Nameless Lake E-Book

Chris Parker

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Salt Modern Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 351

Beschreibung

Nameless Lake is about the unspoken pressures of gender and desire, told through the shifting dynamics of a lifelong friendship. Emma and Madryn grow up with dreams of escaping their seaside hometown, sustained by an obsession with photography and secret acts of vandalism. But adulthood brings its own limitations, and Emma yearns for connection beyond the constraints of her family. Drawn deeper into Madryn's private life, Emma feels new possibilities awakening within herself, but when Madryn faces a backlash from her controlling partner, Emma must finally break out of her role as passive observer.

Leseprobe

For K.B., L.P. & T.P.

‘The times I forgot but never forgot.’

The Raincoats, ‘Fairytale in the Supermarket’

‘When I finally reached my apartment … I hunkered down, covered my face, and cried. Not a single clear emotion came with the tears.’

Yuko Tsushima, Territory of Light, translated by Geraldine Harcourt

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraph12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152AcknowledgementsAbout this BookAbout the AuthorCopyright

1

When I make phone calls to therapists I can’t afford, I begin by telling them my age, that I am married and how many children I have, as if I am calling a taxi and giving precise details of where to find me.

If there is voicemail, I do not leave a message. If they answer, I say I don’t know if you can help me, but I do know, of course, that they will say that they can. I enjoy hearing the I-can-do-this in their voices, even when they are at lunch or about to leave the office. Sometimes I can hear that they are torn between the desire to sell themselves with a dazzling insight and the fear of giving away something for nothing.

I call a therapist who – judging by his address, in a wide avenue just outside the city centre – works from home. The trees have only recently become bare and as the man answers I hear someone sweeping leaves near him. I just feel I’m struggling, I say. There is a silence that may be either thinking or swallowing. His lips seem too close to my ear. Let me take you inside for a moment, the man says. There is a metallic sound of sliding doors and a rubbery clunk and the day is sealed out.

I call someone whose website includes a picture of her consulting room. The light is muted as a blind has been drawn down, with just a thin lozenge of daylight allowed through. There is a broad square table on which a bowl stands, made entirely of green glass leaves fused together, and a rich yellow wing-backed chair draped with a piece of pink fabric too thin to be velvet but with the same sheen. From this it is hard not to extrapolate the private areas of the house: a heavy coffee mug and herbs on a windowsill, a black cat’s fur revealed as chocolate brown in the sunlight. Every detail seems calculated to trigger a yearning for peace and ease so unavailable in real life that something in me turns against the room and its promises and I am relieved when the phone rings and rings and nobody answers.

I call someone who picks up right away. I just want to stop and tell you, I am in awe of you, the therapist says. I am standing outside at work in the smokers’ area, though there are no smokers. You have made the hardest step and I want you to know you are an incredibly brave person. No part of me feels brave. I am looking for reasons to tell myself I am better off without the help I can’t pay for, and that counts as a reason.

I find someone who promises a first session free of charge. I leave work early, pleading a dental appointment, and make my way to an old street between two green spaces where large white houses sit behind railings. At five p.m. I press the bell, which starts a dog barking somewhere deep in the building. The therapist, a bearded man in his late 60s, opens the door and squints at me with discomfort. As he says nothing, I blurt my name. Three buttons are undone on his shirt and his feet are bare and he asks me to come inside while telling me there must have been a mix-up. The man leads me into a room painted white with a white trestle desk and a leather couch. There must be a mistake with the appointments, he says. Now is when I see my own therapist.

Thank you, he says, in a big exhale, relief washing through him, as he understands that I am leaving without a fuss. He leads me back down the hall and I see my shoes have brought black leaves onto his floor.

You’ll find there isn’t much available right now, she says. It is the week between Christmas and New Year and she seems to find something distasteful in my call, as though I should know enough to make my problems recede during this period so that they do not intrude on anyone’s relaxation. After I hang up, my urge is to take down the tree, sweep up the needles, jumpstart time.

The bird must have been watching us as we arrived. Aidan chose the cottage, at the centre of a village near the town where I was brought up. A neighbour stops us as we carry our bags to the door. Sam is already crouching at the key-safe, slashing at Jess with a stick as she tries to distract him with random numbers. We didn’t know what to do, the neighbour says. She points to the narrow sash window, where a pigeon sits behind the glass on the frame. I see that the sofa, the carpet and coffee table are speckled with shit and feathers, the pigeon taking us all in as we react, not convinced we are up to the job of rescuing it. Aidan holds up a duvet cover to deflect the bird as I open the door and walk into the room. The bird turns for a closer look at me and I find myself reaching up to take hold of it. It is shockingly light, as if its bones held no substance at all, and I think of the summer I spent swabbing the earlobes of nervous girls in a surf-wear store that also did piercings, how the life inside them seemed to turn itself down to an almost dormant state as they waited for something to happen.

Your car pulls up as I emerge with the pigeon. Another neighbour has come to watch. Ben goes to the back of the car and opens the door, pulling out Jack and Molly, dazed by the journey from London. Together they make a small audience, looking at me as if I am a magician about to release a dove. I take away my steadying hand, but the pigeon does not move and I worry that it might be weakened by lack of food or water. Then it thrusts itself forward, the urge to go and the commotion of its wings combining in a shockingly decisive movement as it flies up and away. Hi, Madryn, I hear myself say, but you are still looking at my hands, the space where the pigeon had been.

We will make a home here for two days. We spread through the ground floor like water. The staircase is a twisted spine in cast iron. We tell the children that it is not safe to walk on the inside of the spiral. Sam moves his foot toward the centre. Is here OK? he asks, sliding further in. What about this, is this fatal? We explore the upstairs rooms, tiny under the eaves. You call me from the attic room where you and Ben will sleep. It is painted an orange that reaches back and resets some secret clock to when our world was that colour – cups, toys, blankets, underwear. On the landing is a timer switch that makes it impossible not to imagine our own lives, insect-brief, buzzing to a close.

We buy things to eat and burn. We don’t need the clock with hands arranged at ten to two. The wind tugs at the fire. I run a bath. In the chrome I am a half-woman leering out of the steam. We have made two children together but Aidan, standing naked as wide leaves bob outside our window, is suddenly strange to me, a forest animal startled upright. We hear the tick tick bang of kitchen cupboards as children hunt for food. We take great care to keep the fire alive but then we will it to die before we go to bed.

We want to show Aidan and Ben that we know secret ways. What we need from them is a look that says, we will go wherever you want to take us. We shush everyone through the gate at the Abbey marked Private, down beside the Dart where more gates lead to a lawn cut in stripes, a gravel path running around its edge. Only the monks are allowed here, we tell Aidan and Ben. We talk of black magic circles high up on the moor, the warlock from Tintagel with a chest full of cat skeletons. We lead them along the riverbank where deer have come for centuries in search of water. We cross the footbridge and follow pathways under the trees to immense sloping fields open to the sky.

All at once, you are on your knees in the grass. Ben has the camera somewhere in his combat trousers, but he is recovering from a back operation and cannot bend to reach it. He endures it while you try to identify the right pocket by patting each one. I look away. In time, you fish out a thick black string and follow it to the camera. We gather and you capture us, standing without you.

I think of an afternoon at the beginning of the 1980s when you showed me a disco routine where you pretended to be talking on the phone. I remember how authentic your faces seemed: demanding, unimpressed, amused. The music that accompanied us is lost to me, but I remember the dance.

Freed again, the children howl and race along the margin of the field where, in summer, bees search for heather among the rye grass. We are certain they will remember this day, this forest. We are sure it will return to them in fragments as they walk through foreign cities, nurse children, sit at our bedsides. What they will forget is their need of us. They are forgetting it right now, as they scream and circle. It is a surprise to us, always, this not-needing. Soon Sam peels off towards us and the others follow. We check the ground for dropped hats and scarves, but in truth we are already searching the air for shapes their bodies have left behind. You press your face into their hair and you inhale and inhale.

2

I remember how you took pictures. You never had any trouble making people do what you wanted, your authority lying somewhere in that space between you and the camera, the way air passengers have no choice about stepping through the scanner.

Routine returns to claim us. I do not hear from you. What is it called when you cannot answer the demands of your own body? I put down a boiling pan too sharply, misjudging its weight. The water slops over my hand. It becomes a grid of pain. Somewhere I have lost the instinct to deal with it.

Sam asks me if he can adopt a big cat. The animals on the website are rated in terms of the degree of threat they face, but I can’t answer with any certainty when he asks is it better to be vulnerable or endangered?

When Jess and Jack were just a few months old, I invited you to come along to a baby massage class I had heard about. We met in a small hall at the side of a nursery school. There were five of us mothers, and we laid our babies down on little mats in a star formation. The woman running the class radiated a gentle rigidity that made us pay close attention to everything she said and did. Baby, she said every time, never the baby or your baby, which gave her instruction a scripted quality that made it feel we were being inducted into an irresistible cult.

I climb onto Aidan’s bike, a fragile machine that lives in the hall. It is light as an insect. Where do I want to go tonight? Head down and I’m flying.

Sam spends hours looking at a book of extinct creatures. The first thing he wants to know is the fatal weakness of each species. Then he attributes to these animals a kind of foolishness or naivety, as though they could have survived had they not persisted in being too slow, too big, or too desirable to hunters.

Baby was bigger than the individual children flexing and cooing at our touch. Baby was all of them and the world we had assembled around them – we had gathered to worship baby. In that hall I felt a peace so overwhelming I felt it necessary to undercut it when it came to an end, saying to you, as we walked out, my God, that woman, do you think she ever breaks character?

My father has to go, in the end, to a nursing home. When we visit him, my mother and I, he does not respond to us. We call a nurse. She is surprised. This must have happened since I was here a moment ago, she says. We stand and wait. Eleven minutes later, my father’s breathing stops. What we are wondering is this, if he didn’t know we were here, does it count as dying alone? He has an empty holdall in the corner, like a boy on his holidays.

The Carolina Parakeet became extinct because it would not abandon wounded members of its flock, leaving it vulnerable to trappers, a fate that Sam sees as particularly stupid and avoidable.

What does it mean when you find yourself standing at the bottom of the garden, down by the broken scooters and the brambles, when there is no reason – none – to walk any further than the wheelie bins? When faces are waiting at the window, a tiny Beatlemania in the kitchen.

We are careful. We do not demand. At work, I need to receive some documents. The documents are overdue. I write and erase. I wondered … Too tentative. I just wanted to know … Too defensive. In the end I settle for: I’m aware they are due around now. But after I press send I worry that I have not neutralised myself sufficiently.

I picture every house in the street, the same tune played in different keys. It is January; it is April. Snow crowns the trampolines; a sprinkler is dragged out onto the lawn. We advance, marching together. We are ablaze with a purpose we cannot quite put our finger on.

It is too heavy, my father’s old hand lawnmower, my mother says on the phone, as though she will be dragged down somewhere beyond rescue if she has to possess it a moment longer. She says she will pay some men to take it away along with other junk. Sometimes he would let me push it and I would walk along, unspooling a strip of green velvet behind me. I rush to my mother’s house and drag it from her garage as she watches me. It is heavier than I remember.

There were four Madryn Sullivans. They are all me, you explained, swivelling your laptop to show me the Internet Movie Database, where four of the art department jobs you’d done on television and movie sets had been attributed to separate people – Madryn Sullivan (I), Madryn Sullivan (II), Madryn Sullivan (III) and Madryn Sullivan (IV). You were trying to consolidate them into one definitive entity, and I can feel now the shiver that passed over me as you selected your various selves and clicked MERGE.

The lawnmower has a red logo with a golden panther, stretched out as if leaping. I want to take the handles off and put it on my desk, like a typewriter that could cut off my fingers.

Smile at me, you would say, and then you would delay, focusing your lens, assessing the light. They did not know what I did, that you were only playing for time. That what really interested you, what you were waiting for, was the moment when they could no longer hold their smiles.

I take Jess to her diving lesson. I watch her shoulders, flaring and golden like a butterfly sculpted in sand. She climbs and climbs and when at last she falls I feel an exhilaration, a great wiping clean. It is like nothing I have felt since the days when vandalism became our mother tongue – alarms and shattering glass, the relief of a shop window’s collapse, running and not thinking where but just away.

We were eight or nine years old when a woman walked out of the woods. We were circling our bikes around the tiny green with the sign that said no ball games. She emerged from the trees and hesitated as though she had run out of cover sooner than she expected. You screeched your brakes. She was our mothers’ age and soft-featured. Her eyes were red and she looked in our direction without seeming to see us. You asked her if she needed anything, maybe a glass of water. She followed us across the road to your house, walking meekly as though she was our captive. Your mother quarantined the woman in the dining room, shooing us away. But inside the room we could hear your mother’s questions and inside the questions we could hear how anxious she was that the woman be returned to where she had come from, as though your mother was afraid of being caught with something she had not paid for. We understood that the question your mother wanted to ask was, who do you belong to?

Aidan leads me to the sink and slams on the cold tap. Soon the hand is just a hand. I am angry with myself for thinking panic is enough.

When your call comes, I am dulled by a day that is trailing off into rages and sulks. I am aware of this, and glad of it, because it stops me sounding over-eager. You, though, make no attempt at all to hide your excitement. Emma it’s Madryn, you say. I have met someone.

3

You got together with Ben in your mid-20s at a time when we did not see each other often. I remember you did not say you wanted me to meet Ben but to see him. You registered your embarrassment in calling his hair golden, but no other word seemed right – it captured the weighty, official-seeming nature of his handsomeness. You led me into the kitchen of your shared house as though you were a tourist guide leading me towards a monument, and he seemed preoccupied by some urgent and serious business, irritated with the sticky lino that made his shoes rip off the floor with every step. Being good-looking, he seemed to imply, brought with it certain responsibilities, certain obligations.

When Aidan was a trainee, we house-sat for an architect. With its vast, calm rooms and high ceilings, his house seemed designed for another species entirely. The kitchen was full of sunlight and quiet efficiency and everything had a story. I found Aidan at the fridge one evening, reading the packaging of some sausages. Our pigs live in family groups, enjoying fresh air and sunlight, it said. Look at me, he said, envying pork.

The affair is a new thing, just three weeks old. You say this as though it is something fragile and in need of nursing – a thing that has chosen to arrive regardless of whether you are prepared for it. And you are coming this weekend. To see me, but not quite. You are bringing Nicholas, the man with whom you are beginning something you are not calling an affair. You are coming to see me as friend and alibi.

Even the salt was not just salt. It was taken from the Blackwater Estuary with hand-drawn methods used since Roman times. Pebbles, antique utensils and small sculptures stood humbly but unapologetically, as though a voyager had just unpacked her treasures – an effect so pleasingly random it could only have been achieved by design. The architect, when he returned, seemed surprised by how attached we had grown to his house. He tried to play it down, referring to it as his death nest.

I remember the day you showed me around your house for the first time. You had moved in only days before and a gritty film of neglect seemed to lie over everything. A chill moved through the house from a kitchen extension roofed in aged, reinforced glass, so that the entire ground floor felt undressed. Your bedroom ceiling was a sepia map of old roof leaks. But I remember how you described the moment the estate agent brought you there. Even as you walked up the stained concrete path, you felt as though the house had certain expectations that you had to meet. The house had been empty for months, but when the agent pushed a key into the lock, entirely without ceremony, it seemed impolite, even intrusive. Permission, you felt, needed to be granted for you to enter this house, if not by its vanished occupants then by whatever soul inhabited it. Because it did have a soul – you felt this very strongly, you said. You laughed at yourself at this point. As I left, you brushed at a damp stain in the hall with your palm. I can’t stop myself doing that, you said, and the gesture came back to me when I saw you wipe crumbs from Jack’s face. The estate agent told you the house was in dialogue with the one opposite, which shared some elements of its design. I thought about the cul-de-sac we grew up in, where our houses stood around like guests at a bad party thinking, now what?

My parents met in Puerto Madryn, Argentina, you said to a blond man with the sticking-out ears you confessed that you liked. At the end of summer in the late 1980s, we would step off a train into a strange town, the sun still pitiless on barking dogs, high walls, a mystery route threading past closed shops and over tram tracks. As dusk was coming in, we would reach the end of obscure bus routes and find the hostel. We would throw our rucksacks on our bunks in towel-draped rooms that never saw daylight. Then out again amongst odd, dusty, thrilling streets, fresh people. Always a breeze blowing and schoolkids from Italy and Spain kissing and raising lighters as we smiled and fought our way through them. It’s where Ringo Starr was born, you would sometimes say. Madryn Street, somewhere in Liverpool. It’s my mother. She’s insane about all that stuff.

As the days pass, your call makes me wary. I become aware of things you did not say. You did not ask if it was convenient for me to meet you. You did not ask whether I minded being part of your cover story. It didn’t occur to me, at the time, that I might have felt flattered, though I’m certain I did.

I asked you which story about your name was true. She’s not into the Beatles and she’s never been abroad, you said, and I realised you had never thought to ask.

I try to talk to Aidan about your call. He is in the bath. He takes the information in as though he is devouring something small and alive and I watch as it passes along the length of him. When he is sure I have finished talking, he takes off his glasses and thumbs soap into the nose pads, washing away the day.

When we carried out our acts of vandalism, we knew no one would suspect us. We didn’t need to hide; other people’s assumptions took care of everything. The police called at the homes of the boys they knew about, boys who had been cautioned for fighting and slashing tyres. It felt like we were wearing masks, and the masks were our real selves.

4

The light was what we loved most, long ago in that architect’s house. In the kitchen it would swell at lunchtime before ebbing away gradually as it led us to what Aidan called the golden hour. The light would turn pinkish and otherworldly, casting a glow on the indigo tiles, the surfaces of which seemed subtly but importantly unique. The light saturated the room, informing everything we said or did there, seeming to guide our exchanges with a quiet intelligence. For days we believed it was entirely natural, a blessing bestowed on the room – and, by extension, on us – by the arrangement of its windows. Then I discovered a row of discreet bulbs installed beneath the higher cabinets, giving such a subtle light that it felt like the glow of time and money itself, emanated by the kitchen and all it had come to stand for. We tried to replicate this effect in our current house when I found cheap versions of these lights, operated by batteries, which we stuck underneath our cabinets with adhesive pads. One of them came unstuck and crashed down in the night, making Aidan jump up in bed, his face grey in the street light and his chest heaving. What was he imagining? I pictured burglars slinging things around with professional disdain, sifting and evaluating, discarding more than they planned to take. I found myself gripping onto his arm, feeling muscle and bone moving beneath the skin, and it is impossible to know whether I was trying to keep him from danger or to stop him adding to the damage already done.

There was a time when we didn’t talk for almost a year. It was November when you called, deep in the gloom of the month. I was not prepared for how listless you sounded. Are you OK? I asked. I think so, you said. You said you were tired because you were up late, talking. We talked things through and I realised that things are OK, everything is fine, you said. I was aware of becoming cautious, diplomatic. I was asking about you, not Ben, I said. Yes, you said, as if you could not understand why I was making this distinction.

This time, you are not calling to talk about yourself. One of your friends, a set designer, has invited you to use her flat in Potsdam while she is away, working on a film. You are asking me to go with you for a weekend. The flights shouldn’t be too expensive, you say, correctly guessing the first panicky flit of my thoughts. We could rent a car and explore Berlin. You say you know things have been rough for me lately and I need a break. We scorn the term ‘girls’ weekend’, but later, on the balcony of the Potsdam apartment, we confess to using these exact words to explain our plan to Aidan and Ben.

Sometimes on YouTube I watch a man and woman from Toronto who are getting ready to start a new life. They are putting the possessions they have sold into eBay packages and something in the stark lighting – even the lampshades are gone – makes them look tired but young. The man talks about how he admires the woman’s positive attitude, and she says she thinks that phrase is too assertive, that it puts too much pressure on people to present an image of cheerfulness at all times. I prefer to call my thinking post-negative, she says. They continue to nest objects in bubble wrap. The man lowers his voice and says it’s incredible how things have changed for his wife, because life used to seem so hopeless. She stretches tape across the flaps of a box and corrects him. Life didn’t seem hopeless, she says, just my life.

The apartment is enormous, with high ceilings and wide, pale floorboards. The expanse of open floor makes us feel crazed, as though we are required to fill the space and we are hopelessly unequal to the task. We dance around to music from your iPhone. We take our shoes off and jump on the sofa. There is a beer-fridge, the kind with a glass door, but it is filled with dairy produce and leafy vegetables: kale and chard and spinach. Your friend the set designer had hoped to establish herself as an artist, but now the only place where her art is exhibited is here, in this apartment, on every wall.

We buy wine from the local supermarket and smoke our first cigarettes in months. We visit the palaces of Prussian kings and feel the dwindling impact of each precious object. By the time we move on, I am no longer seeing what is in front of me. Over lunch in the Dutch Quarter, I feel a self-consciousness enter our conversation that carries inside it an echo of your phone call, the same diminished energy. I offer up some of the rows I have had with Aidan, the disagreements magnified by our money problems. You do not reciprocate.

I take the bedroom at the front of the apartment. It is furnished only with a futon, a clothes rail and a mirror. One wall is filled with a collage of baby photographs, cut from packaging that once contained nappies, wipes, cotton wool and baby food. The blind is cheap and thin, and when I have turned off the light, the moon still illuminates these legions of wondering faces, who have been given the title Landfill Babies. We never argue, you say. I look at you. Sometimes I want to. But then I’m not sure of what I think. I say I don’t understand, but this isn’t right. What I mean is, I don’t quite believe you. You have always known your own mind. I say this. It never comes out the way it sounds in my head, you say. Things feel overwhelming sometimes. But Ben is good at helping me think things through. The phrase he uses when you are angry is: well OK, let’s break it down.

On the Sunday, our last day in Germany, I drive our rental car to Berlin. It is cold but there are no clouds. We park in a silent street studded with winter trees, deep in the old West. Your talk speeds up as we walk, something inside you unfolding as we find our way, instinctively, to the centre of the city. We are happy to let pedestrians overtake us and I feel myself loosening, some part of myself returning to the teenage days of drift when we travelled Europe by train.

We visit all the places we know we must visit. We take pictures of each other. We are caught up in the glossy shallow flow of the city and it is a relief to always move forwards, forgetting one thing as we rush towards the next. Then it is time to drive to the airport for our flight home. We have covered a vast distance and the magnetism that pulled us from our parking place to the centre of the city does not seem to work in reverse. I hesitate, but by the time you look back to me I am walking again.

We move further from the city, but the sound of traffic does not subside. We are trapped inside a knot of bars, grocery stores, banks. I recognise a poodle we passed ten minutes earlier, browsing the passers-by from behind a net curtain. There are places where the two sides of the city, having grown up in isolation, do not connect naturally with each other. Every street seems to lead to the same arterial road, frantic with cars and trams. At first we laugh about this. But time is short. It takes me a moment to see that responsibility for finding the car is not shared between us. So where is it, you ask. I was the driver, after all.

I stop in front of a store window where clothes are displayed on hangers designed to look like children’s heads, each hook suggesting a kiss curl. I tell myself that this is too ridiculous to be happening. You do something I have never seen before, tipping your head back as if you are looking to the sky for a fresh source of patience. My chest contracts. Let’s break it down, I am expecting you to say. When you look at me again, you seem to be seeing through me to something pitiable – something you are struggling, out of sheer compassion, to understand. I walk on down the street without saying a word. At that moment, I spot a primer-grey minivan with a Snoopy sticker I remember seeing earlier. I hurry on. Seconds later, I turn a corner and see our car. As we throw our bags into the back seat, you are able to make light of all this, talking about the last-minute excitement I have created, but once we are inside the car, neither of us tries to compete with the voice of the satnav, which is forever recalculating.

This, really, is all that the trip is: not the Stasi headquarters or the smoky bar in Kreuzberg, and it is in my mind when you ring me. After the first bloom of your call fades, some part of me believes I should withhold myself in order to show you how much you have hurt me. I cannot separate this from my fear of letting you down, of not being enough. I want to say something that will make you understand how these things have intertwined, but I do not.

Certain words had power over you. You were aware of this and it did not make it less true. In our early 20s, you confessed that you prolonged a relationship with an Australian boyfriend for a least a month beyond its natural life because when he came back into the car after filling up at a service station he said, OK, we’re golden.

The Australian man worked as a driver for a property owner living in Mayfair. Long stretches of his day were spent in the company of his boss’s four-year-old son, who was left to drift from floor to floor of the house, largely ignored by an overworked au pair. One day your boyfriend’s job was to take the boy to and from a birthday party. As he was driven back home, the boy found in his party bag a small potato gun. In spite of a bedroom full of brand-new electronics, the boy was captivated by the gun and was desperate to use it, but there were no potatoes, or any other vegetables, in the house. You told me that your boyfriend took the four-year-old out to find one, but an hour later he rang you, almost in tears, begging for help. I can buy a yacht but not a fucking potato. You bought the biggest potato you could find, took it back to the office where you were temping, and had it couriered to your boyfriend in a padded envelope.

Something comes back to me as I drive us to the airport. On the balcony at Potsdam, you told me that there was a day when Ben asked you and the children to stay at the table after an evening meal. Then he brought out a consumer magazine and printouts from the internet and said, we are going to choose our new washing machine together. The way you told me this made me think, at first, that you were inviting me to join you in teasing Ben. But when I headed in this direction, you became tense and I understood that you saw yourself as fully part of the “we”. You said that Ben spread pictures of different makes and models all over the table. He printed out reviews and costs and energy efficiency ratings. Once the basics of life are sorted out, you can get on with what really matters, is what you told me he said.

You once told me about a woman who worked in the office where you were temping. Inside her cubicle, the woman would cry at her desk with her face in her hands and her elbows on the desk. She had learned to cry silently, but still her body moved in a way that shook the base of her computer monitor. This made the plastic parts rub against each other, producing a creak that sounded like someone sobbing uncontrollably, trying to catch her breath.

When a boy cries, I always know it’s genuine, your mother said when your brother fell off his scooter and tore his arm on the pebble-dashed wall. We offered him our sweets. Girls often do it for attention, but with a boy I know it’s real, she went on as Dylan clung to her, the wind animating her hair as she crouched on the lawn, perhaps thinking we were too far away to hear. In algebra, years later, I thought about this as the teacher drew equations on the blackboard and imagined having to work out 3x + 4y where x=the value of boys’ tears and y= the value of girls’.

5

We shuffled along behind crowds of tourists in Florence and ended the day feeling stunned and depleted. We heaved our backpacks onto a bus and it took us into the hills outside the city to what had once been a mansion but was now a youth hostel. We lay on the lawn as the day began to cool and found ourselves pulled into the orbit of two boys from Oxfordshire, one with a thin, feline face and the other with blond hair parted so neatly it seemed to be saying something ironic about neatness. Other girls drifted into the group along with some pale young men as the boy with the neat parting talked in a bright and confident voice about a notorious criminal who was known to prey on young women travelling alone in Florence and the surrounding towns. We had heard versions of this story all across Europe. In the distance we could see the hard sculpted shapes of the city seeming to float on a cloud of traffic fumes, but here we were captive, quiet English girls and boys pinned in place by that familiar voice, slick with knowingness, taking charge of the space around us. Later, when you had gone to bed, I opened our window for air and heard the feline boy smoking at the window of the boys’ dormitory, above us. What was all that stuff you came out with about the serial killer, he said. I heard the boy with the parting blow out smoke. God, they were hard work, he said, what was I supposed to do? I had to say something to keep things going.

I never feel more listened to than when you are smoking. Hands occupied by the cigarette, the rest of you becomes completely still. When I speak you do not feel the need to respond. You hold the thought like smoke, letting it seep into you before you release it. This is what I think about when I say OK, what time will you get here?

In our childhood, it was understood by adults that there was only so much happiness to go around, and enjoying too much meant that you were taking someone else’s share. My mother remarked to a neighbour, quite neutrally, that the woman from the post office had bought a holiday home in Portugal. The neighbour placed a consoling hand on my mother’s arm and said, yes, but you have a kind and clever daughter.

We swore we would never indulge in invisible behaviour. This is what we called the way our parents took out their frustration by banging pans, clutching their foreheads, crashing doors shut and sighing – the endless range or wordless expression that made everyone uneasy but which could, if the parent was challenged, be completely disavowed. The frustration offended us less than the failure to own up to it. We would hold up our anger before us like a majorette’s baton, we thought – make it rise and spin and catch the sun.