— 2016 —
’cause we were never being boring
Pet Shop Boys
The child not-in the buggy gets off at Birmingham New Street, having run up and down the carriage, tapping at the seat backs with the persistence of a death metal drummer. I look at him as he pads down the platform, stopping to pick a discarded lolly stick off the concourse, and think of my own children – and about how mind-numbing parenthood can be.
A friend asked me the other day if I missed it. By which she meant, did I miss the double life, the conquests, the danger. I looked across the table for a moment, taken aback by the question, and by the insight that lay beneath it. The answer is not so much that I miss the danger, as that I dread the boredom. As the clock edges towards the moment of school pick-up, I enter another world of frequent greyness. The boredom of the cooking, the traffic jams and wee-stops, the tipping of half-finished bowls of Weetabix down the sink that have sat on the table all day so the milk has curdled and what’s left has become crusted to the sides of the bowl like vomit down the sides of a toilet bowl. The guilt of frustration, and the boredom of guilt. The boredom when you hear one of them calling for the iPad at 5.45 a.m. and give in, in a way that makes you feel that you have, yet again, so signally failed. And for sure, it is punctuated by small miracles. But perhaps I am not alone in finding myself fascinated by the ways in which domestic life often feels so desperately drab.
Yesterday, for the first time in a year, I was without them. I sat in a small hotel room in Hull, overlooking a flat roof grimed with mildew. The schedule was mine, to take or leave. I took a bath at midday in the beige floral bathroom, and cut my toenails. I put the red cardboard Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and I slept. I dropped my clothes on the floor and enjoyed the experience of not picking them up. I watched Bargain Hunt on the big Samsung TV, which was unhappily bolted to the wall, isolated against a background of pine-look panelling. Nobody, for once, could come into my room without my invitation. I was responsible for nobody’s health and nobody’s safety. I could negotiate the space as broadly or as narrowly as I wished. I opened the wardrobe and looked at the Corby Trouser Press. I leafed through the Holy Bible, placed by the Gideons. It opened immediately at 2 Chronicles 32, its pages warped, as if it had been dropped in the bath. It told the story of Hezekiah’s pride, success, and death. The sign hung on the door handle like a drawbridge – and a moat.
The room had been booked for me by a man at the University of Hull, and he had no idea how happy it was making me. All hotel rooms are alike, but some hotel rooms are more alike than others. I was in Hull to give a public talk about jealousy and envy, and the difference between them. Why are we so ashamed, I wondered, of envy? Why is envy always cast as a woman? Ugly sisters. That foul witch, Sycorax, in The Tempest, who is grown into a hoop with envy.
It was as good a topic as any, but I’d left the writing of it to the last minute, working from an old talk I’d given some years before. My heart wasn’t in it. I would rather have been thinking about Anna Karenina. I imagined another talk I could give. ‘Anna Karenina at home’, I would call it. Complete with pictures of the places that Anna Karenina might have once lived. The life that Tolstoy’s wife would have inhabited. Grand houses then were arranged en filade – every room interlocking another. En filade means gunfire. That makes a kind of sense. Those moments when someone invades a quiet space, running through a room looking for their shoes or their wallet, metaphorically killing the moment. En filade houses are not-quite open-plan, but open to constant interruption. In Tolstoy’s Moscow house, the tourist groups make their way awkwardly around the building, reversing or side-shifting at the doorways, bumping into the potted ferns that burst out around gathered muslin curtains. A life in time and space punctuated by others. You can imagine the children crashing through the nursery, playing trains, rocketing past their mother, who is copying a manuscript in her bedroom, to reach the dull drawing room with its densely patterned navy blue carpet, its curtains hiding curtains and its candlesticks and mirrors. Everything is connected. The man fixing the gramophone would be walking into the sitting room to speak about the broken needles, past the maid walking to and fro to fetch water and fruit, and the stuffed bear that held the tray of visiting cards. Visitors walking through the living room would pause in the smaller drawing room, embroidered to within an inch of its life.
Sofia Tolstoy writes of the boredom of it all. She complains about the nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping and loving and caring for my husband’s babies. The collection of parcels and the sewing. Darning holes and attending to the children’s piano lessons. Sometimes shopping. Toys for the children – some tops, a thimble, warm gloves, a brooch. I wish something would happen soon. She copies out her husband’s diaries: There is no such thing as love, he writes. Only the physical need for intercourse, and the practical need for a life companion.
I am, she said, a piece of household furniture.
Part of the furniture. Parental life is full of it. Full of these tiny boredoms. And how cleverly memory erases them. The waiting in the queue for the infant swing in the swarming playground. The emptying of the lunch box the morning after the night before, and groping in the bread bin to find two matching slices of non-mouldy bread. The blockwalking with a squalling toddler in a buggy at 3 p.m., desperate for them to have the nap that they’re desperately fighting against. A few months later you realise that they wouldn’t go to sleep because they have outgrown the nap, and the whole exercise was pointless.
Boredom, though, is less about what you are doing, from emptying the bins, to washing up (mundane though these tasks may be), than about a sudden feeling of the absence of alternatives, a feeling of not-looking-forward-to. It’s a mode of waiting for something to wait for. Of wanting the experience of wanting. It has something to do with losing our normal experience of how we live in time. How we live together.
Roland Barthes wrote a whole book about what it means to live with other people. A manual about what it means to endure or enjoy the condition of cohabitation. There is, for him, a way in which we might live together in time but still keep our individual freedom. An idea of idiorhythmic existence – the concept of living alone-but-together, living to a beat that is both distinct and communal. A group of Greek monks, apparently, have got this nailed. The philosopher managed it in his own way by living with his mum. His book doesn’t say anything about living with nits.
Perhaps it is the relentless requirement for presentness demanded by the role of parenthood that I find so difficult, and sometimes so frightening. My children, like most, live in the present. I see this in their wonderful impracticality. Their determination to start an elaborate craft activity involving PVA glue and balloons four minutes before we leave for school. In their ability to spend forty-five minutes transfixed by an earwig, and a worm called Jim. And if I let myself feel for their sense of time, I am required to live in the present with them too.
When I watch small children playing, it seems to me that they transform all the rules of time – all our forward-looking and ambitions and plans and schemes – into a fiction, a tower of cardboard boxes that can be felled at any point and repurposed to make a dolls’ house. This presentness, this being in the now, is delicious, but it is anything but sensible. It threatens all that I construct to keep me moving forwards as a responsible adult, as a mother, as a wife. Child’s play knows no consequence. Their sense for the moment is dangerous. It brings me close to the recklessness that I used to know so well.
Tolstoy kept his own time in his Moscow house, and a separate working room at the top of the second floor – oilskin walls, and a heavy desk with a small raised rail around the edge. It was calm there, peculiarly remote from the rest of the house, insulated from the sounds of the city or the children shouting in the garden. A separate back staircase provided a quick exit out of the rear of the house to the garden. His days were regularised by his own system – wood chopping, exercises, writing, shoe-making, riding his bicycle. But at 6 p.m., the cuckoo clock on the yellow wall above the dining table would call the family together. Time alone would transform to time together, regulated by the cabbage soup and the hiss of the samovar. You can go and look at his room. Beyond the roped-off boundary, in a glass box, lies the great writer’s briefcase. It is black with brass corners, propped up slightly, and the clasp is open, as if still in use.
I imagine the inside of his bag is clean, just a few papers and a pen. Perhaps a book, and an apple from his orchard – a gift he would take to the nursery, at a time that suited him. There was room in his life to think.
We flash through the runs of houses as the sun comes out. The green fields turn yellow, the speed and light create a kind of strobe effect, the leaves transforming into stripes or streaks as we move south. It’s a bright day, the sort where you could burn without realising it. I feel in my bag for my suncream. Safely stowed, not forgotten in the chaos and the mess. Years ago they used to call it suntan lotion. It came in bottles with foreign names. Ambre Solaire Piz Buin. Squeezed out to smell of holidays and sandcastles, of my mother in a bikini and my father with a white hat on, digging an enormous paddling pool on the beach for me, because I was scared of the sea.
My father was a golden man, much like my son. Flame red hair and skin so white the veins on the inside of his arms showed through blue. Growing up, he wanted to be a travel writer. He would have understood Kate Field’s desire to keep moving, to keep walking, to see everything. Every summer in his twenties, he would pack his possessions up into a small rucksack and head for Greece – wearing a shirt and shorts. He stood for hours, sketching. The Acropolis. A lizard. A cliff.
The moles were bleeding for nearly a year, on and off, my mother told me. It was, for my father, a detail. A small thing. It didn’t matter. Nobody really knew about melanoma then. Or about proper suncream. Extraordinary how the body does it. The mutated melanocyte cells begin nesting deep within a freckle or mole, minute but persistent, pushing their way down through the subcutaneous tissue. They are the anarchists, growing out of pattern, careless of geometry and rank. Pleomorphic, giant, hyperactive. They form a mass, hungry for blood. Then swelling in number, they send their misshapen progeny down the line. Neoplastic pioneers heading for the bloodstream to make new families. In-laws and hangers-on pop up, some lost, some full of direction, building themselves new homes in the lymph glands, the watchful sentinels. They gather their force, heading off to distant locations, carried by the blood, and an unstoppable dynasty is begun.
I was thirty-one when my mother noticed the small mole on my arm turning from brown to black, almost red-black at one edge, and slightly harder to the touch. The doctor cut part of it out, then stitched me up. He sat, two weeks later, by the examination couch. We need to take more out, he told me.
There is nothing to worry about. It’s early, he said. He knew about my dead dad. You’ll have grandchildren, and you’ll see them. Loads of them.
They made what he called a wide local incision. I liked the words, which seemed both big and small simultaneously. As the scar healed, it turned smooth and polished, matching the ones on my father’s legs. I have two of them now, on my right arm, one making a large dent, the stitch marks still showing purple like train tracks.
I would give my right arm to get him back. And somehow, in doing so, I did. Those scars, that dent, give me something that nobody else has ever given me, something nobody else can take away. A memory of loss. Two patches of smooth and hardened skin. They are my near misses. My legacy.
The train goes past Kingswood. Looking around the carriage, the passengers gaze into the middle distance as we curve round the M40. They sit, glazed, like a disaffected theatre audience, spectators of lives that are not their own, watching nothing in particular.