The day she gave her last coat away to charity was the first day that the doubts wiggled in her stomach like worms. It was a warm day – a day on which she had no need for a winter sheepskin coat, even if she hadn’t been moving to Namibia. Spring had arrived at last and the hanging baskets that lined the river on her way back home were in full bloom – good job, they’d paid enough in council taxes in the two years they’d lived in their cosy but modern flat.
Winter had taken its time this year, as though Jack Frost was mocking them – So, this is why you wanted to go away, hey? – but all the while knowing that this crisp white winter (the first since she was a teenager and certainly the first – and now the last? – in her married life) would only make her long to stay.
On her way out to the charity shop she had bounced down the high street, playfully opting not to cross the busy road at the pelican crossing but instead hopping in and out of the stream of cars. She had something of the spring lamb about her; even her hair was fluffy after she had attacked it, unusually, with the hairdryer. She had taken time over her grooming that morning, like a cat who licks herself on a windowsill full of spring sun; she was making herself smooth, preparing for the new start.
Yes, going out had been quite different to now, coming back. Going out she had not thought so much of the coat that fit her shoulders so perfectly – moulded to her from four winters’ wear – rather she had thought of the Goodbye party she still had to host, of what to cook, of which of her friends might get on with which of his, although she realised with a smile that by now their friends knew one another: their lives had merged. Now, coming back, she was very aware of the coat, or rather of its absence. She felt exposed and was sure that the builders she passed working on the latest celebrity restaurant were staring at her bare shoulders beneath the unsuitable spaghetti straps, even though builders in this area of London rarely stared, let alone cat-called or whistled. It was the sort of area where even builders were middle class – most of them had come over fro Eastern Europe where they held degrees. See, there are plenty of people who leave their countries, she told herself, stop being so precious. Besides, she would only be a ten hour flight away. The world was small.
But that was where the sadness began. She had met Axel, her husband, not in London (her home town) or Berlin (his) but in Austria, on a ski-ing holiday she had struggled to enjoy almost as much as she struggled to manoeuvre the wide, beginner pair of skis into a position which wouldn’t send her ass over tits downhill. In the end though she was thankful to her clumsiness on skies, for it was on one of the occasions that she had fallen ass over tits that she quite literally bumped into Axel. Axel, the ski-instructor with the dark coiffure so neatly swept into a side-parting that she would have laughed at him were she not so instantly in love with him (Later, when they had been married a year, she read in the Sunday supplement in bed one weekend that people are prone to fall in love with individuals who look after them when they are in a life threatening situation, but she was enjoying the whiskey-laced marmelade on her toast and failed to make any connection to her own life). Axel, the Swiss-German who lived ‘off-season’ in Berlin as a graphic designer. Axel who when he spoke sounded like he was coughing his lungs up, which made her laugh at first. Axel, who could turn his hand to anything, unlike she, who on that miserable day on the black run way over Interlaken which she should never have been on in the first place, reached out his hand to her.
When they had first met, each had been impressed and excited by the other’s country. She, for her part, had invested in a potted history of Britain’s kings and queens which she kept by the toilet and dipped into every day at 7.50a.m., 10 minutes before she had to leave for work, when inevitably her bowels started to move. When he had come to London, just two weeks after the end of ‘the season’, she had taken him to The Tower of London, Hampton Court, just about anywhere she could think of where she could show off her new-found knowledge. It had been early summer, June, by the time things had work had eased up enough to allow her a long weekend in Berlin. She hadn’t worn the coat then. It was hot and they spent most of their time getting drunk in parks. Later on, back on the fourteenth floor of her office near Liverpool Street , wearing spaghetti straps in an effort to stave off sweltering behind glass, she worried that they had drunk too much. She had happy but vague memories of the weekend, but if they were to break up she wanted more than that. And, she started to reflect – letting the uncorrected words from the pages she was supposed to be editing glare angrily at her from the computer screen – everyone in Berlin seemed so young, even him, Axel. As though they hadn’t a care in the world. As though everyone could, if they wanted to, take the winter off to ski. They scorned ‘normal’ people, these Berliners, she thought. But then Axel came to visit her again and declared that he was thinking of moving to London, that it was time for a new phase, and she forgot these early criticisms and in October had a great time with him not in Berlin but in Munich, at Oktoberfest.
He moved to London in November, just in time for Bonfire Night so that she had the opportunity to regale him with all that she’d learnt about the Stuarts and Guy Fawkes failed republican plot. He’d liked that; he’d laughed at her triumph in telling the story and accused her, fondly she thought, of being a monarchist.
That first winter, his arm looped through the arm of her sheepskin coat, she showed him parts of the city she had never seen before. They stumbled across the flat they’d lived in since and even though both of them agreed it ‘wasn’t what they were looking for’ it somehow was, and the price was right and it was very practical.
By January, when she met up with her girlfriends in her now ex-local pub, she had trouble answering their questions about her former ambitions and when they actually said that, ‘your former ambitions’, all she could do was laugh inwardly at the Germanic way in which Axel often said, ‘in former times’ It was a joke she could share with no one; not Axel and certainly not with her friends.
That February, one year after she had crashed into him only a few metres from the start of an Austrian black ski-run, Axel asked her to marry him. Neither of them had, they confessed, considered themselves the marrying type, but both agreed that their different nationalities complicated things, EU or no EU.
Her parents were not overjoyed. She had had to ask her father to stop referring to Axel as ‘your Kraut’ and her normally shopaholic mother appeared amazingly reluctant to even look at wedding dresses. So the wedding had been held in Switzerland – no, not to spite them, she insisted to herself, but because the scenery was better. They had drunk schnapps after the champagne for the toasts – chasers, they had called them – and she had got quite sleepy and sick. It reminded her of their first weekend in Berlin.
Then it was back to London and London life: his graphic design, her editing. Jobs which, they both excitedly concurred, they could do anywhere.
Yes, when she had met him the world had not seemed small at all; it had seemed dizzying! A place of deserts and icy ravines, of glaciers and rocky overhangs, of fish brighter than all the colours in the rainbow and with him, Axel, she had someone to explore all this with. Axel too was full of plans. Every time he turned away from his Apple computer screen he had a new plan. Then he’d turn back to the computer and e-mail the plan to her at work. She loved these plans. She boasted of them to her colleague, Anne, and printed them off, threatening to make a book out of them one day: ‘One hundred places to visit with your partner before you divorce’. If asked by her girlfriends in the pub where her particular brand of wanderlust had sprung from, she – who had skied for the first time at 27 and whose most exotic adventure had been snorkelling in the Florida Keys after a trip to Disneyworld – had just laughed. She had become very good at laughing; she considered that it was feminine and suited her.
She had given Axel her consent to go ahead and lay plans. They were going to do charitable work in Africa. It didn’t matter that they had no relevant experience, ever her father had said as much. Or rather, he had said, ‘There are plenty of failed states in Africa. Pick your worthy cause! What will it be? Orphans? Aids? Disability?’ She had laughed and Axel had nibbled his lip seriously and said, ‘It should not be anything medical.’
It had been easy enough to register as a charity and set up a board of trustees. She had typed up their objectives and their registered charity certificate had been promptly delivered and she had framed it and asked Axel to nail it to the wall of their Chelsea flat. But Axel had never got round to it and the certificate lay face down on top of a bookcase that housed the book on the kings and queens of England (amongst others) which had lost its place by the toilet to ’101 Handy Household Hints’.
There had been another year, their second year of marriage, between the registered charity certificate arriving and their packing now, for Namibia. It had gone quickly and now here she was, on the brink of thirty, coatless in March, about to move continents, ready or not for a new life.
Namibia was supposed to be a neutral choice, a country neither of them had set toe in before. But Axel had ‘found’ some contacts there, cousins twice removed, German descendants who ran a housing project outside Windhoek. At first she had been cautious; she wasn’t sure what a housing project was, but then it turned out that the cousins twice removed (‘as much yours as mine’, said Axel) weren’t sure either and that there was therefore plenty of scope for her and Axel to put their stamp on the project. She devised to run a library scheme and had already started collecting books form her London friends, books which now lay, deadweights, in cardboard boxes in her wardrobe where the winter clothes used to be. Soon the poor, illiterate Namibians would be able to lose themselves in Nazi detective novels and romances set in Skiathos as well as urban dystopias and the odd pastoral classic, her friends’ last remnants of their student days.
He was going to run outdoors holidays, the profits of which would be ploughed back into the ‘project’. He was wild with ideas for it. He e-mailed them now to her in her last days at work to replace the earlier travel plans. But these she didn’t share with Anne, nor did she print them out. She simply shifted them to a file named ‘Axel’ and wondered if a time would ever come when the two of them were not making what the Germans called, ‘future plans’.
She was nearly back at the flat now. They had already found a tenant to take over their lease as soon as they left so that it wouldn’t matter that they were breaking their twelve month contract. The new tenant was Hannah, a tall, dark girl, half Jamaican or something (everyone Axel knew was half-something, except her) and recently arrived in London from Berlin.
He wouldn’t be working when she got in, of that she was sure. These days he was too excited to work. He’d be handwriting plans that he’d blue-tac to the walls, plans they’d have to take down in only two days’ time when they’d lock the door of their flat for the last time.
It was as she reached the bottom of their apartment building that she really became aware of the worms in her stomach. Before her wedding her unmarried friends had asked her, ‘Do you have butterflies?’ But she hadn’t. And she hadn’t now; these were worms. Worms which she sensed – with that sense women have and try their best to resist – would grow longer in Namibia, feeding off the tropics and off other things.
She barely wanted to eat ever again but there was still the food to prepare for the Goodbye Party that night. She’d have a shot of vodka before she started cooking to steel herself. Berlin vodka. Then it would be once again like that first time in Berlin, which after all was summer, and she would remember that night, once in Namibia, as a bleary haze – Axel greeting guests at the door and hugging people other than herself and the image in the back of her mind all night of the shadows of boxes in the space in her wardrobe where her winter coat used to be.
He stood on the brink of the hill and watche dthe dogs melt into the snow below him. Fine. Now he could leave them behind.
He had risen before dawn becaues dawn had come so late: 8:04a.m – the shortest day.
It was a piece of naff marketing to evacuate the world on this day; they could have waited until February at least but then everybody would have been busy with tax return forms and would have been so concerned with how much they could get back that they’d forget that they were supposed to leave. Lately the government had been giving money away. A whole village in Wales who had opted never to leave their hills had tried to spend evey last penny in the local pub but had drank themselves to death before they’d even started on their Post Office Bonds.
He kicked a ledge of snow with the toe of his boot. It shook itself into a thousand flakes then settled back on the ground. He wondered how long it would stay there, unwalke dupon, after he’d gone. Surely in a week it would all melt. They said this was because of the Hottening Up but as far as he cuold see it was because it rained and had always rained where he came from.
Sighing, he took his boots off. His best, buffalo leather boots bought in Tokyo. Bustling, beeping with electronics, bloody excellent Tokyo. He loved that city more than women. So much so, that when it had come to choosing which shuttle to leave on later that day, after it had grown dark, he had asked for a special exemption to the EU rule and had been granted leave to depart with the East Asians on a shuttle fitted with sushi chefs. The Japanese had already cleared the Pacific of tuna in preparation for today: D Day. The environmentalists had gone mad, ‘Leave The Earth As You Found It!’ they’d chanted on their rainbow-painted ships.
But none of us remember how we first found the world, thought the man, wasn’t that the point? We – or rather, our elected rulers, had decreed a beginning to the world’s existence, a time when change did not exist, and now had decreed today, the shortest day, as an aribtrary end to mankind’s residence on earth.
The transit planes that had been dropping out the thick porridge of clouds launched their loud speakers now and the metal sounding pre-recorded voice of a foreign leader assaulted the hill, the dogs, the man.
‘Ladies and gentlemen: gather yourselves. We will leave with hope for our species and for the world.’
He put his hands over his ears and tried to squint out the planes as he took a final look at the sky. There was very little time left before the world would have completed yet another rotation around its star. But the day was not darkening; it was growing pale blue and bright orange. It would be dark soon, of course, but he always forgot this: that first came so much colour.
Even his toes were turning purple. This was the first time in his life he’d been barefoot in the snow.
RIP Lambkin: February 14th – February 28th 2009
Footage unsuitable for lamb-eaters.
The following is Russell Brand’s explanation of how he knows whether a female orgasm is real:
“There’s eye-rolling ecstasy, the bacchanalian loss of self where they’re ready to tear up the trees, the grapes are being ripped from the vines, animals are being strewn across the forest. I think the roots of misogyny are in the unity women have with universal forces when they come. Men go, ‘What are they doing?’ They become goddesses with oceanic pleasure that looks like it may never end and could devour us.”
Are you scared of the orgasm?
“I was a bit scared of them, when I was younger. It’s a bit frightening, this transformative quality, an orgasm in women. I imagine that it looks better than the miserable squirt men issue. It seems different, though, when there’s an emotional element — transcendent.” http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/comedy/article6896096.ece
I was reminded of this while sitting in St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Paris on Saturday evening, accompanying my American friend who was singing at mass. To my surprise, not only did I get to hear her sing but I also heard a wonderful bassist and a sopranist, Fabrice di Falco. Watching Fabrice sing was entrancing. His eyes rolled, his mouth mewed its way through every shape of ‘oh’ like a baby searching for a nipple. When he hit the high notes his whole body shook. I understood why he might like to do this every day.
The last time I prayed regularly was in Paris. Since then I have abandoned organised religion but I have failed to abandon entirely the belief in a soul. Even if that soul is nothing more and nothing less than the vibrations with which Fabrice’s body shook and the rapture of his captive listeners: a group of strangers – Phillipinos, Sengalese, Indonesians, Irish, Americans – gathered together on a cold winter’s night in a city in a foreign land.
Not that I am saying you are God, Fabrice. It’s not you, mate, but what your voice brings together: the sum of your parts, and the parts of those little Phillipino ladies who crossed themselves and the Irish priest who gobbled down that big dry wafer and the 1960s concrete underground worship hall and the Arc De Triomphe outside and the fish lying at the bottom of the icy Seine. My new god’s all that and then some.
I like the Irish priest, Father Aiden, a lot. He tells us he married a couple that afternoon. ‘You see there’s all this sadness in the world,’ he says, ‘and in the midst of it there’s this lovely little couple standing in front of me and saying, ‘Let’s give love a chance.’ ‘
But back from love and getting stuck in in a sad world to ecstacy and losing oneself: It strikes me as so strange that Catholics can believe that God is actually contained by a tinsy bit of wafer and not even a sip of wine. Didn’t the Jesus man break that bread? On his last night on earth didn’t he drink wine with his friends and experience some Bacchanalian loss of self? But then he says, ‘Drink this, in remembrance of me…’ If Jesus had been a woman, would this have been easier to understand, or just another female guilt trip?
‘Let us proclaim the mystery of faith!’ declared Father Aiden at mass on Saturday. When I lived and prayed in Paris six years ago I never really noticed that phrase but now with my new-found lack of faith I love it deeply, truly, madly…
Vive La Paris
Images by The Warlock’s daughter. Music by, ahem, Aron Copland.
So there are two more chapters of Sven on my sister blog www.makingstuffup.com/srilankastory , but I’m feeling rather bad about my treatment of Thomas in them. You see, I don’t want to paint the usual portraits of ‘Africans’. I don’t even want to call them ‘Africans’. And yet as ever I am drawn to the stereotypes, the cliches and most of all, to any sort of plot that I feel works.
Chimamande Adichie, Nigerian author of the extremely readable ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ takes a convincing stand on the need to hear multiple stories about a country, and for people of every country to learn to tell and listen to different storeis about themselves. Can that extend to a white person writing about a non-white country or is that too deemed post-colonialism? Listen to her speech on ted.com or on You Tube
http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
Poppies on parade - The X Factor judges do some remembering
It is November the 12th and a defunct red paper poppy is lying on my desk. I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away, yet I realise this is silly, I didn’t even wear it yesterday, on Armistice Day. I didn’t wear it partly out of protest. Anyone watching t.v. over the past few weeks will have noticed that poppy wearing is obligatory for anyone in the public eye. Anyone, that is, except the contestants on Strictly Come Dancing, who were allowed to dance without poppies on last weekend’s show for health and safety reasons, as the BBC feared the poppies might fall from the contestants’ sequinned dresses and cause them to slip mid cha-cha-cha.
I’m not a big Strictly fan but I did watch it last weekend and saw that the contestants had been dancing with some of our British troops stationed right here in Lancashire, teaching them to do a 1940s style jive to distract them from thoughts of their upcoming tours of duty in Afghanistan. What the hell these local lads are doing going off fighting a fourth war in Afghanistan is beyond my comprehension. I am quite happy to remember the veterans of World War 1 who fought against a threat to our country, but Afghanistan? While I can mourn for the women who have tragically lost their sons and husbands fighting there, I don’t know how we can say that this was ‘for our countyr’s liberty’. And I’m not keen on wearing a red flower like a fashion accessory for two weeks to endorse that.
I’ve taken a keen interest in our British festivities since returning to the UK – Halloween, Bonfire Night, Remembrance Day. In my early twenties I was too busy concerning myself with lofty ideals to notice them, but in the past few years I’ve worked with children which has reintroduced me to the joy of marking the passing of time, of telling stories and sharing traditions. But I’m just not sure what to make about Remembrance Day. This year, the last three remaining British veterans of World War One passed away - Bill Stone, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch. Harry Patch, the last man standing, decline the offer of a state funeral, but when he was laid to rest thousands of people lined the streets of his home town in Somerset.
Harry Patch's last journey
With Harry Patch buried, is it time to forget battles past? Of course not. Without an understanding of our history, we can’t make any sort of judgement on the politics of today. In a recent discussion between the veteran war correspondents Robert Fisk, Martin Bell and Ann Leslie, the claim was raised that the politicians of Britain today have no understanding of history and no personal experience of war. Apparently back in the days of Edward Heath’s government the only member of his cabinet not to be a war veteran was Margaret Thatcher.
While we can be thankful that today’s generation of politicians have grown up in an era which has been spared the horrors of the first hand experience of war, again, I’m wondering what role a tradition such as ‘Remembrance Day’ can have in a society where in which we have to imagine war, rather than remember it.
Where does the X Factor factor into all of this? Well, on Tuesday I was teaching singing to a bunch of people who were old enough to remember at least the aftermath of World War Two. Anne, 75, told me how she liked the songs of WWII forces sweetheart Gracie Fields. But when I asked this group whether they had watched X Factor on Saturday. The assembled crowd of elderly singers broke into cries of fury as they recounted the latest scandalous results of the popular tv show. All but one of my fifteen older singers - who, I should add, came from various walks of life - were keen followers of X Factor news. The viewing figures for X Factor are somewhere around the 11 million – per week – mark. That’s more than the combined populations of Norway and Denmark. So one in six people in the UK watches X Factor, including our potential future Prime Minister David Cameron, who apparently admits being ‘glued to his seat’ by the performances of the terrible twins in the show.
The above mentioned male war correspondents, Robert Fisk and Martin Bell, would like it if we all watched a bit less X Factor and read a bit more about this ridiculous war in Afghanistan. But as their tabloid colleague, Ann Leslie pointed out, the reality is that most people lead very busy lives and if at the end of the day they want to come home and relax by hearing a bit of celebrity gossip, who can blame them?
I agree with Ann. But I’m still not sure whether red poppies should feature on Saturday night entertainment shows. Or what to do with the red poppy that is still lying on my desk.
'Don't forget to deep conditon, ladies!'
‘But when he comes home, what I don’t like is having to share the bed.’
In a sleepy town, somewhere in the north of England, I am having my hair done. The hairdresser moves her pregnant waist 180 degrees so she can tackle my fringe.
‘I hate that,’ she says, ‘I roll over and find him there.’
Her fella is in the army so she doesn’t see him much, which suits her fine. ‘I’d get sick of him if he was always around. I’d never have a tidy house.’
I am always fearful of the biannual pilgrimage to the hairdresser and usually put it off until – usually for emotional reasons rather than visual ones – I can wait no more. For me, as for many women, a hairdresser is not just a person who cuts hair. It is a person with whom we entrust our identities and it is no wonder that a hairdresser often becomes a confidante. But on this occasion my fears are allayed by the fact that I like this woman. She is strong.
‘I used to work in Liverpool,’ she tells me, ‘I never thought I’d have a two year old at thirty and another on the way. That wasn’t part of the life plan.’ But it happened, and she moved and opened up her own salon to fit in with her new lifestyle and her need to parent a child whose father was most often away. She’s not married. ‘What’s the point in spending all that money?’ but does admit that this makes things a little awkward with the army. ‘They’ve come a long way, like in admitting gay couples now, but if you’re a straight couple they’re still really old-fashioned in what they expect from you.’ She knew from a young age that she wanted to find herself an army man. Someone who whose lifestyle would allow her to lead her own life.
She has little time for Cheryl Cole, Britain’s superstar du jour, who welcomed back her cheating husband.
‘I hate it when women do that to themselves. What’s the point in people having died so we can have our rights, just for women to let themselves be walked over by men?’
I am interested and entertained enough not to worry about what is being done to my hair. And I need not have worried. The result is beautiful. I am recreated again.
‘If you decide you want a few more blonde bits round the front, pop in and I’ll do them for free,’ the hairdresser says to me.
Emmeline, this is just to let you know: the sisterhood is alive. You who were always well turned-out, even when being dragged away by police, you who embraced the camera for the cause it could support, you’d approve, I think, of the women who mix burning chemicals to create shining hair. And Emmeline, I promise you: we’re not doing this for the men (as if they’d notice).
So Germaine Greer: What’s it to be? A full head of foils?
