the young red-headed woman pick one up so easily. I wondered who she was and what she was doing in the house. There were always people drifting through but for some reason this memory left a disturbing trace, a sense of loss. It had been months since I had had a full night’s sleep, so often would I wake from some fearsome dream, gasping. In the mornings my face would be wet, but I’d remember nothing of the phantasmagoric perils my brain had thrown at me during the night. Whenever I woke up like this, I was filled with such a profound sense of sadness that I knew instinctively that there was no use getting up today. I assumed, because of watching my mother, that everyone had a certain number of days like this, where they just can’t bear to face the outside. It felt like a mixture of what Holly Golightly called the ‘mean reds’ – being afraid but you’re not sure what you’re afraid of – and the blues. I call them the purples.

  Dreaming of Gabriel and the garden had not been like that. Instead, I felt bereft, with an urge to ask my mother to phone his, but although my fear of the spider in the dream had been tangible, the object of my fear had been so tenderly removed. In showing me both him and the garden as they had been, the dream felt like a gift. I had forgotten there had once been wildflowers out there among the cat shit and the mattresses. I wondered where all the flowers had gone.

  I got up, and cutting through the living room on my way to the kitchen for a coffee, I saw that Lou was back. She’d been looking even skinnier over the last couple of weeks, and in this particular dress – a clinging, floor-length number in shiny yet translucent lamé, metallic raspberry pink with spaghetti straps, like something that belonged on the floor of Studio 54 – she looked even more so. It clung to her hip bones and the ribs beneath her bee-sting breasts in a way that made me feel simultaneously envious and pitying. She was so terribly thin. Her heavy fringe against the paleness of her skin as she stood, backlit by the bay window, made her look like a model with make-up smeared down her face.

  A Godard film flickered on the television, the sound muted. I’m not sure which one it was – one I hadn’t understood, which could be any of them. As I looked at her it struck me that I could see her bush through her dress, and I felt shocked, and then embarrassed by my shock, because if anyone was going to cultivate a full bush, in London in 2011, then it would be Lou.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, with a slight toss of her head. ‘Here and there, and everywhere.’ She was holding a cut-glass whisky tumbler that was almost empty. ‘We ended up in Harry’s latest squat, in Mayfair. You know Harry, my old friend from school, the artist. I don’t know how long ago. What day is it?’

  ‘Sunday,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to be at work in an hour.’

  ‘Sunday . . . ’ she said, in a vague way. ‘But it couldn’t be.’ Her pupils were massive.

  ‘I assure you it is. Your voice sounds very dry. Do you want me to get you some water?’

  ‘Please. I’m dehydrated. My mouth feels like something crawled into it and died. My piss was this horrible colour, almost green, with a sort of film on it. Vile.’

  ‘Are you ok?’ I said, coming back in. ‘You look . . . odd.’

  ‘I’m fine. I drove home. There was a bit of drama with Cosmo.’

  A year ago I’d have questioned the plausibility of there being a human being in existence with the name of Cosmo, but now I knew better.

  ‘We were in one of the rooms, fooling around. I was wrecked. Then we started fucking, I’m not sure how.’ She looked me dead in the face. It was the first time I’d ever heard her talk about sex, which for someone whose bedroom door might as well have had turnstiles, I found strange. You knew she had it; everything about her, the way she dressed and spoke and moved, was geared towards you knowing that she had it. The sound of her orgasms pierced the stillness of most of our afternoons. But to talk about it? Never. At least, not with me.

  Lou downed the dregs and looked away.

  ‘So he flips me over, on the bed. And we’re doing it that way, from behind, and he starts pulling my hair. Not in a sexy I-can’t-control-myself way, either. In a painful way. I screamed.’

  ‘What an arsehole.’

  ‘Right? I wish I could say that I told him to get the hell off me, that I hit him. But I didn’t. I just lay there, silently. Until he finished. And then I drove home.’

  We were both quiet for a moment. Then Lou spoke again, louder this time.

  ‘I’m just so fucking sick of these men, Harmony, with their “liberal principles”. The way they treat us, like we’re just holes. Before the sex, I was talking to Cosmo about a play I’d like to write. He didn’t even pay me the courtesy of pretending to be interested. He just wanted to get me in that bedroom so he could ram me like the porn stars he beats off to. I can’t do it anymore.’ At this, Lou let out a little scream of frustration. The glass, which mere seconds ago had been in her trembling hand, hit the wall on the opposite side of the room. We both stared at it without speaking.

  A door slammed open and then shut.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Josh’s voice was thick with the incoherence of sleep. He was wearing a pair of boxe
r shorts and a T-shirt, cut tight to his body, that he had obviously got at some work training day: ‘Keeping Islington Active’. ‘I was asleep. It’s Sunday morning.’

  ‘Do you think we’re not aware of that?’ Lou walked through into the kitchen and got herself another glass. The whisky was on the counter. She poured herself another three or four fingers.

  ‘So you’re not even going to apologise?’ His accent got stronger when he was angry. He was more awake now.

  ‘Apologise? Grow up, Josh. Are you saying you’ve never smashed anything before? Of course you haven’t. Because you don’t get angry, do you? People like you just bury your pain until it festers into a tumour, and then you die in your fifties.’

  ‘Oh, please. Posh people don’t own the patent on anger, Lou. If anything, you’ve got far less to be angry about. Do you know what it’s like where I’m from? You haven’t got a fucking clue. What it took for me to get here. Work in a factory, marry a local girl, like my dad did, that’s what was expected. And you’re here, crying your eyes out, smashing your expensive crystal glassware all over our lounge. It’s you who should grow up.’

  ‘God, you’re just so bloody honourable. Tell me, then. Have you ever smashed anything? I bet you haven’t, have you?’ Her voice was goading, mean.

  She sat down in front of the television. A man in a hat was talking to a woman in sunglasses as they drove along in a convertible, the shot cropped close, like her hair. We all fell silent as though we could hear what was being said.

  ‘I have, actually.’

  ‘Oh yeah, when?’ She pretended indifference, her eyes not moving from the screen.