On Saturday I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) in one sitting. Didion’s memoir maps the year that follows the sudden death of her husband on 30 December, 2003. Their daughter was seriously ill in hospital at the time.
As I worked my way through Didion’s moving and at times agonising account of her grief, I considered writing about my own grief in more detail than I had done before.
Not the grief from Scott’s death in 2013.
Not the grief from Kristine’s death in 2014.
Not the grief from my father’s death in 2015.
No, the grief from your death in 1985.
I started this morning. I wrote for a couple of hours. During that time I got up and searched my flat for memories of you. Some of them are now in a loose pile on my desk. Dust motes swaying funeral dances in the sun. I caress each item in both hands. Breathe in the distance. Hold the scent and shut my eyes. You are not there. The damp wool of your Christmas sweater when you run in from the rain. Stale cigarette smoke after a late night gig in a club in West Lothian. Unfussy soap around your wrists and hands. The aftershave in the deep plum square bottle (I can no longer recall the name).
1984
These days, we meet people who will become our lovers in pubs.
It is 1984. The miners’ strike kicks off in March. Protestors are evicted from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Tommy Cooper dies live on television. I don’t have a television. I don’t understand the fuss.
I am twenty years old. I am living in a two-bedroom flat, sharing with three other young people. Two men in one bedroom. Two women in the other. We sleep in single beds. We don’t use the central heating. We are on low incomes and we get rent allowances. One night the shorter of the two men staggers into our bedroom, pauses, swivels, and pisses on the bed that isn’t mine. His aim is pure and true. My roommate is out on a night shift. The smell of piss and dettol is hard to shift.
PC Yvonne Fletcher is shot and killed by a gunman during a siege outside the Libyan Embassy in London. The Queen opens the Thames Barrier. Climate change is not a thing.
Robert Maxwell buys the Daily Mirror. Los Angeles hosts the Olympics. My two sports are dominoes and darts. And drinking in Bannermans’s Bar and Sneaky Pete’s. None of these feature in the Olympics.
I am in my second year of nurse training at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary. In pubs, when asked, my roommate and I tell people we are training to be air traffic controllers. We spin this fantasy for over a year. Late one night, in a bar in Rose Street, we celebrate passing our final exams. Strangers buy us drinks. We are toasted, cheered. We walk tall. We are air traffic controllers. We are contrails, spinners and we prevent dots colliding.
These are my memories. Some of them may not be true.
I meet you for the first time in Mathers Bar in Broughton Street. It is warm, steamy, fugged with Benson and Hedges and Silkcut. Everybody is shouting. It is a Friday night. The barmen are sliding double vodkas across the counter. Pints of Tennent’s Extra. Half pints of Snakebite. Bags of salt and vinegar crisps. Box of matches and stained beer mats and filthy cloths to wipe down spills. Everybody is shouting over Frankie Goes to Hollywood or George Michael or Madonna.
You speak to me because I am dressed as a garden gnome. Long red socks. Tackety leather boots. Corduroy breeches with lacing tight over the knees. A gnomic hat. Red or green. The colour I don’t remember. You establish I am going to a party. You want to come too. You offer me a lift.
You are beautiful. Dark eyes, soft dark feathery hair in need of a cut. You have cheekbones. You have long fingers that trace shapes through the thick drunken air. You are older than me. Your trousers are loose and rumple around your ankles. You are not tall. You are, you say, a musician. And a painter.
I am starstruck.
Your lift is a small-wheeled brass-coloured bicycle. It is the only memory I have of that bicycle. We buy booze from an offie and swing the two plastic bags from the handlebars. We ride two-up. We are stopped by the police in London Road. They let us go with a warning. We are laughing and my arms are wrapped around your narrow waist and I lean my face on your back and breathe you in, and you pedal us through the dark cold shredding mist all the way to Milton Street in Abbeyhill.
Joan Didion opens her book The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) with the words:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
These were the first words she wrote after it happened.
My friend Mo opens the door of her flat. She opens the flaps of her fur coat. Black bra and matching frilly knickers. I shriek. We hug. I’ve brought a friend, I say. We squeeze through the narrow hall into the living room. Is it Mo’s birthday? Or mine? My diary entries for the following year may be in the attic. I cannot go up there to check.
We are late leavers from the party. What did we talk about? Who did we talk to? What did we drink?
We leave the party for your bedsit. Where is that? Closeby but I can’t recall the street. You share a kitchen with four or five others. Your room is cluttered and freezing. There are music sheets on the floor with handwritten lyrics. A saxophone in the corner. White walls. We pile our clothes on top of the duvet for extra warmth. My breath is cloud on yours.
Your father was born in Vienna, and aged 14, emigrated with his brother to Scotland via the ‘Kindertransport’ in early 1939. I discover this in your father’s obituary as I search for remnants of you online. He married your mother in 1954, but she died in 1978.
You have two small children, but you don’t tell me that straight away. You are separated from your wife. You don’t tell me that straight away either. Do I puzzle about your living quarters? How spartan they are? The veering towards poverty? Probably not. Most people I know don’t have much money.
Grief and mourning are not the same. I learn this from Didion. It has taken me thirty-five years to get around to this lesson. I tell people I am over it. It was all a long time ago. Yes, I say, it took around ten years to get a grip on it, but I got there in the end.
I am not.
Over it.
Your father, an esteemed vet who researched poultry diseases, dies in 2011. He collapses in his garden while feeding birds and squirrels. No one contacts me about it. But then who would? And why should they? I would like to know where he is buried. Or where his ashes are. But it’s none of my business. Not now. Perhaps not even then.
Some years before his death, your father and I meet in a restaurant in Ocean Terminal. It is across the road from my office. He must be in his early 80s. He is smartly dressed and smiley. We sit by the vast glass windows overlooking the harbour. The sun fills the building with violent white light. Too much light for the subject in hand. We talk about birds and activism. Do I tell him I wrote my Master’s dissertation on genetically modified poultry? I fiddle with my linen napkin, the bread roll. I twist the pepper grinder with a trembling hand. We talk briefly about your children. I want to do the right thing. I don’t know what that right thing is. He says no. I say the offer is there but I understand. It is his decision whether or not to pass on any message. I don’t blame him if he doesn’t.
Somewhere, I have your old passport. I thought I knew where it was. I dig around the top drawer in the filing cabinet. My current passports. My cancelled passports. The cat’s vaccination certificate. Stamps from Chile and Ecuador and Pakistan and China. Bus tickets. My blue plastic EHI card, expiry date 2024. Dear god. Brexit.
Where is your passport?
After the party in Milton Street, we are inseparable. We move into a basement flat in Dean Village. We rent the flat, which comes furnished. It is dark, damp, and smells of supermarket own brand cleaning fluid and spoiling moss.
You are working at a print press. You are playing gigs with various bands. One of them is called Bananas. You are a photographer and an artist and you also do some translation work. I have no idea why you are interested in me. But we are, I think, in love.
I have so few things of yours. And of those I had, some have been lost between Scotland and Australia and Scotland and New Zealand and Scotland again. Each move another moulting season.
I have your father’s English German dictionaries. They are small, pocket-sized, navy, their spines damaged. On the inside of each one your father has stuck a label. EXLIBRIS WALTER SILLER. The label is hand-done and has what looks like a black and white woodcut of two dogs, both with collars. One of the dogs seems asleep. The other has an expression of suspicion, disdain. The dictionary was printed in Berlin, copyright 1929. Your father was four then. Who gave him the dictionaries? Was this for his ‘Kindertransport’ trip to Scotland?
Above my leather horsehair rolled-arm sofa with its large milk stain on the seat and the cat claw scratches along the back, is a painting of yours. On the back of the painting, hanging from long-dried out Sellotape, is your card. The card has your name, followed by the initials DA, then Painter Printmaker. Then your address and phone number, the price of the work at £130, the details of it (acrylic and collage/board), the name of the work, White/White, and a tattered number taped across it.
0106.
The card falls into my hand as I touch it. What am I doing? Why am I opening all of this up. It is not one year of magical thinking. It is three and a half decades.
You use your father’s dictionaries for your translation work. Do you ever speak to me in German? I don’t recall. I am young and silly and don’t know what someone like you is doing with someone like me. I am an imposter and you are beautiful, funny. A musical clown.
All of my friends love you.
We travel to the Highlands. I am introducing you to my family. You sit on the damp grass on the grassy hill high above the fank park at Resipole farm and sketch the view. It is a view I have known since I was nine or ten years old. It is no longer my view but ours. I am waving my arm across my history. You are pencilling in your present. You push your hair out of your eyes. Smack at the midges. You sketch the contours. Fill in the blanks with water colour. I have your notebook in my hands now. I cannot look at it without crying.
We still have a photograph of you sitting astride our pony. The photograph is framed. You are wearing a jumper I bought for your Christmas. The pony is dead now, too.
There are pink cotton sheets in the Dean Village flat. And olive black curtains that twist and sag in the breeze. And your paintings. There is a row over one of these paintings. Maybe our first row. I am shocked when you destroy it at the peak of your rage. I have never seen anyone destroy art.
There is not much else of us in this flat. We own so few things. I am young and you have left most of yours behind.
Often, in the morning, if I’m off work or on a late shift, you struggle to leave. You lie on the bed fully clothed while I bury my head under the hard pillows pretending to resist you. You make me feel sovereign. A queen. This is not good for me.
Or you.
I meet you before the Internet. I can only find you on the Internet in the context of your father’s obituary:
… his wife and son predeceased him in 1978 and 1985 respectively.
I meet you before mobile phones. We use landlines and phone boxes. You push coins in and your words tumble. You always have a purse of them.
You have an address book with phone numbers scrawled in black and violet ink. You have so many friends. There are so many numbers.
There is one drawing of me in your sketch book. I am faceless but I know it’s me because of the trousers. White and grey leopard skin jeans. These heady 80s days. I have no style and no shame. You have drawn the spots on my jeans but my face is turned away. There’s an ear. And hair that curls soft at the back of my neck. I am sitting on a chair or sofa, my feet out of view. I don’t like being drawn by you.
Later, after all this is over, I am a nude model for my aunt’s life drawing class in North East Circus Place, a few minutes’ walk from where you take your last breath.
To be continued – maybe.
If you are struggling to cope or worried about someone with suicidal thoughts, please contact the Samaritans.
SANDERLINGS 