Beach bucket, red plastic, 16 cm x 16 cm x 16 cm,castle-shaped. Made in China c.1994.
Assorted rabbit bones (28).
The scream, if that’s what you could call it, sounded like a cat dying. Or, to be correct: it sounded like the idea of a cat dying (when our cat died, ancient and dribbling, it bolted silently behind the horsehair sofa and would not come out). It was a horrible sound, too protracted to be foxes mating, a noise any Londoner is familiar with. It echoed through the still summer dawn, bouncing and ululating across the half-stuccoed terraces that stand gravely, like balding wedding cakes, along what is, apart from our crumbling black sheep of a building, a very respectable middle-class street. Longhope Crescent was populated by retired newspaper editors, Marxist university professors and one former Labour Party leader – not the kind of people who make such noises, normally. It certainly wasn’t an animal, I was sure about that, but as I came to in a strange bed on my first morning in that house, my mind groping for clarity like fingers in the dark, it occurred to me sleepily that I had heard such a noise before, a long time ago.
The kitchen, later that first morning. I was making a pot of coffee and Josh, my new flatmate, was putting on his trainers, about to run out the door to work. He was – I would learn later – habitually late, waiting until the last possible moment to roll out of bed and often not even showering before he went. Apparently it’s quite difficult to get sacked from local government, even if you have poor personal hygiene. Especially if you’re in the union.
I hadn’t seen him since I had moved into the house on Longhope Crescent the afternoon before, but from the stumbling sounds and muffled swearing coming from the hall in the early hours, I gathered it had been a late one. Hungover and in the process of removing a pallid, not-quite-cooked potato waffle from the toaster, he didn’t seem in the mood to talk. But the strange howling sound had unnerved me, though not as much as the answer he gave me did.
‘Did you hear that, this morning? What the hell was it?’
‘It’s her downstairs,’ he said. ‘Sometimes her dad comes over and shags her.’
I gawked at him. His accent – northern, scratchy – made the statement sound even more uninterested than his casual delivery, but I suspect he enjoyed shocking me.
‘She’s had a hard life, let’s put it that way,’ he said, and went.
At this point, having just moved in, I had not met any of our neighbours. I knew that they were not ‘like us’, being, we were told by the agency who managed our flat, local authority tenants (if that sounds snobbish, it’s not meant to be, I’m merely stating the facts). Upstairs was a Womanist lesbian with a vegetarian cat who complained about the smell of bacon wafting through the kitchen door (Josh said we were not to give the cat, which he nicknamed Chairman Meow, tuna lest it be sick in the hall again and cause another row) and downstairs was ‘The Screamer’. Our privately rented flat was sandwiched between them and let out for a sum much closer to the market rate, but it had retained something of the institutional ambience that the housing association had created in the years since it had taken over the property – woodchip wallpaper and strip lighting, a Victorian conversion butchered and divided, all false ceilings and that clear, checked glass in the doors that looks like the transparent paper pages of a maths book. Fire door, keep shut. Like I said, a terrible conversion, a tragedy, really. If aesthetics are important to you. If you can afford for them to be, which I can’t.
That the house was a shadow of its former self was a fact that I had almost shared with Josh when he showed me around as a prospective tenant. He walked me from room to room, not realising that I not only knew the building better than he did, but that the house had been a central part of my identity for so long that his attempt to explain it to me seemed presumptuous. Longhope made me. He was only its custodian, until such time as I saw fit to return.
It was nothing like I remembered. The patch of concrete out front on which I’d played hopscotch was miniscule; the hall was not cavernous and majestic but shabby, the air dead and musty, as though it had been shut up from the moment Stella and I fled it. The wallpaper was a horror of magnolia woodchip, durable enough to withstand the building’s conveyor belt of tenants. Nor was the house the same as when I saw it in my frequent claustrophobic dreams, and in some ways I was affronted. I had experienced a similar feeling when, as a teenager and after much nagging, my godmother had taken me for a drive past the old place in her car. ‘They’ve changed the curtains,’ I said, insulted. In my childish way I had genuinely and innocently wanted that house to be kept as a perpetual mausoleum to my presence there, and was outraged when I saw this was not the case – I had cried for the entire drive back. ‘I shouldn’t have taken you,’ she said, then. ‘Some things are best left alone.’
I cried this time, too, though after Josh had shut the door. And all because the bathroom suite was no longer blue and there was a pound shop power shower. When he took me on the tour, I had almost mentioned this fact before checking myself in case I ruined my chances of being accepted. Because who does that? Stakes out a house they lived in long ago? A crazy person, no one you would want to live with.
How clearly I could remember sitting in that blue bath as a little girl, the sting of cheap soap between my legs and in my eyes, my mother tutting and rinsing – a present from Grandma, and God knows how old – war soap. I did not want him to know my reasons for wanting to go back. I knew that being honest about my childhood there would only create unease between us. We are taught from a young age that to live is to be in a state of constant forward momentum. It’s viewed as suspect to dwell on the past; to move back into it, suitcases in hand, is pure insanity. But I needed to feel that I existed somewhere.
Besides, the reasons for my presence were too nebulous to be articulated. All I had to go on were the furtive, guilty whisperings of my mother Stella, whose departure from the house when I was little had coincided with a breakdown, and who would clam up or worse, go into a frenzy, every time I probed too deeply, until eventually I learned to avoid the topic, and never mentioned the appearance of the house in my dreams, in which I patrolled the building moving from room to room in the wake of whatever it was I sought. I was in pursuit of someone, or something, that remained elusive. Some scrap, some clipping of a memory long dulled, and I reached out for it, but like a child grasping for its mother’s skirts as she is leaving, I found myself alone, abandoned in the hallway as I stared at my empty palm in realisation that I had clutched only air. Above, the chandelier swung and creaked, as I stood waiting for Stella’s inevitable scream to perforate the dead air. ‘Don’t look! Don’t look!’ She dragged me away, a bundle in her arms as the sirens started.
After these dreams, I woke in a terrified state, startling and gasping for oxygen as though coming up to the surface of the sea. I did not know the reasons for these nightmares. For months I had felt that somehow the house represented unfinished business. The urge to return strengthened as the dreams became more frequent and my sleep more disrupted. This was during the autumn term of 2010, in the second year of my degree in archaeology and museum studies. During my waking hours, I felt constantly restless, as though every cell in my body was buzzing at a higher frequency. A sense of dislocation, which I now know to be the depersonalisation that is so often associated with trauma, pursued me everywhere I went. And then there was the episode at the party. I had been standing on the landing surrounded by people, smoke and noise, and all of a sudden had the horrifying sensation that a part of me was being ripped away, and that I no longer knew who I was. Even after they had picked me up off the carpet and taken me home and put me to bed, to sleep longer and more deeply than I had in years, it seemed to me that normal service had not resumed. I had been splintered into my component parts and I did not know how to reassemble them. And so I went back to Longhope, the only place that had ever felt unshakeable to me, until one awful day it hadn’t.
In any case, explaining the episode, and these vague urges to return to the house of my young childhood, wouldn’t have changed much as far as my new flatmates’ initial impressions of me were concerned. Later, when we began to speak with more honesty, Josh told me that he had had reservations about me, as a flatmate.
‘I thought you might be a potential weirdo,’ he said. ‘But Lou liked you, so that was that.’
‘Why did you think I was a weirdo?’ I said. It became a joke eventually, but at the time I was hurt. I had made such concentrated attempts at nonchalance.
‘It just all seemed a bit strange – someone of your age, a student. I assumed you’d be in a student house, and wondered why you didn’t seem to have any friends to live with. I said to Lou – be careful of her.’
What did he think? That I would attack them? That my sleepless nights, spent sitting in the living room wrapped in a blanket, clutching a mug of herbal tea so hot it burned my hands, were signs of a dangerous instability?
‘I have friends,’ I said, with a degree of defensiveness. But the truth was, I didn’t have many. The student part wasn’t strictly true, either.
As I unpacked that first, bright day in early summer, I found my teenage years in the pockets of an old denim jacket, a jacket my father had bought me sometime in the late nineties, when they were briefly fashionable. ‘You’ll wear this for life,’ he had said at the time, in his Tesco jeans and his Paris ‘68 T-shirt and his cherry red Doc Martens (as if he’d know). In fact, the trend had been fleeting and was only just seeing a resurgence. The ‘creatives’ of East London had decided at some point that year (2011) that looking as though you were raised on a New Jersey turnpike was the last word in cool. I had always vaguely aspired to hipsterdom, hence the jacket’s presence now, but I lacked the angular, androgynous face and figure, and despite a diet consisting mainly of toast, cigarettes and instant coffee, my fleshy thighs remained stubbornly together, rubbing when I walked. Ninety-nine per cent of succeeding as a hipster seemed to involve being thin, and I wasn’t. I craved that effortless spindly lightness that men seemed to like (these days I wonder instead about those men, who seem to like girls that are fragile and breakable, and take up less of their space). Still, the jacket fitted better at twenty-four than it had at eighteen.
So, emptying those pockets, my Proustian madeleine was a denim scrunchie and an old newsagent’s receipt for Just Seventeen. It was discarded chocolate wrappers, from when I used to have a bar every day on the way home from school, before my weight became a source of shame and worry, and those tiny plastic butterfly clips in pastel colours, run through with glitter. There were the audition guidelines for a school play, the main part in which I had desperately wanted, and had not got, largely because of what I had been unable to accept was a mediocre singing voice. Instead I was a chorus girl in a fur coat and pin curls. ‘You actually look pretty’, a girl in my class had said to me, ‘when you wear make-up.’ I have worn it every day since.
Looking at the contents spread out on the dusty carpet, the tastes of my childhood came right back to me. I remembered the fluorescent green, acidic tanginess of Hubba Bubba and how it makes your tongue contract. The saccharine peachiness of Campinos from the vending machine. Home, meanwhile, tasted like the lentil stew that my mother had perfected in the London house and had continued to experiment with long after we moved away. We ate a lot of lentil stew. I can still feel the mealiness of it sticking to the inside of my mouth. It was just about the only thing she could make, and she only made it when she wasn’t in one of her ‘blue’ periods. Most of the time it was I who cooked, following vague instructions mumbled from beneath her duvet. Or else we ate sandwiches.
Lunch tasted of free school meals, the phrase so often used by newspapers as a marker of deprivation. ‘Seventy per cent of the pupils are on free school meals,’ they’ll report, but to us it just meant that your dad didn’t live with you. (I don’t think Bryn ever sent us much money.) They used to have these bacon burgers – imagine, in this superfood-preoccupied era, such a thing as a burger made of reformed bacon. I loved them, not because they tasted of actual bacon, but because they tasted of pretend bacon, like crisps, or in the same way a banana milkshake tastes like an alien chemist trying to replicate the distilled essence of a banana: banana extra, banana concentrate, with added banana. A pretentious acquaintance had a nostalgic dinner party once, when we were students, and only just discovering that there were things to be nostalgic about. We all sat down and consumed huge quantities of mini pizzas and potato smiley faces and Spaghetti Hoops and Angel Delight, and I’d scoured the aisles of Iceland looking for those fondly remembered, umami-ish bacon burgers, but no luck. They have probably been banned. So I came empty handed, and felt uncomfortable at the canteen memories that were less novelty than daily reality for a child whose mother was governed by mysterious forces that swept in like storms to galvanise and then disable her.
The smells are less tangible. I know in theory what it should smell like, a nineties childhood: Impulse body spray and Matey bubble bath, and too much Lynx (clinging to the skins and clothes of boys who wanted us to want them while at the same time hating and fearing us and our strange bodies) but I can’t raise any of these memories. The only smell I recall is the one which, all summer, emanated from the utility room. We’d spent a day at the beach – a secret beach, I had called it, because along with my mum’s friend Susan and her daughter we had driven for miles through windy country lanes, eventually parking next to a bank of sand dunes. From there we had walked for what seemed like miles, across the dunes, until we reached a stretch of unblemished sand. I can still see it now: the sea sparkling in the sun as I ran towards it, seven.
But the smell wasn’t the sea, not quite. On the long trudge back to the car across the dunes that hundreds of rabbits had made their home, Sue’s daughter lagged behind, pausing to pick things up and dropping them in her bright red bucket. It wasn’t until we got home that we realised she’d been collecting bones. The bucket was full to the brim with little rabbit bones, bleached white by the sun but browning at the edges. There was even a skull, beaky and bird-like without its distinctive ears. Later, after tea, Susan’s daughter got in the car and forgot them, leaving them to rot over August in the utility room, producing a smell that I could only describe as decaying seawater. So there it is: my childhood smells like a bucketful of rabbit bones. It’s not ideal. Strange, though: I cried when my mother threw these precious found objects away.
‘Do you ever feel an overwhelming sense of sadness that you’ll never be a child again?’ I once asked Lou, after I had been at Longhope Crescent for a month or so and had got to know her better. I was thinking of the denim jacket, which I was wearing, and how, instead of making me look fondly back on my teenage years like someone older, wiser, thinner, it just made me feel sad for the things I had lost.
‘Sometimes,’ said Lou, smoking a fag out of the window. ‘It’s normal, though, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I thought there was something quite feeble about it.’
‘Like how?’
‘Like sometimes, when I was a teenager, and even now when I’m being particularly negative, I sort of wish I could just check into a hospital, maybe a psychiatric ward, maybe for exhaustion, and just be looked after for a bit, or possibly forever. Then I wouldn’t have to think any more, and people would feel sorry for me, and visit. It’s pathetic.’
Lou looked at me. ‘I’d say that’s pretty normal, darling. Maybe you’re having a quarter-life crisis.’ She waved her hand at a pile of newspaper supplements lying haphazardly on the kitchen table. ‘Aspiration-fuelled anxiety. Call up the papers, they’d be all over it. The “lost generation”, that’s us. Or what was it one of them said? The “fuck it” generation. Fucked. We’re fucked.’ She said this almost jubilantly, carefully enunciating every letter of the word with pleasure, but mixed with a hint of derision that implied that to have any kind of crisis whatsoever was unbecoming.
‘Ha.’ I walked over to the window.
‘It’s the boomers, of course, bringing us up to think we’re such special fucking snowflakes. And they sneer at us. We were raised by people who were never hugged as children. Our grandparents’ generation were practically Victorians. Why else did they have the sexual revolution, the summer of love? They wanted the affection they never had as kids, ergo they were all nailing each other. The boomers are a generation of casualties.’
‘I was hugged as a child,’ I said.
‘Of course you were. We all were. Probably too much. That’s the point, isn’t it? They didn’t want to make the same mistakes that their parents did, so they smothered us with love and attention and told us we could be whatever we wanted to be. And now they say we’re entitled and idealistic and they resent us. They resent us for having the love that they never had, even though they were the ones giving it. Well, I resent them.’
She put her fag out, as I did a rapid mental audit of how much I had told her during those first, fast-talking coked up nights in the kitchen, when she told the story of her childhood and I skimmed the surface of mine. That my parents were self-styled bohemians, that we had lived in a commune, though not that it was in this house, and that they had divorced. Nothing, as far as I remember, about all the pain that had played out within these very walls, Stella’s removed sadness as a result of it, the wounds it had left on me. ‘Where did you go after the commune?’ Lou had asked. ‘Everywhere,’ I said. ‘Stella never settled.’ I told her nothing about how we had left, had tried to be a family, only for my mother to flee back to Longhope, taking me with her for those few short months that ended in horror. I didn’t even know where to begin to talk about that summer.
‘Spare me the pop psychology,’ I said. But Lou’s talk of Victorian parenting brought to mind my stern, sullen grandfather, a man I had met perhaps twice, and one time barely counted because he had come to try to persuade Stella to ‘rejoin society’ as he saw it, and my mother hadn’t let him past the doorstep.
‘Sometimes I think you girls are obsessed with your parents,’ said Josh, from the doorway. ‘It’s all you ever talk about. Why not live your own lives?’
They made it impossible, I wanted to say. Or at least, mine did. The myth of their wild youth muffled everything else, and because of that I barely know myself. Beyond the walls of this house, and all it stands for, I am a curious outlander. The only clues are to be found here. Instead I said nothing.
‘How can we not be?’ said Lou. ‘They played us their music, endlessly. They reminisce fondly about Astral Weeks, and get maudlin over Polaroid photographs. They watch BBC4 documentaries about the sixties and every other weekend is the anniversary of something, some momentous, history-changing occasion: John Lennon taking a dump, or whatever. And they’re surprised when we fetishise vinyl and put little nostalgic filters on our photos? Is it any wonder we talk about them? It’s the last time anything was tangible. All our shit is in a cloud.’
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Josh. ‘You say you hate it, but you love it. You know all the words to all eight minutes of ‘American Pie’. I’ve seen you in the kitchen, dancing to the Stones, looking at pictures of your mum from her modelling days and going on and on about how your dad once got off with Nico, as though back then it was so great and there were no power cuts or unemployment or bombed-out bloody buildings all over the shop. Things are better now.’
He sat down at the table. They often had arguments like this, in which Lou would argue flamboyantly and dramatically while Josh would play the part of the no-nonsense, straight-talking northerner. He seemed to consider it his task to rile her up and calm her down again, while he acted as a vessel for her class-based frustrations and her vague sense of embarrassment at her own privilege.
‘Things are better now? Things are better now? They had it so bloody good, Josh, with their free education and their massive houses that cost a piece of piss and are worth millions now . . . ’
‘My parents bought their council house,’ Josh said, or tried to, but was drowned out.
‘Even the drugs were better back then. That weed I picked up last week was shocking. You smoked it; you know what I’m saying. No one laughs when they’re high anymore, have you noticed that? I hate them. I hate them for doing everything first, and for free, and then destroying it for us. I hate them but I want to be them. Don’t you?’
Throughout this exchange Lou had been waving her hands about and the kimono that she used as a smoking outfit (and which, of course, like almost everything else she owned that wasn’t digital, had once belonged to her mother) had fallen open to reveal the cream perk of her breasts. But Josh was still looking at her face. It was taking some effort.
‘It’s obvious you want to be them. I mean, look at you Lucia,’ he said. ‘That hair.’
Lou lit another cigarette. ‘You think things are better now?’ she inhaled. ‘When everything is a version of something else? Every fashion trend is recycled, and every song is sampled? And every plot’s already been done a thousand times?’
‘I just think you live in the past to avoid having to think about what’s going on now,’ said Josh. ‘And that’s also why you dress like a grandma.’
‘Harmony?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to back me on this?’ They both looked at me, but who was I to mock the idea of living in the past? Josh was right, to an extent. I revelled in the lives that they had led.
I stayed silent. My parents met at a CND rally. They were everything Josh talked about, and more besides. Their nostalgia weighed more than my own ever had.