Airmail, page 24
I am grateful that, in the end, these decisions were made for positive rather than negative reasons. These decisions made me consider where I was in my life, and what I was doing, and what sort of picture I was piecing together.
EARLY MEDICAL
I will make this choice have happened for a reason.
And you lock the memory of this choice in a little white box the size of a thumbnail
that you tuck into the bottom of your heart.
And you remember it, from time to time,
with the brush of a finger.
(Written July 2011)
To the children I do not have,
You are not my missing puzzle pieces, and I am not waiting to find you in my future. Although the picture isn’t complete yet, and I still haven’t found the corners.
With love,
Rachel
Dear beloved,
I’m writing to say
And I know you’d love it
If I kept this polite and concise and not spoil your day
Because your love for me was a list of things that you could cross out, crumble up and throw away
Just like this note
While my love for you was into me
Integrated like oxygen in the sea
Like the dirty in your soul
Now there’s a hole in my picture, Dear Lover
There’s a hole in my picture
See, naturally we’d clash
When you’d turn your back on me
You chipped away at my chest and I frayed your spine
But I prayed that you’d just turn around and sit (the fuck) down
And we’d be fine, we’d align
But there was a hole in our picture, Dear Lover. There was a hole in our picture . . .
See, I’ve found myself another piece, and I know I’d be lying
If I said that we fit together perfectly but oh
We love trying
Or am I just banging my head and my arms and my legs
Against ersatz lovers?
Wearing. Down. My edges
To the point where
Anyone would do
Even you . . . again?
Heaven forbid.
I’ll keep a hole in my picture, Dear Lover
I’d shoot a hole right through my picture
And I’d wish you well but I’m well aware
That all the snakes and the goat-head devils in Hell
Got your back, girl
And you’ll do swell
In your cruel and selfish world
With a hole in your picture, Dear Lover. With a hole in your picture . . .
Dear 2004,
I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while now, petal. It feels weird even writing to you when I have no idea what you look like. I’ve got a vague shadow at the edge of my brain, right next to the place where I kissed a boy in a field, which I think is you but it could just be an episode of My So-Called Life which I accidentally stored.
In some ways it’s quite nice not remembering the first time we met. I’ve had a grand time re-creating you and wondering what happened. The advantage of not really knowing someone is that they will always be anyone. Maybe that was the year I was a spy. I might have been cool as fuck, a popular starlet on the university campus with my own TV show, which no one has ever seen since. Maybe I was a bully. I quite like the idea that I was a proper bitch, because I’ve tried a few times since and it just ends in paranoia and too much lipstick. I might have been beautiful. I might have peaked, I might have troughed, and now we’ll never know, but it’s lovely thinking about the infinite parallel universes when we, darling 2004, were everyone.
The intrigue of possibilities almost outweighs the social awkwardness of entire forgotten friendships. It’s taught me to be good at flashing a familiar smile to everyone, just in case we’ve met before and they were one of the people who sank into your arms and never emerged. You taught me well, you beautiful arsehole, and it taught me a charm I was too lazy to have otherwise learnt.
I have flashes of you. Snapshots, which flicker like they’re projected on canvas in a darkened room. I remember a nice lady leaning close to my face on the train, asking if I was all right. I remember swimming towards her thinking she was probably a weirdo who wanted to talk about religion and then realising there was blood in my mouth. I remember getting home and crying at my mum because I didn’t know how I got there, and my bag was hurtling towards London and my memory of you hurtled away with it. There were some tablets, but none of it seemed real because we knew that it was my fault and I’d worried myself into this, splashing around in a whirlpool with flailing arms and a gale-force sadness. Did you reach out, 2004? Did you try to save me? Or did you stand there laughing as I let go of your fingers?
I wanted to write to say I miss you, but I’m okay. Like, properly okay. You probably knew me as a liar, but I don’t do that as much now. You probably knew me in pain, but that’s all gone too. You probably knew me as a worrier, and that’s still true because there’s a lot to worry about. Seriously. Shit be scary.
But perhaps the main reason for writing is to say goodbye. Properly. If we said it at the time, then I don’t remember, so I stand before you and salute you farewell. Perhaps the mists will clear one day and I’ll awake one day at the age of seventy-four, heart hammering with excitement as I realise I can finally see you. Live up to expectations, eh?
Good luck, pal. I hope you’re not lonely. Thanks for building everything out of pieces of nothing and for standing aside as reality bolted through the back door.
I love you, I think,
SiânyB
xxx
Dear ——,
If I only knew what you were, I’d address you properly. But the thing is, dear missing piece, I’m missing so many pieces of the puzzle that’s me that I’m at a bit of a loss to identify the most important missing piece, and it’s surely to the most important missing piece that this letter should be addressed.
I’ve tossed and turned for nights on end. I’ve got up, lain down, got up, had many cups of midnight tea, always a mistake since then you have a 3 a.m. trip to the loo, which, in our sub-zero house, is stepping into the Arctic. It’s my husband’s and my little joke that as we brace ourselves for the chilly pee, we mutter, ‘I’m going out. I may be some time.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, on one of these Arctic trips, it came to me that the search for my missing puzzle piece should start with the physical. A whole world of stuff there! I’m missing so many physical bits – appendix, tonsils, wisdom teeth, parotid gland, plus an assortment of other oddly shaped and oddly troublesome bits you don’t want to think about and nor do I – but as I say, I’m missing so many bits that if you put them all together you could make quite a passable new human being. Obviously, you’d need to get legs and arms from somewhere – oh, and a head, which I could possibly provide, since in the grave of my five times great uncle Frank, there are two heads. Let me explain.
Poor old Uncle Frank! He was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1746 for supporting Bonnie Prince Charlie, and when his innards were merrily burning in the executioner’s bucket, his head was lopped off, dipped in pitch and exhibited on Temple Bar, once the gateway between Fleet Street and the Strand. Perhaps Frank would have chosen dignity as his missing piece.
Anyhow, after a number of decades, my family stole his head from the top of the Bar, transported it back to the family home in Lancashire and buried it behind the panelling in the family chapel. There it remained until central heating was put in and Frank’s head, so well preserved by the pitch, began to singe, so they rehomed him in a basket, covered him with a napkin and kept him on the sideboard in the dining room so it would be easy to pass him round after dinner. Eventually, when guests began to object, Frank was popped into a hatbox and sent for safekeeping to the bank. It was after World War Two that he was finally buried, in Burnley, and even then he wasn’t left in peace.
In 1978, those who decide these things decided a plaque should be erected in the parish church to commemorate Frank’s life and grisly death, but my mother said no plaque was going up before she’d seen Frank for herself. So one November day, the tomb was opened and my mother leant in. There was Frank, still intact, bits of hair, pike hole through top of skull. But he’d acquired a friend, another head, rather less well preserved than old Frank. Who he? No idea. So the two heads were left together.
What bad luck for Frank! He was missing so many pieces, and he ended up with the one thing he didn’t need – another head!
I, of course, sometimes lose my head myself, but since I usually find it much where I left it, that’s clearly not my missing piece. I’ll need to look elsewhere.
As one of seven children, my missing piece is not the sibling I never had. I’ve enough siblings to run a moderately successful ‘hire a sibling’ business. We were less a family than a herd. I’ve only one brother, though. He, poor chap, is missing something. But sisters provide almost everything a girl needs – unsolicited support, unsolicited criticism, unsolicited advice, unsolicited opinions. And gossip. My goodness, without sisters I’d certainly miss that.
I once went to confession in St Peter’s in Rome. I dislike St Peter’s. It’s a bully of a place. It crushes you. From all its great height and weight it whispers, ‘I am large and magnificent. You’re small and very unmagnificent. Given the choice of preserving me or preserving you, who would God plump for?’
Anyhow, there I was in St Peter’s underneath a sign saying, ‘Confessions this way.’ Why not? I walked the half-mile or so past the dead popes, plaster saints and whatnot until I reached the confessional box. I know, I know. The secrets of the confessional and all that. But don’t you want to know? And it will be me who’ll be damned for telling, not you for listening.
So, I go into the box and kneel down, and the priest – young, American, spookily careful diction, ignores my dull and not altogether comprehensive list of sins and asks me if I ever gossip.
Me: What?
Father Spooky Diction: I said, do you ever gossip?
Me: Do you know anything about women?
Father SD: [Shifty silence.]
Me: I have sisters. No gossip, no sisterhood. There’s strength in sisterhood. Do strong women offend God somehow?
Father SD: Gossip is —
Me, interrupting: Is God a misogynist?
Father SD: God is not.
Me: What about you, Father? Do you want women to be weak and feeble and in thrall to men? Because that’s what you’ll get if you deprive us of sisterhood, and if you don’t want the missing piece of your jigsaw to be your two front teeth, take care how you answer.
I didn’t, of course, say it quite like that. I actually laughed and said, ‘Well, Father’ and ‘Oh dear, Father’ and ‘I’m entirely in the wrong, Father,’ because I was educated in a convent school and ‘Well, Father’ and ‘Oh dear, Father’ and ‘You are so much wiser than silly little me, Father’ were the expected responses.
Father Spooky Diction in St Peter’s in Rome kept his two front teeth. I’m wondering now whether my missing piece isn’t the sucker punch I never delivered. Maybe.
On the other hand, perhaps my missing piece is my other life: the life I thought I would live but somehow never did. You see, I wasn’t born or bred for the city. I was born and bred in the bleak and wild country of the Lancashire–Yorkshire border, Brontë country, ‘It’s me, I’m Cathy’ waily Kate Bush country. I really miss it – the rain, the mist, the ‘bugger off’ high moorland, the valleys sunk in stygian gloom. I miss the farms all tumbled about with ragged sheep, discarded fridges and brothers who live together but haven’t spoken since that row over a teaspoon in 1942. I thought I would live in Lancashire all my life. It doesn’t do ‘pretty pretty’, but I prefer the ‘gritty pretty’. Gritty pretty stays with you. It’s not my missing piece, though, because I won’t mislay it even when I’m dead.
So here we are, and time’s nearly up, and I’ve still not identified my missing piece. It’s not bits of excised body; it’s not Uncle Frank; it’s not family; it’s not an unlived Lancashire life. The best contender so far is that Vatican sucker punch.
Can that really be it?
I’m still tossing and turning and tossing and turning, just as I described at the start of this letter. But now it’s coming to me, and actually it’s been staring me in the face. I’m a chronic insomniac. Four hours a night, and often not consecutive. So my missing puzzle piece turns out to be nothing more exotic than thousands and thousands of hours of lost sleep.
At last, my letter.
Dear sleep,
Yes, you. I shan’t be polite, since you don’t deserve it, you slippery tease. Where the hell are you when I need you? I’m lying there, a ridiculously easy target. You’d hardly need to aim. But although you whack my husband as soon as his head hits the pillow, you bypass me entirely. Well, not entirely. You almost settle, then whoosh! You’re off, away, and I’m left with murder in my heart, because there’s nothing more annoying than lying sleepless in your bed when the person lying next door to you is snoring. What’s your objection to knocking me out?
And you’ve outwitted me. I mean, I’ll write to you, but I don’t want to catch up with you, because if I catch up with all the sleep I’ve missed, I’ll be like the dog, asleep until I die.
So, sleep. You’re my missing piece, but I’ve decided not to send this letter to you. Instead, I’m going to buy a ticket to Rome and see if I can find Father Spooky Diction. If I can deliver that sucker punch, he might just punch me back. Sleep’s for wimps. I’m aiming for the knockout.
Dear Fate, or Destiny, or Circumstance, or God, or whoever it is in charge of what happens to us all,
What a powerful position you are in. You can change a person’s life in a split second, for good or bad.
When I look back at the paths I have taken through life, I try to convince myself I’ve had some control.
In my career, for example. Or, more accurately, my careers. I’m now a full-time writer, but I took the scenic route to get here. It wasn’t so much a career path as a fifteen-lane career highway. I started in children’s television, as a wardrobe girl and then a scriptwriter. I moved into the music industry. After that, I organised tourism festivals. I worked in book publishing, in arts marketing, in public relations. I’ve also been a barmaid, a waitress, a grape picker, a Kindergym instructor. Each job led on to the next, like beads on a necklace. When I look back, I can see the links between them.
In my relationships, I’ve been lucky. At the age of twenty-five – nearly twenty-five years ago – I met the love of my life, my husband, John. I didn’t have to think hard to join my life to his. It made sense to me immediately.
But life isn’t always about making choices and getting them right. Sometimes things simply happen to us, not because of us. And sometimes, even more mysteriously, things don’t happen.
Tonight, I want to say thanks for three things that didn’t happen to me. Three terrible things that I somehow escaped, because of fate or destiny or that other mysterious force. But if they had happened, my life path would have changed forever.
In 1984, I was nineteen, living in London and working in a music club called the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden. It was open until 2 a.m., and we bar staff would have a few drinks at the end of the night, then head home. Sometimes a colleague gave me a lift, but more often I caught one of the minicabs that was waiting outside. Not the familiar London black cabs, but private cars licensed to local minicab companies. One night, I finished my shift, had a drink, went outside, got into the first car waiting and gave my address to the male driver. As we drove – I was in the back seat – I heard something you don’t often hear in a cab, or in fact in any car: the mewing of a kitten.
‘Have you got a kitten?’ I asked the driver.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Down here, in a box.’ I leaned forward, looking between the seats. Sure enough, there was a kitten in a box on the floor of the passenger seat.
I’ve always loved cats. As a child, growing up in a country town in South Australia, I once had eight kittens – wild ones I’d tamed. I told the driver about that. I talked about carrying them all around in a little sling, the names I had for them, how funny they were, how much I loved them.
‘I love kittens too,’ he said.
We got to my house. ‘Goodnight,’ I said to him. ‘Goodnight,’ I said to the kitten.
The next afternoon, there was a phone call to the music venue. A detective from the local police station. There had been a serious incident the evening before. One of our customers had got into what she assumed was a minicab waiting in front of the venue. She gave her address. They were nearly there when the driver turned down a side road, locked the doors and proceeded to rape and assault her. It was dark, she couldn’t see him, or later describe him. But what she did remember was a strange detail. He had a kitten in a box in the front seat. The detective wanted to know if any of the venue staff had noticed anything.
I was interviewed for an hour. The detective worked out the timing. After dropping me off home, the minicab driver had returned to the club again, picked up the other young woman and attacked her. It was a random assault. It could have been me. But it wasn’t. Was it because the kitten meowed when it did? Because I started talking so cheerily about cats and kittens? Or for another reason? I’ll never know.
Ten years later, I was on a beach in the west of Ireland, babysitting my two-year-old niece. We were having a picnic and I gave her a big piece of orange to eat, while I walked down to the water to rinse out our plates. We had the beach to ourselves. The sun was shining – it was a lovely day.
