The Cost of Living Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Ophelia and the Great Idea

  Beautiful Mutants

  Swallowing Geography

  The Unloved

  Diary of a Steak

  Billy & Girl

  Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

  Swimming Home

  Black Vodka

  Things I Don’t Want to Know

  Hot Milk

  CONTENTS

  1. The Big Silver

  2. The Tempest

  3. Nets

  4. Living in Yellow

  5. Gravity

  6. The Body Electric

  7. The Black and Bluish Darkness

  8. The Republic

  9. Night Wandering

  10. X Is Where I Am

  11. Footsteps in the House

  12. The Beginning of Everything

  13. The Milky Way

  14. Good Tidings

  A Note on the Author

  You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people are.

  – Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (1990)

  ONE

  THE BIG SILVER

  As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story. One January night I was eating coconut rice and fish in a bar on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. A tanned, tattooed American man sat at the table next to me. He was in his late forties, big muscled arms, his silver hair pinned into a bun. He was talking to a young English woman, perhaps nineteen years old, who had been sitting on her own reading a book, but after some ambivalence had taken up his invitation to join him. At first he did all the talking. After a while she interrupted him.

  Her conversation was interesting, intense and strange. She was telling him about scuba-diving in Mexico, how she had been underwater for twenty minutes and then surfaced to find there was a storm. The sea had become a whirlpool and she had been anxious about making it back to the boat. Although her story was about surfacing from a dive to discover the weather had changed, it was also about some sort of undisclosed hurt. She gave him a few clues about that (there was someone on the boat who she thought should have come to save her) and then she glanced at him to check if he knew that she was talking about the storm in a disguised way. He was not that interested and managed to move his knees in a way that jolted the table so that her book fell to the floor.

  He said, ‘You talk a lot don’t you?’

  She thought about this, her fingers combing out the ends of her hair while she watched two teenage boys selling cigars and football shirts to tourists in the cobbled square. It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals.

  She asked him what it was that he was scooping up from his bowl with tortilla chips. He told her it was ceviche, raw fish marinated in lime juice, which was written in the menu in English as sexvice – ‘It comes with a condom,’ he said. When she smiled, I knew she was making a bid to be someone braver than she felt, someone who could travel freely on her own, read a book and sip a beer alone in a bar at night, someone who could risk an impossibly complicated conversation with a stranger. She took up his offer to taste his ceviche, then dodged his offer to join him for a night swim in an isolated part of the local beach, which, he assured her, was ‘away from the rocks’.

  After a while, he said, ‘I don’t like scuba-diving. If I had to go down deep, it would be for gold.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s funny you say that. I was thinking my name for you would be the Big Silver.’

  ‘Why Big Silver?’

  ‘It was the name of the diving boat.’

  He shook his head, baffled, and moved his gaze from her breasts to the neon sign for Exit on the door. She smiled again, but she didn’t mean it. I think she knew she had to calm the turbulence she had brought with her from Mexico to Colombia. She decided to take back her words.

  ‘No, Big Silver because of your hair and the stud above your eyebrow.’

  ‘I’m just a drifter,’ he said. ‘I drift about.’

  She paid her bill and asked him to pick up the book he had jolted to the floor, which meant he had to bend down and reach under the table, dragging it towards him with his foot. It took a while, and when he surfaced with the book in his hand, she was neither grateful nor discourteous. She just said, ‘Thanks.’

  While the waitress collected plates heaped with crab claws and fish bones, I was reminded of the Oscar Wilde quote ‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’ That was not quite true for her. She had to make a bid for a self that possessed freedoms the Big Silver took for granted – after all he had no trouble being himself.

  You talk a lot don’t you?

  To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take, but it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else.

  Later, when I was writing on my hotel balcony, I thought about how she had invited the drifting Big Silver to read between the lines of her undisclosed hurt. She could have stopped the story by describing the wonder of all she had seen in the deep calm sea before the storm. That would have been a happy ending, but she did not stop there. She was asking him (and herself) a question: Do you think I was abandoned by that person on the boat? The Big Silver was the wrong reader for her story, but I thought on balance that she might be the right reader for mine.

  TWO

  THE TEMPEST

  Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced twenty years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realized I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.

  Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.

  When I was around fifty and my life was supposed to be slowing down, becoming more stable and predictable, life became faster, unstable, unpredictable. My marriage was the boat and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown. It is also the ghost that will always haunt my life. I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are. I am not sure I have often witnessed love that achieves all of these things, so perhaps this ideal is fated to be a phantom. What sort of questions does this phantom ask of me? It asks political questions for sure, but it is not a politician.

  When I was travelling in Brazil, I saw a brightly coloured caterpillar as thick as my thumb. It looked as if it had been designed by Mondrian, its body marked with symmetrical squares of blue, red and yellow. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Most peculiar of all, it appeared to have two vibrant red heads, one on either end of its body. I stared at it over and over again to check if this could possibly be true. Perhaps the sun had gone to my head, or I was hallucinating from the smoky black tea that I sipped every day while I watched children play soccer in the square. It was possible, as I discovered later, that the caterpillar presented a false head to protect itself from predators. At this time, I could not decid
e which part of the bed I wished to sleep on. Let’s say the pillow on my bed faced south; sometimes I slept there and then I changed the pillow so it faced north and slept there too. In the end I placed a pillow on each end of the bed. Perhaps this was a physical expression of being a divided self, of not thinking straight, of being in two minds about something.

  When love starts to crack the night comes in. It goes on and on. It is full of angry thoughts and accusations. These tormenting internal monologues don’t stop when the sun rises. This is what I resented most, that my mind had been abducted and was full of Him. It was nothing less than an occupation. My own unhappiness was starting to become a habit, in the way that Beckett described sorrow becoming ‘a thing you can keep adding to all your life … like a stamp or an egg collection’.

  When I returned to London, my local Turkish newsagent gave me a fur pom-pom key ring. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I attached it to my handbag. There is something very uplifting about a pom-pom. I went for a walk in Hyde Park with a male colleague and it bounced around in a light-hearted manner as we kicked our way through the autumn leaves. It was a free spirit, madly joyful, part animal, part something else. It was so much happier than I was. He wore a delicate ring with a tiny sleepy diamond embedded in the latticed gold band. He said, ‘My wife chose this wedding ring for me. It’s Victorian, not really my style, but it reminds me of her.’ And then he said, ‘My wife crashed the car again.’ Ah, I thought, as we walked past the golden trees, she does not have a name. She is a wife. I wondered why my male colleague often forgot the names of most of the women he met at social events. He would always refer to them as someone’s wife or girlfriend, as if that was all I needed to know.

  If we don’t have names, who are we?

  I cried like a woman when I knew my marriage was over. I have seen a man cry like a woman but I’m not sure I have seen a woman cry like a man. The man who cried like a woman was at a funeral and he did not so much cry as wail, sob and weep; his tears were very strong. His shoulders were shaking, his face was blotchy, he reached into his jacket pocket and took out tissues to press against his eyes. Every one of them fell apart. Strange sounds and utterances came from his diaphragm. It was a very expressed grief.

  I thought he was weeping for all of us in that moment. Everyone else was crying in a more socially conscious way. When I spoke to him at the wake afterwards, he told me that this bereavement had made him aware that in his own life, ‘Love had signed its name in the visitors’ book but never moved in.’

  He wondered what had stopped him from being bolder. We were sipping fine Irish whiskey, a brand favoured by the exceptional man who had died. I asked him if he and this man had been lovers? He said yes, on and off for many years, but they had never risked making themselves vulnerable to each other. They had never owned up to their love. When he asked me why my marriage was shipwrecked, his own honesty made it possible to speak more freely. After I had spoken for a while, he said, ‘It seems to me that you would be better off finding another way to live.’

  I imagined the conversation that I had never had with the father of my children being found one day in the black box that was flung to the bottom of the ocean when the boat crashed. One rainy Tuesday in the far future, it would be found by artificial life who would gather round to listen to the sad, strong voices of human beings in pain.

  The best thing I ever did was not swim back to the boat. But where was I to go?

  THREE

  NETS

  We sold the family house. This action of dismantling and packing up a long life lived together seemed to flip time into a weird shape; a flashback to leaving South Africa, the country of my birth, when I was nine years old and a flash-forward to an unknown life I was yet to live at fifty. I was unmaking the home that I’d spent much of my life’s energy creating.

  To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being. This task is still mostly perceived as women’s work. Consequently, there are all kinds of words used to belittle this huge endeavour. If the wife and mother has been impregnated by society, she is playing everyone’s wife and mother. She has built the story the old patriarchy has designed for the nuclear heterosexual family, and of course added a few contemporary flourishes of her own. To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents. If she is not too defeated by the societal story she has enacted with hope, pride, happiness, ambivalence and rage, she will change the story.

  To unmake a family home is like breaking a clock. So much time has passed through all the dimensions of that home. Apparently, a fox can hear a clock ticking from forty yards away. There was a clock on the kitchen wall of our family home, less than forty yards from the garden. The foxes must have heard it ticking for over a decade. It was now all packed up, lying face down in a box.

  My kind neighbour saw me standing in the garden as the doors of the removal van slammed and the driver started the engine. She asked if I needed to rest. I lay down for an hour on her sofa. As I was about to leave, she asked, ‘What are those things there?’ She was pointing to my daughters’ childhood fishing nets, which I hadn’t packed with everything else. One was yellow, the other blue, still coated with grains of sand. They had used these nets to catch small fish on seaside holidays, wading up to their knees in the sea, waiting for something incredible to come their way. The nets, five foot long, were now leaning dreamily against my neighbour’s Victorian bay window.

  Their father and I agreed that we would live separately but we would always live together in the lives of our children. There are only loving and unloving homes. It is the patriarchal story that has been broken. All the same, most children who grow up in that story will struggle, along with everyone else, to compose another one.

  FOUR

  LIVING IN YELLOW

  Night after night, I went around recognizing myself in an idea that suggested general disintegration and, at the same time, new composition.

  – Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child (2015)

  That November I moved with my daughters to a flat on the sixth floor of a large shabby apartment block on the top of a hill in North London. Apparently a restoration programme was due to start in this apartment block, but it never seemed to start. The floors of the communal corridors were covered in grey industrial plastic for three years after we moved in. The impossibility of repairing and rehabilitating a vast old building seemed gloomily appropriate at this time of disintegration and rupture. The process of restoration, the bringing back and repairing of something that existed before, in this case an art deco building that was falling apart, was the wrong metaphor for this time in my life.

  I did not wish to restore the past. What I needed was an entirely new composition.

  It was a bitter winter. The communal heating system had broken down. The heating was off, the hot water was off, and sometimes the cold water was off too. I had three halogen heaters on the go and twelve large bottles of mineral water stored under the sink. When the water was switched off, the toilet would not flush. Someone had anonymously written a note and stuck it on the lift door. HELP. Please help. The flats are unbearably cold, could someone DO something. My oldest daughter, who had begun her first year at university, joked that student life was a luxury in comparison. For a few weeks after she departed to begin her degree, I woke up in the small hours with a queasy feeling that something was wrong. Where was my oldest child? And then I remembered, and I knew that we were all of us moving forwards into another kind of life.

  It was futile to try to fit an old life into a new life. The old fridge was too big for the new kitchen, the sofa too big for the
lounge, the beds the wrong shape to fit the bedrooms. Most of my books were in boxes in the garage with the rest of the family house. More urgently, I no longer had a study at the most professionally busy time in my life. I wrote wherever I could and concentrated on making a home for my daughters. I could say that it was these years that were the most self-sacrificing, and not the years in our nuclear-family unit. Yet, to be making this kind of home, a space for a mother and her daughters, was so hard and humbling, profound and interesting, that to my surprise I found I could work very well in the chaos of this time.

  I was thinking clearly, lucidly; the move up the hill and the new situation had freed something that had been trapped and stifled. I became physically strong at fifty, just as my bones were supposed to be losing their strength. I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

  I heaved two huge stone plant pots from the garden of the family house and placed them on the balcony outside my bedroom. This balcony was the size of a long, thin kitchen table. There was just about room for a tiny, round garden table and two chairs. The pots resembled ocean liners docking in a tiny pond. They did not belong here. Not in this new life living in the sky with long views over London. The bleak communal corridor walls of the building had been painted a speckled grey in the 1970s, which I suppose matched the grey plastic that had been laid over the mangy green carpets. These corridors were lit all day and all night, a sinister, unchanging twilight. At other times they felt amniotic and trippy, as if we were floating in grey membrane. My friends thought they looked like something out of The Shining.