Sheets featuring faded paisley pattern in pale green, circa 1970s. 220 × 260 cm. 100 per cent cotton.
I remember:
Standing in the dingy hall, in the late afternoon. The house seemed empty, but there was music playing somewhere, cooking smells, footfall creaking. The sound of a dog barking. A clock ticking. I was playing with my bouncy ball, throwing it into the marked squares of the floor tiles: black, white, black. The noise echoed. The soles of my red Mary Janes squeaked.
The spiral of the staircase rose above me into darkness and then, right at the very top, disappeared in streams of light emanating for what seemed like miles above my head. The chandelier, always a source of anxiety, mocked me from above. I liked going up there, to the room at the very top. That might be where the grown-ups were hiding. Perhaps I’d go there now.
I am big enough for the stairs, but only just. I go up two at a time, to the first landing. It is gloomy, the window blinds are closed, as are both doors. I push one open and walk into the room, see bare floorboards. It’s empty, so I take this chance to spin and spin in circles, my nose tilted up towards the meringue of the ceiling rose until I feel dizzy. I sit on the floor, wondering where my mum and dad are. I will try their room.
I mount the next flight of stairs. I am tired and grouchy, and clammy, even in the cool indoors. It’s been very hot. I should be outside. Where is everyone?
I call for my mum, first in a small voice, then more loudly. I haul myself up onto the next landing, my bare knees hitting the rug of the second-floor landing, scratchy. I call for her again, the whine in my voice reverberating through the lonely house. I start to worry that they have all left me, that I am alone in the world.
Just as I start to cry, I hear the creak of the door to my parents’ room, a shaft of light. In it stands one of the grown-ups. She is not wearing any clothes, and between her legs is orange and furry, like copper wire wool. I look at it in horror, but she smiles at me, and puts her fingers to her lips. Behind her, my father yawns. I glimpse him half uncovered by my parents’ sheets – white, with a faded, mint-green paisley pattern (there are photographs of me lying on those sheets as a newborn). Harmony pulls the door to.
No, this is wrong, that is not how memories are at all. They are not neat narratives, but a series of shining flashes like those of a camera taking shots in quick succession, distinct from one another: there I am playing with the ball, climbing the stairs, calling for my mother, looking at the naked woman. One, two, three, four. That is all.
This is a memory I have always had. It was never repressed, just never dwelt upon. I grew up knowing it. That my father had other women Stella hardly kept a secret, nor was she especially forthcoming on the topic. It just was what it was, until it wasn’t. To learn from Coral that in fact she had hated it, had wanted me, and him, all for herself, made me wonder how she had behaved towards anyone who got in the way. Harmony. My namesake. My other mother.
The chunk of my life during which my mother and father were apart was four times longer than the time they had been together, and yet somehow their relationship continued to loom large throughout my childhood. Stella had had innumerable boyfriends, Bryn fewer relationships, and for longer, but both spoke of their time at Longhope with a wistful longing – my mother in her good moments skimming over the less savoury details and recalling, above all else, the sense of camaraderie, the endless stream of kooky visitors, the togetherness of it. No wonder it seemed to her a golden time. The countryside, her depression, had isolated her, and she must have craved the companionship of the city. Though at her lowest points she appeared to blame Longhope bitterly for all the pain she suffered in her life, you only had to see her eyes blazing to know it was also the place where she had had the most fun.
Bryn was happier in the wilderness, but when asked would speak fondly of the thrill of rebellion and his various scrapes. As a squatter, he experienced a number of brushes with authority, the one I most remember him reminiscing about being the time when Longhope was raided by the police shortly after it was squatted. They broke the door down and the fifteen or so people staying in the house scattered. Bryn said he was in what was then the communal kitchen that was to become Coral’s living room and kitchenette, and so bolted through the French windows into the garden and up a tree. ‘I was up there for nearly twelve hours, freezing my bollocks off,’ he told me, smiling.
To Bryn, Longhope prompted reflections no more profound than funny anecdotes. He was never one to live in the past, and that was part of his charm. He certainly never mentioned his other lovers, or ‘your father’s girlfriends’ as Stella would darkly refer to them after several drinks. I remember there always being lots of women around, but my memory of the naked redhead in the doorway was the only concrete experience on which I could rely. There were other things I recalled about my time in the commune, of course, but it was and remains hard to distinguish between what had actually happened and what was the result of the legends created by my parents, or the few photographs I had seen. Did I remember the bathroom because I remembered it or because I had seen a picture of it? Were the faces of the residents masks that I had conjured or reflections of the people I had met?
I had always thought I remembered, for instance, playing in the garden. A rug would be put down for us under the lilac tree, and Gabs and I would lie on our backs and look at the sky through the leaves. Someone made a swing, and we pushed each other on it. Stella and Vita sat on deck chairs, watching. They gave us cubes of chopped-up mango, small enough to suck. They tasted of sunshine.
Another memory. Once, as I was being taken to bed, I looked out of the second-floor window below to see three of the grown-ups on the swing all at once, laughing. Another time I was trying to sleep but I couldn’t because the music was so loud. The light from the kitchen glowed from the top of the stairs. When I stood on the threshold, there were people dancing.
Did she describe these things to me or did they leave a lasting imprint?
I knew I remembered the woman in the doorway. Before I returned to Longhope Crescent and my namesake began to sweep through my dreams, that was all I could be certain of, a series of scenes, as though imprinted on a negative. Returning, and meeting Coral, changed that, filling in some of the still-faint blanks. Harmony had picked up a spider that frightened us in the garden, she had held me when I tried to fly and instead fell, played with and tickled me, and, I felt with utmost certainty, loved me. According to Coral, this young woman wasn’t just my father’s lover but had been as much a parent to me as Bryn and Stella. Yet my parents – driven by motives which seemed to hint at mean and exploitative acts on their part – had told me she had died before I came to the world.
It is not that I couldn’t countenance the idea that my parents might be cruel – I had been well aware from a young age how sadness can make a person unkind. Stella’s warm love enveloped me with a depth of feeling I never doubted, but she was also brittle, taking even the mildest of comments as a profound criticism of her very being. In her mind, a minor mistake or upset was not simply a case of human error but a monument to her having failed as a mother, standing in testament to all her flaws and weaknesses. ‘I might as well die,’ she would say, sobbing, during some row or other when I had expressed myself as any teenager does, ‘I’m a useless human being’. It was a tendency towards the dramatic that I also noted in Lucia – that automatic leap towards the worst-case scenario: yourself. And so I would comfort and reassure her and whatever small slight I had made would be forgotten as I swallowed my own grievances and held her to me like a baby.
Where Stella could be sensitive and prone to lashing out, my father Bryn seemed to run on indifference. As one of the calmest people I knew, it was a mystery to me how he had stayed for so long with my mother. He was perpetually unflustered, including by the fact he had a daughter, but again, I knew his love was under there, somewhere. The closest I can come to explaining it is that his affection was expressed in his treating me with respect. I was cocooned in the balmy comfort of his high regard. Even as a small child, he would speak to me as though I had the emotional and intellectual sophistication of another adult.
I was a child of whom grown-up feelings and grown-up conversation topics were expected, a legacy that came from having no siblings. There were other children in the house, of course, but they were to an extent expected to contribute to the commune as an adult would: by shelling broad beans, or pressing tofu, and entertaining them as they curled up on the sofa with their roll-ups and their home brews.
That day in the garden, when I unearthed the cement, was a shock, but confirmed a feeling that had always niggled about that summer, which is that things had gone horribly, awfully wrong and that no one, for reasons of guilt or estrangement or mistrust, would tell me what happened. And trying to remember it was like staring down into a murky garden pond: every now and again, at the corners of the shadow of your own reflection, you catch the shine of a fish scale in the light, and then it’s gone.
I stared at the etching of our name. My thoughts were all white noise, cut through only by Coral’s placing of her hand on my shoulder. Her skin was coarse against mine, like the palm of a girl I had known at school who lived on a farm and whose skin was cracked with criss-crossed lines, except Coral didn’t work at all. But I did, and I needed to be at the pub soon.
‘I think there are some things we need to talk about,’ Coral was saying.
‘Too right,’ I said. Then, ‘I can’t believe Stella.’
‘She had her reasons, though I can’t say I agree with them. Hey, have you got any more beers upstairs? Might as well make the most of the rest of the sunlight while we talk.’
We had barely made a dent. I looked hopelessly at the remaining expanse of garden. It was hard to tell but it appeared to stretch out for over thirty feet. If you laid the house on its side, it would fit comfortably in the space.
‘I don’t think we’re going to have time. I have to go,’ I said. ‘I have work.’
‘Please yourself. Miss Curiosity the one minute, aren’t you, and couldn’t care less the next. Whatever, I’ll amuse myself. Got a ten bag and a BBC4 documentary.’ I tried to laugh. ‘See you tomorrow.’
I ran upstairs. Josh was in his room dozing when I came in. He held his arm out to me, smiling, and tried to pull me down on top of him. ‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘What’s wrong? You look odd. Are you ok?’
‘I just found out that my dad was sleeping with this woman when I was a kid who I thought died before I was born. While he was with my mum. Which sounds weird and eccentric, but actually isn’t all that surprising, except my mum lied to me which is why I thought she was dead, and I don’t know why. Also she has the same name as me.’
And by the way, I added in my head, we all used to live here.
There was a pause. ‘Ok,’ said Josh. ‘But are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, in a way that I hoped sounded business-like. ‘I have to go.’ I kissed him, his chest hardening as I reached up to stroke the hair at the nape of his neck. ‘Wait up for me.’
‘I will,’ he said. ‘I wanted to have a chat actually. I’m worried about Lucia. She’s going a bit off the rails.’
I hadn’t seen her, but it did not surprise me. ‘Let’s talk about it later.’
I descended the stairs just as Coral started screaming again. I really should plough through her gruff reticence and talk to her about that, I thought. I’m not proud that I hadn’t, but the truth was that I was frightened to. But mostly I just thought what I always thought, whenever anyone of my parents’ generation started behaving in their typically unfathomable way, like the time I visited my dad at his last place and they broke out the chanting with no forewarning. Which was, simply: ‘Jesus Christ. These people.’