Does anyone else feel guilty when they see a police car?

Posted on September 20, 2012 by gabrielablandy

When I was seven, I told my mother I wanted a willy. It looked so much easier for my brother. On family walks, having to squat down in the grass, I would often pee all over myself, or down the back of my trousers.

Eventually, I developed a technique of taking off one trouser leg and the leg of one of my pants. Then, I stood with my feet very far apart, watching the glistening arc in its decent to the ground, feeling very satisfied and intrigued by the mechanics of the body.

 

In response to one of my recent posts, one of my readers commented about his own memoir-writing process. For those of us out there, writing about our lives, what are we to do when we discover truths we’re not all that keen on; if our instincts are to keep our secrets close and avoid judgment by others?

For me, this is a pain barrier I go through with every chapter of my book.

How’s the writing going? friends might ask me.

Right now, I’m getting through the discomfort, I say.

I used to try to write through it, but I’ve learnt that this just makes it all the more painful. Just as we sometimes get through life without words, we can make silent progress through our writing. This is in those moments that we need to understand, rather than write. I don’t necessarily mean that we have to be able to realize the meaning of something – we can tie ourselves up in knots, searching for explanations. What I think is more important is to be compassionately aware of how we feel.

 

At school, during break, my friends and I used to run all the way down the tarmac hill past the swimming pool, over the playground to the rugby pitch below, where there was a climbing frame. This phase lasted a whole summer. I would have been about nine.

We wanted to be down there as soon as possible, and would run straight out the door after lessons. It was only when I was halfway down the hill that I remembered I needed to pee. The thought of going all the way back to the toilet, and then having to come all the way back down the hill again, seemed too much of a waste. I would miss something. So, I kept going.  

I would spend the next 20 minutes of break in ecstatic joy at the games we were playing, but always on the verge of wetting myself – especially when I was laughing. I might let out a tiny amount of pee into my pants. Sometimes that tiny amount would last a split second longer, and I would think I was going to wet myself entirely. This was a feeling of intense fear – often I would scream.

 

When I first began trying to write about these break times – building up to a specific occasion that I have never forgotten – there was a long period of discomfort that I had to ‘get through’.

I wasted a lot of time, trying to search for meanings; solutions.

Every time, I would conclude the problem was that no one would want to read this, or that people would think I was mad – they may even hate me.

Was that what I was afraid of? People hating me?

What if the only ‘hate’ to fear was my own?

Perhaps what I’m really afraid of, when I worry about what people think, are my own judgments?

By now, I was in a real knot. And I still couldn’t write the chapter.

I put my pencil down. I sat on the floor – nice and comfortable with cushions supporting me from all angles. I thought: what if this feeling need not have words? What if it’s simply ‘information’?

I sat there, acknowledging how uncomfortable I felt – restless, jumpy, breathless even. And then, I felt something else – something bigger, something beyond the discomfort. It was myself. So there I was – my whole self, holding this feeling of discomfort, until the two merged into each other and then I felt understanding, which was a soft, gentle sense of forgiveness.

 

This time, as we swing from the climbing frame, laughing, jumping, I know that I really do have to pee. There is a squat tree nearby and, beyond that, a corrugated iron shed with a tractor inside. I check to see that the shed is empty, and then I slip behind the tree.

My summer uniform is a knee length, pink, floral dress, which has a zip all the way up to the neck from just below the belly button so that it can be slipped on and off easily. I lift this up and hold it in a fist at my waist, along with my pants, which I’ve taken off completely. My black buckled up shoes and white ankle socks stand far apart on the ground.

I don’t recall in which order the next set of events come. Logically, the first thing to happen is for my friends to shout that someone is coming. But, in my memory, I don’t see their faces, or hear the scream. Do they call my name?

Either way, I stop, drop my dress and run around the tree. I’m not sure what’s happened: is someone there; have they seen me?

I’m creeping round the side of the tree. I don’t know if I am confused about why my friends aren’t helping me, or if this is something I think later, angry, needing to blame someone, other than myself.

As I creep round the tree, I hear my friends, screaming, or gasping. And then I come face to face with a boy in the sixth form. I know who he is. He’s one of the naughty boys, dark reddish hair, freckles on his face like splatters of mud that seem to have smudged, just perceptibly, as if blown by the wind.

Boo! he says.

There’s something very disgusting in that boo; so private that it can only be sexual in some way. The privacy is tender and shameful.

Something I did think, right then and there, but also later, days after, was that he had seen my face. It was the one thing I wished I could change: if I can’t change it all, at least make it that he doesn’t know who I am. Please, please, please.

What I dreaded was walking out of chapel the following day – because I would have to walk past him, and I had no idea what that would be like. This was the thing I feared the most and knew that I would have to do every day until he left the school, probably with the boys either side of him, sniggering too.

 

After I read that comment by my reader about truths and secrets and people’s opinions, I got on my bike. I had to cycle to the station to catch a train. As I went through the city, I thought about how it had been to write about the experience of being caught peeing. At each draft, until I was able to sympathise with my discomfort, writing almost gave a sensation of physical pain – such was the feeling of long-held shame. But that day, as I sat on my cushions, it was as if I finally said to myself: it’s okay.

I had waited years for that comfort.

I got to the station, padlocked my bike, and when I looked up I saw the police car. I walked past, acknowledging the strange quickening sensation inside me. When I got to the electric doors I thought: I mean, it’s not like I’m a criminal, for god’s sake.

Then I wondered, what do other people feel when they see a police car? Fear, worry, nervousness, anger, ignorance, denial – guilt?

None of these are all that wonderful to feel, but at least in sharing we have a chance of comfort, and by that I mean the comfort we can give to ourselves. The pain barrier is often nothing more than denial. Lower it down. It’s okay.

 

Those of you out there, writing about yourselves, remember that we’ve all felt uncomfortable. We haven’t all been caught with our skirts up around our waists, but by baring our secrets we can remind others of their own stupidities; and in that act of remembering, perhaps smiling – even laughing – both of us have a chance to feel forgiveness.

Posted in Essay, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Lost Belongings

Posted on September 10, 2012 by gabrielablandy

Dan is on the station platform, holding a woman’s handbag. He stops and looks back in the carriage.

What’s that? I ask.

Someone’s left it, he says.

Maybe they’re in the loo, I tell him.

I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone get up.

The train begins to leave. We look along the platform and then Dan fishes in the bag. He pulls out a mobile phone. ‘Mum’ is on the last dialled list – a picture of a young, fun-looking woman with blond hair. Dan calls and while he speaks I direct him to our connecting train.

What did she say? I ask once he’s off the phone.

 

I left a sleeping bag on the tube once. I was halfway up the stairs when I realised. I carried on, thinking that the train would have already pulled out. But it wasn’t my sleeping bag – I’d taken it without asking. Just as remorse was settling in, I remembered this had been the train’s final destination. I turned and hurried back, but I was stopped from coming onto the platform by a guard.

I left something on the train, I told him, breathless.

What was it? he said.

A sleeping bag.

It’s okay! he yelled down the platform to another guard who was standing by the door of what I realised was my carriage.

They were already treating it as a threat.

 

Young, fun-looking mum says her daughter only realised, she’d left her handbag as the train pulled away. She’d had to watch it on the seat, disappearing. When she got home and told her mum, they phoned the station, but no one had been able to help.

Couldn’t someone radio the train? Ask the conductor to get the bag? I say.

Dan laughed.

What?

Yeah, like they’d do that for a bag.

It was a Friday evening. We were on our way to Brighton for the weekend. Dan arranged to meet the girl’s mother at the same stop on our back through.

 

When she was driving, my mother used to keep her handbag in the space between her seat and the car door.  One evening, she had to stop and deliver a letter. It was pouring, dark. She hurried back across the road and jumped quickly into the car, shaking out the rain from her hair. It wasn’t until we were home that she realised her bag was missing.

We got back in the car and drove to the letterbox. The two of us got out to look. The rain had stopped, but the puddles were still there with the city lights within them. Every so often, a car would roll past, but other than that there was only the noise of water rushing into the drains. The bag was gone. We drove to the police station, but nothing had been handed in. My mother was devastated.

The following morning, the phone rang. As my mother answered and listened, she frowned.

Who was that? I said when she put the phone down.

The man who found my bag, she told me.

What’s wrong?

My mother didn’t answer immediately. He’s bringing it over, she finally said.

That’s great.

Hmmm, she mumbled.

  

Earlier this year, Dan and I were in London, watching the six nations with a group of friends. It was February. The day started off cold and crisp. By late afternoon it had begun to snow.

Let’s not stay too late, I said, thinking of having to get the bus back to Oxford.

Okay, Dan said. Ten o’clock.

The rugby finished and we went to another pub. The streets were already thickening white. At a little after ten I said to Dan that we should go.

One more, he said.

I didn’t want to leave either, but knew that we should. One more seemed possible.

But after that, I suggested we get going. Dan had a few inches of beer in his glass. He was leaning on the bar, looking at me, but lacking some of the recognition.

Let’s stay, he said.

We can’t, I told him.

Okay, one more, he said.

Half.

He nodded.

A few minutes later I saw him with a pint in his hand.

I walked through the busy bar and went and spent a minute in the quiet of the toilets. I had stopped drinking a few hours ago. I was just beginning to find the time arduous, the busy bar seemed a personal affront. I splashed water on my face, took a few breaths in and went back out.

I found Dan and leant in close and said: this is one of those times that I’m being serious and it’s important for you to listen to me. Let’s go.

He nodded and finished his drink.

When we got out into the street, the snow was falling still – thick pieces, that I felt pass my face.

Jeez, Dan said. Why didn’t we leave earlier?

Do not even say that, I told him.

What? he said.

I carried on towards the station. There was hardly any moving traffic in the street. Buses had been parked half-heartedly, sitting at angles from the pavement, their lights off, looking abandoned. Clapham Junction was crowded. The trains to Victoria were all delayed.

What are you so annoyed about? Dan asked me as we waited.

I wanted to leave hours ago, I said.

So, why didn’t you?

I stared at him – that’s responsible, I said.

Dan suggests trying to find a taxi. When we get outside, the street is still in an eerie state of desertion. The light is a pale, artificial orange. It makes me think we’ve walked onto a movie set at the end of a day’s filming. We go back inside to check the train departures boards, but it’s hard to make sense with all the delays. I ask a woman in uniform about the trains to Victoria.

There’s one about to leave, she says.

We hurry back up to the platform and just make the train.

Result! I say, turning to Dan.

Once we sit down, I offer him some of my tea.

He takes a small sip, even though I know he doesn’t drink tea without sugar, and doesn’t really like tea anyway.

We pass ruins of gas towers, huge, just visible in the darkness. There are old warehouses, abandoned buildings, their windows dark, as if burned out. Battersea power station appears through the night.

I tap Dan on the arm and say: all these relics.

We talk about how many buildings there are that had a use before anyone living today had even been born.

Though, the power station wasn’t disused that long ago, Dan tells me.

But other stuff, I say.

He nods.

The train stops and I remark on how empty the station is.

I guess, it’s late, I add.

As we get up to go, I notice a plastic bag under the table near us. Inside are foreign cigar boxes strapped together with tape.

This is dodgy looking, I say, picking up the bag to report it.

There is hardly anyone one on the platform. We keep looking up and down until a guard walks into view.

Over there, I say to Dan, pointing.

Wait here, he says, taking my arm above the elbow and squeezing. He seems angry as he takes the bag off me, which saddens me. I watch him hurry down the platform. He and the guard are talking now. They both keep looking in the bag. I am aware of a strange feeling – this sadness from before, or perhaps more of a confusion at what Dan could be so angry about. I know we’ve argued, but we’re friends, always friends.

Suddenly I think: if that is a bomb then at least I’m looking at the man I love.

Dan and the guard have put the plastic bag down on the floor. They are still talking, which strikes me as odd. I hear something and turn to see a man coming out of the carriage, wiping his hands. His face is shocked.

Have you lost a bag?

 

I realise what it was that bothered my mother all those years ago when that man phoned up about her bag.

Why didn’t he just drop it off at the police station? my mother kept saying. She wasn’t sure she wanted to open the door to him.

It made no sense to me then, a ten year old – not yet hardened against the world, still trusting, innocent.

I crept into the hall when the knock came. My mother hadn’t wanted me there. I caught a glimpse of shaggy hair, flecked with grey at the temples, an old, thick jumper. The man was short, muscular. His hands were workers hands, dirty nails, short stubby fingers. He told my mother that he hadn’t thought about the police station – that he’d simply found her address.

It was too late to phone last night, he said. But I knew you’d be worried. I wanted to bring it as soon as possible.

My mother gave him a few pounds, which I told her later was stingy.

He can get himself a pint, she said.

She was still aggrieved by something – something she couldn’t align in her mind, something this man had done. She was still trying to pick a hole in it, unable to believe in his goodness.

  

What were you and the guard talking about for so long, I say to Dan.

We were basically just looking at the package saying: so, this could blow at any moment, really.

Was that why you told me to wait here? I ask.

Dan nods.

I thought you were annoyed with me, I say.

Annoyed with you? he says, incredulous.

He presses me against him as we walk through Victoria station, searching for the exit to the street where we can pick up the night bus home.

 

Posted in Memoir | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Moments that change us

Posted on September 6, 2012 by gabrielablandy

Something happened last week, which made me refer back to the diary I kept when Dan and I were living in Denmark, WA. It was the end of February, 2011. Dan’s mum was staying. I wrote that I was going to call home that afternoon.

It was my mother who answered. Her voice was croaky, annoyed at losing sleep – it was 7am her time. She said: your father’s had a heart attack.

He’d been playing tennis at the weekend and felt something in his chest. He told my mother after the game. I can see the offhand humour he uses, though this is underlined with a seriousness as he recognises that he wouldn’t be telling my mother unless he was worried. But at the same time, he doesn’t want to make a fuss; he really doesn’t want to make a fuss.

My mother persuaded him to see the doctor who then sent my dad to hospital, saying it was a heart attack. That was Wednesday. It was now Friday.

I began to cry, asking how come no one had told me.

Mum said that she wasn’t going to until it was a fait accompli: there was nothing to worry about – they would put a coil in to hold up the artery, and that would be that. She was going to see Dad later.

Give him a hug from me, I asked.

I can’t, she said. I told him I don’t love him anymore.

It was because he had let her down. He was supposed to be her Rock of Gibraltar.

Last week my Dad’s left hand stopped working properly. We were on a boat with Dan and a friend of Dad’s from university. That morning, we’d been caught in a storm. The plan was to sail to Newton Ferrars, but as soon as we got out to sea, we were hit by something.

Dad had mentioned the wind as we were having breakfast, saying it had been howling down the estuary at four o’clock that morning when he’d got up to take a pee. It wasn’t howling any more – it sounded soft, but I realise now that this is the sound of gathering.

We put on our gear and the four of us went on deck. It was raining. I didn’t have any waterproof trousers so I’d borrowed a pair of wellingtons and had put a pair of shorts on. I wasn’t too exposed – though, with the rain, the wind was chilling. I’d be all right as long as it didn’t pick up.

We went slowly out to sea. The sky was blurred. It looked like it was dropping down on us. Moving gradually down the channel, muffled – everything hazy and running at a sort of timeless pace, I didn’t notice the storm coming until it was on top of us.

My belly is churning. I have wedged myself in the cockpit with an arm hooked over the railing behind me because the boat has tipped right up and I don’t want to fall forward, into the water. The cutlery is clanging in the drawer below. I can hear the trays in the oven sliding around. Dan is up the front with Dad. They have their life jackets and harnesses on. They are trying to bring the jib in.

I drum three of my fingers in a sequence on lid of the box where the gas canister is kept. Because of the rain, I feel a film of water beneath my fingertips. Through this, I am able to keep from throwing up – as long as I watch the horizon.

I see how changed the land is – only a silhouette through the mist. The sea is caving in and then rearing up. The land looks austere, in a primitive form, unmanned, untamed – and yet it is a rock, stable. The sea crashes at it, this entire body of water that can be settled one moment and then suddenly churned up.

I find out about Dad’s hand later that day.

We’d turned into Falmouth, moored up against another boat. Dan and I went down the jetty to feel the comfort of land. On the way, a man called good morning from his boat.

It was the strangest thing to realise it was still only morning.

My Dad went to have lunch with another friend from university who lives in Falmouth.

He was back by the time Dan and I returned to the boat. I made tea and sat up in the cockpit. The day was clearing and the sun came out between the clouds very warm. When I went down below, Dan was sitting opposite my dad.

Are you going to tell her, Dan says.

They both look at me.

My Dad says that he has lost some mobility in his left hand.

Did you have wine at lunch? I ask.

He looks coy – after his heart attack last year I am trying to get him out of the habit of drinking at lunch time. I tell him quickly that I’m asking because he’s slurring his words and I want to know if that has anything to do with what’s going on in his hand.

It would be a good thing if you had a glass of wine at lunch, I say.

But he’s in that cryptic mode of his where he avoids the truth for some reason.

He says he’s waiting for his doctor to call him back.

It’s okay, Dan keeps telling me, reaching up to where I am standing next to him, taking me by the wrist.

I touch my Dad on the arm, waking him.

It’s nearly five, I say. Do you think we should call the surgery?

He thinks, rubbing his sleepy face. If they haven’t called it’s because they’re busy.

I nod.

He takes a deep breath then and says: how about this trip to Penzance to see your Davy?

The week before, as we were planning our route along the coast, I’d asked if we might be able to make a stop at Penzance where Humphry Davy was born. I’d written about him in my first post here. There is a statue of him in the high street I wanted to see. But all that week the wind and the tides had been against us.  

We go down the pontoon together to ask the harbour master about trains. When we get to the office, my dad’s phone rings. He takes the call outside while I look at timetables with the man in the office. When I go out, Dad is just finishing.

They say I should try and see someone here, my dad tells me.

The doctor takes an age, saying: lay your hand here, try and push that, wriggle, pinch this.

Dad’s own father died at sixty-six – younger than Dad is now. It was a series of strokes – soon after he retired. My Dad has worked overseas most of his life. Towards the end of his career my mother was begging him to stop working, saying it was time he came home. There was always just one more trip.

Now the doctor gets up to consult a book. He has my dad take his shirt off and I see the scar down the centre of his chest. I have a powerful sense of how important he is to me – aware that during the storm that morning I hadn’t felt fear – I knew we would be all right because he was there and nothing defeats him. Finally, I am getting to know my father after more than thirty years of catching glimpses of him between jobs.

The doctor clears his throat and says something about a damaged nerve. I move in my seat and in that movement I am aware at how solid I’ve been sitting.

That’s a relief, my dad says in his offhand way. It’s not a stroke then.

Oh, no, the doctor says, looking at us both then and taking the depth of our relief. Sorry, no, I should have said sooner – not that.

It’s pouring when Dad and I get out of the station in Penzance.

The night before, reading the book I’d brought with me on Davy, I had come across the line: ‘the death of his father was to make a profound impression on his mind. It changed the whole course of his conduct.’

I asked my dad if he could say the same for his father.

It happened over a period of time, Dad said. Towards the end, he couldn’t really speak.

By this I took that, because it hadn’t been sudden, Dad meant the effect was gradual, even minimal.

It affected the way that you viewed retirement, I said to him, remembering that he’d once told me that he didn’t know what you were meant to do when you retired: he saw nothing when he thought of it – his own father had either been working or dying.

The rain is coming down heavier as we walk up the high street, looking out for Davy’s statue, and also the Star Inn where he spent many hours, standing on the balcony, telling stories – those gathered from the Arabian Night or his grandmother.

Dad and I talk about how this purpose – this trail we’re on – makes the weather bearable by giving us a reason to be making our way through it.

Davy’s biographers all draw attention to his diverse talents. Coleridge said that ‘if Davy had not been the first Chemist, he would have been the first Poet of his age.’

In a letter to his mother, reflecting on his school-life, Davy wrote: I consider it fortunate that I was left much to myself when a child…I perhaps owe these circumstances the little talents that I have and their peculiar application.

I am grateful for the life my dad has given me. Though his trips were lengthy, my mother bore them steady and resolved – so that I was never afraid – and no matter how long he was away, he always came back.  

The day before the storm we had moored on a buoy in the estuary at Heyford. I decided to go swimming. Although it was cold I thought this would be the only chance I would get.

I’m going to swim to that buoy I told my dad, pointing across the channel.

The water was dark – an ivy green. Imagining how cold it was going to be almost made it impossible to dive in, but I finally did, squirming to the surface and swimming quickly.

The current was strong. I had to head upstream of the buoy so that I would be drawn onto it. When I got there and turned, I saw my dad on deck. I waved.

He handed me a towel when I climbed back up onto the boat, and then he went down below. I sat in the cockpit, feeling the burning cold of my skin, the hotness of blood beneath, my pounding heart.

Later, Dan told me he’d watched my dad while I was swimming. My dad had been in this amazing state, he said: not fretful or nervous, but absolutely at the ready.

Such loving concern surprised me – not because my father has lacked it, but because he has spent so much of my life away. Once, I asked my mother why Dad never said that he loved me. She told me he chose to show it in other ways. Because of that, I have never doubted his feelings or searched for reassurance. I have simply trusted that anything I could ever want from him exists, if I should ever need it.

What I felt in Australia, as I waited for news about my dad was that I was only just getting to know him. The day before, I’d had news that more than one artery was blocked – a coil wasn’t going to work. They were doing more scans. I left my phone beside me when I went to bed that night.

My brother said, you sound frail, when I answered my mobile. It was the middle of the night and though I could feel the depth of sleep I’d been in, I could also feel that an awareness of the situation hadn’t left me, because I was sharp with it now.

I feel frail, I said.

Don’t, my brother told me. You’ll set me off.

I knew that Dan was half awake beside me because as my brother began to explain what was happening on the phone, he took hold of my knee beneath the covers. We were lying in the moonlight. I could see the silhouettes of all the trees tops beyond the huge window.

My brother told me that it was something to do with cholesterol – a build up in the arteries. But it wasn’t because Dad was in poor shape, it was hereditary.

Dad’s really healthy, he said. The doctors are going to do a by-pass tomorrow and it will be fine. You can speak to him the day after.

I told Dan everything once I got off the phone. The sky outside was a bright grey. The moon was near the top right corner of the window, big and white.

Dan stretched and sighed, turning to curl on his side.

When I finished he said: so, it’s genital, then?

There was a moment of silence in the semi-darkness. Then he said: wait…what did I say?

The two of us began to laugh – wonderful, deep, sleepy laughter.

Posted in History, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Honesty, and how we might write

Posted on August 30, 2012 by gabrielablandy

My thoughtful readers and all the pioneer bloggers out there have brought my attention to something. Firstly, the draw of honesty, and secondly, how we might write.

Perhaps, they are the same thing.

So far, my writing journey has lasted nine years – the same amount of time that Dan and I have been together. All along, there has been fear, in various degrees, with both of these loves. Each of them hinge on my ability to look into my heart, but more than that – to be honest about what I find there. We look outwards all day long – we do it without thinking, never facing the conundrum of: I want to see this rose in front of me, but how do I do that?

But looking into the heart? At some point in my life I stopped doing that, and without realising I lost an important art – one that we are born with, but which must be nurtured if it is to stay with us.

I know that, as a child, growing up on a farm kept me close with my heart. I was left much to myself in a landscape of hills of soft wheat. Cows gave birth, milk, shit – such extremes, such experiences! The house itself gave a total sense of safety, but also a feeling of magic. It was a house of fairytales, somehow, perhaps because of the books I was reading, which I kept on the table at my bedside, but also because of mysterious sounds, which came from the ancient floors. The rooms were cold, there were bird’s nests on the window sills.

All this time I looked in. My heart was my friend. I have no memory of the conscious act, but I feel – now – how strong my impulses are within, developed for so many years. But, I have had to refashion the synapses, which connect me to them.

I am still learning.

Some of this ‘education’ is an act of deciphering: looking, listening, decoding. When I was at drama school, I spent hours, lying on a plain of wooden floorboards, feeling like there was something wrong with me.

Put your attention into your feet, our voice coach would tell us.

With my eyes closed, I would wonder how I might go about that. In this private experience of doubt I felt alone.

Looking back on my adolescence – and sharing it with people (those I know, and those I don’t!) has been a joyful experience. I am lifted up with the beauty of reciprocity. There is nothing to fear. We are not alone.

Every morning at Drama School, I would lie on my back and feel exposed. It had something to do with having my eyes closed – not knowing what was going on around me. And, as if in compensation, I would find my other senses intensified. Sounds came as though they were right at my ear. Often, this would bring a painful awareness that many people in the room were able to exhale for far longer than me. I would try to breathe in deeper, exhale slower, but then I would feel tense, and grow unhappy, frustrated. Sometimes, my breath would come in a faltering shudder. Sometimes, it would come out in one gulp, and then there would be nothing, and I would experience a strong desolation.

All the while, the voice teacher walked through the room, continuing with her instructions. I felt she could see past my flesh into where I didn’t want her to know. I felt that, despite knowing what was going on, she kept quiet about it – perhaps out of some hope for me. I wanted, in our private voice sessions, to weep and bare all, but at the same time I couldn’t trust this instinct. A lot of girls were weeping in the corridors and classrooms – I wasn’t able to shrug the feeling that it was all a bit of a parade.

Now, when I give my breathing a look, I have come to a point where I want to know all about it, instead of trying to make it ‘fit’. How can you ever know yourself if you do that; if you make of your soul’s journey something of a pottery lesson, shaping the clay without first looking at it, seeing perhaps which shape it already resembles, where it asks to go?

There are days when my breathing is shallow – when I can hardly feel anything at all; then I bring my attention outwards a little, to the next perimeter – perhaps my tummy or my back, see if I can get a sense of that. I might feel where they lie with my clothes, or contact the floor, the wall, the mattress.

But I accept. There are the numb times. Those days where I seem to bounce in the world, where all I can feel is the very outside of me, fighting through the air – those times when I can’t even feel that, and could be nothing at all. There are times when my head won’t shut up. It wants to question everything. There is a tone of despair, wailing, why? This can often be relieved by thinking of childhood curiosity, connecting to that state of knowing nothing, but feeling no fear at that, coming to everything with the joy and excitement that we once came at everything, our instincts forever guiding us towards knowledge.

At the same time, when the feeling is wondrous, I don’t cling to it, desperate for it to stay. Last night I had a beautiful sense of my neck, running from almost halfway up my skull down into my shoulders. It wasn’t the bone I was following, but it was more than the outside of my flesh. Perhaps it was tendons. It was all there. Today, not so much, but I am happy to wait – to look and accept what is there.

At the beginning of my MA in Creative Writing, I hadn’t found a permanent place to live. I first stayed on a friend’s sofa in Clapham while the introductory week was going on. I only had a pair of flipflops, even though this was now late September. I had spent the last 18 months in Mexico and, somehow, came home to find things mysteriously vanished.

Next, I moved in with the sister of a boy I was at junior school with. I had a box room, but during the day I would sit in the attic upstairs – the sitting room. With my computer on my lap, I worked. I had the view through the skylight – that feeling of space a stretch of sky brings me. One of the stories I wrote here was published, but so many weren’t. I wanted to know what I’d done right, but also what I was doing wrong. One story I remember in particular because of what it taught me. It was called, The Observation Book, and began like this:

                Isobel and I wonder if Franklin wears a wig. That’s the great thing about having a twin – no matter how mad my thoughts are, I know I’m not alone. We’re sitting now in the front room watching him through the window.

                ‘There,’ Isobel says as we see the wind gust in the trees, but on the ground Franklin’s hair remains fast. ‘Surely?’ She says, but apparently not.

                Franklin leans over and starts raking the lawn and we hold our breaths, but nothing happens: leaves pile up, birds fly over, and our wig theory remains unconfirmed.

I would begin new paragraphs thinking: but how am I supposed to decide if these two twins should have a father, or whether the gardener does wear a wig?

I felt that doubt was an error of my ways, my technique. I was doing something wrong, which I needed to resolve so I could make decisions and get on with the story.

I have come to learn that the answer is simply the one we choose. Only that. If I choose those twins have a father, then they do. As for the gardener, I spent the whole story with these two young girls, wondering what would happen: how do I know? how do I answer? how do I choose?

It was like walking at night with a torch. In the blackness, the light shined forth only a little way. My eyes were able to continue some of the work and see muffled shapes beyond the bright. Then there were the sounds to go by, which came out of the dark – sometimes soothing, sometimes not. I had to take it slow. Take each step. No matter how much I wanted, I couldn’t see beyond the torch beam. I had to trust. There was something there – I just couldn’t see it right then, but I would – we never stay stuck forever. I kept exploring what I did know, what I could see. I kept true.

What did I discover about the wig? In the final scene, the mother is sitting with her daughters at the kitchen table. The gardener is desolate as a result of a huge case of stage fright he has just experienced. Franklin is a member of the local operatic society. They perform Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in minimal settings. He is in the aftermath of humiliation. He still has his costume on. Here I was with my torchlight. I could see this scene very clearly, but still not beyond it, though I knew I was close to the end, I could sense it from the darkness beyond. I took my time, I didn’t rush. Round the kitchen I went. To the dog Heidi who had been a good character up until this point, perhaps she had an answer. Then finally, I found myself at the gardener’s costume. And there it was. The beam shining on the final part of my journey.

They offer everyone a refund, but nobody takes it.

                We all file out of the city hall in silence and head back to our cars. Heidi is carrying her beanbag in her mouth and tottering along as if this is an evening like any other and I envy her ignorance. We shut her in the back of the car and drive the twenty minutes home without saying a word. We can’t even bear to put the radio on, and for once Isobel doesn’t even bother trying to annoy me.

                At home, we put the kettle on and wait for Franklin to come and pick up Heidi. As we are sipping tea and Mother is just setting out a fruit cake and some plates and cutlery, there is a knock at the back door. We know who it must be, but in the six years Franklin has worked for Mother he has never once knocked. Isobel gets up and answers the door and we see Franklin, still in full costume, standing out in the cold shivering.

                ‘Oh Franklin,’ Mother says and gets up and brings him inside. She then sits him down and serves him up a huge slice of cake and pours him a cup of tea. Heidi pads over and eye’s him up cautiously, but when he breaks off a piece of cake and holds it out for her she gobbles it up and then lays her head on his lap.

                Franklin tips half the sugar bowl into his tea, stirs it and takes a long sip. He then reaches up and begins to remove his hat. As he takes it off I grab Isobel’s knee because along with the hat comes his whole head of hair and he is sitting at the table as bald as a nectarine, sighing and shaking his head.

                ‘Oh heavens,’ Mother says, but then she springs up and starts rummaging in one of the kitchen drawers as if she has just remembered something, and we all carry on as if normal.

                ‘I knew every line of that song,’ Franklin says eventually. ‘Every line. I’ve been singing it every day in the shower for the last six weeks.’ He then cups his hands over his reddening cheeks and stares down at the crumbs on his plate.

                ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mother says and wanders over and squeezes his shoulder. Isobel and I are both speechless; we can’t take our eyes off his shiny head. (I am praying he won’t feel a draft.)

                ‘Stage fright,’ Franklin says. ‘I’ve always had it. That’s why I never get the decent parts. But they were desperate tonight.’ His bottom lip starts to quiver and then a fat tear rolls down his cheek and into his big droopy moustache. ‘That was my w-w-w-one ch-ch-ch-chance,’ he sobs.

                He is about to bury his head in his hands and Mother looks at Isobel and me in terror. I leap up out of my chair and shove his hat back down on his head and start humming the opening to his song. He looks at me as if I am completely bananas, but I straighten his hat, making sure the hair underneath is in place, and start humming the opening again.

                Isobel then gets up out of her seat and takes his hand and starts humming too. Mother starts to clap in time to the music and Franklin suddenly opens his mouth and sings. Then we are all dancing around the kitchen and Heidi is jumping and barking. Mother hitches her skirt up and starts kicking her legs in the air and Isobel and I are shaking our bottoms and Franklin is singing with his gentle voice: ‘A wandering minstrel I, A thing of shreds and patches…’

Writers out there, go with care, go with honesty, and trust that in the blackness beyond the answers lie waiting. They come when the time is right.

Posted in Essay, Fiction, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

Between two people

Posted on August 27, 2012 by gabrielablandy

There are five or six girls, sitting on a bench in Christchurch meadow with notebooks on their laps. On the lawns behind are larger groups of students, in the city for the summer. Backpacks lie flung on the grass. I listen to each of them, talking in their native language. Every so often they will try out English phrases on each other – those they have learnt that morning perhaps. The girls on the bench are gossiping quietly, showing each other their work. At the end of the bench, a boy sits, facing the other way. He has his palms flat on his thighs. His body is rigid.

It’s as if he’s making a resolution, I think.

He will tell her tonight.

Perhaps he’s berating himself for an already missed opportunity, using the disappointment to fire himself up. He will do it. Tonight.

When I was fifteen, I got drunk with a boy I was seeing at school. We were deep in the woods on a warm afternoon, lessons over for the day. It wasn’t the first time I’d been drunk, he wasn’t my first boyfriend, but so much was new: being entirely alone with someone older, of the opposite sex – so far away from people, from interruptions – drinking, just the two of us.

After a while, I begin to need to pee.

I continue drinking from the can in my hand, unable to decide what to do. To tell him is impossible – too personal. He will imagine me, squatting down in the bushes and won’t fancy me anymore.

The urge grows and I begin to fret. I become short tempered, bite at something he says. Then I see my way out. I begin to argue with him, trying to escalate things to a level that will enable me to storm off. I try – standing up abruptly – but fail, either because he reaches for me or I falter, or both: the moment isn’t hot enough.

He suddenly says: um…sorry, do you need the loo?

I’m mortified. NO! I shout.

And then, as if this question – the impertinence – has enraged me beyond return, I run off. I do not stop – I can’t. When I’m certain he’s not following me, I crouch beside a bush. When I stand up, I sigh in utter bliss, then continue to walk slowly back to school, elated by the relief.

Shame only comes later. With sobriety, I expect.

 They are meant to be in their beds by ten o’clock, but once they have been checked in many sneak out and into other rooms. Each morning, Constanza hears of who went where. She behaves as if this is a silly waste of time, but tonight she rests beneath the starched sheet, willing to hear a rustle at the door – the whisper of her name. She imagines the way she might answer. How should she arrange herself on the bed? She could pull her t shirt down and expose her tanned shoulders.

Both curtains are open and the moon has risen into view – enough to brighten the room with a silver dust. She lies on her front. Now, the door slides open, and clicks closed a moment later. She hears footsteps across the wiry carpet. Raphael comes to kneel at the side of the bed. It is difficult to keep her eyes closed – once or twice they twitch of their own accord.

 On my final night in Australia on my gap year, I went to a club with my brother, with nothing in my mind, but to have a good time. We were staying in a backpackers’ and were leaving for the UK in the morning. My brother’s flight was several hours earlier than mine.

I noticed a boy dancing with me. Eventually, we began to talk. The fact that he had the same name as my brother was a great ice breaker. The three of us continued to party, heading back to the hostel once the club closed.

My brother took himself off to bed. I ventured out into the garden with the boy. We sat at one of the wooden picnic tables and started kissing. Voices came and went, doors slammed. Traffic wheezed on the road, beyond the high brick wall. The night was soft and warm. I took a break to go inside and pack my bags. When I came out again, the boy had taken off his shirt. He had extremely small nipples and strange patches of hair around his sternum. I faltered.

He left just before my brother got up. The taxi was already there, waiting to take us to the airport. My brother checked his bags and went through, and I sat in the lounge area, thinking the next few hours would pass slowly, painfully.

Perth airport is small. Having been back there recently, I can picture where I was sitting, though I wouldn’t have been able to remember from that first time I was there. I can see the glass front, which looks out onto the carpark, the electric doors.

I look up as they swish open. It’s the boy from the club.

I couldn’t go to work, he said, sitting down next to me. I called in sick.

He gave me one of his rings. I thought I would never be able to get on that plane.

At some point, I needed to go to the toilet, which was beyond the cafe area to the right. When I came out of the cubicle, I saw the boy, standing by the sinks. He came towards me, talking. His words were hot and mumbled. I simply laughed at what he was suggesting, but I realise that for him there was a greater more serious level of desire going on.

When I got back to the UK, I saw my uncle and aunt.

How was Australia, my uncle asked me.

Amazing, I told him. I’m going back as soon as I can.

My uncle smiled and said: okay, so what’s his name?

 The girls are gathered on Broad   Street, outside another of the famous colleges. The boys are with them. They have a few hours until they have to return to their rooms – tiny, cramped quarters with papery linen, which Constanza leaves dishevelled each morning, only to return to everything pulled tight once more. Climbing into the narrow bed, she will tug at the sheets, which seem to suck the body heat from her, hiding it for an age, before gently giving it back. Only then can she surrender to sleep, having gone over every detail of Raphael from that day. She first will pick apart every look of his, and then each word – she remembers them all – seeing if there might be something, hiding there, which might console her feelings for him. She might imagine him in the room with her – perhaps standing by the window, watching her. In a moment he will reach out and touch her shoulder.

She falls asleep then, dreaming of him. He grabs her hand as they are arguing in a wood, where the trees grow endlessly up.

Why do you hate me! she cries at him.

Hate you, he shouts. I don’t hate you.

And then he yanks her towards him, so that she flies at his chest, and suddenly they are kissing.

In the morning, at breakfast, she feels as though the air between them is burning. If he were to touch the tip of his finger against her wrist she would collapse onto the floor. But then she catches a glimpse of him, shovelling eggs into his mouth. A tiny creamy yellow blob lands on his chin. She has to look away and shake herself, for suddenly he seems quite repulsive.

Now, she flicks her hair over one eye. The boys are in a group close to the gates of the college. They shout across to the girls, pointing at the people, sitting outside the cafes. They dare someone to go and dance in front of them. She wonders what Raphael is thinking about. He hasn’t spoken for some time, but he has pressed himself close to the other boys and seems interested in this challenge.

Okay, Constanza says.

You have to ask for money too! one of the boys shouts.

She wants to look at Raphael, but doesn’t dare.

Everyone is giggling as she walks across the road and chooses two women, sitting at the front of a group of tables. The sun is low and they still have their sunglasses on. A pair of white cups have been pushed aside, both with pink lipstick half moons on the rim.

Constanza begins to hum. Nerves have made her voice shaky, but she lifts her arms in the air. She stares at the ground, though she can sense something from these two women – more than the fact that they have stopped talking. She moves from one foot to the other. One of the women clears her throat and Constanza feels her face twitch with embarrassment. She begins to turn her wrists, clicking her thumbs.

After another moment, she cups her hands and dips her knees slightly, glancing very quickly at each woman in turn.

What are you doing? one of them asks. She thinks they must be American.

She shrugs and makes an incoherent sound, looking at them dumbly, gesturing with her cupped hands again, but they are now looking over their shoulders and have crossed their arms tightly over their bosoms.

She giggles and skips away – though this is not how she feels at all. Shame has made her itch all over so that she has to leap, to run, to get away. She goes the entire length of the street and only then looks for the others. They have dispersed – some of them are hiding behind parked cars. Raphael is standing up against the wall near the bookshop. His body is rigid. Constanza pretends she has not noticed him, walking as if her attention has been caught by something in the sky, thinking to entice him that way. She walks, feeling a grief, creeping towards her the longer she waits for him, until her girlfriends fly out of various doorways, screaming, surrounding her. Though relief comes quickly, conquering everything uneasy, there is a sense of regret too, because he will certainly not approach now.

 A friend came sailing with my family in Greece the summer I was due to turn sixteen. Towards the end of the holiday, she went off with a local man that we’d met in a bar one evening.

My father went into a discrete panic when we got back to the boat and he saw she wasn’t with us. Apparently, he spent the night searching for her. When she finally returned, he told her: anything else like that and he’d send her home.

I hadn’t known any of this at the time. It came up in a conversation years later. At last, my father was able to express his fury. He seemed surprised – as if I should have known how insane it was: how serious it would have been if he’d had to inform her parents that she’d, say, been raped.

That same holiday, I was involved in a new experience. I was having long wonderful conversations with someone several years older than me. He was a man not a boy. Both of us were in relationships. I was still seeing the guy I’d got drunk with – the one I’d had to argue with in order to get a pee break. The man was seeing a woman who I imagined as slender and willowy, with that very delicate pink skin that reddens at the touch; pale copper hair, like wheat beneath the setting sun.

Both the man and I had been unfaithful to these partners. We both regretted it deeply and spoke about that regret often. Sometimes, I thought we were trying to persuade each other that it would be okay, that it would be worth it – perhaps we would start something with each other; we wouldn’t have to go back to these other relationships and confess. At other times, I think we were trying to explain to each other why it couldn’t happen.

Everyone else on the holiday noticed. We would sit together wherever we could and immediately be thrown into some unravelling discussion, our two heads growing together, like a sculpture.

Sometimes I felt pained by it all. This was on days where I couldn’t decide if I would risk it all, or if I would deny myself. I would thump between these two extremes in a rising and sinking of elation.

Maybe, I felt as though it were up to me – that he would, if I would only give him a sign. And then there was a moment when I felt I would give in, but I saw something in his eyes. It was a fear almost. I pulled myself back; lay in bed that night, unable to sleep.

I thought I’d carry the experience of this for a long time, but it faded very quickly – almost at the airport as we all said goodbye. I think it was the meaningful way he looked into my eyes. It was suddenly all too soppy – now that we were no longer surrounded by the ocean, sitting in restaurants on the waterfront, candlelight about us. In the harsh strip lighting of the airport, he looked rather too English and feeble.

Posted in Fiction, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Exposure

Posted on August 20, 2012 by gabrielablandy

During the rehearsals of a pantomime in a Scottish town, an infant is needed for the Spirit of the Mustard-pot. Ellen Terry’s father offers her services. He has acted both at Edinburgh and Glasgow, throughout the 1820s and 30s, and the stage-manager will assume she has inherited talent. In addition, her mane of pale yellow hair and small size is perfect for the mustard-pot. They try to put her inside, but Ellen howls and screams, showing far more lung power than temper for the stage.

 

The park slopes upwards, away from where Dan and I sit near the stage. Above the rows of festival goers on their picnic rugs and fold away chairs, children have gathered at a basin in the hill. There is something in this assembling, like ants drawing round a spillage of honey, coming from far, somehow knowing about this treasure.

The larger children run from one side of the basin to the other: down into the grassy trough with their arms flailing, shouting and laughing, now up the other side, staggering between bushes and narrow tree trunks, some flopping over and even choosing to roll back down into the swarm below – even better if they can knock someone over.

Toddlers are bent double, using their hands for balance as they walk – straightening up for brief moments to look around them, their faces wide with wonder. Now, one sits down with an abrupt bump, astonished. Kids pick things up from the ground – stones, twigs – throwing them, hurrying on.

It is a haven, this bowl in the park, where only childhood roams.

This is the first things Ellen Terry remembers:

In the corner of a lean-to, whitewashed attic stands a simple, solid oak bureau. Standing on this bureau, she can watch the sunset from the window. The smoke of a thousand chimneys hangs like a grey veil, with the fires in the sky burning beyond.

Before her father and mother leave for the theatre each night, they put her to bed, but directly their backs are turned and the door locked, she jumps up and goes to the window.

Her bed consists of a mattress laid on the floor – on father’s side. Ellen is – she believes – her father’s particular pet. She will sleep all night, holding his hand.

One night, Ellen Terry wakes to find a lovely face, bending over her – thick, rich brown hair tumbling forward. Father has lit a candle so that the visitor might see. As Ellen’s eyes adjust, she realises the face belongs to a lady with a beautiful complexion, wearing a silk dress. This is the first silk dress she has ever seen. She stares into the woman’s soft, brown eyes, which appear very dark – perhaps because the Terry’s are all very fair. Ellen reaches out to touch the gold chain around the woman’s smooth neck. The woman is her aunt. Ellen will never forget this exquisite vision.

A heavy bank of cloud travels across the sky, throwing a shadow over the crowd and park below. As it breaks, people lift their faces, leaning back onto rugs and bin liners. Trees quiver, but the sound of leaves in the wind is drowned out by the music. A large group surrounds the stage, dancing gently.

The DJ on stage has pulled up the sleeves of his leather jacket to allow his arms to move more freely. All around me, the crowd punch their fists into the air in time to the music. The DJ dances, pressing his fingers to an earphone, using the other hand to spin the record into place. As the song mixes in, a powerful swell of cheering goes through the crowd. People jump and wave. The DJ smiles and nods his head with the beat.

Towards the end of his set, the DJ gestures to someone off stage. There are two figures, standing in the shadows. Perhaps they have been there some time, watching. He leaves his decks and wanders towards them, pulling one of the figures into the light. It is a young girl, who struggles a little at first and then allows herself to be brought onto the stage. This must be his daughter. She looks about eight or nine, casting hurried glances out to the crowd and tugging her hair over her face like a curtain.

Now, he is lifting her up on the speakers at the front of the stage as everyone cheers. He steps back and she reaches for him, but he points to the crowd who have raised their arms. She turns to us and he goes back to his decks. The little girl steps from side to side, her knees soft so that she bops up and down. She wears all black. Her hair is long, thick – it is a comfort to her as she pulls it first over her face, then tucks it back behind her ears, and now twists it round her fingers. She keeps looking over her shoulder at her father, turned slightly away from the crowd, swaying, fiddling. She seems to be begging him.

She’s not so shy at home, he says over the microphone.

She continues playing with her hair, glancing at us, swaying, looking over her shoulder at her father, swaying more. He nods and smiles. People are waving, clapping. She looks out again, giggling. We cheer. She glances at her father once more who brings his hands together over his head. Slowly, she lifts her arms into the air, and the crowd go wild.

In her autobiography, Ellen Terry held very strongly that a child’s earliest impressions moulded its character. Things came and went in her life, but she always adored pretty faces like that of her aunt.

She was also unable to keep away from shops where they sold good old furniture like her bureau, which became like a stage to her – the sunset beyond the window a glowing, adoring audience. She liked simple rooms with low ceilings better than any other; and for her afternoon siesta she often chose a mattress on the floor.

She abandoned the stage twice – on the second occasion, leaving London without word so that her parents thought her dead.

But she always returned.

Before his set, I’d seen the DJ in the crowd, though at first I wasn’t sure and looked harder. He took a swig from a can of beer and wiped his chin. The movement exposed more of his face. I tapped Dan on the arm and pointed.

Hey, isn’t that –

Yeah, Dan said. It is.

The DJ was alone. It was strange to see him like that, anonymous, looking almost forlorn – in the way that celebrity can be when it’s unidentified. Something about his leather jacket gave a sense of him shrugged into himself. He took another sip of beer, glancing sideways. His face was expressionless.

But then, two young boys approach. They tap him on the shoulder and lean in very closely as they speak. Eventually, the DJ nods and the three of them begin rearranging themselves – one of the boys standing with his back to the stage now, raising a camera. The DJ and the other boy stand with their backs to me, motionless, waiting. The boy’s arm is flat across the DJ’s shoulders, his palm pressing flat on the dark leather, holding.

After this, as if a floodgate has been opened, more and more people come, slowly at first but then increasing – the taps on the DJ’s shoulder, closing in on each other, closer, closer, until finally, he turns with a rigid jerk. But, very quickly, he checks himself – the edgy look on his face replaced with a smile. He nods, strangely submissive or resigned, and shuffles into position, people on either side of him, their arms a lattice across his back, a clamp. I feel strange to imagine the smile on the DJ’s face as he looks into the camera. It was this that first made me think of Ellen Terry because of a photo I’d seen once.

In 1864 Julia Margaret Cameron photographed Ellen Terry. In the picture, Ellen Terry leans against a wall – almost pressing her cheek to it, as if seeking comfort. Her eyes, cast down – the hand that rises up to hang a finger off the beads around her neck – add a sense of lonesomeness. Nearly a century later, J B Priestly was to talk of ‘the mystery, the challenge, the torment, the solace’.

The picture was made during Ellen Terry’s honeymoon. It is entitled, ‘Sadness’.

 

Perhaps I was sickened slightly by this constant stream of people, taking photos. But I was struck also with that first glimpse I’d had of the DJ in the crowd, lonesome in his obscurity, knowing myself what a taste the limelight can leave you with. I felt that I wanted to talk to this man, who I’d grown up watching in a strange and beguiling TV show. But why?

I asked myself whether I wanted a piece of his celebrity. No, it wasn’t that – I didn’t want a photo. But of course, there was a reason I got up and wandered down the hill to the stage where he stood. I didn’t know what I was going to say – only that I wouldn’t tap him on the shoulder.

Down here, the music is so loud that I have to lean in close to his ear. Even this feels presumptuous. I am near enough to smell the leather of his jacket, see the lines in the skin of his hand as it grips the can of beer.

What’s it like with all these people wanting to take your picture? I ask.

It is a moment before he looks at me.

Fucking annoying, he says, and we both laugh. His eyes are a gentle brown, questioning.

Why do you do it? I say.

You’ve got to, he tells me.

Do you ever say no?

When my kids are with me.

I would remember this later – when he and his daughter are on stage – and again I would think of Ellen Terry, the fact that her parents only had one destiny in mind for her. One biographer describes that attic room of hers as a prison. But, there are always two versions, especially for those under the spotlight. Even our own actions aren’t always clear – not to us, and not to those people we act upon.

I am about to say something to the DJ when a woman taps his shoulder. Another photograph. The fan gestures with the camera and asks if I can take the picture.

You’ve become complicit! he tells me as I look at them through the lens.

Shall I start charging? I say.

I want to be able to continue talking, just the two of us, as normally as possible, but that is hopeless. More people come, each time, handing their cameras to me. Once this rush dies down, he asks if I’m enjoying the festival and we talk about the acts. Someone asks for his autograph then and afterwards he sighs and touches my elbow. He tells me that he only wanted to come out and enjoy the show before his set.

During the performance of her first role, at age eight, Ellen Terry is so eager to watch the scenes she’s not in that she borrows a knife from a carpenter and makes a slit in the canvas at the side of the stage. For the first time, she is able to see the effect of weeks of thought and labour, which have been given to the production. On the first night, she had tripped over the handle of the little cart her character is to drag about the set. A snigger ran through the house as she fell onto her back.

But now, she watches with wonder, free of the concerns of her own performance, the burden of being forever watched. While it is a thing to be on stage, there is something about this slinking into anonymity, revelling in the exhibitions of others.

 

I feel comfortable, standing by the DJ’s side, talking of normal things, but perhaps I am just like all the others, disturbing his peace, a deluded fan, thinking myself far more important than I could ever be. As I continue to stand beside him in the crowd, more and more people come to ask him to pose for a photo. It’s hard to keep the thread of the conversation going. I want so much to talk about the role I remember him in – that series on TV. He was a lot younger then – much boyishness about him. I would love to tell him that in the show he looked to be having wonderful fun. What was it like? But there are too many people now – too many photos. I imagine putting my thumb over the camera lens, or cutting him out of the frame.

He seemed so free in that TV show – perhaps because he was a boy still, looking at the world with playful eyes, before it was fully exposed, or had fully exposed him.

The two of us now seem caught up in an endless wave. It’s stupid me still being here. I give him a look as he poses again. He dips his head in some acknowledgment – but of what? I’m not sure. I can’t separate myself from these other fans – I could be just like them, dazzled by the brightness of fame.

I finally say goodbye as the clouds heave above. At once, there is a look of confusion on his face. I am shaking his hand – it was cool to chat, I tell him, looking for a space in the crowd to make my way and leave him be.

He touches my arm – aren’t you going to take my photo? he asks.

Posted in History, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Things that make us stand out

Posted on August 13, 2012 by gabrielablandy

When John first sees Ruta Meilutyte swim, he thinks her breaststroke tidy enough for her to be one of the best swimmers in the world one day. She is a rangy, blond-haired twelve-year old, but there is something in the bone structure of her face – her angular jaw and neat chin, the strength of her forehead – that suggests a body on the eve of might. But it’s also her eyes – pale, bright, unaffected. While other girls her age walk with a glance to the side to see how they are being perceived, Ruta watches the space that awaits her – the space where destiny lies – heedless of people’s thoughts, concerned only of the world and what she will make of it.

*

My mother, spurred by horror stories of children drowning, had my brother and me, taking swimming lessons at a young age. She grew up on Copacabana beach, in one wave or another, and thought omitting to teach a child to swim was one of the most irresponsible things a parent could do.

By the time I’m seven or eight and we begin swimming lessons at school, I already have most of my badges, earned at the local pool. My favourite part of the assessment had been when we got to wear our clothes in the water. It was bliss to come out of the changing room, walk down the damp pool’s edge, and have no trembles of self consciousness whatsoever. It always seemed my swimsuit was see-through, or that yet again I had chosen badly – as if it was a fault of the design that my tummy protruded.

This particular season, when my mother takes me shopping, I am charmed with a yellow suit that has fine black horizontal lines. My mother buys it for me, saying it will be very sweet.

But in the changing room, walking past the mirror towards the pool for PE, I am struck with the bulbous image that looks back at me, those two stupid stick-like legs, which somehow manage to prop me up. With these yellow and black stripes I have managed to play a prank on myself – fat bumblebee, everyone will think: a big, swollen lump that waggles as if drunk on nectar, scrawny limbs flailing.

*

After the Olympic semi finals, John tries to talk to Ruta about the strengths and weaknesses of the other swimmers who have made it to the final. She holds up her hand for him to be quiet.

Tell me what I have to do! Tell me what I have to do to be better, is all she says.

*

I have verrucas. There are seven in total, spread over both feet. Two are much worse than one. I am a bumblebee in socks.

I hate the lengthy process: turning the verruca socks the right way with the elastic making sucking, slapping sounds – filling them with talc in order that they might slide on, but finding always that final half a centimetre that remains slack beyond my toes, where any more pulling will only cause them to rip.

I walk down to the pool, feeling eyes on me – the movement of heads as these eyes follow. There are hushed sounds: ugh! verrucas!

After a few weeks, I decide to leave them at home, telling my teacher as she has us putting away our things to get ready for swimming that I have forgotten them.

She clicks her tongue, and begins searching in her desk drawers. The thought of having to wear a ‘spare’ sock sickens me, but relief floods when she only finds one. I experience an unexpected pleasure in the fact that both feet are infected.

Oh, she says when I remind her. She sighs and glances around the room.

I feel safe, but just as I begin to sink into my seat, she springs up from hers.

We’ll use a plastic bag! she announces.

*

When the starting beep comes, of all the athletes lined up, it is Ruta who springs from the block first. The fresh green of her cap launches up through bubbles and foam at every stroke. Beneath the water, her blue suit looks metallic – it is like the silvery, rainbow-tinged skin of a fish.

Ruta’s green cap is ahead, reaching the end first, turning three tenths of a second ahead of the field.

Dan and I have sprung to the edge of the sofa. His mum is cheering.

She’s still at school, Dan says. If she wins gold, she’ll be going to lessons and everyone will know she’s an Olympic champion.

*

At my junior school we were divided into four ‘houses’. For the lower part of the school I was a Tadpole, and when I moved up to the senior part I became a Frog. The houses competed with each other in all areas of sport. Athletics was held on the final day of school, kids sitting with their parents, eating their picnics in between events.

The swimming took place the week before, and for three years Frogs were undefeated. We had a gifted brother and sister duo. There was always a whisper of awe in the air whenever they strode out to take their positions at the water’s edge. The sister is now a pro British triathlete, but even back then, when she can’t have been more than eleven, there was talk of her turning professional. It was absorbing to watch her walk across the slate slabs, simply for this sense of watching greatness, the expectation of seeing something that would give a clue as to what talent really looked like, where it began in the body, how it revealed itself in the move a hand makes to readjust the strap on the goggles. No one ever beat her. I didn’t want to miss a thing.

*

Ruta is close, so close – fighting, you can tell. The president of Lithuania is in the crowd. Ruta’s father is watching on TV. The other swimmers are trying, but they don’t have what she has.

Oh, Dan’s mum says. It must be awful for the one who comes last.

But even last is the eighth best in the world – not, say, the slowest in the year.

The final race I ran at sports day was the hundred metres. It was the year I would leave and move to secondary school. Parents lay on chequered rugs, the mothers in wide sunhats and floral dresses, their flesh white and a little baggy.

I am good at the hundred meters, quite speedy, but just now, walking down the grassy bank towards the track I am preoccupied with the two horizontal creases my burgeoning breasts are making of my t shirt. I wish my mother had bought me a polo shirt, like the other girls have – the fabric would have been thicker and able to resist the fragile push of growing flesh. But not a t shirt where the material is soft and impressionable. A collar would have also hidden my shapeless, over padded neck. I admire the pale, elusive hollows at the base of the other girls’ throats, enviable above the delicate buttons of their polo shirts.

We begin to line up. I tug at my shorts. They are too tight – hand-me-downs from my brother, which are riding up in the crotch area. But now the crowd is falling silent and slowly the atmosphere, a sense of thrill, drags my thoughts outwards, to the track in front. Some of the girls are taking their plimsolls off. I stare down at my own, glancing over once more as I see feet now bare, stretching freely in the grass. Without shoes they look feminine and light, sprightly. As the assistant headmaster says, on your marks, I quickly take mine off. The ground is baked hard from the summer sun. It is unyielding.

Get set!

I do not like this unknown sensation beneath my feet. I glance to the side where I have flung my plimsolls, sensing the onset of a great error.

GO!

We all release forward, and even though my legs are going, moving with that energy and fast twitch that I know I have for the hundred meters, everyone is getting away from me. I have no forward momentum. Each pace dies on the ground so that I start from nothing every time. I had thought I might win, but the gap grows and I watch as even the two biggest girls from my year move away from me – girls who are tubby all over, not just a swollen bumblebee body.

In this situation, two seconds is an eternity. The finish line waits for me. Everyone else has flown through. I push and push, but I can’t change the fact that this is the last race I will ever run at this school and I am the slowest. All that crossing the line does, is make this official.

*

Ruta finishes, springing round in the water to look at the stadium. Her eyes seek the board and her hand flies to her mouth as she sees the 1 next to her name. She hops up onto the lane divider and rejoices with her arms rising up, her swimmers’ hands flat and sharp in the air. But she still continues to look around, checking how people react to this display of winning, as if someone might correct her. But the cheering continues. She shakes her head and her eyes have a look of panic rising to the surface, or some emotion made startling for its novelty.

*

The school had beautiful grounds. I loved the horse chestnut trees, those big floppy leaves, which you could pick at until they were left looking like a fish skeleton. There was a mulberry tree outside the tennis court, with plump sweet fruit that stained fingertips a beautiful shade of reddish pink. Rose bushes had been planted along one side of the pool – at least a dozen varieties, red, pink, white, peach. I remember tiptoeing on the ragged soil, cautious of sharp stones, just to bring a puffed up flower to my nose and inhale. The sensation of petals on the face is like a breath of sorts, an almost wet, but loving breath.

 *

I am on stage in a production of Alice in Wonderland, put on by an after school drama group I’ve joined. My part is disappointingly small. I wanted to be the red queen, but was cast as one of the minion playing cards she orders to paint her white roses red. I have a small group of lines, which I divide my heart between. Each word carries an island of passion.

It is the final night and I have finished my piece. Just as I’m carrying out my last, heartfelt exit, I spot my headmaster in the audience. Had I known he was there I would have given more. I sit back stage and feel like weeping.

The following week he calls me into his study and tells me that he has a very demanding part in the school play that he is thinking of casting me in. It is a part that makes me happier than anything has up until that moment. I am twelve.

Waiting to go on stage each night, I have no thoughts of myself, my body. It is the energy that lies beyond the stage amongst the audience that I focus on – energy which is there for the taking if you give yourself boldly, and let go of fear to take hold of what is beyond.

 *

We march down from the classroom in single file, entering the pool area via the small, iron gate, that is like sandpaper to touch, rusted as it is. We leave our towels on the benches lined up in front of the rose bushes. They are in full bloom and their petals quiver in the wind.

On my left foot, I have the ‘spare’ verruca sock, which has turned a sickly yellow with age. On my right foot, a red plastic bag crackles with each step. It is secured by an elastic band at my ankle. I feel it cutting into my flesh. All I can do is try not to look at it, or think about it, but this is hard.

In the water, my right leg is buoyant, keeping the bright red level with the pool’s surface. It is tough to bring it down beneath me. I am aware of the water in a new and startling way – outraged at its transparency, at the way it seems to act as a magnifying glass.

Older children have begun to line up at the wall to the pool, having come out of lessons already for their break time. When our class is over I do not want to get out of the water.

The teacher shouts my name.

I am at the far side of the pool – the opposite side to my towel. I make to swim across, but the teacher comes tearing over.

Out now, she says.

I cannot even swim to the steps nearby, as she is standing right above, pointing at the edge of the pool by her feet.

I put my hands on the side and struggle for a moment as I try to pull myself up. The bag has now half-filled with water and is heavy and cumbersome. I lie on my belly, the paving slabs warm beneath my bathing suit – a drowned bumblebee, legs and arms trying to work. I get to my feet and begin to walk the width of the pool to my towel. I have to pass right in front of the wall, where the older children are standing. The only way to do it is holding my breath. I take slow, careful steps, trying to ignore the loud sloshing sound, as my right foot – leaden – slaps down each time on the slate.

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Two Trees Entwined

Posted on August 6, 2012 by gabrielablandy

Henry’s sons are rebelling in France. It is the year 1173, which began on a Monday and will see fighting from Scotland to Brittany. The land will watch man tearing himself to pieces, destroying much of what has been built.

Before Henry quits England for France, he goes to his mistress, Fair Rosamond. He drops to the floor at her feet, but she will not allow her king to kneel before her, and curls around him on the cold stone. He is talking of his sons…insolent, he says. Contemptuous… The words bring blood to his face.

Of his wife, who is also involved, he cannot even speak.

Rosamond strokes his hands, his cheek. She kisses his lips.

My Rose, he says. My royal Rose.

He swears his return will be soon.

Why should I stay behind? Let me come and bear your sword, and prepare your bed at night, she begs.

The king shakes his head. He cannot help smiling.

Wanting you, my life is death, she says, gripping him.

My dearest love! Roses are not fit for travel. You shall pass the day with music, the king tells her.

Rosamond feels tears down her face, creeping towards the corners of her mouth. They are salty on her tongue.

This was to be the last time they saw each other, or so the ballad by Thomas Delone published in 1612 goes:

 After that daye faire Rosamonde

The king did see no more.

The ballad ends with a murder – Eleanor of Aquitaine, the jealous queen, poisons Rosamond with a deadlye draught –though this is a story modern historians don’t believe.

 

Within the remaining walls of Godstow Nunnery, near to the shell of the south-east chapel, is a fragile tree. Its trunk is grey, brittle. There are very few leaves – green, but a diminished green. In 1808 Robert Southey, writing under the pseudonym of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella in order to write Letters From England, talks of a hazel tree growing over the grave of Rosamond, bearing every year a profusion of nuts, which have no kernel.

 Enough of the last year’s produce were lying under the tree

to satisfy me of the truth of this, explain it how you will.

 I don’t know if this ailing tree is the hazel tree that Espriella talks of, but it is a striking figure, alone in the Nunnery ruins; tall above the grass and weeds around, battered by wind, cowering almost. Why has this tree grown where none other has? Or is it the sole survivor?

Beyond the perimeter, there are numerous trees. Trees in rows, in flocks, scattered across the lumpy landscape. Close to the ruined walls, directly west of this sole survivor, are two trees entwined; the trunk is like the fingers of a worn, wrinkled hand that have crossed themselves for luck. Above, is a mix of slight lime leaves and pink blossom – possibly a crab apple – amongst larger, greener foliage – almost waxy – durable and thick. There are bursts of both, lying like continents and sea.

 

Adelina rises, gathers the cloth by her bedside, and goes directly to the dormitory door. The nuns sleep clothed with their girdles on, so she simply adjusts the cord around her waist, which had slipped to the back during sleep, and touches her head. She no longer wears her hair in ringlets as she once did – but that is almost another life now.

The birds sense the coming sun and have begun to call softly, enquiring. Some of the older nuns are wheezing in their sleep. Sister Talida has been removed because of her illness. It will not be long for her now. Under insistent pain, her life will tighten and break.

Adelina descends the stone steps to the church. She can hear into silence now, sense the life of it – what it gives, that feeling of peace. But peace is not always with her. There is doubt and fear in her heart, which often makes little room for good. Life is a hard task, each day a climb, never knowing always wondering: what lies beyond?

She folds the cloth in half and then again until she has a long narrow strip, which she holds across her arms and walks slowly in this way towards the gravestone. Nubs of wax lie scattered, their flames burnt or blown out. Adelina kneels, laying the cloth on the stone and closing her eyes. She does not know, but thinks perhaps that it is love we all seek; love, which in its purest form can guide and heal.

 

On my way to the Abbey, I saw a man in a field, moving slowly and with method. He had a small shovel in one hand and some contraption in the other. I left the path and began to walk towards him, across the pitted, marshy ground. At one point he stopped still and dug the shovel into the ground.

Hello, he said, when I drew near.

Is that a metal detector? I asked.

He nodded.

I told him that I’d never met anyone with a metal detector before.

It was his boss that had got him into it, he said. They were fairly cheap to buy – anyone with a few hours to spare could take it up.

How deep does it detect? I asked as he dug up another lump of earth.

Twenty to thirty centimetres.

I wonder what’s down there.

He stopped and handed me something and said: I’ve already found this today.

It was a buckle. The frame of the buckle was extremely slender and the prong had a fine, almost sharp, triangular point.

The man told me that he thought it might be about 1870.

He crouched down then and put his hand into the hole he had dug. When he stood up I could see that he had something and was cleaning the dirt off it. He handed it to me – it was a smoothed, thick shard of metal. I made a tight fist around it, and felt a presence against my flesh, a small yet perceptible weight.

Is it warm from your hand or the ground? I asked the man.

 

Rosamond was buried in front of the high alter at the nunnery in Godstow. The nuns lit candles for her and laid them around the tombstone. As I approached the ruins and saw the walls of the chapel, with the windows – some of their tracery still intact – I thought of the women that had looked at the world beyond. They might have pressed their palm against the glass, wondering what life meant, what their future would be. Unmarried life was hard and may have been why many women came to the nunnery, and also why the story of Rosamond became such a meaningful one for them – this woman who had won the heart of a king, a woman like any one of them could have been. Although the ballad is not historically accurate in terms of the events it portrays, it told me something of the times: Rosamond is prepared to bear Henry’s sword and target in France so that the blows will come to her breast instead. But Henry sees only a woman before him – and thinks only of the soft peace in which their sex delights – unable to grasp the strength that Rosamond’s love has given her. There was also the queen’s jealousy – thought powerful enough to give rise to a legend of murder, even if this murder didn’t actually occur.

 

I told the man with the metal detector that I was on my way to Godstow Nunnery.

Ah yes, he said.

I asked whether he had searched there.

It’s not allowed, he told me. The site was protected.

I asked him how long he thought this protection would last – moving on in general to all the land along the river here, saying how incredible it was to be in town one minute and then suddenly surrounded on all sides by countryside. At what point in the future, beyond our lifetimes, would this all be built upon?

But this area floods, he told me.

Measures can be taken against that, I said, thinking of all the terrain that man had already reclaimed of this country; how centuries ago the invention of machines such as the plough had enabled the taming of land that had for so long been thought inhabitable. Everything changes.

 

As I came inside the walls of Godstow and approached the south-east chapel – the only significant remains – I took in a deep breath, thinking, you are to enter a space that is hundreds of years old, where many things have gone before. I stepped inside and listened. I imagined how trapped a life could feel in times of ignorance – constrained, desperate, frightening. I reached out and placed my hand against the stone. There are so many people of this world, whose names we will never know – thoughts, troubles, joys that have gone on unwritten and thus are lost to us.

A cobweb stretched across the mortar. It had caught hold of a tiny leaf that had browned and curled. Now, an earwig scuttled across the pale stone.

It struck me – leaving the chapel and finding a rock to sit on and watch, feeling the nunnery’s still quiet presence – how things are shaped: it was Henry’s relationship with Rosamond that enabled Godstow to become the building it did. He made huge endowments after her death. This was the place of her resting and Henry gave money and shingles and wood, enabling the nunnery to be enlarged. Now, it is a ruin, though it’s no longer falling down. It looks stable. A lot of the damage was purposefully inflicted by the Royalists, during the Civil War of the 17th century, to stop the Parliamentary army getting hold of the nunnery and using it as a stronghold. Some of it was due to people coming and taking stones to build their own houses. Times move on.

Inside the chapel I had seen something glinting amongst the grass and nettles. I’d thought of the man with his metal detector, and crouched down, but it was only a scrunched up aluminium pie case, thrown by someone, unthinking of this place and all it had held once. On the walls, initials were carved in the stone, full names, dates – people needing to have some remains of themselves within these already remains. Something in this deliberate act for posterity seemed cheap against the unknowing, humble ruins of the nunnery.

 

On visiting Godstow Nunnery after Henry’s death, the Bishop of Lincoln asked whose grave it was that was being so worshipped. When he was told, he was furious that a harlot could have been given such pride of place and ordered that her remains be removed outside the nunnery.

They were moved again during the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536. It is said that when the tomb was opened up, a sweet smell issued forth.

 

On my way back, I saw the man with the metal detector still making his way around the field.

I’d asked him what he did with the things he found.

Clean them up, try to date them, he said.

Do you sell them? I asked.

No, I keep them. But then, I’ve never found anything that’s worth much.

I continued home, but watched him as I walked, waving once. He was too engrossed in his work to see me: head down, waving the metal detector from side to side, searching out what had been left behind – these fragments of the past.

It seemed to me that the trees were fragments too, pieces of a bigger story. Those two trunks, plaited as one, knotted together forever, just as Henry and Rosamond. Their lives became entwined the moment they met, as did the future of Godstow. Then there is that sole survivor, grey and crooked, which spoke to me of what endures, despite all. Eleanor was to outlive both Rosamond and Henry, see the start of the 13th century and become ruler of England for a time. But beyond even her life was the unfaltering enchantment of Fair Rosamond – her remains venerated by the nuns of Godstow, still fragrant centuries later, producing a hazel tree, whose nuts possess no kernel as if in some proof of chastity. These are the things the metal detector can’t ring out, which come to us some other way.

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Swimming in lakes

Posted on July 30, 2012 by gabrielablandy

The waitress must have been sitting on a small stool behind the counter because when I left my table to find the toilet, I only saw her head between polished yellow cups, a napkin dispenser, the small hand-painted bowl with the label, tips, stuck to the side. She stood up quickly as I passed by.

Later, I caught a glimpse of her putting on mascara. It made me think of this private world she had back there, moments that she could grab for herself. Perhaps it was this that made me feel voyeuristic, but I also felt it had something to do with the level at which she was sitting, so low down, a helpless height, personal and vulnerable.

I asked her if the place got busy.

Oh yes, she said, and the look on her face was of those times: the rush, the panic, the exhaustion.

She told me she was from Poland and I asked her what it was like.

We have four seasons, she said.

I glanced at the window. The street beyond was ashen – the light from the sun kept back by thick, heavy clouds. The whole morning, rain had been coming down in a debilitating way: I’d sat watching it, feeling for the lack of colour – the only shades I saw were where the rain had dampened and darkened. People hurried by beneath umbrellas, their faces flattened, showing nothing.

What do you miss about Poland? I asked the waitress.

The lakes, she said. Here they’re all private.

I thought for a moment and then told her I’d been swimming in a lake nearby.

Where? she said, stepping closer.

In October last year, we finally got our summer. One day, I cycled out to Stanton St John with Dan. This second chance in the weather was apt: Dan and I had been arguing the day before and needed a lift too. We went slowly at first. I was in front, cycling in a daze, my heart sunk.

I’d been in a writer’s fever. Nothing was coming out right. In trying to make my way out of my wordless, black hole, I’d succeeded in thrashing away at everything – even the people I care for the most. I’d seen the expression on Dan’s face, taking in this stranger before him who had put away her love. I could see him grow hollow – although he was trying to hang on. Still, I couldn’t stop.

That morning, he’d taken my hand and said: come on.

I pushed myself on the uphill stretches. By this time, we were beyond the city. Fields stretched out on either side of us and the air was balmy. I felt flies in my face, the warmth of the breeze; I began to surface and see the world again.

We stopped down a side track in the village, lying on the soft earth beneath trees so that when the wind blew the sun appeared as flecks and dots around us. I held out my hand and felt a finger print of heat against my skin. We listened to the birds in the trees, looking up at the loud sounds of rustling foliage to see twigs, falling down. Beyond the treetops, came the beating of wings.

I turned to Dan and whispered: I’m sorry.

He smiled and said: hello.

We set off again and found a quiet road that had turned dark in the heat, the tar almost glistening. There was the scent of sap, of bark and hay. Dan pulled level and, as he began to move ahead, he said: do you think I’ll be able to take my shirt off whilst going along no hands?

He had a bag as well – the strap set diagonally across his chest and back. I watched him pull this upwards, over his head. He wobbled then and had to touch the handlebars. Now, holding the bag in his right hand, he managed to get his t shirt off. I cheered.

We turned to head home and were on a stretch of straight road. We decided to race to see who would reach the bend first. Dan would cycle without hands as a handicap. At first, I was just managing to keep level, knowing that I could build my momentum and change up a gear, increasing my speed. But when I changed gear I lost my rhythm and squealed. I was falling behind. I fought against the now heavy peddles and came level again, knowing that I now had enough to get ahead. Dan grabbed his handlebars.

Hey! I said.

I was wobbling, he told me.

Now, he was going without hands again and I was sliding ahead. I had found a rhythm. I was tired though – almost nothing in my legs – but something kept me on. I could feel the heat in my face. It had nowhere to go with the warm air, pushing back. Then Dan came up from behind, pulling level. He was fully gripping his handlebars, grinning at me. I began to laugh.

I don’t think I would have made it to the bend anyway, I told him, as Dan reached out and took hold of my bike and the two of us rode along parallel.

We came out of Stanton St John and saw the lakes across the field, turning to wheel down a narrow track, which led to the larger of the two. We laid our bikes down and stood by the shore. There were two swans, close to each other, drifting on the water. I couldn’t see how deep it got, but close to shore the bottom was mud and stones, tufts of reeds. Dan began to take off his clothes. He stepped into the shallows. I could tell that it was cold. I watched him, wading in deeper, naked.

Shall I come in? I asked.

No, it’s icy.

He went under and swam out. I thought he would be in the water a while, in which case I would go in. I undid my belt, but he was now turning and coming back. He began to rise out of the water.

I was going to come in, I said. Was it really freezing?

Dan lay his arm against my cheek. It felt cool, refreshed.

You should go in, he said.

I began to take my clothes off and then stepped slowly across the grass to the water. I heard Dan take a picture and turned and grinned at him. He was still naked, waiting to dry, the hair on his body straight with the weight of water.

At first, I stood with my ankles submerged, watching the swans. I was a little wary of them, remembering another lake that we’d been swimming in when we went to Ireland in the summer. This one was salt water, being close to the coast – flooded several hundred years ago. The woman whose Bed and Breakfast we were staying in had taken us there. It had been raining solidly for two days, and when she mentioned she was going swimming in a nearby lake it seemed like a perfect way to be outdoors and defeat the weather. There were two swans, loitering by the pontoon. She told us that it was important to wait for them to swim away as the male could be very protective of his mate.

It is the woman’s friend that I remember now – her Rubensesque figure. She strode up the pontoon in a chocolate coloured swimsuit with large cream polka dots. Her grey hair was cropped short.

A few months ago I was doing badly, she told me. I was overweight, spending too much time indoors. No self esteem.

It was difficult to believe – her eyes gave off light they were sparkling so.  

What changed? I asked her.

She smiled and told me that she went to Australia.

I spent a month out of doors, she said. It’s not that I lost a great deal of weight, but I feel fantastic.

I could sense it – her energy, her love for life, more powerful in its gratitude, having lain dormant for so long. She dived into the water after the woman who owned the Bed and Breakfast. They both began to swim towards the opposite shore.

Come on, you two! she called over her shoulder.

Dan was pulling on his trousers now, standing near to the bikes. I began to wade forward into the lake until I was ready to push and bear down, stretching my arms out to reach the water, feeling it icy on my belly first, then covering my back and shoulders, my neck. My lungs squeezed tight and I began to breathe in short bursts. The swans were watching me. Now, I saw a pair of coots, but they were retreating, their necks jerking as their legs worked beneath the surface. I turned onto my back and looked at the sky, empty of clouds, a bright, watery blue: so much light, such a hopeful colour.

When I came out, I felt the air warm on my body, a very faint tightening sensation on my skin as the water began to evaporate. Dan came, clothed, and held me against him. He was breathing slowly, this source of life, my happiness. I felt grateful, knowing him, now feeling our hearts, moving together – cleaned of the scum, which can build up daily and obscure this truth.

That night, I wrote this poem, my block released:

Here, on the lake, the swans live out their lives.
They are country folk – unlike the town birds of the city’s canals.
On the lake, the hours pass with only nature’s clock,
The earth,
Ticking round.
The sun comes and goes, a blooming and fading of colour.
The day slips by in tiny, speechless movements.
Now, the swans face each other.
They dip their beaks into the lake.
At once, their heads follow, breaking the surface,
Their necks coming after,
As a rope might slip from a pontoon, lolloping into the water.
And they surface again, moving with the wind.
One begins to drift away, towards the farthest shore, and the wind shows across the lake, 
Wrinkling the space between them.  

This is the thing:
They are not apart now because they have argued.
The one, standing in the shallows, is not snubbed.
It does not stretch its neck in protest.
The other does not continue to dive under in a display of no concern.
They simply do what they do.
It is man’s touch that gives the swans a dialogue,
Beyond their own silent rhythms and the beating of their hearts:
Man’s touch that confuses the landscape with pylons,
And thrusts into the air a distracting hum of traffic.

I dream of spending time in a wooden house on a lake. There is a small pontoon and each morning I walk out and dive into the water, and each morning I am renewed.

I met a woman from Canada once, when I was living in Mexico. She had a lakehouse in Nova Scotia. There was something in her manner that would always strike me. I know what it is now. It is the air of someone, needing nothing more than to watch the wind play out across water’s surface – this dance of ripples and circles.

I understand how that waitress can miss her lakes in Poland.

Posted in Fiction, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Not all those who wander are lost

Posted on July 23, 2012 by gabrielablandy

‘Are you writing a novel?’

I turn to the table next to me where two young men are sitting – one in a grey suit, the other in a crumpled shirt, jacket slung over the back of his chair. It’s not clear who has spoken as they’re both looking at me.

I laugh and say: I am actually, though that’s not what I’m doing right now.

It’s the man in the suit who speaks. His skin is an olive brown, smooth when relaxed, though showing settled grooves with each expression.

What’s your novel about? he asks, glancing at my laptop.

After I tell him, he says: if we’re talking about things that happened to us when we were twelve, I have a story.

I’d noticed the waitress seating them earlier, but I had several websites open on my laptop, which I was trying to read. I was having breakfast before going to visit an exhibition at the Anaesthesia Heritage Centre: A Blessing in disguise – Misuse of Anaesthesia.

It was the start of my blog. I needed something to write about, though not in order to talk in a specific manner – a critic giving details on the merits of this or that. My process is not so clear-cut. There is a moment, before I sit down to work, that I feel a very keen sense of empathy. It is from this, almost heartbreaking, point that words begin to flow.

The exhibition at the Heritage Centre wasn’t an obvious choice, especially to those who know me, but it had given a small sense of possibility. This is what I look for – indications, connections, clues almost.

The previous year I had read about Sir Humphry Davy. Born in 1778, Davy is most famed for his invention of the miner’s safety lamp, but it was his relationship with Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas) that I was more familiar with.

During his twenties, Davy became acquainted with many men of letters, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge – many of whom were to sample Nitrous Oxide, as soon as Davy had proved that it could be inhaled without danger.

For Coleridge, his first time brought ‘a highly pleasurable sensation of warmth,’ as if he had returned ‘from a walk in the snow into a warm room’.

The blog felt like a quest. First had been the decision to write, followed by a gathering of my skills – history, fiction, autobiography – and then a search that had led me to position myself in the direction of the Heritage Centre.

A wind is gathering. Will it blow me onwards?

‘If you’re a writer,’ says the friend in the crumpled shirt. (I hear a Canadian accent.) ‘You should check out the exhibition at the British Library.’

I’m going to an exhibition, I tell him. At the Anaesthesia Heritage Centre.

Why? the man in the suit asks.

There’s something in the way he slips forward in his seat and becomes alert that makes me think he has a medical background.

I shrug and say: I’m on a journey.

Even more reason to go to the British Library, the Canadian friend says.

What’s going on there? I ask.

He thinks for a moment – It’s to do with literature and landscape. I can’t remember the exact name, but it says something about those who wander not being lost.

After breakfast, I walk to Malet Street. Behind me is the Birkbeck library where, during my MA, I came a few days each week to write, stopping for lunch at the same cafe that I’d met those young men earlier. They seemed so unalike, one from Baghdad, one from Toronto; a scientist and an artist.

How did you become friends? I’d asked them.

The artist said: we’re both competitive.

They were rather like Davy and Coleridge, who became devoted to each other. Coleridge promised Davy that he would ‘attack Chemistry like a shark’ in order to better understand his friend. In a letter to Coleridge, Davy states that he has moved his furniture into the garden amidst the strawberries, and is writing in the shade of an apple tree.

‘Thus I begin to claim a relationship with nature,’ Davy writes, appealing to Coleridge’s romantic and poetical spirit.

I take out my phone and call up the Heritage Centre.

I’d like to come and see the exhibition, I say. It mentioned on the website that although entry was free, booking was recommended.

When would you like to come?

I’m in London at the moment, so…this morning?

We’re actually closed today, the voice tells me.

After I hang up, I stand very still. I cannot deny the sense of failure that I feel – the inclination to go home.

Although Davy discovered that Nitrous Oxide appeared capable of destroying physical pain and might be used with advantage during surgical operations, it was nearly half a century later in 1844 that Horace Wells, an American dentist, first used Nitrous Oxide for the painless extraction of one of his own teeth.

Davy was long dead by then. He never knew what a chance he had missed. But at the time of his ‘experiments’ with Nitrous Oxide, Davy wasn’t searching for a practical means of anaesthesia, but rather greater knowledge of how gases affect health and spirits.

He was looking in the wrong direction.

Now I know, with the Anaesthesia Heritage Centre closed, another course is needed, one which I have already been given. I turn right around and begin to walk towards the British Library.

On Euston Road, there is a squat building with mirrored glass. It’s not the only one, but it’s the only one with a garden, growing on its roof. Evergreen House, it’s called. To get a decent photo would mean halting the traffic in both directions. It would be an exciting thing to achieve, but every car and lorry that goes past is trying to get somewhere specific. They don’t have the luxury of stopping, or changing track. I take a photo from the pavement instead.

On my computer that night, it’s possible to see the trees in the street reflected in the building’s mirrored windows. It looks like there is a tree, growing inside the building, bursting through the roof in the way that hair pops out of a sun visor, giving a whole new sense to that rooftop garden.

In the toilets to the British Library, there is a piece of paper pinned above the sinks, saying that someone had left two rings there, which aren’t valuable in terms of money, but hugely important. If anyone finds them could they please get in touch?

The man from Baghdad had commented on one of my rings earlier, asking if it was from India.

Australia, I told him.

He said he had been led by the design.

Waves? I asked.

Or snakes, he said.

The exhibition room is windowless. The air is cool, like the inside of a cave. Original manuscripts lie safe inside locked, glass cabinets. Images are projected onto blackened walls. Sheets dangle from the high ceilings. They are marked with contour lines so it appears as if hills hang all around us. An audio provides the sounds of Industrial Britain, the scrape and pound of machinery. Poems lament industrialisation’s assault on nature. The burden of loss is powerful.

People wander the exhibits and scribble into notebooks, or stand listening to audios. ‘Folk…they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever’. This line slips inside me and lies peacefully animate.

The farm where I grew up has been informing my writing for some time. But it isn’t just the memory of the land – its shapes and shadows, flecks and movements – that I write about. It is the way that, growing up deep within the countryside, I make sense of the world – seeing patterns, reoccurrences; coincidences.

Landscape is a narrative: there is the journey across the land, but also the way that land becomes entwined with our emotions. It creates a dialogue of sorts – sometimes one of comfort, sometimes antagonism.

But how to capture all this in words? All through the exhibition, there are writers who have launched themselves from one point of inspiration – be it a wild heath, a cityscape, the sea – their story flowing on.

‘My dear fellow,’ Coleridge was to write to Davy from Cumberland. ‘I wish I could wrap up the view from my house in a pill of opium and send it to you!’ This to me is what we want to achieve as writers – something that will give our readers a whole experience.

When trying to describe his experiences of Nitrous Oxide, Davy reveals the intensity of the search for words to describe sensations entirely novel: ‘like blind men who use the language of sight’.

The search for words is like that photo of Evergreen House. At first, it seems impossible, but then, as language comes, a story – often unexpected – is revealed.

It is this search, the act of seeing and feeling, and consequently laying out words, that is the thrill of writing for me. From one important moment, a chance meeting, a story can unfold.

The brothers have come to stand outside their father’s room. The door is open an inch or two in the hope of persuading a breeze, but even that would be like a hot breath. The summer months are dry. Even at night it rarely drops below 28 degrees. The boys softly push and shove with each other, trying not to laugh. Their bare feet, sticky in the heat, make tender kissing sounds on the tiles. Finally, one of brothers reaches his hand through into the room and feels for the light switch. He clicks it on and just as quickly turns it off again. The brothers freeze, looking at each other. Some of them have put their hands over their mouths. There is the sound of their breathing, shaken by the tickle of laughter in their belly. Nothing happens. One of the other brothers steps forward to try again. He reaches into the dark room: on, and then hastily off.

They hear the father sigh and shift beneath the thin sheet.

On, and then off, once more, most of them giggling now. On, and then off. On. Off.

There is a shout from the father and they all tumble into the room to see him out of bed, grabbing his belt and turning to come after them.

How many brothers? I’d asked the man in the suit.

Nine, he told me.

Nine!? I said.

But the man in the suit simply shrugged.

Nine brothers?

Yes, he said, composed.

Landscape can enlarge the space the self has to swim in. This was something George Eliot felt keenly. I see my own landscape, and that of the man in the suit, growing up in Baghdad – what different spaces we are swimming in: one sees waves, the other snakes.

Are you the youngest? I’d asked him. I imagined him the youngest, getting away with things.

No, I’m in the middle, he said. My older brothers got to work for my father, doing important things, so they were left alone much of the time. The youngest are allowed to be because they’re cute. So, often the brunt fell on me. My father is head of a tribe. He’s important. Serious. He doesn’t like to be disobeyed.

I was thinking of that belt.

In the commotion, one of the brothers has managed to slip under the bed as his father rushes out onto the landing, chasing the others down the corridor. The boy hears the sounds of beating and later his father’s footsteps, returning. He watches his two dry, greyish feet pause on the rug beside the bed; then each disappears as the mattress heaves and sings above. He waits. The noise of his own racing blood is a constant hum in his ears as he lies on the tiles, seeing the silhouette of a dead beetle close by, against the wall. Outside, the city is quiet – there is only the hiss and spurt of his father’s breathing, which is not yet deep enough for the boy to come crawling out.

One day, this boy will come to England – London – but for now the stretched out shadows, the flat expanse of the tiles, the patterns of the rug almost obliterated by the darkness is the only landscape he knows, as he waits for his father to sleep.

Posted in Fiction, History, Memoir | Tagged , , , , , , | 15 Comments