endings and beginnings, august 2023
(from cambridge to london)
On our last night in the Cambridge house, Josie comes home from dinner with her mother and immediately runs up to the attic, where I am sitting cross-legged on the stripped bed, surrounded by bare walls. My impractical red paper star lampshade, which makes our veins stand out shockingly against our skin, is one of only a few remnants of our already past life here.
Josie collapses onto the stained mattress to tell me she is drunk, and out of the pocket of her leather jacket falls £3.01 in silver and pennies, a clove, a Venus earring, some tobacco crumbs and two sachets of black pepper. I welcome their alien presence in the bed.
The bed feels strange that night in the dark. It isn’t possible to see the lack of belongings in the room, the void where there once was so much, but even in the darkness it is oppressive. We fall asleep.
The next day Josie leaves at 7 in the morning and I hardly stir. I think we kiss goodbye, my lips finding her cheek with my eyes closed, and I feel as I did as a child when my mother left for work and I felt her slip out of my grasp. I sleep through my alarm. When I wake up, I scrub sparkly blue eyeshadow and red wax out of the carpet with uncharacteristic brutality, a final effort to remove my presence from this room where I have lived so much. The walls are washed darker by incense — so much for not smoking in the house — and against the smoke sediment stand out the ghosts of my postcards and photographs, odd constellations.
I drag all of my belongings to London, arriving bruised and sweaty.
A few days later I'm sitting outside a pub next to Daunt Books, reading Deborah Levy with a half pint in front of me, when a huge Ukrainian family passes by, one of the children wearing a T-shirt that reads «мир» (“peace”). She smiles at me.
I don't feel like I live here yet. Don’t really feel like I live anywhere.
Later that day, in Hyde Park with Poppy, someone calls my name and runs over to us. I realise that it is Matevz, the subletter, who has been sitting under a tree, wearing knee-high black boots and a t-shirt of a band they don’t know, imprinted with a huge razor blade. Poppy describes the extreme serendipity of our encounter as “the flow of the social current”. It doesn’t feel like I am part of a social current here yet — or any kind of current, really.
I’ve run out of space on my phone so I only have five songs downloaded, one being ‘Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress’. I listen to it constantly. It reminds me of the bar where I worked until last week, where the old men would act as though it was a personal serenade to me every time it came on.
My mother visits and we go to the pub in Soho. She takes what is apparently her first shot ever, at the age of 53. “It's like ice cream!” she says (it’s a Baby Guinness). I didn't know that I could teach her things like that, after all these years.
I descend into the usual menstrual insanity.
A homeless man lies prostrate on the pavement, arms outstretched as if crucified. On the tube, a child is holding her hands to her temples like a woman on the brink of breakdown. She possesses a maturity in this gesture, gone as soon as she moves.
On the platform at Finchley Road, I sway into the gravity of the departing train. Consumed by dull pain, my fingers and toes tingling from lack of blood. The pain settles deeper and deeper inside me until I am certain that I won’t make it up the fire escape. For a long second I consider throwing myself into the oncoming traffic, a thought which is gone almost as soon as it materialises.
Everything I own is stacked in boxes, all of my plants in a crate, curling into each other. I sit beside them, foetal, and will the pain to subside. All bedrooms are best christened in this way.