Author’s note
Mary Quant’s shop on the King’s Road really was called Bazaar. To the best of my knowledge, she never employed anyone called Sylvie, and never summarily dismissed anyone for their interest in silk.
All characters in this story are fictional or used fictionally. London, Oxford, Bucharest, Tokaj, Miskolc, and Budapest are real places used fictionally. There are many bars off Lipscani Street, but the Grey Wolf is not one of them. There is no Szant Gabor vineyard in Tokaj. The vineyards at Szant Tamas and Mezes Mały are very real, and their wines are better than I could ever describe in writing. The Astoria in London is sadly no more a real place, but it was in 2007. Oxford does have a University (two of them, in fact), but it does not have a Department of Balkan Studies. The Saïd Business School is part of Oxford University, and there is indeed a statue of a bull outside, but I have never heard it talk.
Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided and Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995 are genuine works of art. The works of Sandrine, Yang, and every other student at the fictional Pest Fine Art College are not, but with acknowledgement, I have no objection to anyone changing that.
One Hundred Balloons Without String
1
December 12 2007
“You’ve gotta come see it, Szandi,” says Yang. I slam the phone down but it misses the base. I hit the clock instead, which flashes 03.00.
I put the handset on the pillow and turn over so I’m looking at it. The white plastic appears faintly red in the clock’s LCD glow. “Szandi?” I hear. The black dots of the speaker seem to wink in the dark as she talks.
“Yeah?”
“My sculpture. It’s finished. You’ve gotta come see!”
“I will. I’ll come over first thing in the morning.”
“It is first thing in the morning, you daft bitch.” I hear her laugh, but it’s distant. I bet she thinks she’s put her hand over the mouthpiece; but she’s too stoned to get it right.
“Are you gonna make me come and get you, Szandi?”
“Just try.”
“Pleeaase,” she says.
“OK.” I’m too tired to argue. I’ll get back to bed quicker if I just go.
I pull on a jumper, thick woollen leggings and a pair of pumps, and head out of the flat into the cold city. The mist coming off the Danube wraps itself around me like the breath of a thousand ghosts.
I make my way through Víziváros. The streets get narrower with every turn, until I reach a passage that’s little more than a crack where one building has slipped down the hill with age and worked loose of its partner. There are no lights, but I know every chip and layer of orange and blue and green and brown paint on the door that opens onto a thin concrete staircase. I climb to the top and ring the bell.
Yang opens her studio door a few centimetres, and looks me up and down as though she can’t figure out why I’m here. All I can see are her eyes. Her pupils are huge, like she’s sucked in two black moons. I was right. She’s stoned. She fumbles to free the safety chain, opens the door fully and reaches out a hand to drag me inside.
We stand on the paint-splattered floorboards just inside the door, our hands still locked together. She grins but her muscle control’s gone, and the smile teeters on her lips. She’s wearing the long T-shirt I printed for her that says slut slit a few centimetres above the hem. The black letters are spaced out and I can see enough between them to know the T-shirt’s all she’s wearing.
She steps to one side and pushes me forward. I’m standing in front of a glass tank about a metre high, the same deep and twice as long. Inside are loads of little red balloons. They’re just hovering in space, refusing to fall to earth or float off into the sky. Some of them are clustered together so it looks like they’re supporting each other, but I walk all the way around the tank and there’s clear air surrounding every one of them.
“Gelatine,” she says. “Cool, huh? Chemicals suspended in extract of cow!” She giggles, wobbles, and nearly topples through the glass.
“Like a negative of Damien Hirst,” I say, but it’s more beautiful than that; and more old fashioned, like the millefiori paperweights in dad’s study. The concept’s modern and kind of cool, but there’s something in the execution – the smoothness of the red; the flat, crisp angles of the glass; the clarity of the gelatine – that belongs to another time.
“It’s called One Hundred Balloons Without String,” she says.
“At least that’s descriptive.”
She sits down on the floor beside a little pile of screwed-up and sticky papers, and starts rummaging through them. “Wanna hear the text?” she asks, grabbing at my leg with one hand and shaking a pair of chopsticks off a piece of A4 with the other.
“Text?” I say, sitting down next to her.
“Yeah, the words that go with the sculpture.”
“I know what a text is. Isn’t it a bit out of date, though? People don’t really do that kind of thing any more.”
“I know,” she says. She’s sitting with her legs crossed and the T-shirt’s riding up. My eyes follow the long, pale olive line of the inside of her thigh. She puts the sheet of paper in her lap. “It’s part of the whole retro thing, like you said about Damien Hirst.” She picks it up and moves it closer to her eyes, then away, then back again. “Ah, fuck it,” she says. “You read it. I’m knackered.”
She hands me the paper. The edge is covered in a thick, sticky gloop that I hope is gelatine. I’ve forgotten how exquisite her handwriting is, even when she’s scribbling. My eyes trace the narrow, inverted curves of her ns and her ms, and the almost shorthand ripples of her vowels. Her letters have the elegance and tightness of her body, the perfect proportion of its angles and curves.
“As newborns,” I begin, “we announce ourselves to the world utterly without fear. We take in a gigantic lungful of air that fills our shrivelled skin like a balloon and, for the last time in decades, without embarrassment, expectation – or fear – we let out an almighty scream. Although, and precisely because, we are ignorant of them, there is nothing in our future or our past (not the slap of the mother’s hand nor the reward of her breast) that tells us what we must do.”
“Yeah,” she says. Her eyelids are starting to fall. The skin on them is smooth, like cream-coloured suede. I watch as they move slowly up and down, trying to decide whether she’s more beautiful with her eyes open or closed.
“Hey, don’t stop,” she says, staring straight at me. Her brow’s creased like she’s cross, but her spaced-out pupils stay big and glistening and distant.
“No.” I put the paper down. “You tell me.”
“Tired, Szandi.”
“Yeah, but you’re not too tired to call me over here. So tell me about your metaphorical balloons!”
“Fuck, you know, Szandi. You’re born and you open your eyes and all around you see this cat’s cradle of ropes and cords and strings. Family, rules, race, sex. Like a balloon tied to the vendor’s hand, on the verge of floating into a limitless sky with nothing to direct us but the breeze of chance. Life feels, what?”
“Precarious,” I offer.
“Yeah, that’s it. Precarious.”
“Only,” I say, looking at the sculpture, “if you look at life from every angle you see there isn’t a cat’s cradle at all. There’s nothing touching anything else.”
“Yeah. But who can see their life from every angle? Only God could do that. Do you believe in God, Szandi?”
I shake my head.
“Me neither.”
“Maybe when we die,” I say. “Maybe we can see it then. When we’re really old, and lying in our beds with our eyes closed and all we can hear is our breathing. Maybe we get so far from the world we can see our life from every side.”
“That’d be sad, wouldn’t it?” says Yang. “Live that long knowing exactly where you are then just before you die ping, someone cuts the rope.”
“Better to die young.”
“Like Claire,” she says, without sympathy, without any feeling at all. Just as a statement of fact.
“Like Claire,” I repeat, and pick up her text. My hand’s shaking. The paper makes a sound like rain falling gently on glass.
“What did I write about dying?” she asks.
“You don’t remember?”
“I’m tired, Szandi. Tired and a bit stoned. Read it to me.”
I turn the page, reading as I go, and let my eyes find their way to the last paragraph.
“…we walk towards death in ignorance,” I read, “fearless once again of punishment and reward. We take a gulp of air with what’s left of our lungs; and announce our presence, without embarrassment, expectation – or fear – not with a scream but a gurgle, a dribble, and last a rattle. Finally the balloon has reached space, beyond hope, fear, past, present, horizon; beyond air, beyond weather.”
It’s beautiful. Her words are like poetry in the same effortless way the sculpture is. They slide off the tongue and float weightlessly away without making a ripple.
“It’s overwritten,” I say quietly. “Is that part of the retro irony?”
“Yeah,” she says, opening her eyes. “I took the style from your blog.”
Touché.
“Fuck you,” I say, and start to laugh.
She screws up her forehead and leans towards me. Her head falls onto my shoulder, and a spike of hair jolts out of place and flops over one eye. She juts out her bottom lip and blows, making her hair dance. The combination of the gesture and her utter seriousness is comical and I feel the corners of my mouth twitching.
“Hey, you,” she says. “Let me be serious for a minute.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Yeah.” She frowns harder, scrunching up her nose. “I was going to tell you I made this for you.”
“For me?”
“For you. Because you’re not like any normal balloon.”
“Right.”
“You see all these balloons?” she asks. She tries lifting her head but she’s too tired and it slides from my shoulder to my chest. She puts a hand there as a pillow, letting it mould itself to my breast.
“Yeah.”
“Look at one of them. Any one. Pick a balloon,” she says, like she’s a magician doing a card trick. “What do you see?”
“You tell me.”
“You see that the only thing making it any different from all the other balloons is its position. The only thing that makes your balloon different is how it relates to every other balloon. It’s only when they’ve all floated off into space that you can look at a balloon and see it on its own.” She sighs and shrugs her shoulder gently against me. “Poor balloon.”
“Poor balloon?”
“Yeah,” she says, but now her eyes are firmly closed and her words are getting blurred. “Poor balloon. Think…need to change…in the morning.” Now her voice is hardly there at all, and it’s starting to merge with shallow, ragged breaths that will soon become a snore. “Ninety-nine Balloons Without String…One With.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask. “You’re the one floating off into space.”
It’s too late. Underneath the T-shirt her chest is rising and falling in the slow rhythm of a torch song. I kiss her head, ease it gently down onto my lap, lean back, and look up at the ceiling. The flaking eau de nil paint is textured with pits and splashes and craters. I look at the patterns they make, joining the dots in a hundred different ways. I try seeing each one separately, cut off from the scratches and marks around it; but I can’t.
***
It’s midday when I come back from the shops, and Yang’s in the shower, back in our flat for the first time in a week. The water rinses the sleep off her like a layer of fine powder and leaves her shining like the stone of a fresh-peeled lychee. I step in and we kiss and let our fingers flow with the water down the contours of our flesh. She takes me, still wet, to bed and we make love for an hour, tongues and hands and skin blurring in moist heat. As our bodies move, the water slowly dries, and when we’re spent we lie on the bed, glinting with the sticky sheen of sweat and sex.
For a while, I watch her and listen to her breathe. Her eyes are shut but the rasps from her lips come too quickly for sleep. I want to tell her I love her. I put my arm around her shoulder and nuzzle the thick, black hair. I press my breast against hers, watch her lips open and sigh as my hard pink nipple brushes the soft brown of hers. The thin layers of sweat and skin that separate us melt together. I push down on her a little harder. I want the boundary to disappear altogether. I want my heart to leap out of my chest and start beating in hers. But it won’t. Not yet, not until the morning I wake up, feel a body next to me, and don’t think of Claire.
***
It’s mid afternoon and slivers of silk surround me on the sofa. I pull pieces off at random and throw them on the floor together, trying to make the colours and shapes talk to each other. Instead they just flop down in heaps and look a mess.
“What the fuck?” asks Yang, standing in the door.
“I’m playing,” I lie.
“No you’re fucking not, you’re messing with your sculpture.”
“OK. I thought I could maybe do something with the lining, or put some coloured stitching in. It’s not right.”
“It’s finished,” she says. She starts picking the bits up from the floor. Then the ones on the sofa, till she stands in front of me brandishing a thick, multicoloured weapon. “It’s been finished for over a week.”
***
Now it’s night, and she’ll sleep through till I bring coffee, and shake her till she remembers she has to set up for the exhibition. I’m glad she’s asleep. Often I’ll wake and over the nape of her neck I’ll see Yang’s face reflected in the glass of the clock, her eyes open. She’s not sleeping, but she’s not awake. Deep behind the black of her pupils there’s an intense concentration I can’t penetrate.
I go to the kitchen, pour a beer, and sit down with the letter I’ve been avoiding all day. I tap the edge against the wood for a minute or so. The postmark says Tokaj. I don’t recognise the ballpoint handwriting that’s pressing unevenly into the cheap envelope, but that doesn’t matter. I know it’s about dad.
I push the beer across the table, slide my finger under the flap, tearing it clumsily like I’m gutting a fish with a blunt knife, and lay the sheet of shiny lined paper on the table.
Dear Szandrine,
Your father doesn’t know I’m writing. He’d just tell me not to interfere. But isn’t that what friends do, eh? I would’ve called but there was no way of getting your number without him suspecting, so it’s a letter. Sorry it’s not a very good one – you a student and all, but the only things I’m used to writing are invoices.
I know you’ll be here in a week anyway but it would mean the world if you came home early. Even if it’s only a day. To show your dad you care. Sometimes when I go over he’s so grey and quiet I wonder just how ill he is. But he won’t see the doctor. Maybe you could make him.
One more thing, and you mustn’t let him know I said anything. You already know what would make him happy, even if it’s too late to make him well. Tell him you’ll look after the vineyard. Tell him you’ll take over Szant Gabor when he’s gone.
I know it’s all too much to ask but what am I supposed to do? Marko’s my oldest friend in the world.
Gyorgy
I go to the bathroom and open the door of the big mirror-cabinet above the sink. There’s the cutthroat dad gave me when I was ten, its blue enamel handle shining amongst the tampons and pill bottles. I open it out and watch as a droplet of moisture appears and glistens on it like dew on grass. I hold the blade up to my lips. The edge is so fine I only know I’ve cut myself from the red that’s swirling in the centre of my tear.
“Oh, dad,” I whisper, wiping the carbon-steel on the letter, leaving a smudge of salt and blood and rust.
Half of me wants to run home and hold him for as long as he has left. And half of me wants to go back into the other room and lose myself forever in the warmth of Yang’s sleeping body. At this moment I have two lives in front of me, but I know the moment I choose one, the other will die.
It’s long past midnight and even though it’s winter the sun will come soon. The darkness outside is already loosening. It melts in front of me, and I realise it’s no longer the orange yellow dark of streetlamps and neon signs. It’s the sleazy light of a bar, the Grey Wolf in Bucharest. It’s New Year’s Eve. 2006 is about to become 2007. The future is full of possibility. I have a place come the autumn to study languages at the Sorbonne. I am about to sing in public for the first time. Somewhere, waiting for me, in the West, Claire is alive.
2
It was 7.30. Two countries were about to start a new life in the EU, and I was playing in a concert to celebrate. There was a glass of Pilsner I hadn’t touched in front of me on my table. Jason, The Point of the Bomb’s roadie, was still playing with the amp so I couldn’t run through my sound check. Behind the bar a CD player broke the quiet – just – with acoustic jazz covers of Kraftwerk so cool my breath formed little clouds that danced over my beer.
The Grey Wolf was off Lipscani Street, the centre of Bucharest’s trendy bar quarter and the heart of the historic city. The entrance was under a small neon sign and led down some cramped stone stairs to a basement. I was amazed anyone could find it, but a steady stream of punters filled it out and soon the seats were all taken.
“Hey!”
I looked up from my beer. The woman sitting opposite me was smaller than her voice. She had short, pixie hair and wore a tight, black cotton polo. She must have been about twenty, but in the artificial light it was hard to tell.
“Hi.”
“It’s OK to drink it, you know.” She smiled at me. Her eyes flashed mischief. “I won’t tell anyone you’re underage.”
“Eh?”
“It’s OK. I had all my best hangovers when I was fifteen and away from home.”
I laughed. “I’m seventeen. It’s my first time in Bucharest.”
“Me too,” she said. “So what are you doing?”
“Waiting for that guy to finish playing with the set,” I said, pointing to Jason.
“You’re a musician, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool. I’m Ilke.”
“Sandrine.”
“No way! With an accent like that.”
“My dad,” I said. “I’m from Hungary, but he saw a film with this French actress in it, just after I was born. The register office wouldn’t let him spell it the same, though, so technically I’m Szandrine with a z. Which doesn’t make sense in Hungarian or French.”
“Cool!”
“So where are you from?”
“Berlin.”
Berlin.
“You OK?” asked Ilke, but I was too lost in thought to answer.
***
I was a week old when mum went back to England and left me and dad in our huge house at the heart of the vineyard. It was the 9th of November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down.
There were no photos of her in the house. Dad never talked about her, and taking my cue from his silence, I never asked. I filled in her story for myself until it was stronger than any real memories I had. In my version she walked across no man’s land towards the Berlin Wall. When she was almost there it disappeared, and without slowing she walked through the empty space where it had stood. She became smaller and smaller on the horizon, but as far away as she got, I could still see a trickle of dust from her hands snaking back towards me, and I knew one day I’d use it to follow her to the West.
In October 2006 mum came back. She came to Hungary on a research trip, with an assistant called Claire. I was asleep when they arrived. In the morning I was up early, woken by my heart racing. In the excitement my shoulders got caught up in the fabric of my dress as I pulled it on. When it finally fell into place and I could see again, there was Claire, standing in the vineyard like she’d been waiting for me all her life. I blinked in case I was still dreaming, and when I looked again she was gone. I sat on the corner of the bed, trying to breathe while my pulse skitted over my skin like a moth caught in a lamp. By the time I’d collected myself and gone down to breakfast mum had left, and taken Claire with her.
***
I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Wanna try it out?” a deep voice shouted in my ear.
I looked up. It was Jason. I turned to say goodbye to Ilke; but she was no longer there.
I took a gulp of beer and stood up. My head swam for a moment but then it cleared.
“You bet.”
I threaded my way through the packed bar without touching anyone, as though some kind of force field had surrounded me. Before I knew it I had my guitar in my hands, and Jason and I were lost in conversation about music.
I’d been writing and sharing songs with the guys from The Point of the Bomb online for months. Some nights when I sat typing the lyrics into my computer as I sang them to myself, I imagined the words floating out of the window and speeding their way down the cables and fibres of the Web, and finding their way eventually to an internet café in Paris or London or Barcelona where Michael and Janie and Steve and Greg were waiting.
On October 17 my screen had flashed.
Mike’s in the Shack. Wanna chat?
I clicked through. What’s up?
Wanna play?
Play?
Yeah. Bucharest. New Year’s Eve. Half an hour. Try out your new songs.
You’re fucking kidding?!
When I’d finished setting up, Steve signalled for me to join the band at their table, huddled next to the stage.
“What’s it like outside?” I asked.
“Piata Universitǎţii’s filling up,” said Michael. Big city squares were the kind of venue Michael and the band were used to playing, but tonight they’d chosen low key. No having to watch what they said or did for the cameras, and no big deal having a beginner like me as support.
“It’s heaving out there,” said Steve. “It’s like feeling the blood rushing back after you’ve slept on your arm.”
“That’s a metaphor we could run with,” I said. “Ceausescu cuts off the country’s blood…”
“And then he’s gone, but sensation still doesn’t return for a while,” said Steve.
“Yeah,” I continued. “You just have pins and needles and the dull throbbing pain of trying to readjust.”
“And finally the blood comes back and life goes on,” said Michael.
“Fuck me!” said Greg, the drummer. “Do you guys never just chill out?”
Before I knew it, the lighting had changed. I was on stage.
I had a half hour set, ten three minute songs I’d written after local thugs killed a Serb called Radko because he had a job and they didn’t. Musically they were formulaic. I’d sing the verses in a folk and torch song cross with my guitar. Then I’d thump out the choruses to a metal bass line and drums, courtesy of Steve and Greg, who’d been playing around with the music online for the last week. The structure was always the same – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, fade.
I sat on a barstool, put the guitar on my knee, and began strumming Mostar Bridge, a diatribe against the chattering classes, complete with rhymes that were little more than the kind of doggerel we did in language classes at school:
I was gonna join Bono and Midge
But you headed me off at Mostar Bridge.
What happened as I played was unlike anything I’d experienced alone in my room. The audience pounded their fists in the air to my choruses. They were expectant through the verses, still until the next crescendo. The Grey Wolf was a single living creature and I was its heart.
Too soon I was building to the chorus of my final song, Greg pounding drums behind, Steve thrashing the bass beside me.
A gut full of lead
And a face full of steel.
He’s dead but the wounds will heal.
I could feel the force of the noise I was making pushing me forward. I opened my throat and sucked in a lungful of passion and fury, spitting it out in a scream.
The wounds will heal,
The wounds will heal,
The wounds will heal.
He’s dead…
Pause.
But…
Just me and a near-silent arpeggio on my guitar:
The wounds will heal.
There was a second’s silence. I took in the crowd of faces. They were all looking at me. At that moment, absolutely nothing separated us. I breathed in, and my head fell onto the belly of my guitar.
3
The moment I came off stage the audience, the applause, the music – even the Kraftwerk covers they put on again – disappeared. Or rather, I knew they were there, but instead of sharing a skin with me like they had been a moment earlier, now they were going on somewhere else.
I sat back at the table but it was empty. The band was getting ready for their set; Jason was adjusting the amps.
I stared into the glass and saw Radko looking up at me through a single eye. He died on an ordinary evening in October that year. I sat on the landing, listening through the banisters to Dad and Gyorgy talk. Their words came in tiny bursts, the long silences between broken only by the whirring of a moth that had found its way in off the porch.
“I went to see his landlady,” said Gyorgy.
“And?”
“Didn’t know a thing.”
“You were the first to tell her?”
“Yes, and you know what?”
“What?”
“She didn’t cry. Didn’t cry but she was devastated. She told me I had to go and see his room. I want you to see how beautifully he kept it, she said. Kept saying he was only young but he knew how to look after things. I told her I knew. Told her he was the best worker I ever had.”
“So what was it like?” asked Dad.
“What was what like?”
“His room.”
“I couldn’t face it,” said Gyorgy.
Silence settled again until I heard a strange, rhythmic noise, that got slowly louder until I could hear it was the sound of sobbing.
I sat and watched Camus the vineyard cat leaping to try and reach the moth as the tears continued, interrupted only by Gyorgy’s occasional cry of “fucking animals.”
The next day’s papers said Radko was beaten to death by a gang of racist thugs on his way home from work. They described the attack in detail. One guy knocked him on the back of his head with a piece of metal or an exhaust or something like that. He fell to the ground. Someone stamped on the side of his head – they knew because there was a boot mark on Radko’s cheek – pinning him to the ground while the others kicked him in the kidneys again and again and again until his organs burst.
***
I drained my beer and watched The Point of the Bomb finish their set. Michael worked the crowd with just a few movements of his right hand, which he reached out to them and reeled back in slow motion. The audience lost any individual identity and became one being, its ripples of movement following Michael’s lead. It was like watching a snake charmer. With his black curls and leather trousers he reminded me of Jim Morrison.
“Fancy another beer?” he asked when the set was finally over. It was 10.30, about the time one of their gigs would normally be getting started. But the Grey Wolf was already half empty as people went to jostle for position in Piata Universitǎţii.
“Not heading off yet?”
“Not yet. I’ll turn up at the last minute, make sure I get a nice place on the edge.”
“I never had you pegged as claustrophobic,” I said.
“Now you put it like that, neither did I. I guess I like to get a whiff of what’s going on, but when it comes down to it I’d rather watch than join in.”
“You wanna watch it,” said Greg. “That kind of thing could get you arrested.”
“See you back at the hotel, then,” said Steve. “We’d rather take our chances in the mosh pit. You were great by the way, Sandrine.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Steve put his index finger to his eye and gave me a mini salute. I giggled. I had a fresh, cold beer in my hands and I was beginning to feel like I belonged again.
“Don’t wait up,” said Michael.
“As if,” said Janie, who turned to me, bent over and whispered, “mind yourself with that one,” just loud enough for Michael to hear.
“Fuck off the lot of you,” he said. It was the last thing he said to any of them.
With the rest of the band gone, Michael and I finished our beers in near silence. We’d spent two years talking in the chatrooms and forums of his website, Endangeredworlds.net, swapping lyrics, discussing tunes, chewing over politics. He’d heard my amateur MP3s. I’d seen Youtube clips of his concerts from all round the world. Now we’d heard each other play for real there wasn’t much left to say. But the silence was pleasant enough.
“I might head back to my hotel and watch on TV,” I said when both our glasses were empty.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Or I might just wander around.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t want to be in the middle of things. Sometimes, when something’s really important, it’s best to watch it from the edges, from the spaces. Or even to watch other people rather than the thing itself.”
We said goodbye, and I headed out of the Grey Wolf high on the smell of beer and smoking fireworks. People bumped and jostled down the streets like pinballs, stopping to fling their arms around strangers, kissing each other and shouting messages of love and peace that were instantly lost in the noise. They seemed to share my heady feeling of hope and endless possibility.
I didn’t see the ghosts standing at every shoulder, pushing them on; ghosts of the thousands who simply disappeared from the world, drawing substance again for one night from the beery breath of the masses. As far as I was concerned Ceausescu had died in 1989, and taken Romania’s problems with him.
I weaved up and down the alleys off Lipscani Street, wondering what to post on my blog, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall. I started walking up Smârdan Street, crossed into Ion Ghica Street. The crowds had almost thinned to nothing. My feet felt like they were on springs. Come midnight something – the old East? My old life? – would stop forever, and something new would take its place.
I approached the back of the wall of people as the giant clock counted down the last few seconds. Romania held its breath. I half expected to see mum walking ahead of me, melting the crowds in front of her so I could follow. But I didn’t see her.
I saw Claire.
I stopped about twenty metres from her. She hadn’t seen me. She was in the middle of a conversation with someone. It took a few seconds to realise it was Michael.
My brain didn’t have time to put things together before the countdown finished and the crowd erupted. A wave of sound swept back towards me. Immediately afterwards another wave followed. Of movement. A row of heads rose up out of the mass and fell back down. It seemed like these heads became detached and rolled back towards me. As they reached the back of the crowd everything slowed.
I felt something tickle inside my chest. I was calling out to Claire, only the sound was taking too long to climb its way out of my lungs. I watched, motionless, as she and Michael broke off their conversation and turned to see what was coming. Then she turned her head 180 degrees, searching for a way out. She must have been looking right through me but then she vanished, and so did Michael.
Through the forest of running legs I saw her for a fraction of a second. Or at least I thought I did. I thought I saw her last breath leave her, silently, in a cloud of ice crystals that evaporated into the night; and an eye, a single eye, unnaturally wide and black, in what seemed like recognition.
Something snapped inside me. The violence of it threw me against a wall. I stood there as the world around me – the mad, vibrant, exciting world that had sent a flirtatious glimpse of what it had to offer me – shrunk down to the size and shape of my skin.
I was alone.
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall
Bucharest January 2 2007
I stared into his single eye, the one that wasn’t pressed flat to the pavement, for five minutes; it refused to stare back at me. Although I scoured the dark of his dilated pupil; although I counted the crazings of blood across the glassy white, I did not, for even one of those three hundred seconds, nor the three months that followed, think of Radko as anything other than an idea. He became in my eyes, in my thoughts, in the lyrics of my songs and the words of my blog, the emblem of everything the world needed to hear.
I didn’t actually see his body. I didn’t see the moon-black blood leak onto the cobbles or the early autumn wind pick up the torn corner of his shirt and tease the passers-by with the sight of prepubescent welts and bruises that, cut off in death, would never mature; or of starburst thread veins that gave the skin around his kidneys the patina of toecaps. But in the five minutes it took Gyorgy to tell my father that Radko was dead, to explain the positioning of every blow, to cry into his arms; to dry his tears and hold my father as he let go the uncontrolled sobbing of his own; to sit at the table, two men approaching old-age drinking beer in a silent toast to a youth they barely knew – in that five minutes I screwed my stare through the glassy surface of a single eye, down the optic nerve, past brain and spinal cord, limbic system, circulation and endocrine; but as far as I looked nothing of Radko looked back. His soul had already gone.
All I was able to see that night was Radko’s eye – the one that wasn’t pressed to the pavement. I knew it was the pressure of the boot that forced it open so it looked like it would pop out of its socket; but in my imagination it was wide in astonishment. I watched as the astonishment turned to fear then resignation then the pupil began to swirl as blood surged up from his liver and spleen and slowly the shiny black went dull and grey. And I kept thinking to myself, What’s happening to his other eye? Is that eye dead as well? Radko was split in two and one of them was dead but what about the other one? Eventually in this picture the kicking ended and the thug with the boot on Radko’s cheek gave a flick of his ankle and flipped him over. Radko turned face up and I could see that the second eye was as grey as the first – there was only one Radko and he was dead. But what had happened in the thirty seconds or so in between? The other Radko could have been desperately trying to signal something. It might not have been too late for him. But no-one would ever see.
Three months later, yesterday, just after the stroke of midnight, in the first screams of the crowd’s celebration, Claire was dead. I saw her body. I watched it fall, watched the horrified scream of Michael’s contorted figure as it tried to twist free, as it turned and spun and eventually fell, squeezing the final breath from her fragile flesh. I know – the images to prove it are there on Youtube – that she took less than a frame of film to die and be buried in the crush. In that one twenty-seventh of a second or less; in that time so small there is no proof it ever existed (or rather there is digital proof that it did not) I saw enough in one frozen eye to know that she understood every detail of my love for her. But before her death stare could answer me she was gone.
After Radko died I locked myself away and wrote song after song; I cannot write a word for Claire. I don’t understand, and the thought of what my silence means terrifies me.
Every word to describe what happened, even stripped to the barest fact, scans like the opening of a verse. Violence itself has a rhythm, the quiet-loud-quiet of a throwaway pop song. The gap, the fraction of meaning I need to fill to turn the bare lines of history into song, is so infinitely thin that if it brushed your face you wouldn’t even think it was a breeze; but it surrounds like a second skin. I can’t get free of it without turning inside out.
4
I clicked back to Endangeredworlds’ homepage. Someone had reformatted it completely so there was just a simple screen, outlined in black. To go anywhere you had to click a discreet “enter site” button in the corner. Otherwise you just sat there and stared at the banner endlessly scrolling in 48 point Calibri, Goodbye, Mike, words can never say.
Words did say, of course. In addition to the forums, Greg had posted an account of the tragic events. I read it through for what must have been the fortieth time, and for the fortieth time the words pulled me up short:
Endangeredworlds is in mourning today for Michael Tyler. The site’s founder was killed, along with his sister Claire, in riots that broke out in Bucharest on the stroke of New Year.
Along with his sister Claire
He’d talked about her ad infinitum, about the clingy sister he had to phone or e-mail to check in with every night, to make sure she hadn’t done anything stupid like she did seventeen years before. And that was Claire.
Instinctively, I took my hand off the keyboard and looked at it. It was hooked over from all the typing, but as I stared at the space between my fingers and my palm I said the same thing to myself over and over again.
“It’s empty. Something was there but now it’s gone.”
I had to get back onto the streets. I could clear my head there, in open spaces filled with car horns and the chug of Vespas, screaming youths and the chorus of hacking smokers. My room was too quiet. I needed noise to think. I needed to go and kick paper cups and tin cans in the gutter. Then I’d sit in a square somewhere with a beer.
Outside it was freezing, but the cafes and bars still spilled people onto the streets. Everyone seemed to have a laptop. They were all reading or writing, telling people what it was like to be there while history was made. Hardly any of them were Romanian. The Romanians were all at work, dealing with the new reality of being in the EU. Those that were left were all political tourists like me, hoovering up everyone else’s experiences from the forums and the blogs and chatrooms in case they missed anything out when they told the story to their friends back home.
I looked at reflections of their laptop screens in the windows as I walked. I realised, suddenly, that I was checking to see if any of them was reading my latest post. I quickly looked down at my feet, turned the next corner, and sat down at a café table with a beer.
“Excuse me, miss.”
It was the waiter. I told him I hadn’t finished my beer and I’d let him know when I wanted another.
“No, I don’t want to take your order,” he said. “I don’t mean to bother you but didn’t you sing in the Grey Wolf on New Year’s Eve?”
“That’s right,” I answered.
“You were great.”
“Thank you.” Had it really been less than two days?
“You’re from Hungary aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“It seems strange.”
“What seems strange?” I asked.
“You coming here to join in with our celebration. Most Hungarians hate us. The ones who live here have bolted themselves into their homes since Christmas in the hope it’ll all go away. And the ones who live in Hungary think now we’re brothers together in the EU the Romanians will come in the night and take their jobs. So why are you here?”
Why are you here? aWell, Claire, why were you here?
***
I was staying at a boutique hotel near the city centre. It was the kind of place where the staff treat you like a friend rather than a customer. That’s great when you arrive lonely off the night plane, desperate for a welcoming face; less so when all you want is to sit in the bar and watch the world. When I got back Nicolai was on reception. He must have been in his fifties. He looked like he’d worked there all his life, and he’d been shrinking into the counter since the day he started. Every bit of him was getting smaller with age except his smile. By the time he retired it would fill the front of his head.
“Good night, Nicolai,” I shouted from the door. It was easier than the puppet games we’d play otherwise: I’d smile at him and he’d smile back and I’d have to look away before it got embarrassing and I’d time how long before I could make eye contact again, all the time watching his fixed smile from my peripheral vision, wondering when he’d say hello. “I’m heading back home tomorrow. Will I see you in the morning?”
“Then it’s goodbye,” he said. “I don’t work tomorrow.”
“Thank you for everything,” I said, shaking his hand and palming him a ten dollar bill.
“You’re welcome,” he said with the same smile. The one that said I was the best customer he’d ever had, the same one he used with everyone he met. “Will you be having room service tonight?” he asked. “Or would you like to settle up now?”
“Can I pay now?” I reached in my purse and handed over my dad’s credit card.
Nicolai stared at his computer screen, and down at the card; he frowned. Maybe he was going to call my dad and say your daughter’s done a runner with your life savings. It was OK. Dad was happy to let me have a card because I always paid off what I spent from my allowance. But Nicolai wasn’t looking suspiciously at me, just the credit card.
Suddenly I understood. “A friend booked the room for me,” I said.
Nicolai looked at me, and back at the details on the screen. He could see Michael’s name. Through his smile he was itching to ask. Professional courtesy, I guess, and maybe a touch of sympathy, held him back.
I nodded; and returned his smile.
“Of course,” he said.
5
When I took my clothes off I realised I hadn’t washed for two days. I’d been collecting filth like the growth rings of a tree. As I showered I felt the warm water prising my pores, holding them open and scraping out the rubble and decay. I was growing weightless as the dirt vanished down the plughole.
The next thing I knew I was lying on the bed rubbing sleep from my eyes. My hair was matted so I gave it a few quick tugs with the brush. I put on some skinny jeans and under my coat I wore a purple jumper that had a polo neck big enough I could reach with my lip to chew it without taking my hands out of my pocket.
I’m on a mission
to tell every politician
that while they drink champagne and laugh
whole cultures starve
wrestling with us just for air
condemned to history’s electric chair
governments will never listen
or search the streets for cultures that go missing
so there’s no reason for the talk to carry on
that’s the point of the bomb
I was humming the tune of the song that gave the band its name when a man in a dark suit joined me in the lift. The immaculate way it was tailored made him look English. I was transfixed by the way the light played on his tie, which was made out of a red silk shot through with purple and blue and a hundred different greens and yellows.
His skin was grey like it was coated with fine cement powder. He looked at me through faded blue eyes, without blinking, and water collected in little pools that teetered on the edge of his eyelids. I wanted to tell him it was rude to stare when I realised I wasn’t just humming; I was singing the lyrics aloud and he could understand every word.
The door opened in the lobby and I expected him to make a dash for the exit, but he didn’t move. He stood between me and the door. I tried a smile. There was a flicker at the corner of his mouth but it was so small it could have been a tic. I didn’t want him to think I was staring him out so I tried to look somewhere else, but I only got as far as his hair. He had a sweep of grey, with streaks of silver so pure it shone like a halo. The style was as exact as his suit. But that wasn’t why I couldn’t shift my eyes. There was something else about this guy’s hair that had me hooked.
“That’s the point of the bomb, did you say?” he asked.
Here we go. “Sorry,” I said quietly.
“Is that what you said? That’s the point of the bomb? Is it?”
Oh shit, he thinks I’m some kind of psycho. “I’m really sorry,” I garbled. “They’re just lyrics from a song, that’s all.”
“I know they’re lyrics from a song,” he said. “My son wrote them.”
The doors pinged to say they were about to close and the guy in the suit looked down to press the button.
I had absolutely no idea what to say. He hadn’t a clue, of course, that I knew Michael, but his expression was clear. A mix of exhaustion, desperation, and a pinpoint of hope.
“I’m going for a beer,” I said. “Do you want to join me?” He wanted to talk to someone about his son, and I was happy to give up an hour to hear him talk about his daughter. “I’m Sandrine. I was a friend of Michael’s.”
“Peter,” he answered, holding out his hand. A smile loosened his skin. It fell back into its natural folds and jowls, releasing tears from each eye that followed crooked paths through the furrows of his cheeks.
I didn’t take his hand. Instead I threaded it through the crook of my elbow and led him towards the bar, where I ordered us two beers and a bowl of olives.
Looking at him in his dark pressed suit, his old-world elegance fading into the neo-classical style of one of the sofas in the bar, I wondered if I should have got him a glass of wine instead, or a port, or sherry. But he seemed happy with his Pilsner, probably because the glass was big enough that holding it gave both his hands something to do.
“So Michael was your son?” I asked. It was only fair to start where he wanted and let the conversation drift to Claire in its own time.
“Yes, Michael was my son,” he repeated, the blue of his eyes filling out two shades and growing ten years younger as he said the name. “Did you know him well?”
“We spoke almost every day.”
“You live in England, then?”
“No. What I mean is we communicated by computer.” I had no idea how to explain the world of online political activism, of Bulletin Boards and chatrooms.
“I see,” he said, although I couldn’t imagine he did. “Through Endangered Worlds I suppose?”
“That’s right.”
“Same here,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s how I’ve spoken to him for the last three years. Every night in the chatrooms on Endangered Worlds.”
My head was asking a hundred questions but all that came out was: “Why?”
“Because for the first time in nearly forty years I’ve been able to talk to my son.”
All I could do was repeat, “Why?”
“It’s a very personal story,” he said. I’d pushed him too far, and I didn’t blame him for clamming up; but he carried on. “Before I tell you, I should probably introduce myself properly. Sandrinechanteuse – I assume from your age and your accent that’s who you are – it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Greenhamgal.”
“Well, Greenhamgal,” I said. “I’m delighted to meet you, too.”
“Now we’re properly acquainted let me explain. First, though.” He got up from his chair and took my glass. “I think I should get us another of these.”
I watched him head to the bar. This had none of the feel of a dream; but if it was real then I was talking to someone I’d chatted to for hours about their experiences of all-women camps at the anti-nuclear protests of the mid-80s, someone I’d been tempted more than once to ask about the openness of the lesbian community in England; and that someone was Michael and Claire’s father
He put two beers on the table between us and sat down.
***
I listened to Peter for an hour, during which I bought us two more beers and said nothing.
He was born in 1942. By 1963, when he left university without a degree, his father had given up hope of his son ever entering a proper profession. In desperation he sent Peter to his uncle, who had returned from the Far East long after the war with a Chinese bride and samples of her father’s silk, and made a fortune selling cloth to fuel the post-rationing fashion explosion.
His uncle soon realised that Peter was a born aesthete, and sent him out with a constantly changing supply of new colours and weaves to sell to the boutiques that kept springing up on and around Chelsea’s King’s Road.
When he met her, Sylvie was working as a dressmaker at Bazaar, Mary Quant’s Chelsea shop selling the miniskirts and sharp-cut clothes in big bold prints that made the couturier’s name.
“Sylvie loved the feel of my uncle’s cloths,” Peter said. “It was finer than any silk she’d come across before. Whenever I was passing she would rush out from her workroom in the back to run my samples through her fingers.”
But the brash young Quant wasn’t interested in the feel of cold, clinging waves of smoothness on the skin. Her eye was on colour and pattern: bold, bright, and primary; a million miles from the delicacies and subtlety of Peter’s silks. One day Sylvie was so excited when she heard Peter’s voice, so eager to get to him before Quant sent him on his way for wasting her time, that in her rush she tore the dress she’d been working on for a show that evening; Quant dismissed her on the spot.
“She stood there,” he said, “on the King’s Road, her shoulders hitching themselves in tiny convulsions as she bawled her eyes out. I’d cost her her job, just because I got turned on watching her threading the slick fabric through her fingers, kneading it in her palms, running it over feint blue veins that pulsed under the porcelain skin of her wrists. I felt awful. I’d used her. It had cost me nothing – I never sold anything to Bazaar so I didn’t care a jot if I lost their business – but it had cost her everything.
“Then I realised what I could do to make it up to her. ‘Come back to my place,’ I said. She had nowhere to be, after all. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she replied. ‘I live a hundred yards from here,’ I said. ‘I keep a roll of all our silks in the flat. We can spend the afternoon there. You can see them all, and the ones you like the best you can have. You can make your own dresses from them and start your own shop.’”
She went back to his flat. They spent the afternoon throwing roll after roll of silk on the floor. Together they explored the texture of every cloth. Afternoon became evening and they began to drink wine. As the alcohol dampened their sensitivity they started taking off clothes to expose more and more skin to the fabric. By the time evening had turned to night they were naked and the layers and contours of their bodies were inseparable from the folds and hollows of the cloth.
“She left just before morning. She was gone before I woke, before I could help her carry her pick of the fabrics, so she left with nothing. My father found out I’d been involved in an altercation in one of London’s most respected boutiques and stormed into my uncle’s office. My uncle managed to convince him to let me stay in the business on the condition that I didn’t set foot near the King’s Road again. A man in his position couldn’t afford that sort of publicity. A man in my uncle’s position rather liked the publicity, so instead of sending me to Harrogate as my father had hoped, he set me up with an office in Paris.
“I never saw Sylvie again. At the end of the 70s my uncle found out through his connections that she had a son, Michael, and a few years later a daughter, Claire. She died in 1974. That was the last I heard of any of them until I saw Michael on the television one day. He was still using Sylvie’s name, Tyler, and there was something about him that made me feel I was looking at an old photo of myself.”
“His hair,” I said, speaking for the first time. “I knew there was something familiar when I saw you in the lift. You and Michael have the same hair.”
He took a sip of beer, looked as if he were thinking for a moment, and laughed.
“That’s it!” he said. “You’re right. He had my hair. Anyway, I could never speak to him as myself, so I became Greenhamgal, and you know the rest.”
The image of Sylvie, wrapped in silk, took over my mind. Seeing her, consumed by the touch, the taste, the cold smell and slow, sliding hiss of silk on her skin, I knew that something hypnotic had entered Claire’s genes and I understood, just a little, why I had fallen in love with a woman I’d seen only once, on the other side of a window.
“Here.” Peter’s voice startled me, and I wasn’t sure whether it was from tiredness or too much beer or daydreams of Sylvie. “Take my card. Call me when you want to talk some more.” I took the card. The only thing written on it was a number, in purple on the palest spearmint. The card was thick and handmade, shot through with the finest threads of what could only be silk.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, and added: “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“That I couldn’t tell you anything about Claire.”
I opened my mouth to ask him something but instead I just smiled.
As soon as I hit my bed I started crying. Caught in the sticky web of the seconds before sleep, I understood exactly the delirium of the New Year celebrations. It wasn’t about the innocent glee of the unknown. It was about a hope born of relief: that a part of the past was over; that tomorrow’s pain would, even at its worst, be different from yesterday’s.
For the first time in my life I wanted to go home.
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall
Arrivals, Ferehegy Airport, Budapest January 3 2007
Blog Zero
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is no longer about me and politics; from now on (for now at any rate) it’s about me and Claire. Rather it’s about my attempt to find and preserve her; to right the digital wrong done her by Youtube, I guess. In time it will become my memorial to her, and of my love for her.
So why not start again? Why not scrap “Songs” and create something new? To start with, what would I call it? Until I’ve finished there’s no way of knowing what would be suitable; you can’t chop and change a blog, pencil in a first draft and revisit it again and again.
No, this is still “Songs”, but it’s Blog Zero. When people call something “Zero” they never really mean it’s something absolutely new. What they really mean is it’s something absolutely different from what went before. “Zero” is that wonderfully ambiguous nothing – that mouth; that genital space – that equally means end and beginning; sucked in and spat out. Ground Zero; Year Zero; even the epidemiologists of AIDS gave Patient Zero his name not for taxonomic reasons but because they wanted someone to blame for bringing down the final curtain on the sexual innocence of the Seventies.
New beginnings are “One”, not “Zero”. There’s a tired feminist point to score there but I’ll score it somewhere else, because this isn’t the place for ideology any more.
I’m waiting for my connection back home; I have a letter from Claire, and I want to read it looking out of the window at the spot where I saw her staring up at me and fell in love.
6
“Thank God you’re OK,” said my dad, wrapping me in his arms and holding me for longer than he’d ever done before.
“Yeah, I’m OK.” What else was there to say?
When he finally me go I could see the relief in his eyes, and I realised his relief wasn’t just that I was safe. It was relief I hadn’t got caught up in the trouble.
It made sense. He had no idea I knew Michael or Claire; he didn’t even know about the singing. As far as he knew I was just going along for the politics.
There was no point getting hurt. I wasn’t like some of the kids at school who were bulimic or self-harmed and hid it from their parents, then cried to their friends that daddy didn’t care, as if fathers were supposed to be psychic about their daughters instead of loving them. If he didn’t understand, it was only because I didn’t tell him.
***
When I was younger I used to tell my dad about my plans. “I want to go to the Sorbonne when I’m eighteen,” I declared over breakfast one day when I was eleven.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said without looking up from his plate of eggs.
“It’s not nonsense. I want to go to Paris and study languages.”
He sighed. “It’s good that you’re ambitious,” he said. “But you can study languages in Budapest. It’s a great university.”
“I don’t want to go to a great university,” I said, pouting as though there was something bitter in my egg. “I want to go to the Sorbonne. I want to learn languages so I can travel where I want to when I’m grown up. But when I’m a student I want to be in Paris so I can sit in cafes on the Left Bank. I’ll drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and write songs about politics for old men with accordions to play in the Place de la Concorde.”
He took a sip of his own coffee, and put his knife and fork down. He leaned over the table and looked at me concerned, like the dentist used to do before he told me I needed a filling. “Szandi,” he said. “Where do you get such ridiculous ideas from?”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” I said.
“Pleased?”
“Pleased,” I confirmed. “You gave me a French name. A French company sells your wine.”
He didn’t answer. He just shook his head, picked up his knife and fork, slowly exhaling air as he moved his shoulders in what could only be called a Gallic shrug.
I tried a few more times but the response was always the same. He never forbad me my dreams, just met them with quiet incomprehension. Perhaps he thought I’d grow out of them. Perhaps he thought he was employing some kind of clever reverse psychology. All it did was make me keep my ambitions to myself. Then I discovered Endangeredworlds.net, and I realised there was a whole network of people out there with similar dreams.
They all seemed to want what I wanted. They all understood the pull of the Left Bank. Their cultural language was built on Eastern European émigrés like Kundera and Kieslowski, who had ended up in France. There was an energy that contrasted with dad’s slow, lethargic disillusion with the vineyard’s new owners.
Before long I’d gone from not being able to share things with my dad to not needing to. We led different lives, although they always coincided twice a day at the dinner table, three times at weekends. I never doubted that my dad loved me or that I loved him back, but love had absolutely no bearing on the physical courses our lives took.
***
The lingering presence of his arms only confirmed a love that was no less present for being unspoken.
“I’m starving,” he said.
“Me too.”
7
After two large bowls of paprikás and several fistfuls of bread, I kissed dad on the cheek, washed up our plates and went upstairs. There’s a gap between two of the balustrades on the landing from which you can see the top of the kitchen table. For a moment or two I watched dad’s back leaning into the struts of his chair as he read the paper. His arms and shoulders were relaxed, all the tension in his posture gone.
Our house was in a natural hollow on a south-facing slope of one of the Tokaj Foothills. It rarely attracted sunlight at ground-level, and the long, low building cast little shadow on the vines that crawled up the hill behind it. Had a large family lived there, as had been the case for most of Szant Gabor Vineyard’s history, the house would have been spacious. For us it was almost unwieldy.
The layout was the traditional wide and shallow of farmhouses and chateaux throughout Europe. It would have made sense to close down the rooms at each extremity, but it suited us to use every last corridor and cupboard.
The western side of the house was effectively mine. I could pad down its stone hallways, over shabby cotton runners, through airy rooms and what was left of the peeling trompe l’oeuil patterns on the walls, and the only company I had was the occasional mouse that had escaped Camus’ clutches.
I didn’t keep anything in these rooms, not even books, which I crammed into my bedroom two or more deep. There was just a breeze that blew through layers of woollens in winter, and dried the sweat on my naked skin in summer.
The last signs of life on the vines long gone into hiding, so there was little to see from my bedroom window by daylight. At night there was nothing except shifting blue shadows in the moonlight that marked the contours of the hill. But I could still see the exact spot where Claire had stood on the gravel path, on the eighth row of vines from the house.
The envelope was still thick and cold in my hand, tickling the skin of my right thigh as I fidgeted. The shutters were open and my light was on, but there was no-one outside to see me standing naked in the window.
Pulling the chair from my desk, and placing it under the window, I opened the envelope and read.
Dear Sandrine,
Dearest
Sandrine,
If you’re reading this it means I’ve finally listened to what my brother has to say, rather than badgering him endlessly for advice, ignoring it, then coming back with the same questions again, as I’ve spent my life doing.
There are so many things I want to say, answers to questions I imagine you asking, but if you write back there will be plenty of time for me to answer. And if you don’t then saying them now would have been a waste.
So I’ll confine myself for now to a few brief facts about my life so you know a little about the woman who is about to tell a stranger that she loves her.
I got up, took a full-length blue cotton dress out of the wardrobe and pulled it over my head before sitting down again. The finest hairs on my skin were so sensitive to the breath of the air that I needed the layer of fabric to act as a damper between them and the night.
My mother, Sylvie, was a seamstress. She earned her keep doing piecework at home for a London fashion house. She had no husband to look after or to be looked after by, so because she was paid by the item she worked long into the night, every night. She often forgot to put me to bed at all. I didn’t care because I was captivated by her, and watched in silence, hoping she would forget that I was there so that I could stay up with her. I loved to see the deft flicks of her hands, the shimmy of metal blades, the folding and playing of cloth in the strained electric light.
When I was four, a sliver of petrol-coloured silk slipped through my mother’s scissors. It seemed to stop for a moment in mid air, suspended by an invisible thread from the steel. Then it twisted like a silverfish into my outstretched hand. If I had ever sipped from the wine that was never far from my mother’s side, I would have realised that the feeling I experienced as I pressed the fabric between my pudgy fingers, lightly then firm then lightly again, was intoxication. For hours I watched her working the cloth. My hands moved in mimicry, and I marvelled in the cold smooth texture on my skin as the light flashed blue and silver and shots of jade on my eyes.
When Motor Neurone Disease put an end to my mother’s career, I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t allow anything lovely in the house any more. One night she was too weak to shut her bedroom door and I heard her crying. I knew how drab the house had become now that it wasn’t filled with fabric, and I assumed my mother was crying for the lost beauty. I opened my bedside drawer and took out my most prized possession, the sliver of petrol-blue silk.
I crept into my mother’s room, tapped her shoulder, and placed the cloth on her hand, where its ephemeral softness would soothe her as it soothed me whenever I was unable to sleep. My mother stopped crying long enough to look at me, and smiled. The next morning, although I was only five, I used various kitchen stools and a good deal of ingenuity to reach enough cupboards to prepare her breakfast. Full of excitement, I rushed upstairs with the bowl of cereal and the glass of orange juice, and dashed into mother’s room.
I was delighted to see the present she had left the previous night had worked. My mother was lying there peacefully, the silk next to her on the pillow. It was only when I went closer, to wake her, that I saw the cloth was resting on a sheet of paper. The writing was larger and even more childishly written than my own: You don’t understand. I no longer feel anything.
I studied at Oxford where I got a First, and carried on, starting and almost completing a doctorate.
Then, in 1989, at the age of 24, I had a breakdown, and my life went into a sleep. In 2006 your mother came to work as a lecturer in the department where I worked pushing papers as an administrator, the only work that was mindless enough for me to do in my sleep. She saw something in me, took me under her wing, and I woke up. I carried on where I’d left off, as if my seventeen year snooze had left me not one line, one pound, one pull of gravity older.
I was asleep but, like a reveller who’s grown intoxicated and manages only a fitful slumber, there were times in those seventeen years when a sudden, rasping intake of breath woke me and my eyes shot open in a night-terror of confused lucidity.
One such moment came in 1996 when I saw Tracey Emin’s installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995. It consisted of a tent, on the inside of which the artist had embroidered the names of everyone with whom she had ever shared a bed, from lovers, to her mother, to the dead children in her womb.
After leaving the gallery, I sat in Bar Italia drinking coffee. I decided to embroider my own list on the inside of my mind. As I went through the list of my sleeping partners it struck me that I’d only ever shared my bed with things, and never with a person. I was so horrified that I put my coffee down at once, and fell back into the disturbed sleep of depression.
In October your mother brought me with her to Hungary as her research assistant. We arrived late, after you had gone to bed. Your father gave us a bowl of gulyás and showed us to our rooms. The next morning I woke with the first touch of sun. I hadn’t seen the place in the light so I went walking by myself in the vineyard.
For some reason I stopped on the path by the end of the house furthest from where I’d slept. I can remember every detail of the place – I stood next to the eighth vine back from the house. I looked up and there you were. You were wearing the thinnest blue dress that flowed around you like water. For the first time in ten years I remembered the list I had sewn inside my skull in Bar Italia, a list that began with a sliver of petrol-blue silk, the colour of your dress. I saw the contours of your body moving by the imprint they left in the cloth, and remembered the silk that had dropped from my mother’s scissors, the silk that had comforted me to sleep and caught the last tear my mother shed. I knew the feeling well enough this time to know that I was intoxicated. I was in love.
As long as I live, when I close my eyes it will no longer be to the criss-cross patterns of red and black or pinpoints of white noise and three-quarter faded images, but the cool, bright, ever-changing shimmer of blue; a blue that melts into cotton and silk and has no shape of its own, that takes the form of your flesh, is your skin without thickness or weight, the always moving liquid that I only have to close my eyes to drink.
So, where do we go from here?
Your
Claire.
My mind was blank of anything but uninterpreted images, images of skin and flesh, and silk and cotton; images of myself as Claire had seen me. Which me had she seen in those last seconds? An idealised me, framed by my bedroom window, or the desperate, helpless Sandrine, watching her die in slow motion? I would never know. Never. And never was too big a word for me to bear.
I found myself watching someone else, from beside the vine on the eighth row back, perhaps. I was watching a letter fall from their hand, brushing the hem of a blue cotton dress as it fell.
I was watching someone who looked like me, except that whirring cycles – like helicopter blades – of blankness and tics had taken hold of her face and were distorting it, slowly extracting what was human and leaving only a series of anatomical shapes. It was as though Picasso were working his life sketch into its final, disjointed state. Only he wasn’t pulling the girl I saw apart into a portrait. She wasn’t becoming one of the Desmoiselles D’Avignon. She was becoming Guernica, the twisted shrapnel of a person, iron and cement and death. The surface of her skin, dripping with sweat, fired off light indiscriminately like so much futile flak, while what was inside invisibly went sour.
In the end the noise of the building scream, silent but visible on every inch of her skin as it pushed her into a thousand inhuman shapes from the inside, was just too loud. I had to look away.