Signs of Life (21 page)

I was convinced that the ‘Love and Fear’ spectrum was my own idea and then, a while later, I saw the exact same thing in a film. I haven’t come across my
third list anywhere else, though I now know that H. G. Wells did write something similar, obviously before I wrote List 3.

I decide to go and fetch the shoe myself. It’s been kicked and trodden on so it’s a bit scuffed, but nobody’s taken it. I suppose it is an unremarkable object unless you have
invested it with meaning.

My fifth favourite drug, if drink, cigarettes, coffee and hard work are not readily available, is a very hot bath. I find they can knock you out quite nicely. So I shuffle
along the wide corridor to the institutional bathroom in my poor old satin pyjamas, which are not feeling particularly royal right now, and lock myself in.

Falling for someone who makes you feel special
because
he makes you feel special says nothing about you except that you are needy. It says that you crave this kind of
attention, crave the adoration. It shows up your vanity. Maybe, as long as it doesn’t reach such extremes, there’s nothing inherently wrong with vanity – perhaps it’s just
another way of coping; a way of making the world smaller. But if you persist, you are fooling yourself. Look around! You are growing old and leaky, it happens to everyone and it doesn’t
matter, but it’s a fact.

I was wrong about everything, even the music – the water pipes that sounded like a piano playing a great way off – because there is no music now, just hot water
thundering out of the oversized taps and a gloomy industrial echo. I turn off the taps and watch my toes disappear in the steam. Everything has evaporated. I think it would be better if I
disappeared.

This is not a moment you should have in a bath because things are breaking and they need to fall to the ground and smash into a thousand tiny pieces and not be softened or
bloated by water. A whole sense of self is shattering. The pieces that are coming away are hard and they need to hit the ground. This is a point of honour. Contact with the ground must be made,
smashing and clattering and splintering, total obliteration of what falls.

Climbing five floors up the front of a building is risky even if you are calm and focused. Carl was angry and upset. If you can have suicide by cop, it stands to reason,
surely, that you could have suicide by climbing. Doesn’t it?

I know instantly that Carl is dead. I know this even before his body hits the ground.

Slap!

I lean out of the window, looking down. Blood is already beginning to pillow his head, seeping out from under, not like red wine dashing across a table – it spread slower and seemed
thicker, more like the syrupy vodka in the clouded bottle in my freezer.

Though my eyes are on his broken body I am not, in any familiar sense, looking at him. I stay like this. I don’t know how long. Were people rushing towards him now? Recoiling? Did some
scuttle away again? Was it all done in silence? I stay, watching, leaning out of the window. I am trying to deny it. Then this shock: his whole body shot out one great twitch, the last thrash of a
landed fish.

If I owe a debt, then to whom and how shall I pay? Is ten years enough? I want things to be simple. Sometimes they are. But even when they are not, I tend to bulldoze in and
reduce things anyway, make them neat and tidy, easier to cope with. This aspect of myself shows in my writing: the mistakes I make in writing, clichés and sentimentality among them, are the
mistakes I make in life. I know this, but it is difficult to eradicate all faults, especially when they have grown slowly over years and formed a mental carapace.

Watching the sky this afternoon, I was thinking how years go by like aeroplanes and how you don’t have to ‘get through’ the day, or the night for that matter,
because nights and days pass all by themselves. And what passes for love.

I said that Johnny never again asked me what I had had for lunch but he did; he asked me when he came to visit me in hospital. What did you have for lunch today? Hearing it was
like looking at an old photograph that stirred up memories of what we once were to each other.

Love remoulds your inner landscape, creates its own chambers within you. You carry it inside like heart and lungs. Perhaps this is where feelings of ownership and belonging come in. I
don’t fully understand this process but I think it involves an exchange at a very deep level. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether it’s someone else’s cat or someone else’s
writing, if you love it and it touches you like this, somehow and in some way it becomes yours.

The first time I stayed at Johnny’s parents’ house, they put us in separate rooms. In the middle of the night I sneaked into his room and we made love, and
afterwards Johnny went downstairs and brought back a midnight feast: his father’s port and his mother’s homemade cake and big fat sandwiches he made himself; delicious, all of it. We
finished it all up and Johnny went downstairs to make the same again. We were young then, with huge appetites, and there was a feeling that there was always more.

In a sitting down moment, which could be any given moment or all and doesn’t, of course, have to be taken sitting down, sometimes a soft feeling arises. You might be
close to tears, wide-eyed and absorbent, zingy, still, or very private. I read something that reminded me of this feeling: ‘I am my own home and this is where I belong, and things keep going
forward, endlessly.’ This is from a story by Banana Yoshimoto. The story features a lonely young woman who is given an amulet that has healing qualities. Because I read the stories over and
over again, the collection itself became a talisman. This book has been in many bags and opened so often that the spine is frayed at each end and the cover has worn soft at the edges, torn a little
in places.

I especially remember reading the stories on holiday by the sea. Quite early each morning Delilah and I would leave our hotel; she wanted to get established on the beach in one of her four
bikinis, I wanted my two cups of black coffee. Every morning I would stop at the beachfront cafe, sit for an hour or so, drink my coffee, look out over the ocean and read a story.

All I have is my feeling for the story; a feeling about what belongs and what goes where. Writing starts with a feeling. This feeling lives in the ruins at the back of my head,
among other wild creatures. I have to coax it out, invite it to show itself. It is necessary to be quiet and open, and to listen as I try to bring it forward. As it comes, it changes. There is
something in its mouth. The creature comes almost into view, drops whatever it was carrying and leaps back into the dark.

We are writing this up as an accident, said the police, as if the way they wrote it – the very fact of their writing it that way – changed or determined or set what
actually happened, a substitute for certainty.

The police and the hospital decided I should be released. I don’t know why these two big institutions acted at the same time – you’d think, maybe, that the
police could have decided first and the hospital could have released me later, preferably not on the same day. But that is not how it happened. The judgements arrived at once. You are free to go,
they said, and then
they
said: You are free to go.

The flat opposite is finished; the builders are gone. They have done a good job, from what I can see. I should finish too but it is hard to let go. Elegance has to do with
holding things lightly, it means stopping at sufficiency; doing no more than is required,
saying
no more than is required.

You are free to go.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following people for helping me find my way in writing this book.

Nancy Rawlinson, who encouraged me right from the start, always had great suggestions on process as well as content, cheered me on through some of the most difficult stages of
writing and who, right at the end, spotted something important.

Catherine Janson, who realized I was a writer before I did, who read about thirteen iterations, managing to be enthusiastic each time, and for her faith that I could do
it.

Maggie Gee, for her generosity, insight and advice.

Jenny Turner, Anna Wilson and Jane Campbell for many consoling and inspiring conversations about writing, and life.

Tim Gordon and Zoe Pagnamenta for their sparky interest and helpful introductions.

Paul McDermott for taking me seriously, helping me see what it was I was writing about and his precise observations.

Lila Cecil and Joy Parisi for creating Paragraph, a wonderful writers’ space in New York where I finished the first draft.

Donald Winchester, for his kindness.

Thomas Ueberhoff for loving the book and saying so.

Paul Baggaley, Emma Bravo, Nicholas Blake, Jonathan Pelham, Kris Doyle, Sandra Taylor for their enthusiasm.

Georgia Garrett, who responded with warmth and sensitivity to the manuscript and to me, who saw what was missing from the first draft and who championed certain aspects when I
wasn’t brave enough to.

Kate Harvey, who showed such care and close attention, inspired structural changes as well as fine tuning, who nurtured me with lots of time and who ensured safe transition
from manuscript to book.

P
ERMISSIONS

The publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Hart Crane, ‘Voyages I’ from
Complete Poems of Hart Crane
by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing
Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Deborah Garrison, ‘I Answer Your Question with a Question’, from
A Working Girl Can’t Win and Other Poems
by Deborah Garrison, copyright © 1998
by Deborah Garrison. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

William H. Gass, from
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
by William H. Gass. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 1968 by
William H. Gass. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Seamus Heaney,
The Spirit Level
, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Alison Jarvis, from ‘Elegy For A Drummer’ by Alison Jarvis.

Sarah Kane, ‘4.48 Psychosis’ © Sarah Kane 2000, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Medbh McGuckian, from ‘Venus and the Rain’ (1994) by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press www.gallerypress.com.

Georgia O’Keeffe, from
Georgia O’Keeffe
– Copyright © 1976 by Georgia O’Keeffe. Published by The Viking Press. All rights reserved.

Sylvia Plath,
The Bell Jar
, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Stevie Smith,
Novel on Yellow Paper
, by Permission of the Estate of James MacGibbon.

Daniel Stern,
The Suicide Academy
, copyright © 1968 by Daniel Stern. Reprinted by permissions of George Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the author.

Francesca Woodman,
Notebook 6
and
Journals
, courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Virginia Woolf,
Diary 3: 7
, by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

First published 2012 by Picador

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ISBN 978-1-4472-0435-0

Copyright © Anna Raverat 2012

The right of Anna Raverat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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