Signs of Life (18 page)

I developed a habit of calling the police. It was an escalation of the alarm calls habit, which I hadn’t quit. Any time I sniffed violence, I called. Walking along a
street I came upon a man and a woman, he was walking ahead issuing threats and she was following behind, pleading. He had obviously beaten her before, and he was obviously going to do it again, and
so I called the police. Another time, I heard a fight in the road outside my flat. It was late at night and I could hear male voices shouting and punches landing, and so I called the police, but
the fight stopped and the men went away of their own accord. Even though the police came, each time, I kept calling them because I didn’t feel answered. And perhaps I also sensed that they
would be needed soon, for real.

The builders are bored today. Two of them are jousting with long cardboard tubes, I can see them through the two lower windows, dancing back and forth across the floor. I
wanted Johnny to be my knight in shining armour, my champion, my dragon slayer, my avenging prince on a charging white steed, which was probably why I got back together with him.

In the hospital, each bed had a curtain that could be drawn right around, a parody of a four-poster bed, and the curtain design was a repeating pattern of blue crowns in
diagonal rows. I clearly remember the sound of the metal curtain rings on the metal rail whenever the brisk nurses pulled the curtains; like the rush of small, heavy coins being emptied from a
velvet purse onto a long table, or the crunching of chainmail on the arm that picks them up.

The woman who runs the Spanish restaurant owns the whole of the building opposite and she is in the flat, viewing progress. The builders are moving around more than usual,
looking busy. I know this woman because I go to her restaurant quite often now. She glances over into my room and sees me sitting at my desk, but she looks away again as if she hasn’t seen
me. Whenever we see each other at ground level, we say hello. I don’t think she is being rude today. I think it’s just that up here there is a different etiquette. She is respecting my
privacy, but this privacy doesn’t actually exist, as the builders, and me – and my sister – all well know. And yet I do not relieve her of this charade, I do not call Hello! or
wave. She prefers to think I retain some privacy and I prefer to let her think that.

The police had a lot of questions for me after Carl’s death. Every day the doctors brought the police to my bedside. They came to ask their questions, drawing the royal
curtain, arranging themselves in a horseshoe around the foot of the narrow metal bed and each time they came all I could think, my only thought was, Will this horseshoe hold my luck, or will it all
run out? Their questions came fast and sharp, knives thrown at a target. My instinct was to protect myself and this is why I didn’t speak. My silence allowed me to listen, and what I heard
was that they really only had one question. How doggedly they asked this question. And how furiously they wanted an answer.

I wanted to answer, but with what? It was in the hospital that I first started to write it down. It was Shirin’s idea: If you can’t talk about it, why don’t
you try writing down what happened? Remember, remember and write it down. I started to record what I could remember, vaguely aware of this thing nudging at me that wanted to be fed or watered or
let out. And the next day, when they came and drew the curtain and stood in a horseshoe at the end of the narrow metal bed and asked me their questions, I was able to answer, I’m writing it
down. They were not entirely satisfied, but one of them persuaded the others to leave me alone, saying, She’s writing it down. As they walked away I thought, My luck is holding.

The only things in my fridge were coffee and vodka. I never ran out of coffee or vodka. Occasionally I would buy fruit, intending to eat an apple a day, but often the skin
would go wrinkly and the flesh would shrink, and I wouldn’t notice until the apples were actually disintegrating, and then I would throw them out and, a few days later buy fresh apples to lie
innocently in the bowl, untouched, until they too started to rot.

One morning I picked a new apple from the bowl to take to work, red on one side, green on the other, shiny, firm; a perfect Disney apple. Later that day, sitting at my desk, I took a bite. The
apple was too big and too sweet. I noticed the sweetness of it hanging on my lips and inside my mouth and I had to wash the taste away with a gulp of water. I set it aside. The apple lay on the
windowsill, gradually browning where I had bitten it.

When I noticed it again I became annoyed with myself: until the affair with Carl I had been a hearty eater but now I was a pathetic creature who couldn’t manage a whole apple. Who the hell
did I think I was – Snow White, choking on the red skin of the poisoned apple? Except that I didn’t require a wicked stepmother to poison me, I was doing the job myself with drink and
cigarettes.

When Shirin visited me in hospital she would tell me stories about being a little girl in Tehran, and what it was like having to leave Iran aged eleven and finish her childhood in another
country; she had to learn how to be Iranian in England, which is an entirely different thing to being Iranian in Iran. There was so much that she had to relearn – reprogram, actually –
in order to fit in. For example, when she fell, she was used to saying, ‘Ai!’ but she learned to say, ‘Ow!’ instead. Even the shortest utterances that one assumes to be
instinctual aren’t; they are learned behaviour.

The day the Shah left Iran, she smoked her first cigarette. That night there was a gathering at her parents’ house and when the adults went to dinner, Shirin who was ten years old and her
friend Ali who was eight rifled through all the bags looking for cigarettes and took a single one from every packet they found. Upstairs, in her bathroom, they compared their loot.

I got a Winston!

I got a Marlboro!

I got a Silvester!

I got a Dunhill!

They smoked standing over the sink, coughing their guts out. When, later, the adults challenged the children, they flat denied it.

I read that we start growing up with the first lie we tell our parent figure, so it follows that when you carry out a crime, or a misdemeanour, and don’t confess; that’s grown
up.

I tried to run away through work and other drugs. Even when I was with him, work served as a welcome distraction from Carl, and afterwards I used it even harder. Maybe I
thought I could make up for everything I had done wrong by being good at work. Maybe I thought long hours in the office could ground me. Or that if I did well in my job, somehow this would balance
out the lies I had told, like there was some kind of Virtue/Sin balance sheet and someone was keeping score. But I wasn’t at the front of my face. Even though I was physically present at
work, much of the time I would sit in my chair, staring out of the window, feeling around in my hairline, touching my spots as if they were little ornaments, dusting them with my fingers.

Returning from work in the evenings, everyone around me looked tired and loose and drab, and all I could see was beaten down men and women with droopy shoulders in bad suits and cheap shoes. And
trees with branches outstretched waiting for the day to drop into their arms, exhausted.

At home, after feeding Molly, I liked to pour myself a glass of wine or vodka, sit on the rough wooden steps to the garden with the light of the kitchen behind me, light a cigarette – a
Marlboro Light, preferably a soft pack – and read poetry, especially, then, John Keats. I liked the voluptuousness of Keats on death.

I was hooked. Not just on the drinking, the smoking, the reading of poetry, but on the idea of myself drinking and smoking and reading poetry. I stood apart from myself and watched. I had to
reach the point where I could pass out as soon as I tipped into bed, but it was difficult to judge. Sometimes I drank and smoked until I could barely stand up to brush my teeth and sometimes I
would wake to find myself on the sofa with the lights still on and drool on my shoulder. A pattern emerged: every night I would work late, until half-past nine when it was dark or even later, and
then go home and drink and smoke until I simply cut out, and every morning, coming round after a night of inadequate sleep, with a furry mouth and a fuzzy mind, I would light the first cigarette,
bitter, necessary, and brew the coffee strong and hot: the black coffee and the dry cigarette working to cut through the fog from the night before. And that was my life. Evenings: cutting out.
Mornings: cutting through.

I wanted to love Johnny. I thought that I might fall in love with him again. He had not yet fallen out of love with me and he was willing to forgive me, I think, but only if I
worked. This was an unspoken condition. Perhaps he noted how hard I was working in my paid job and thought that I should be putting an equal if not greater amount of effort into repairing our
relationship. He had no way of knowing that even though I was putting the hours in at the office, I spent a lot of time staring into space and picking spots, and that the effort I was making at
work was much less than it seemed. By the time Johnny and I got back together, Carl had been sacked and this also met a condition for Johnny; he could not have tolerated me spending each working
day in the vicinity of my ex-lover. Before we got together again, Johnny slept with a woman he met at a conference. He didn’t tell me; I just knew. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.
Perhaps I smelt it. When I asked him about her the only thing he would say was that she was petite, which made me feel lumpy. Although I didn’t like the thought of him with another woman, I
could hardly complain. And anyway, having slept with someone else was another condition for Johnny.

Falling in or out of love – what does that mean, exactly? How long does it take to fall in love? Thirty seconds? One minute? A minute’s fall is a long, long way
down. There is no hope of survival. Fallen in love is like fallen in battle – dead and gone. Sometimes people say, ‘I was falling in love with her/him, but . . .’ This
‘but’ is curious; it implies that they stopped falling, but how? Dropping onto a ledge? Grabbing a convenient branch on the way down like they do in cartoons? Opening a parachute? No.
It’s not like that. The whole idea of ‘falling’ in love is wrong. One doesn’t ‘fall’ in love; one simply
knows
. You know in an instant whether or not you
could love a person. There is an opening towards that person, a sense of coming forward, of discovery.

I’ll be watching the crane – mesmerized – looking up at the man in the clouds and then realize the builders are watching me so I come back to my work and my
desk where my anglepoise lamp is a scaled-down version of the crane, minus the man. I want to wave at him, partly to discover if he can see me from such a height and distance, but if I do that, the
builders might think I am waving at them.

I wondered why I couldn’t make myself do what I should to mend it with Johnny. I just knew that trying made me sad and tired.

You are not working hard enough on this relationship, he said, and it was true but by saying this he squeezed the ambivalence out of me, like getting rid of a pocket of air – the trouble
is, I was breathing that air.

There are no builders in sight. I attempt a wave at the crane driver but just as I lift my arm and start waving one of the builders, the fat-faced one, comes to the window. I
abort the wave soon enough that he couldn’t possibly think I was waving at
him
, but unfortunately it did attract his attention. It’s pointless anyway, waving at the man in the
crane because if we met in the street we wouldn’t recognize each other. He may as well be the man in the moon.

It is said that you are not over the last lover completely until you are into the next one. Johnny must have heard this too because when we split up for the second time, he
found a new girlfriend almost immediately and he was already quite established with her by the time Carl died. The weird thing was that she was also called Rachel. Of course I quizzed him. How did
they meet? How old was she? What did she do? Where did she live? And, most importantly: what did she look like? He told me all, enjoyed it rather, I thought, and fair enough. He said she was
beautiful ‘in a classical way’ but he didn’t give me enough to go on: I couldn’t
see
her. Classical how, exactly? I asked. Like a Greek goddess? A Roman coin?

What I really wanted to ask (but didn’t) was, Am I prettier than?

I would wake early, often around 5 a.m. One morning I pushed my feet into some old trainers, pulled on a cardigan and went out to the shop looking for cigarettes. It was
already light and birds were singing but the streets were empty apart from an old drunk shouting at the sky; just another person wrestling with his demons. Along came a young businessman in a suit
striding down the pavement. I asked him if he had a light, but I must have startled him because he drew back as if I had scorched him and then walked around, giving me a wide berth. This man would
have seen me as a peer at 9 a.m. but at 5 a.m., he clearly didn’t. I was puzzled by this at first and then realized what I must have looked like to him: snaggly unwashed and unbrushed hair,
old pyjama bottoms, skanky trainers, bags under my eyes, tired skin – I probably looked more like the old drunk’s daughter than a young professional. Instead of seeing this as a warning
sign, I was filled with contempt: my pyjamas may have been old but they were
satin
, for goodness’ sake, and that fool didn’t recognize a princess when he saw one.

We think we can escape down half-deserted streets but all the things we use to defend ourselves – overworking, over-drinking, over-eating, under-eating, smoking, etc.
– are well-worn pathways. The really frightening thing about the abyss is not that it exists, but that there is always a road in, and we take it.