The Cellar

We have to attain the past, the poet says. Kafka said that. It's not there, inert, waiting for us. We need to find our way back, discover it. What questions can we ask of the past? What can we listen for which echoes there?

Two boys lost their ball in deep grass on a French hillside. Following it, they discovered it had fallen into an entrance of a cave. Inside, by the light of their torches, they discovered great ochre-coloured beasts painted on the cavewalls. Lascaux: the belly of the world.

And the belly of the past? He wants, the poet says, to remember the darkness that remembering carries with it. Wants to know the contours of the darkness even as they are drawn back, like a cave beast that reveals itself to torchlight.

Forgetting does not simply draw back from memory; it bears it. To carry a torch into the darkness is not simply to observe the expanses of the beast. For its shining ochre gives the darkness from which it emerges more depth and more presence. The night itself becomes dense; darkness heavy and more strange. 

Ann and I went down the stone steps into the cellar of my shared house. There, amidst posters of 80s popstars no one had bothered to take down, she spoke of her father's violence, of how he'd chipped her mother's front teeth when he hit her in the face with a tea mug. She told me how he made his new family – his young wife and children – live in a small house, away from him. He wanted his space. He wanted to stomp around in his big house on the hill, surrounded by lawn.

He liked to sit on his big lawnmower, his face beet-red from last night's drinking. Everyone was afraid of him. His new wife – scarcely older than Ann – with her high voice. His new children, who came to visit a couple of times a week. He was a dreadful bully, her father, Ann said. Everyone was afraid of him. She was afraid.

She had something of his violence, she said. Last year, she'd hit a man, punched him, right in the face. A shop assistant. He was rude to her, so she punched him, and he sat down in shock. Another assistant rushed to lock the doors and pull a metal shutter down. Ann was trapped in the shop, the sole customer, and they called the police.

She thought, then, of her father in the asylum. In a real padded cell. A real straitjacket. Was she, too, going mad? Another day, she found herself driving very fast on the dual carriageway, undertaking cars on the inside lane. She was full of fury, she said. It came from nowhere. She heard sirens, she said. There was a chase, she and the police.

She pulled up on the hard shoulder and they tested her for drink and drugs. But she was sober, she said. Sober and very calm. She had anger issues, they told her in court. She had to go on an anger management course.

On the course, they did roleplay exercises, and talked about their feelings, sat in a circle. The course leader took her aside and told her she needed counselling. Her G.P. put her in touch with a counselling service that used an office in the annex of a Didsbury church.

She thought of killing herself, she told the counsellor. She didn't want to turn out like her dad. She thought of killing him, in his house on the hill. She'd be doing the world a service, she said. She should kill him and then kill herself. No more violence, she said. No more madness. Her counsellor said nothing. He was a Rogerian counsellor: they didn't intervene.

But she was too tired to kill anyone now, she said in the cellar. She didn't feel well.

We sat on an old mattress. It was damp. There was dust in the air. The cellar was only partially lit and only partially in use. The light in our room flickered on and off. A loose connection.

Ann told me about the bloodstained mattress on which she used to sleep. It was covered in blood, her blood. She shuddered. There were boxes of my landlord's books in the cellar. I opened one, idly. A hardback Zohar, in three volumes. Now that's a rare book, I told Ann. Ann said she didn't read books. She hadn't read anything. The Philakolia, in an old paperback. A dozen books by Thomas Merton. 

Sometimes, she thought she was going mad, Ann said. Would she know she was mad when she went really mad? Sometimes, she couldn't control herself. She just snaps … She gets very angry. She goes blind with rage. Afterwards she feels terrible remorse. She just wants to kill herself. Sometimes she curls herself up beneath her kitchen table and thinks of death.

Everyone's mad, she says. One of her tenants has gone mad, she says. She won't answer her door. She's not paying the rent. How was Ann going to get her out? She phoned her: no answer. She put a note through her door: I know what you're going through. Let's talk. No reply.

She knocked on the door, at first gently, then more loudly. Her tenant was inside, Ann was sure of it. Finally, she unlocked the door, opened it and called inside. Nothing. It was dark in the hallway. Ann didn't want to go on. Suddenly she was afraid she'd see a body hanging from the light fixing. She was afraid she'd find a blue corpse in the bed, a turned over bottle of pills beside her. She stepped back and closed the door, shuddering.

But later, ear pressed against her floor, Ann thought she heared sounds from downstairs. A kettle being boiled. The clatter of cutlery. Someone was alive down there. Ann felt angry. She was being hoodwinked. She jumped up and down on her wooden floor. She stomped up and down her living room. She was being ripped off.

She thought of calling her gangster friend. She thought of her muscly old boyfriend. She would have sent him down. She wouldn't send me down, she said. I wasn't the type. I didn't look threatening. She thought of putting some lit newspaper through the letter box, of smoking her out.

She thought of her father, in his house on the hill. She thought of her father's young wife with her piping voice. She thought of her father's two young children, whom she had barely seen, her half-brother, her half-sister. She thought of her sister, addicted to heroin. She thought of her brother, who had a nose like hers before her surgery.

And she thought of herself, lost in the middle of her life, not knowing what to do or where to go, but fearing she was losing her sanity. Rage built in her and fell away. She clenched her fists till they went white. She stomped again. She shouted. She played The Kinks very loudly. Then she played Seal to calm down.

She had a shower, and sang along to Seal as she washed. Then she wept, she couldn't help but weep. The pity of it all. The pity of her, going mad in her flat. Who was she? What did she want? She thought of what her counsellor said when he broke his silence: You're a good person. She was a good person. Her counsellor was a bit in love with her, though. He said as much. Her business partner was a bit in love with her, she said. Was I a bit in love with her?, she said, looking at me. I said nothing. Her eyes were very big, her body elfin.

She was a good person, she repeated. She was getting ill, she said. Maybe it was because she was good. Because she was so good. It's very hard to be good in this world, she said.

Her mother remarried, she said. The new husband was very nice. Ann and he got along. He helped her with her projects. They were going to convert her flat into two smaller flats. Then she was going to turn her tenants out of her Stockport house and live there. That was her plan. She always had plans, she said.

What she couldn't stand about this flat was the distance from the bedroom, her high bedroom, to the bathroom. It was too far. She pissed in a bowl, she said, like an old fashioned chamber pot, and carry it downstairs. She felt so tired, she didn't have a choice. But it was disgusting, really disgusting. She disgusted herself, pissing in her washing up bowl, high in her room.

But it was too far to come all the way down the stairs, across the hallway and through the living room to the bathroom. The flat was laid out the wrong way, anyway, she could see that. Up in her high room, she planned to knock down walls and put up new walls to change its layout. It was big, very big, and it needn't be so. Subdivision, that's what she wanted. Getting two flats out of one.

They were going to put a straitjacket on her, one day, she knew that. They still had straitjackets. They were going to put her in a padded cell. They still had those, too, she said. She was going to be sectioned. The police, when they caught up with her, treated her like a madwoman. The shop assistant whom she hit said that he, too, had mental problems. It was his parents, he'd told her in the backroom of the shop. It was my parents, she told him, and he didn't press charges.

In court, she had admitted she sometimes lost control of herself. She's mad, they all thought, the judge and the magistrates. And that's what her tenant thought, who was from New Zealand. That's what her Kiwi tenant thought: my landlady's mad, quite mad, so I won't have to pay rent. She's mad, the tenant thought, so I can be mad, too.

All this in the cellar, sitting, the two of us, on the mattress, she at one end, leaning against the wall, me at the other. Everyone's going mad, Ann said. Everyone will go mad in the end, she said. Nick Berry was looking down at us. Nik Kershaw in a roll top jumper. Howard Jones with his shock of hair. The pair from Tears For Fears, covered in make-up.

Ann dreamt of making me up. I would look great with make-up, she said. My eyes. My lips. I had bigger lips than she did. Bigger eyes. You'd make a great woman, she said. She liked Tears for Fears, Ann said. Their later stuff. It was very well produced. Sowing the Seeds of Love and all that. She knew something about production. Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos, that's well produced as well, she said. She and her brother were listening to it the other day whilst they were doing the painting. And Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars, by Edie Brickell …

I was a good person, she thought. Like her. Like her brother.

Then she was crying. She was crying uncontrollably. Mel & Kim looked on. A permed Kylie Minogue looked on. Madonna in black and white, with sharp cheekbones and a hat. Three volumes of the Zohar on top of the box. The Mertons. The paperback Philokalia. Where were we? At the bottom of the world. Deep beneath the world.