The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  ‘I was ten,’ said Josh. ‘There was this adventure weekend that we were going on at school. It included a day trip to the Cadbury factory. Did you know that Cadbury was the first company to build a tailor-made town for their workers? Obviously I didn’t know that then, I just wanted to go for the chocolate. But my mum said I couldn’t, we didn’t have the money. Even though she’d just spent £150 on a steam carpet cleaner from JML.’

  The absurdity of the steam carpet cleaner broke the tension, and we all laughed.

  ‘What a cow,’ said Lou. ‘So then what happened?’

  ‘Well, I was angry, obviously,’ said Josh. ‘Everyone else was going. After school, on the Friday, I watched them all get onto the bus with their rucksacks, all excited, and I was so pissed off at the unfairness of it all, that when I got home I went into the front room and picked up one of her china ladies and smashed its head on the mantelpiece.’

  I could just see a lanky, ten-year-old Josh, freckled and shaven-headed and furious in his school jumper, standing in a pristine living room with its steamed carpets, smashing up a shepherdess. I felt a new affection for him that came from knowing where he fit, and guilt at my pity. He had grown up in what, as a child, I used to call an ‘ornament house’. I first became aware of their existence when Stella began taking to her bed in the afternoon and I started going home with friends after school, noting how different their immaculate homes were to mine. When I think of them now they are always presided over with a sense of stifling gloom – the velveteen settees, the painted wildlife scenes, the women in lampshade dresses clutching parasols in the cabinet. No books. These silent houses were not places for children, so we played in the garden or the bedroom. Our house, where there was always music of some kind playing, may have been eccentric and chaotic but it felt like freedom in comparison. I’d run through the door into my mother’s bony arms and bury my head in her shoulder and she’d say, ‘How was it? Did you have a nice time?’ and I would say, ‘It was an ornament house.’ She would clap her hands and laugh with delight at my snobbery. After Thatcher there was little to distinguish the lower and upper middle classes for that generation other than matters of taste. Josh’s mother probably thought the china ladies elegant. To my own, they were aesthetic monstrosities.

  Lou (who may have been thinking something similar, though when would she have ever been to a house like this?) stood up and walked over to him, placing a hand on his cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. For a moment I thought she would kiss him, and the imagining of it alarmed me.

  He shook her off. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry too. You know how I am, in the mornings.’

  ‘I should go to bed,’ said Lou, and walked out.

  I remained where I had been standing, feeling like a failure. It struck me that I should have said something to Lucia, some comforting thing, but I hadn’t had the chance and I knew that next time we saw each other the subject would be closed. Like many rich people I had met, she pretended openness but maintained an impenetrable inner core. So, while she would regale us with tales of her bohemian childhood, of trips to India and Marrakesh and teenage drug binges on friends’ country estates, it was all told with an aloof distance, so you went away feeling as though you didn’t really know her at all. Lou spent most of her time acting like a caricature, her poshness offset with a knowing campness. Now she had shown me a rare hint of the vulnerability residing in her roped-off heart, and I had forgone the opportunity of allowing her to confide in me and, in so doing, had failed in my feminine duty.

  What had happened to Lou was a violation. An example of the almost-rape that so many of us had suffered, and talked about, at university. It brought it all back: the tender trip to the tube the next morning, the pain of rough sex that we hadn’t desired and hadn’t asked for, either, the sometimes-bloody crotch of your underwear. And the excuse-making, the twisted feeling of pride. The neat validation that came from being a girl who was wanted. It was just what boys needed, wasn’t it? No one had ever told us otherwise. My mother had talked to me about sex, of course, from when I was at an early age. It would have been difficult not to, in light of the community she had joined in her tenderfoot youth and birthed me into. We had never talked about the seedier side of it. Sex was the free and beautiful expression of desire between two or more consenting adults. It was a spiritual experience, not an ordeal, she implied. My stop-start relationship with the academic, how after weeks of silence, one flick of his thumb on a keypad would see me open my legs for him: that would be beyond her understanding.

  When she first came to the house in 1978 she had only just turned nineteen. On reaching London she decided she was no longer a suburban ingénue in a Biba dress and white, plastic high-heeled shoes but an artist with a desire to translate the mysteries of the world. It didn’t suit her; despite her commitment to the counter-culture, her middle English ideals remained steadfast. On marrying my father, which she did less than a year after joining the commune, she demanded total fidelity, something he adhered to, he later told me during one of our more honest chats, because of his physical obsession with her. She would have it that his hippie ideals were embarrassingly outdated by the late seventies. The bathroom doors had long been reinstated. She hid her conventionality behind an eccentricity of dress and a furious and unpredictable temper, but it never really left her. She would dispute this, inhabiting as she does now a converted chapel in the West Country with a boyfriend fifteen years younger, a regular at the Glastonbury solstices, but she has always exhibited a blinkered omission when discussing the past, especially when it comes to anything negative that might reflect on her. ‘Remember how you slapped me around the face, when I was fifteen?’ I said to her once, and, drawing therapeutically on her talent for selective memory, she denied that she’d done anything of the sort.

  Ask her about the seventies and she’d tell you she was living the bohemian dream. Perhaps in some ways she was, but, despite feeling a profound envy of my parents with their romantic idealism and of their luck in inhabiting a world of hedonistic certainties, I have always, secretly, been sceptical. It seems to me that no other generation has ever so successfully mythologised itself as that of the boomers, and, in my more cynical moments, I would question the validity of their reminiscences as sounding as though they were lifted wholesale from some collectively produced, crowd-sourced memoir. They pick and choose their pasts as I would carefully select pick and mix after school, with all the old favourites making an appearance – fried eggs, flying saucers, cola bottles. And she was no different. An acid trip here, a Stones concert there. I make it sound as though we were never close, but the opposite is true. The closeness I felt to her, as a child particularly, was almost oppressive in its fierceness. I can see her faults as clearly as she sees mine. I am, after all, an extension of her, living and breathing in the world, with philosophies as thin and arms and thighs and breasts as fleshy and cumbersome as hers were. That is part of the problem. When I thought about my mother jumping in that Chelsea pond during a sweltering garden party and how she turned up laughing on the doorstep, indifferent and flushed in Coral’s mud-sodden borrowed dress, I knew I was supposed to have shared her old comrade’s feelings of disapproval. Instead, I felt a fierce, unconditional love for the ebullience of her selfish youth. It was a kind of awe.

  Harmonica

  Hohner ‘Great Little Harp’ harmonica, 1960s. Made in Germany, 4” long. 10 holes, key C. In the original box with original instructions. Hand engraving on reverse reads: ‘Bryn Brown’.

  Songbook, 12 Bob Dylan hits for harmonica and guitar (arranged by Jerry Sears), published by Warner Bros Music, London, England, 1966. 26 pages 30 x 22 cm in size. Coffee cup stain on cover. Includes such classic hits as ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’. Contact seller for more details. Check out my eBay shop for more Dylan memorabilia.

  There was a Situationist working at the tube station, that
July. I could tell this because of the boards. One morning, the ‘Thought for the Day’ was a Lenin quote: ‘The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.’ The following week: ‘Humanity will not be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist.’ It made me happy, that somewhere amidst the increasingly corporate-seeming Transport for London network, there remained a strident revolutionary idealist who was probably boring the tits off his colleagues with his visions of left-wing utopia. His politics may have been deeply unfashionable, but seeing his words nonetheless felt like the last gasp of the old, anarchic spirit of London making itself known like breath forming fleeting clouds on glass.

  I do not take the tube regularly, and didn’t even then. The pub where I worked was within walking distance, but it wasn’t just that. The space felt sick and unnatural to me, and whenever I went down there it was as though I could feel the weight of the earth above us as we scuttled like rats between one station and another, in darkness. I preferred to get buses, as they made me less anxious. I would happily sit on one going from one side of the city to the other, even if it took hours, even if it was late at night, even if it was the 29, which was nicknamed the ‘death bus’ because of its reputation for criminal activity and violence, and where I once asked a man who was smoking a crack pipe ‘do you mind?’ and he responded by courteously opening the window.

  Living in the north of the city, I could go weeks without seeing the river, and then all of a sudden I’d be on the top deck of a night bus, drunk usually, and we’d cross over and there it would be suddenly: London, all marble bathed in light. I’d feel this surge in my chest at the knowledge that this was my place, and their place: my parents’. The seat of our muddled, non-linear history; a nest of legends and recollections. As we passed through the streets, I would try and imagine what it was like, in the sixties, seventies, eighties, that summer. I saw the pavements strewn with rubbish and the boarded-up tube stations and the bombed-out houses, backdrops to men with long hair and clove-scented cigarettes, and girls you called ‘love’. I saw the pub where you went when you wanted to take a contract out on someone, now a paean to ‘British tapas’ and salted caramel, where a man once played the spoons in the back bar and my mother cried with laughter because she had never seen such a thing before. As I rode the bus and zigzagged through ancient streets, I saw the place I was born shift and ripple and transform, all the while looked over by a nuclear sun smiling faintly as everything was painted duck egg blue. Now, on the pavements, sandwich boards are popping up. The same marketing slogans – which give the illusion, much like the packaging on a smoothie bottle, of emerging unmediated from the lips of a single, quirky human being – repeated over and over. ‘Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free kitten’; ‘Soup of the day: the tears of our enemies’. Each statement calculated for maximum virality. But take heart, I think, take heart: there’s still a Situationist waiting at the tube gates, a Rasta with a megaphone at Victoria. A soul still beating somewhere.

  ‘Everything is so clean,’ my mother said, when she came to see me shortly before I dropped out of university, ‘it’s as though it’s all been sandblasted.’ It is true. There’s a man who has been taking pictures in the London Underground for nearly thirty years, and that’s the first thing you notice when you look at his photographs: the dust and the dirt. His pictures are all skinheads and men with afros smoking, old ladies in trench coats clutching their handbag clasps tightly, people kissing and pissing and fighting and singing. Stella would say it was more alive then, but that could be nostalgia talking. Though buskers must play in clearly delineated semi-circles, you’ll still catch ‘Here Comes the Sun’ drifting through Euston on a gloomy day. And though there are fewer teddy boys and gutter punks and girls with fluorescent orange Ziggy Stardust hair, you’ll still spy an original every now and again, fishnets torn and bloody knees, rolly hanging limp from chapped lips. Back then, you had the characters, your tapdancing Lord Mustards and your Stanley Greens, the ‘Protein Man’ imploring you to buy less protein; meat; fish; bird; egg. They may be long gone but they’re always replaced. In 2010 it was the Jesus freaks and ‘Angel Nigel’ wrapped in an England flag, ranting in Holloway Morrisons. It’ll be someone else now, no doubt, some street poet, or glittering drag queen.

  This place can survive the sandblasting. There are still drunk kids roaring with laughter as they throw bits of chicken at each other, perching en masse on walls like crows, before charging down the high streets. The knackered commuters still sleep standing up and giggling freshers still sit on each other’s laps, their arses grazing each other’s crotches. Snatched, electric glimpses of life.

  What legacy are we left by our parents? For me, it’s the past. I see my parents’ history rolled out in a shimmering trail behind them. They made me at Longhope. Some would say I was infatuated by the aching coolness of their youth, but they would be wrong. I’ve never found it cool. And I can spot the children of other hippie parents a mile off. When they’re toddlers they have odd socks and a ratty bit of hair that grows longer at the nape of their necks, and when they’re adults they find it impossible to settle at doing anything without the uncomfortable feeling that they’re selling out. There’s a vague sense of embarrassment that surrounds us. Our reference points are slightly off. We missed too much television. We know people who were born on boats. We care both too much and not at all.

  I was not infatuated, but I felt a tenderness for them that propelled me back to the house, a place I thought I knew because it had been immortalised in photographs now lost. My mother in the bath with me, backlit by the gaps in a dusty wooden venetian blind; my father, smoking at the table with the other men, a bowl of half-eaten curry in front of him and no women in the room apart from a pair of ankles and a sheer, sweeping skirt visible from where I sit under the table; Gabs and me lying side by side in the wildflowers, smiling at one another (if I could have one, just one, it would be that one). The things we lost in the move, in all the moves, there were so many of them. All those photographs, left nonchalantly on the curb, or burned in the back garden.

  I felt the tenderness well up in me as I walked through Longhope’s rooms again, as an adult. It felt strange not telling Josh and Lucia about what had led me there, this attempt to reconstruct my history. Particularly Josh, to whom I became close as we sat up late into the evenings, smoking, or embarked upon long walks as Lucia slept through the oppressive heat of the day. That summer we spent many hours snaking our way through Islington, from top to bottom, east to west, past the giant mysterious white letters that spell out ‘H O P E’ at various locations across the borough, watching the scenery switch from multimillion pound houses to scruffy estates and back again. How the world can change in the turn of a corner, I thought, as we crossed a wasteland of a street near the prison, where black spiked railings protruded from the brick and concrete instead of trees, and then moments later entered the lush greenery of a dappled Georgian square.

  The first time we walked together, on the pavement of a busy road, we almost collided when he tried to cut across from my left-hand side to my right. ‘What are you doing?’ I had asked, laughing, as we jolted one another. He flushed with embarrassment, explaining that he’d rather walk on the other side. ‘It’s so I’m the one that gets hit by a car, not you,’ he said, and I wanted to burst into tears because the kindness in his gesture made me feel bereft at never having experienced anything like it before.

  On these walks, we mapped dead teenagers, passing and noting their memorials: the flowers, the bicycles and football shirts, the faded, streaked portraits of their babyfaces, the choking goodbyes of friends and classmates spelled out in rounded letters: ‘sleep tight, mate’. A heart on the dot of the ‘i’. And each time we would stop for a second and Josh would inhale sharply, and swallow.

  He told me about his family on these trips, about the wars on his estate, the petty and not so petty rivalries, hi
s school, the girls, so pretty and clever, all mothers now. I liked talking to him. He had a way of listening intently to the things I said and retaining them, then bringing them up in conversation weeks later, agreeing, interjecting, ‘It’s like that time when you said . . . ’ before quoting myself back at me. Even throwaway flippant things he treated with enthusiasm and curiosity. It wasn’t so much that it was unusual to feel listened to by a man, though when you are young that is in itself exceptional, but it was more the feeling of him seeing me as a person in the world with things to say, as valuable as – perhaps I dared to hope even more valuable than – any other. It was as though he were trying to tell me, ‘your words matter to me as much as the things you could do with your body’, though I know he thought about those things too; I would catch, for instance, his fleeting glance at my lips, my breasts, and hold that knowledge in my fist like an amulet, telling me I could be beautiful.

  I was less honest with him. I was always taciturn where my family were concerned, partly from not knowing. Stella’s talent for editing the past rendered any enquiries pretty futile. Anything that would show her in a bad light would be discarded on the cutting room floor. She’d come off best no matter what.

  And my father? Along with his girlfriend Mokomo (not Japanese; not the name given to her at birth; a mere five years older than me) he was ensconced in the mountains, busy with his latest sustainable living project; a self-sufficient organic farm in the forest, centred around a yurt that he had built himself. There was no telephone and he rarely switched his mobile on, not that I’d have been able to hear him through the sounds of the ritualistic drumming. Plus he’d been emotionally off-grid for years before that. We didn’t have a particularly close relationship and I rarely saw him.

  The last time had been in the winter of my first year of university, when he’d spent a weekend at a Buddhist retreat in the city. He’d insisted we meet on Carnaby Street – there was a vegetarian curry restaurant that he had frequented in the sixties – for lunch. I had tried to explain that the street was not what it once was but he hadn’t listened, and it was difficult for me to argue with a man I barely knew. To me, he had always carried the authority of a stranger, and that, mixed with the strong desire I had for him to show that he was interested in me, made it very difficult to contradict him. So he led me down the pedestrianised street only to stop outside one of Carnaby’s many designer clothing shops looking baffled, and a little sad.