Journal Extract – 22 May 2012

I left that apartment in May 2012, the first hot day we had that summer. It was a day of dappled light and things left unsaid that should have been said.

That’s what you’ll think, when in another city, on a Thursday in autumn perhaps, your mind will skitter back across the memory of today. You won’t remember a patterned swimsuit on a washing line, your friend telling you about the renovation of her house on Charlbury Road, the silver car in the driveway, the way the water fell over your fingers into the Belfast sin. You might remember eating almond cake barefoot at lunch time, pollen blowing over the fig trees, that later you had ice lollies in the Common Room Bar. It was the start of summer.

Dreams like preludes, last night. Dreams of storms in the garden, of packing cases like tiny theatres – all those commonplace, familiar objects, taped-up boxes of domestic dolls-house scenes. You dreamed of driving from Oxford to that grey and yellow storage unit, a three-floor city of dim-lit corridors and lifts and key codes, and doors like fridges. Your life sealed in there. It’s just stuff; you said when you woke up. An accumulation of superfluous stuff. When it’s over, you hope you’ll be a lighter version of yourself.

The horn bowl you threw your keys into when you came through the door after work. Books beside the bed you read and reread and never read. Poetry, prescription drugs. Packing boxes, bubble wrap, Stanley knife, brown tape. You scribble three words onto labels: store / charity / rubbish. In the latter: travel-stained espadrilles, an empty bottle of a 10 year old malt Whiskey from Jura (which your parents gave you when they went to live in Africa), an ashtray from Essaouira, napkins you decorated at weddings, flight boarding cards, Cornish beer-mats, pieces of coral, chipped tea-cups, memories of all the countries that passed under your tyres, those summers in the shadows of horse-chestnuts, boots once soaked with the dew of an African morning when you woke at dawn and took the dogs up onto the cliff. You stood in the breeze and someone photographed you, standing there in the blue hour, that feather-silk shirt and your hair blowing across his face.

Your apartment is so light. You didn’t remember that. You think that he was here last night, alone, when the sun was like a blood orange over the Observatory, Arancia Rossa di Sicili. All the windows are open. You open the fridge. ‘Lonely men live like wolves’. A bottle of champagne, as promised.

You empty kitchen drawers into bin bags. Receipts from Naples, Bologna, Corsica, Geneva, matches from an island off the East African coast. In the bedroom you find the yellow necklace he bought you in India when he was away for a month and came back with a beard and a dark suntan and strange tales of railways in the Himalayas. A gold earring reminds you of a rose garden in Paris, a wrist band, those white hospital corridors in Oxford, the icy cold sides of the bed and the warmth when the morphine injection flooded you. Roman sandals you bought near the Villa Borghese. A book of Annie Freud poems you read pressed against the canvas rucksack on his back, on a motorbike crossing the plains outside Florence. You think of thunderstorms in Siena, fighting in the Dordogne, fighting in Casablanca, smoking joints in Fez, riding an ancient African motorcycle to Jacaranda Island.

Motorcycles were a constant; panniers filled with sweaty, rusk-coloured clothes, little coins, poems you wrote about archipelagos. Motorcycles under cedar trees, maritime pines, beside catacombs, at the summits of Tuscan hills. You nearly died in the Loire, on black gravel, lost the visor to your helmet in a tunnel near Lake Maggiore after the Swiss border. Yes, and your passports flew out of the pocket of your jacket at 5 a.m. coming off the ferry from France. You smile at this, maroon passports flapping along the motorway twenty miles behind you, after weeks, 4,000 miles, so nearly home.

You didn’t honestly believe this would be cathartic – put it off to the last minute, you thought you’d pay anyone to take this place apart for you. You didn’t want to touch the door handles, the mirrors, the blinds, take your bed to pieces. You wanted to unpack everything somewhere new, as if it were new, wiped clean of your shared history. You were going to do this blankly, numbly, with speedy efficiency – stop to look at nothing, hold nothing. But instead, you are savouring being here, now, doing this. The process has nothing masochistic about it, the division of possessions, the separation of memory is tender, quite gentle – you take this one, I’ll this. This reminds me of that night, the mosquitoes and cicadas, the smoke from your Sportsman cigarette. And this makes me think, as I haven’t done for months, of flying from Nairobi to Malindi in that little rickety plane. With you. Do you remember?

The Dwelling Issue

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.  Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead.  Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

―    Beryl Markham, West with the Night

I was watching a programme the other night about Mogadishu – in my pyjamas, which is how I seem to spend most of my time at home – in my pyjamas, a big sloppy cardigan and a pair of scratchy Himalayan socks. Before the closing credits, a Somali man saw the sea for the first time and made this extraordinary, startled gesture with his hand at the feeling of the waves rushing over his feet. It was such an authentic movement, quite unique – and for some reason it resonated; it made me feel despicable for moping around my parent’s house, freshly returned from New York where I spent an unnecessary sum of money on martinis and bracelets and little emerald leather notebooks. The Somali had escaped from the most godforsaken place on earth, walked 500 miles with his family to safety and built a tin shack home for them, the size of a small garden shed. They were a family of ten, sleeping on the earth floor, and yet their contentment was genuine. I couldn’t help but be ashamed at how despondent I am about my teething problems in re-launching myself from the temporary shelter of my parent’s home. It has been four months, and I admit I’m beginning to feel jaded by the search for a place of my own. Now I have a week to dismantle my old apartment and close it up again into brightly coloured packing boxes and I have no-where to unpack them. I’m homeless and I need a home – soon, somewhere only I have a key to.

But of course, the silly thing is that I have one, for now; I have a beautiful book-lined family home which smells of baking and fresh paint. When I come home, my father is cutting the grass in the garden and the pale lilac blossoms of the wisteria entwined along the balcony have come out. And I love it here - I do. Every week it becomes closer to the vision that is locked away somewhere in my parents’ heads. Last year, they bought this bland four-bedroom house, ignoring the protestations of their daughters who suffered, they claimed, from ‘façade-snobbery’ – and perhaps they were right – we probably did. I think back on all the homes we have had – the red-brick mansion flat on Sloane Gardens, the mews house on Markham Street just off the King’s Road, the pretty thatched cottage in Wiltshire, the elegant Georgian town house in Bath – and now we are all here, in Oxford. And my parents still love us enough, after carting us around with them for all these years, to buy a house big enough for us all to come and go and have friends to stay and one day grandchildren – a focal point for everyone to congregate, retreat to after break-ups, stop in for tea, stay over when too drunk to drive home. Somewhere you go for good cooking and a cuddle, and comfy beds.

The last few months I have watched them competently realise the architectural sketches they made last year – the light, interconnecting, high-ceilinged rooms, wood floors, iconic chairs. One day a fireplace arrives – then a vast ceiling fan the colour of sodden wood, which is now the centre piece in the drawing-room, revolving silently. The music system is installed, light dimmers, a minimal pendant lamp arrives from Sweden – a soft white jelly-fish hovering in the hall.  Everything is project managed and executed with calm precision. I come home, and there is something else to discover, something new to unwrap – little glittering down-lighters, now fitted and tilting a soft light over alcoves of books. There is a deep balcony along the rear width of the house over-looking the garden, which seems to flow directly into the room before it; seagrass meets turf. The hall smells of the warm, waxed wood of the parquet floor when you come through the door. Some mornings, deer pick their way along the path at the back of the gardens on their way back to Christ Church meadow. The house has a very distinct feeling about it now, entirely its own – tranquil but lived-in, very much a family home. And now that it is all coming together, we imagine the parties we will have here in the summer, Sunday lunches outside, fires at night, and, just like always, Nina Simone.

So, my looking for a house has been a painstaking process, the search narrowed because I won’t go anywhere but Central North or Central East, and I can’t do basements. I have had to mentally disassemble my concept of what it would be like, as a single woman to live alone again, and scotch-tape it back together as something a lot less glamorous. Perhaps it’s living in a university town – I’ve seen too many squalid arrangements of cheap furniture and green carpet. I’ve upped my budget, upped it again, and still - nothing. Hard to comprehend that a studio bed-sit with no central heating can cost eight hundred pounds a month (before bills, and in Botley). I’ve tried to like Botley, briefly, but residential suburban areas near train stations depress me. I’d rather live in a hillbilly shed in the woods.

And then there are the things you just hope for – a bay window looking over a leafy street, light from the south, a space, however small, to make happy memories in, remember in years to come – oh, yes, I was twenty-seven then and this was yet to happen. So every day, quite firmly, I’m telling myself to believe that my discovery of the right place will be serendipitous, somewhere unexpected around the corner – and to hold out for that.

Notes from Tuesday

On Tuesday night, I attended a private view party at Messum’s for the artist Robbie Wraith, who I used to model for some years ago. After weeks of inclement weather it was warm and balmy in London and I was on a date, one of those early dates with someone you really like. It was one of those evenings when you can’t articulate yourself with any eloquence and you’re holding your glass of chilled wine close to your chest, unsure if he can notice that your hands are unsteady, or whether his stomach feels like a petal in a blizzard too. You drift on the ebb and flow of your own nervous conversation until dark falls and the brisk taste of the wine makes you bolder, able to laugh at yourself.

Anyway, there was one moment – I was dazed, standing on the pavement in a sleeveless black dress, smoking and talking to a woman - Sandy, her name was, who was telling me about some television programme I have never heard of. I was only half listening to her, thinking that the paintings and drawings of me downstairs – framed now, hung and perfectly lit, had somehow taken on a life of their own – they were no longer me, or the person I am today. They, and I, have changed and aged, and although we were never replicas, at some point, through the artist’s eyes, we were presumably a reflection of one another, somehow. It was an odd feeling.

After the party, we went for dinner at Polpo on Beak Street and ate little plates of strange food and afterwards we found the bar downstairs at Hix and I drank a Brandy Alexander and he something with espresso, and we talked about… well, I can’t remember what we talked about, because I was aware of feeling as though I were near a precipice and trying to decide whether I was unready, or afraid, or just cowardly, whether I should step back from it and turn away.

But then it was midnight on St James’ Street and we were half-lost on our way to Park Lane, but not really caring. We were saying that London has never looked so beautiful, so clean. And then the rain fell, and we found our way. And I remember thinking that somehow, the beginning was over.

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Visit Laura Bailey’s Vogue blog for more on modelling for Robbie Wraith, his current show Works from the Studio, and why the soundtrack will always be Dylan.

Smoke Online

Matt Haynes, editor of the magazine Smoke: A London Peculiar, wrote to me recently for my permission to publish a poem previously printed in Issue 16. Smoke has been going now for nearly ten years, and in that time was stocked by book-shops from small independents, to the giants like Books Etc, Daunt, Foyles and Borders. The latter ceased trading when the publishing industry crashed in 2010, Smoke lost 25% of sales overnight, and subsequently closed. But now they’re back with their latest incarnation, the relaunch of their new website and – I have to say – I really do admire the way they have weathered the storm.

Matt Haynes on Smoke -

‘it’s a love-letter to London,         to the wet neon flicker of late-night pavements,         electric with endless possibility, and the soft         dishevelled beauty of the city’s dawn… to the         overheard stories and unexplored histories, the         facts and the fictions, the accidental poetry and         fugitive art of graffiti-slashed suburban stations         and rain-splashed shopfronts… the out-of-shot         lives half-glimpsed from a train window, or from         a phone number scrawled on the back of a         Travelcard, dropped on the night-bus stairs… ‘