Constancy
For a time, she cleaned the house, the Scotswoman. For a time the house was hers and we were hers; the house was her territory. ‘I walk it like I talk it’, she would say, ‘not like you’. ‘You live in an ivory tower, the pair of you’, she would say, and I would nod. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ and now we were children too, children with her children, but this was welcome. Just as a washing cat, when you offer her your hand, will think for a moment and then lick you, too, the Scotswoman became our mother, the mother of us all.
Who was I, amidst this activity? I have photographs – there I am, with the children, with the husband and wife, who would divorce soon after, there I am, healthy at last, sitting on the sofa with the others. How was it that a year before I had been so thin and pale! How had I made it from a succession of brown rooms to the light of this house? Shared life; open days turning first in the Spring, then in summer.
The children played and she moved about our house. How much mess there was! How much chaos to order! Constancy: the family was part of our life; the days turned; there was a pattern, a time to be in one place and then in another. Was it to escape the house that I went to the cafe? Rather it was part of the rhythm of my life, the turning of the day. It was necessary to go out in order to return; necessary to make a voyage so to come back to them all eating lunch. Then I would greet and join them; we would eat and talk until the afternoon would call me back to my room to work.
The Regulars
Past the alcoholics to the cafe each morning. I was a regular, just like the man who each morning would put pen to the cafe newspapers, underlining this word and then that. For what was he searching? Whatever it was, it is was with a method known only to himself; when the papers reached me, they were already annotated. There was a fellowship between us, he and I. Both knew the other needed order, regularity; both in the cafe and in the quietness of the morning when the cafe was nearly empty.
And we found it in each other, I in the markings he left in the newspaper, and he knowing the newspapers would come to me, that I would rise and ask for them politely and he would pass them to me politely. Later, when I was busy with the last book, I would recognise his stoop in my own and knew now as then that my fellow regular was engaged in a vast and secret labour.
Broken Mirror
It has changed now, that town at the city’s edge. Back then it was nowhere. Obscure life! Boondocks at the edge of the world! But I wanted obscurity; it was necessary, I knew, to bury myself for a few years.
In the first days, I thought I might return to the world one day; to emerge as out of another dimension and say, here I am! I would return to the world. Meanwhile, I thought, anything might happen; I was ready for adventure. I passed through the supermarket to behold the simple beauty of one of the assistants; I exchanged CDs at the secondhand record shop to hear the shop owners with their Manchester burr; I searched for books in the bookshop. I would visit the library and the delicatessen; I was content, calm, after years at the edge of life, years on my guard.
What I had said to myself, then, before I moved in? I am moving through that part of myself called Manchester. For a time, the Spring and Summer of that first year, it was no longer my world through which I passed; the mirror had broken. What had it showed, that mirror? The desolation that required from me a great act of imagination. But who has the strength for such mythmaking? Mirror of nothing; closed door against which you sank. I was moving through nothing; ‘Manchester’ was the name for my defeat.
How can I forget the lad with the scars on his shaved head following me home and asking for money for a chippy? How can I forget the crack addicts who broke into my house and held me a knife point? They came from my street, said the police, though they could prove nothing. I turned through files of photographs in the police station; what did matter – as soon as one gang was caught, another gang formed; ‘steaming’ happened again. I moved; but a month later, they burst through the door of another house. They held a knife to the throat of my flat mate. ‘I’ll kill her’.
They all moved, my housemates, but I stayed in the house on my own. I covered pages in my handwriting. I read. Without television, without computers, life became simple. Silent days! But who can live on their own for a life? I worked too hard, but I was working on nothing; how could I believe now in the power of myth-making? How many stories could there be? The final metamorphosis: the world become stone; the world become glass. What chance was there against that hardness? There is only one story: the becoming-opaque of what was once transparent. The becoming-obstacle of the world.
I would like to have written, but writing had soured. And how could I read, I who was only able to see the ashes of books? The only drama: there was the day and there I was. The days turned; no one was with me in the house. I passed from room to empty room: no one. Outside, the wide day, outside, too, the burglars and muggers. I was paranoid; I saw the crack dealers and the drug runners; I saw the muggers with their eyes on our bikes. There were enemies everywhere, indifferent eyes, eyes which looked only for opportunity.
Watching eyes that when I saw them returned my gaze. Some were hateful, they stared and you were to look down when they stared. Some entreated me, asking me for kindness, but in a second, they, too would be fullof hatred. I followed a crack zombie, arms flailing, walking quickly among crowds in town. He begged from one and then the other. For a few moments, he was wheedling, entreating, and then, refused, his eyes would go cold and he would flail over to his next target.
Some were desperate, like the weak addict who tried to entice me down an alleyway. I almost went, curious about his desolation. He was not a man but a wraith and he was weak from addiction. What new saint could love this man? What power of love could enclose him? He was damned and he passed among the damned. I stepped towards him and then recovered myself. Perhaps he was hiding a knife. He was weak, yes, but perhaps he was holding a knife behind his back. In the end, he had fallen below need like others. Damned men came and went; as I passed through the day, I passed by them, zombies of the day.
Living From …
But now another world had extended towards me like a hand in friendship. Come Spring, and I moved. Come Spring, and the offer: move in here, R.’s gone, there’s a spare room. To that spare room I brought my books; to that room, I brought the CDs I had been left. I thought: I’m ready to give up the world. I want an obscure place to recover. And so over the weeks, through Spring and Summer, I rediscovered my relation to need; I began to eat regularly, I spoke to others, I was no longer devoured by the madness of work.
Nothing happened – the world turned into light and as it turned it was as though it reached more deeply into itself, that it drew on great and secret reserves and made them present. I ‘lived from’ the world, as the philosopher would say; I ate and took pleasure in eating. Before, I boiled noodles and poured powder on them from sachets: that was my lunch, that was my dinner; at teatime, I ate packets of stale gingerbread men from Greggs.
Now, great and elaborate feasts were prepared each evening; I would be given a twenty pound note and sent to the supermarkets: ‘make a magnificent salad’. I discovered errant and distracted time: an hour in the garden drinking tea in the sun, an hour wandering from one delicatessen to another. ‘Have you tried X.?’ my landlord would ask, and when I said I had not, he would buy X., just so I could try it. Shopping became a delight; by day to town and then to the sales in the shops for the rich. I looked for bargains; I found them – coloured ties I have never worn, the velvet jacket I still keep in my office. To live from the world: there were no addicts here, no zombies. Only colours and flavours and the welcoming day.
Sometimes, it is true, the world withdrew into itself; it refused me, it became the surface which spreads indifferently around me. World of addicts, world of enemies. Because years had passed and I was known, there were people to avoid; I was known; I had enemies. Avoid him, avoid her, move furtively, secretly, trace paths on which you would see them before you are seen. Merciless day, I thought, you always found me! You found me in the record shop and the bookshop. You found me in the cafes and in the evening when I drank a glass of Leffe in the bar over the bridge.
I thought, I am becalmed; the town was the ocean and you, the day, were my companion. You were patient, and you waited. The street drinkers knew you; the crack addicts knew, and I came to know I could not escape you. At those times, I went out to escape the house and came in to escape the world. My bedroom was the threshold poised between the inside and outside; it was not a place I could remain. Perhaps that was my life: eternal threshold, poised between the possible and the impossible.
The Welcoming Day
But life was expanding. Champagne before dinner in a hotel restaurant, guest of a rich visitor; Lagavulin in the evening, saffron in the rice. Delight of the world! In the evening we came home from restaurants along the wide pavements on the street. How is it that at night you move more quickly? Satisfied, replete, we came back to the house whose lights blazed into the night. Happiness, was that the word? Steady contentedness in what fruits the hour brought. Round oatcakes, slabs of Lancashire cheese, thick ham, each slice resting on separate papers: the fridge was full, the cupboards were full.
What was it to live in a house where food was forgotten in the press of new food? Amazement that the cupboards hid out-of-date tins and jars! Amazement that great plates of food were thrown out: last night’s dinner, remants of yesterday’s lunchtime feast! Chicken in sauce, pork in pliau rice! Dishes of salmon cooked in milk! When my landlord came in, he would always bring food. Collaver from the church. Communion bread and holy water. Pillow bread from the Arab delicatessen; dolmades and olives from the Greek one. Black loaves of Polish bread, German Pumpernickel; in the morning, we were asked, what do you want to eat tonight?
At night, our garden would become a run through. I would hear them, the burglars, coming through our garden. Sometimes I would look in the dark to see if I could catch them. Why not grow the hedges really high?, I asked. Because then they could work without being seen, prising open our windows and our doors. Then they could break their way into the cellar door and rise up into the house. When they all went out and I was left along in the house, I could not settle. What was a house uninhabited? I switched lights on and switched them off; who was watching, outside? I left rooms and entered others; I made sure the curtains were closed. The house was too vast. Then, at last, they would all come home. Relief! Life was close again. Life was close around me.
Sometimes, walking out at night, I would hear muttering behind me. Sometimes, I saw figures standing behind windows, shouting out. I thought: I am being followed. I thought: they are looking for me. Who was there? For a long time, I stayed in at night. I feared the darkness, or rather it was darkness that what I feared seemed to hide itself. When scaffolding came up round the house, the burglars would call taxis out at 4 AM to see who was there. After all it was easy to scale the scaffold, to climb to the first floor and then the second … I slept with my light on. I couldn’t fall asleep until dawn; morning, for me, never existed. How to sleep when sleep was darkness? My landlord would go to the door when the taxis came to show he was there. A big man, unafraid of the dark at 4 AM. A man whose house was all around him, and whose tenants, except me, were asleep.
Megalapsyche
What is it to be enrooted in life? To send deep roots into the earth? I knew what it was to live among those who were so enrooted. Old furniture in each room, the Jacobean chest in the hall, the oak parque, the plates around the picture rail: the house was rooted not just in the world, but in history. How deeply it was rooted! What it must be to stand at the doorway and think, this is mine! It’s many rooms were filled with tenants. In its rooms we lived, each of us, in retreat from the world. Obscure life!, but that’s what we wanted, obscurity.
The house had found us, as it found the taxi drivers who would sometimes leave their cars and come in with my landlord. I would find them in the dark room by the fire. Builders who visited to work on the house would lunch with us in the sun. One would detach himself from the others and speak to my landlord. Long and private conversations on the bench in the garden. Of what they were speaking? The grass was long around their ankles, but still they sat. The sun went down, but still they were sitting. Then he left in peace, the builder, having spoken and been listened to.
He died a year ago now, my landlord. In a dish in the living room, there was money for anyone to take. If you asked, you would receive. What does it mean, to be a man of God? What does it mean to be gathered by God as into the house and its many rooms? I do not know. But for my landlord, God was there in the house as he was everywhere. He waved incense into the garden. Bless the plants and the trees, bless the animals. It was an old Russian practice, he said. In the corner of the room, there was the icon, with a candle burning in front of a saint’s face alongside a bottle of holy water.
I saw his photographed face, my landlord’s, a year ago in the church. Many of us were there, former tenants, visitors, guests. The disgraced doctor. The man who wrote letters of hatred to my landlord. The woman who left five messages a day on his answering machine. Where were the taxi drivers? Where was our roofer? We had not known how to get hold of them. They had come and they had disappeared. I thought: now we’ll be scattered, all of us. That is what death does, it scatters us, we are given back to ourselves, we who were in steady orbit around the one who died. But to whom are we given? One without you, friend, one minus you, which is to say, to a new isolation.
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