by
Deborah Levy
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When I was a teenager, most arguments with my mother were about clothes. She was baffled by what it was inside myself that I was expressing outside of myself. She could no longer reach or recognize me. And that was the whole point. I was creating a persona that was braver than I actually felt. I took the risk of being mocked on buses and in the streets of the suburbs in which I lived. The secret message that lurked in the zips of my silver platform boots was that I did not want to be like the people doing the mocking. Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong. On a bad day, my mother would ask me, ‘Who do you think you are?’ I had no idea how to answer that question when I was fifteen, but I was reaching for the kind of freedom that a young woman in the 1970s did not socially possess. What else was there to do? To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear.
If we cannot at least imagine we are free, we are living a life that is wrong for us
These were not questions the driver could answer. There was no X in his mind’s eye. If the satnav directed him south when I was heading north, that’s what we were going to do. Satnav was his only compass. We were driving at the beginning of Genesis when the earth was formless and empty – apart from the signs on the screen. It seemed to me that satnav had switched off the way that drivers inhabited a city. It made them rootless, ahistorical, unable to trust their memory or senses, to measure the distance between one place and another. The River Thames, referred to by Londoners as the river, was of no geographical significance to the driver. Its brackish water, mostly salt water, flowing for 215 miles, was just one of many abstract rivers flowing through the abstract cities of the world. The river, once the Port of London where apprentices ate salmon fished from its depths, was now just a grammar of digital signs. As I listened to the calm but firm robot voice giving directions, I realized we could be anywhere, so long as the Voice was with us. There were no landmarks. The driver did not look at the Albert Hall when we passed it on the northern edge of South Kensington, he was absent to its physical presence, and instead was existentially alone but together with his satnav. The Albert Hall in Old English was a landmearc, but he worked with digital mearcs – with the bonus of live traffic updates.
Mary Berry tastes a sponge cake. Paul Hollywood is breaking a slice apart with his big hands to test it is moist and feather-light. It seems the South African child is happy to concentrate on the pleasures of baking. Her middle-aged self watches this child warily. She does not want her to make trouble for her daughters and tell them to get some real problems when they complain about not having the right brand of trainers for school. She has never wanted her own children to have to be brave. Brave like the children on leaking boats fleeing wars. How many medals does a child need pinned on to her pyjamas? Nothing had taught her that having to summon an abundance of courage, far more than anyone should have to bear, is healthy for a child. She had witnessed the courage of the African children in her country of birth who lost their parents in the struggle for human rights like other children lost their milk teeth.
I had no regrets about not swimming back to the Big Silver, but I did regret not finding the white Egyptian cotton tablecloth on Christmas Day the year before. In the end I’d had to use a white paper tablecloth. It didn’t look that good, though I had suggested to my daughters that our table looked like the sort of French brasserie where the waiter writes our order on the corners of the paper cloth and then comes round later to add up the bill. They did not recall the sort of brasserie I had in mind and asked if I was going to charge our guests for Christmas lunch. This year the white Egyptian cotton cloth would be adorned with candles, red berries, holly and mistletoe. Their father would join us and I would invite the man who cried at the funeral and his new lover to join the table. And Celia, obviously, if she could fit me into her busy schedule. We decided to make cranberry as well as bread sauce, and swapped tips on how to make both. There was no way we could console each other for the undisclosed hurt that had contributed to sinking the boat, or for our lack of desire to swim back to it. Yet it was true that the societal mask of husband and wife, which we had worn for so long, had slipped, and we could see each other again. Perhaps what we saw was too human to bear. We stood up, put on our coats and kissed each other goodbye.
<3
(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a quote from Yeats that reads: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,” and the first time I read that line it hummed over my mind like a diviner’s stick.)
lmao
My mother has told me a hundred times about the boy who sold his blood to buy her flowers. “He had a motorcycle,” she says. “He had no money, but he wanted to take me on a date so he went out and sold pints of his blood so he could do it.”
Pints.
“He was woozy at dinner,” she says. “He couldn’t eat at all. He seemed like he was going to faint. But he’d bought me flowers. Lilies. Isn’t that romantic?”
This story bothers me. It intrudes upon my father, and that’s part of it, but it’s also the way my mother wields those flowers as some false barometer of love.
As if her generation were worthy of blood and mine only backstage corn syrup.
My mother has asked me on every Valentine’s Day since I was fourteen, “Did he buy you flowers?”
“I told him not to,” I say.
“Why would you do that?” she says. “What kind of standards are you setting?”
“I don’t want that kind of relationship,” I say. “I don’t want flowers.”
I want to say: Stop pretending that the point is the lilies and not the blood.
“Have you talked to Goca Igrić? I think she’s who you’re looking for.”
Goca is also a journalist. She is Serb and chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and drinks several pots of Turkish coffee a day and was, at the time, under threat of death from all manner of political and criminal organizations after spending the war years defiantly speaking out against Slobodan Milošević.
I once asked my uncle when he fell in love with Goca.
Though they didn’t start dating till ages later, he said perhaps it was that first time they met, in a café, when he told her what he wanted to do and asked her to be his fixer. He said Goca paused after he’d described his batshit-crazy, terrible, likely lethal idea. She exhaled all the smoke from her lungs and said, “I don’t think I can not do this.”
“Maybe that was when I knew,” my uncle said.
It was the first thing my family ever taught me about love that felt as honest as blood. I can’t not do this.
Frank led me downstairs and as he took off my shirt I said, “Wait!”
I’d spotted a giant sepia photograph of two people holding a baby, framed over the fireplace, and I asked who those people were, because they were beautiful.
He said that they were his parents, and that the baby was him, but that when his parents got divorced his parents hated each other so much that neither of them could stand to look at the picture anymore, and were going throw it away, so he took it.
I put my shirt back on, because maybe everything just winds up terrible in the end and there’s no point at all and we couldn’t possibly fuck with all that tragedy watching over us, could we?
Frank took my shirt back off, but not unkindly.
My relationship with Bob lasted a full year longer than it should have because Barack Obama was running for president and had so raised our expectations of what redemptive things were possible that we thought perhaps he could save us from the petty, insidious ways we’d been hurting each other. We, too, could change.
Thanks, Obama.
chuckled at this
A year later you were both invited to the same wedding in a vineyard. You were smoking cigarettes and drinking bourbon and he had quit everything, which, no matter what had passed between you, you acknowledged as a very good and impressive thing. The two of you walked down rows of grapevines and he asked you to let him make amends. You said amends were made. Check it off the list. Consider it done. You crushed a cigarette under your boot and ground it into the soil. You kissed the boy on the cheek when he drove you back to your shitty motel and you thought that was a pretty good way to say goodbye to someone forever.
The next morning the woman at the front desk said a man had come looking for you in the middle of the night, around four a.m., and she’d told him there was no one by your name staying there. You gave her back your key on its plastic ring and thanked her. You realized that this generous woman working the night shift at the goddamn Sea Breeze motel had more sense than you, and she’d met him for only two minutes.
ahhh dating the joy of dating a 12-stepper