Signs of Life Read online

  There are six ways to eat oranges

  1) my father taught me to peel an orange in a spiral so that one could later put the peel back together to form an illusion-orange. can’t blow bubbles or turn cartwheels so this was an important skill –

  Now a days this always reminds me of the old irish custom from King Arthur where if one cuts a strip of skin all around the outline of a dead man and then lays it around a sleeping man then when he wakes he will love you. Of course if he wakes while you are laying the strip down he will die.

  Francesca Woodman

  Reading the quotes and extracts is like hearing old favourites come on the radio, things you can sing along to, but when I looked at what else I’d written I put it down quickly, bundled out of my flat in a hurry. I couldn’t read the notebook, or not much of it, because as well as the unhelpful gaps, the me of ten years ago is intensely irritating to the me now – whimsical, self-absorbed and whiney like an annoying younger sister.

  I ended up taking a long walk by the canal, the farthest along the towpath I have yet been (I may even have reached Limehouse). After an hour or so I was getting hungry and thirsty so I started back and it occurred to me that trying to get away from myself like this was a bit like running away from home when you don’t really mean it.

  And, I suppose, that although she makes me wince, I do still like the bits of other people’s writing she wrote down.

  Four

  Where I live now is a one-bedroom flat in Islington. It’s up three flights of stairs, which sounded too high and so I nearly didn’t bother to see it, but my sister made me come and I liked it immediately. There is more daylight in the rooms compared to where Johnny and I lived in Hammersmith and I don’t miss the garden because I never gardened. I like the little roof terrace I have here, which is reached by two French doors directly opposite my desk. What I can see through these doors is mainly the backs and roofs of other buildings. To my right is a tall church steeple with a weather vane that catches the light on low, pink evenings and the bells ring out at the weekend at seemingly random times (I assume the bells are rung by machine and I think the machine may be broken). There are three trees, but they are quite far away and not very tall and apart from the fact that they sway where nothing else does, they are unremarkable.

  The building directly opposite is in a pitiful state. There is a tapas bar underneath that is well run and popular, but the two-storey flat on top has been forgotten. I haven’t seen a light on. The black plastic drainpipe is broken and hanging down and flaps and bangs on windy nights and days and the wooden frames around the four windows are rotten and crumbling, the white paint weathered away. A sinewy buddleia has taken root out of one crack in the wall and looks feral, like a half-starved urban fox.

  Today I am counting things I remember. I imagined this would be like opening a high cupboard and a whole load of stuff tumbling out that had been shoved in there and forgotten about for years. This hasn’t happened yet.

  I have counted the number of arguments with Carl and categorized them (mild, serious, vicious), and the number of times we had sex outdoors or in vehicles, and the number of times I avoided saying whether or not I loved him. (I didn’t.) We kissed first in May but it was over by September, so the affair was short enough to count almost everything that happened in it. There was one birthday, mine. I turned twenty-four that summer, and something that seems curious to me now was that I thought of him as so much older than me because he was thirty.

  We had one good-natured disagreement. It was about how many pistachios make the perfect mouthful. He said one at a time because then you keep wanting more. I said five, because the ratio of shelling-time to size-of-mouthful yielded more crunching, but then I am the kind of person who rips open a bag of pistachios, trawls through for the freebies – the ones that have come out of their shell by themselves – and gobbles them up. On one long car journey we experimented – I was shelling, he was driving – and agreed that fifteen was outrageous and ten too many, which made me doubt my position but I stayed with five because by then it had become one of those bonding jokes you get at the start of something, like knowing you can’t win but wrestling anyway because you just want any and all physical contact because you know it will end in sex. This movement between play and passion was the best; I don’t know exactly how it shifted, but suddenly the humour would give way to tenderness and then the tenderness would grow edgy, and it made the sex bigger, somehow. But when I think of those early, fresh days now (so few of them), it’s not just sex that comes to mind, it’s laughter. His laugh made a puppy out of me; it was something he threw out like a ball, hard to resist.

  Almost all of my memories are fragments, impressions. For example, there was a conversation with Johnny about new work-friends – we were at home; I think it was a weekend. Johnny told me that he had made a new friend at work. What’s his name? I asked, barely interested. Her name is Fiona, Johnny said. Now I was interested: Is she pretty?

  Not really, he replied.

  What does that mean?

  It means you have nothing to worry about, he said. Then he asked: Do I?

  Do you what?

  Do I have anything to worry about?

  I knew then, that he meant Carl, but I said: What do you mean?

  Well you’ve got a new work-friend too, he said.

  What, Carl? God, no!

  Johnny relaxed into reading the paper again.

  So now we both have new, non-pretty work-friends, I said.

  Of the opposite sex, said Johnny. I never heard him mention ‘Fiona’ again.

  I can’t bear it that the start of the affair was also the beginning of the end with Johnny, mainly because of the position that leaves me in, but also because I don’t believe things were that clear cut.

  When I got home from being with Carl that first time I had to deal with Johnny and so it wasn’t until he and I were lying far apart in bed that I began to think about what I had done and the thought was so hard and heavy that I turned quickly away from it and my drunken state helped me to turn off the scene so that I fell asleep without any trouble.

  The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the cloying sweetness of alcohol only a few hours old and a dullness like thick liquid that had seeped into every crevice inside my head. I began going about my morning: black coffee and toast, shower, drying my hair. Johnny barely spoke, still angry, which suited me because it meant I didn’t have to tell the lie again. I knew he wasn’t suspicious, because he didn’t ask who I went to the pub with. I had never lied to him before.

  Johnny and I did not argue much but I doubt there was genuinely less conflict between us than between other couples. If we wanted to be a couple who never fought, it was probably because we were so young when we met that we believed it was desirable, even possible, to be in harmony all the time. I remember one fight shortly after moving into the flat we bought together. We were having a break from decorating, sitting side by side drinking tea. An argument began, though I can’t remember what about, and as it got more heated I shook my empty cup at him. Don’t threaten me with a teacup, he said, and then laughed at how ridiculous that sounded. Most of our rows were resolved quickly and amicably like this.

  On my way into work I tried to avoid thinking about what I had done, yet images of Carl and me in the bar and in the housing estate kept crowding forward. I knew that I would have to see and talk to Carl, but because I couldn’t bear to admit that I had betrayed Johnny, I couldn’t begin to prepare for that encounter. I had an image of the kind of life I would have with Johnny – a big house, a leafy lane. The details were slow and suburban, though I didn’t see that then. I thought I could make my heart a private road: no speeding, no collisions, no thoroughfare, no heavy load. No entry.

  I met Johnny on a research trip, along with thirty other students, in a tropical paradise off the coast of Malaysia. We met towards the end of the project, and his reputation preceded him so that when he arrived at the camp, I was wary of him an
d looking for faults – I decided that he wasn’t as gorgeous as I had heard, nor as laid back. But after a few days he won me over and we got together by a fire on a beach in the moonlight. Our magical beginning was something we referred to as if it bestowed a certain grace upon us. But now that I think about it, there were problems. Yes, there were the sunsets over the ocean, the dolphins swimming just offshore, the fresh coconuts, the fishing boats sailing past – but Johnny had already had an affair that summer with a French girl, and it was camp gossip that they had been seen having sex on a beach. It was this that had hardened me against him to begin with. When the project ended and all the students regrouped, Johnny received a lot of attention from the other men about the French girl and I became jealous and rejected him. Whenever he and I looked back we saw our beginning as perfectly romantic and glossed over all of this. If I chose, even unconsciously, to remember the good and forget the difficult on this occasion then it makes me wonder how many other uncomfortable memories my mind has suppressed.

  Ivan’s note lay on top of the papers spread over my desk. He’d used thick black marker pen on a big piece of paper. The note said: Rachel, please call Johnny ASAP, Ivan. I scrumpled it up quickly and threw it in the bin. I didn’t look up as I tidied my desk; scared that someone would meet my eyes and give me a look that would tell me they’d guessed it all.

  After my sister’s accident, the day I went back to work, I found a photograph in the top drawer of my desk. The picture was of the office manager, a man who took the limited powers his job gave him very seriously. People laughed at him behind his back. Carl had written 666 on the office manager’s forehead. It made me smile. That same morning Johnny had had to leave early and when I was getting ready for work I found a note on the kitchen table. The note said: Cheer up. I didn’t feel cheered, I felt I had received an instruction.

  Carl and I went out together at lunchtime to a cafe I had never been to before and where we felt sure we’d find no one else from work. We sat opposite each other on burgundy banquettes that were smooth enough to slide on except for the patches of silver tape over cuts in the leather. Carl looked tired and though he listened, he already seemed to know what I would say. He didn’t protest when I told him it had been a mistake and must never happen again. I got the impression he felt strongly for me and felt I was leaving him and that he was taking it hard, even though we had barely been together. I was worried that he would tell someone and asked him not to. I must have asked what happened when he got home, whether Katie had been angry that he was so late, but I can’t remember his answer. The way Carl behaved made me think well of him and made him more attractive, though I couldn’t admit this at the time.

  One reason I wanted to let Carl down gently was because I already knew about his family. Carl’s father died when Carl was six years old and his younger brother four years old. Their mother never recovered from the loss. She slid into a depression from which she never fully emerged and, after a few attempts, she killed herself when Carl was fourteen, his younger brother twelve. His younger brother, who I only ever heard Carl refer to as ‘Our Kid’, still lived in the house they had grown up in and where his mother died. It was in the outskirts of a city by the coast that I had never visited.

  A dream I recorded in my notebook around this time: I am standing in front of a large white house on a grassy hill that slopes down to the top of a white cliff far above the sea. As if in a bowling alley, I am rolling balls of fire, one by one, down the slope and they drop off the cliff into the sea where they are instantly extinguished, steam hissing up from the surface. The mood of the dream was calm, I remember it as pleasant though puzzling – what was the fire that I was extinguishing so methodically? Occasionally I still dream about Carl, and also, though less often, about Johnny.

  Carl chose all his clothes well. He knew what suited him and he didn’t mind spending a lot of money, even though he didn’t earn a great deal. I especially liked the way he looked in blue jeans and heavy boots, the way the denim, soft and pale in places, showed off his thighs, which were strong and well shaped, not too broad. He wore reddish brown workman’s boots, shiny with age and wear.

  He was attractive because he was confident and I think he was confident because he knew he was good at sex. After the awkwardness of the first few times, we soon became fluent. For him I learned to wear silk camisoles, tight cotton vests, to leave them on until he said, Take off your top – and then do this in one smooth motion. Although the way he watched made me feel like a goddess, his fierce regard induced in me a kind of disorientation – a sense of discovery that didn’t lead anywhere; with him, I was never really sure whether I was more myself or less myself.

  I was nervous about living high up but in fact I like it better than being on the ground floor. I fantasize about growing strawberries and lettuce on the roof terrace, though in reality I almost never go out there (I have my desk almost flat against the doors and so it’s tricky to open them). But I am trying other new things, like wearing my hair down instead of always scrunched back and buying luscious shower cream instead of unscented blocks of soap and making tea in a pot with actual tea leaves. Living up here just suits me.

  It is very nice to have feet on the ground if you are a feet-on-the-ground person. I have nothing against feet-on-the-ground people at all. And it is very nice to have feet off the ground if you are a feet-off-the-ground person. I have nothing against feet-off-the-ground people. They are all aspects of the truth, or motes in the coloured rays that come from the coloured glass that stains the white radiance of eternity.

  Stevie Smith

  Johnny and I went camping in Corsica. We found a perfect place to stay; a little patch of flat, mossy ground for the tent, a river, shade. The day after we arrived there, I sat by the river, reading. Johnny said he wanted to go for a walk and set off up the steep side of the valley. Whenever I looked up from my book, I could see him getting smaller as he climbed. Later he returned with a small yellow flower. He’d seen the flowers high on the hillside through binoculars and decided to go and pick one for me.

  During that holiday, my birthday came around making me feel low, as birthdays sometimes do. That evening, as it grew dark, Johnny crawled into the tent carrying a fruitcake with candles on it, something he’d planned before we left England. I remember his face in the candlelight, especially his warm, wide smile.

  Sometimes I would dearly love to see Johnny again, to talk with him, hear his sense of things. I don’t even have his phone number.

  If I couldn’t make the kiss unhappen then I wanted it to have been a simple mistake, something that happened because I was drunk. But I had been drunk before, many times. I didn’t have to decide whether or not to tell Johnny, I simply knew that I would not. Telling him would make the act bigger than it needed to be, and as I made myself see it, not telling Johnny the truth was an extension of the mistake, not a separate act, and so I had only done one wrong thing. One wrong thing in five years of a good relationship didn’t seem so bad. If you took the mistake and divided it between all the days and nights we’d had together the mistake became so small that it almost disappeared.

  Because of what happened later, I destroyed or threw away everything Carl had given me. When it turned nasty I wrote down as exactly as I could, with dates and times, the threats he made to me in case I ever needed them to use as evidence against him. But when it was all over I tore these pages out of my notebook. Now I wish I hadn’t. I am not a particularly well-ordered person, and I wonder whether well-ordered people have accurate recollections and people like me have to put up with a jumble. I can never be bothered to put my washing away – I just take what I need from the pile of clean laundry on a chair in my bedroom. This lack of order used to nag at me, and I would berate myself for not being a better person. Even though I now believe that order is over-rated, my doubt over what happened, and when, presents a problem in writing things down. Sometimes this doesn’t seem to matter, but other times it does. For example, the conversa
tion with Johnny about new work-friends: I can’t remember when this took place so I can’t tell whether Johnny was looking for reassurance early on, before anything had happened, or whether it was later. Although I have said I was sure Johnny was not suspicious the night of the kiss with Carl, the fact is I don’t know for certain. I don’t know very much at all about how it was for Johnny.

  I do still have a photograph of Carl. It is at the bottom of a box of pictures that I have been meaning to put into albums for years. I remember taking out all the other photos – the envelopes at the top were dusty because the box has no lid – and laying the picture against the brown cardboard at the bottom, piling everything back on top. I did this quite deliberately, as though I was hiding it from myself. The photograph is of a group of colleagues. We worked closely together for a time and there was a great sense of camaraderie between us, but I am not in touch with any of them now. In the photograph, Carl is crouching on the ground and smiling up at the camera, squinting slightly against the sun.

  I don’t know why I kept it. I thought I had washed my hands of the affair. Did I keep it as a souvenir of the darkness?

  Yesterday, I went to the cupboard in the corner by my bed (awkward to open because the room is too small, really, for the bed, which I brought from the old place), found the box of old photos and took out the picture. Thick grey dust stuck to my fingers, I was surprised how soft the dust was, I thought that’s how fog would feel, if you could touch it.