What, live without a fixed address? Me? I’m not sure about all this. Receive no letters? I am accustomed to certain rhythms in my life. I like the morning paper to come through the letterbox. I like my day to start with very cold orange juice. I like the sense of my mind starting from cold, like the engine of my car, to its agreeable morning purr. I like my fingers on the computer keyboard; the pen in my hand. I like a full-length mirror on the wall, unsmudged, unsmeared. In fact, I feel pretty much as my grandmother must have done, when she declined to abscond with her gypsy lover.
I, on the other hand, like Mad Jack’s stubbly chin: I like his wide mouth, his even teeth, his bright eyes and long fingers. I like the music he makes. I like his past, meeting up with mine to form this powerful present. If I have to, I will do without my certain rhythm, and think the privilege of a fixed address well lost for love.
I sit at the window where lately the splashes of blood appeared and disappeared – there is no sign of them now – clearly, the way to deal with these little demonstrations of a traumatic past, seeping through the barriers so sensibly erected by our conscious minds, is to ignore them, as one might the tantrum of a naughty child. I watch the Band getting out of the van, instruments glinting in the pale light. For once their voices are lowered – in deference to what? Me? Frances? I hardly imagine so. More likely the moon. Jack, long, lean-thighed, quick moving, somehow elongated, fit for a Goya portrait. My breath catches in my throat. My heart lurches. I speak advisedly. Love it may be, but the symptoms of love and death are not so dissimilar. I have an ECG trace of my own heart to prove it. (Where? Where are my belongings? Where are the traces of my history?) I have always travelled light, but this is going too far. I should have taken more from Matthew’s house. I should not have provoked him. Now he has control of my past, as a witch has control of the person whose fingernail clippings she possesses. I thought I was happy enough with the contents of the nylon bag I brought with me in the bus – I thought that some money in the bank, a cheque book, a credit card or so, an address book with the numbers of friends and colleagues, and a change of pants and a change of jeans was all I needed – my past, after all, being carried in my memory if I needed to refer to it, my present being an ongoing situation – but here I am, wanting sight and feel, the physical actual sight and feel of a strip of blue, waxed, lined paper containing a portion of my cardiac history. Oh, how much weaker am I than I thought: where is my home? where are my slippers? – and I remember how I once did possess, in my late twenties, a pair of mauve high-heeled fur-lined slippers of wonderful vulgarity, which I can only have bought to annoy Godfrey the Goatherd – whatever became of them? – of the copper-bottomed saucepans I like? my manuscripts? My familiar desk is still at Central, it’s true, and in it the kind of pleasant, familiar things one keeps in office desks – nail varnish, love letters, unanswered fan letters, a few floppy discs which contain my attempts at writing, as recorded by a kindly secretary attached to the Wild Life programme, the producers of which spend so much time hovering over burrows or lying in wait for foxes – the miracles of nature taking for ever to film – that she is only too glad of something to do, if only my typing. Perhaps the ECG trace is in my desk at Central?
On this strip of pale blue waxed paper that I now so irrationally miss, is the record of the pattern made by my heart in one of its occasional attacks of tachycardia, when it reverts to its foetal speed, some 200 beats the minute. The pattern is aesthetically pleasing: a steady, satisfying, regular beat driving across the paper, as a pen drives along the page; it is just that the upstrokes and downstrokes are far too close together for comfort – as they can be, to continue the analogy, in various groups of words.
‘Pipetting up palpitating placenta’ for example, and all those s’s – Starlady Sandra, Sandra Sorenson – but that I daresay is fanciful. These attacks of tachycardia (see what I mean? the upstrokes again? the overheated rhythm?) are brought about, depending on what doctor you care to listen to, by black coffee, alcohol, a shortage of potassium, stress, undisclosed emotion, the attempt to deny the past, or by the possession of an extra bundle of nemones in the heart, through which the electric cardiac charge can short-circuit. (Oh Daddy-oh, was this your doing? A defect, running through your genes, or those of my mad mother? Or just a copying mistake in the DNA?) The ailment is professionally linked – doctors, writers, journalists and media folk tend to suffer from it – nature’s way, perhaps, of eventually phasing out those people too sharp for their own good or that of the species – the sick should really die off before they can reproduce, and the weak remain unprotected – a point I put to a casualty doctor while he prepared to return my heart to normal by injecting intravenous Verapamil, but he remained grim faced and merely wrote something in my notes. (I took the opportunity of reading them, later – ‘patient agitated and rambling’.) These medical men are not great ones for laughing on duty. I daresay my father was not a bundle of laughs as he worked. Tamara, of course, laughed a lot, rather as poor Mrs Rochester did, up and down dark corridors. As a child, I frequently woke to its sound. My version of the primal scene. Well now, my heart, as recorded on this particular strip of blue paper, was in the throes of one of its pets, its little demonstration of its traumatic past – I do try to take my own advice and ignore its childish tantrums, and sometimes it works, gives up and reverts to normal, but more often nowadays it requires the paternal intervention of the medical profession, and injections of this and that. The ‘that’ on the blue strip I so particularly miss is the record of the time they injected stryamine intravenously, instead of verapamil, and first I had a catch in my throat, of the kind I have now, waiting for Jack in the moonlight, my love, and then my heart lurched, and lurched again and I cried out first in love and then in terror, as I died, I swear I died, and came alive again, and there is the record on the page – the heart just stopping, stopping, the straight line running across the page, unmarked, running across, not even upstroked, down-stroked by palpitating placentas or Sandra Sorenson, or Nazi SS; then, thank God, thank God, starting up again all over the place, the beats leaping out of control, off the paper, like seismological needles shaken right off the page, then by some miracle the steady habitual beat reasserting itself, starting up again: regular, even, conventional. Thank you, Daddy: you engineered me well, whatever else you did.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ I say, when I am able. ‘I see I am alive again.’
But they don’t care for jokes, as I say. When he’s gone Sister says, ‘We’d run out of Verapamil. But you’re all right now, that’s the main thing.’
‘That’s the main thing,’ I agree.
But now, as my heart lurches, I think of death as well as love. I wonder where my home is, and why I have never had one. ‘Home is where the heart is,’ Frances said today. She speaks so seriously, her great eyes so solemn, uttering the myths of our society with such reverence I don’t like to dent her faith and start arguing. Oh, pitter-pat, pitter-pat, returning to the pre-natal state!
Starlady Sandra Sorenson, S.S.S. An extra S, an extra bundle of nemones. What terrifies me is the way it all ties up.