In Which We Use Our Backpacks For Pillows

Girls in the Window

by EMMA KEMPSELL

Amsterdam looks like Paris when it folds back on itself in Inception. You can walk ten blocks and it all looks the same: rows of buildings sighing against one another, lining the canals. But Amsterdam is nothing like Paris, or Inception: it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Paris hides its sex under sheaths of sophisticated black, and tucked away on top of hills; Amsterdam throws sex at you from windows with neon lights. And yes, Parisians smoke, but they only inhale for so long.

The first coffee shop we went to was Susie’s Saloon, which we kept forgetting, calling it Susie's Boutique, or Susie's Parlor, and once, I think, Sally’s House. Poor Susie. We sat at a large wooden table at the back. It was "the best seat in the house", and we bought Cokes sporadically to keep it, passing three joints around at once. I closed my eyes when the smoke hit the back of my throat. I looked up when I exhaled and felt it move through my veins, hitting the top of my head, filling it with lightness. Moving my head too quickly made the world whir past my eyes like a heavily distorted bass line.

Our group was big enough to allow for occasional zoning out. I’d listen to the start of a conversation, and then daydream without fully realizing. It’s like getting to the bottom of a page and realizing that you haven’t actually read anything. After what felt like days, I would rejoin the conversation with an earnest stare and an abrupt, “What?” If I got bored I'd look at Alex and smile slowly until he laughed, then we'd look at Gemma, laughing, until we were all in hysterics. Repeat ad infinitum. Or, for at least twenty minutes.

When we went to rent bikes to cycle to the Van Gogh museum, my stomach looped into knots. I couldn't even consider the pleasant prospect of feeling wind in my hair, the gentle rise and fall of the cobbled streets beneath me, or the exhilaration I might feel afterwards. I was too busy imagining my demise. It would be at a junction or lights; I would panic, fall and cause a huge scene. The small street would suddenly be filled with angry bodies: boys with long greasy hair wearing heavy metal t-shirts, fresh, perfume advert-perfect blonde women with flowers peaking from their bags, men in ties with briefcases and more experienced children on bikes would jostle to shout close to my face in Dutch as my friends doubled over their bikes with laughter.

My bloodied hands would sting, and my face would burn red. I would feel five years old and I might have tried to jump into a canal of my own accord, if only to hide my face. So I didn’t get on a bike, I went to a sun filled rooftop with my roommate, where we had the best iced-coffee known to man and let our heads become clouded with lemon haze and The National.

The sky was blue and bright at one in the afternoon. We walked down a small alley and as I turned my head in what felt like slow motion, I saw three girls gyrating slowly in their underwear. Only a thin layer of glass separated us. I spun my head back to face my friend. Without realizing what we’d walked into, we just kept walking. At the end of the street we took respite at the side of a bridge. It was dirtier than I expected, and less sexy.

For the girls in the windows, there is no pretense of interest. This is not porn, they are not actors. Their hands might move under their red panties, but they don't pretend to enjoy it; some of them look downright terrified. Their eyes are glazed over and sad, but the worst thing is that they watch you watching them. It’s a strange situation to be in because although you expect it to be a removed titillation, it’s interactive, and on top of that, one of you looks like she’d rather be anywhere else. Maybe they act more interested for prospective customers, maybe they just let their guard down to find their own little moments of respite in the eyes of young girls who could just as easily be behind the window, but aren’t. We walked back the way we came, because we needed to see it again, prepared. It was more depressing the second time.

Our group expanded at night as we followed people we barely knew who barely knew where they were going. The fuzzy yellow lights doubled with reflection in the canals, as we snaked around the little streets in packs until we were lost. At the door of a grungy dubstep club, the music searched through the walls and floor to find our feet. It carried us to a corner booth where we sank into a yawning leather couch. It thumped along with our hearts after the first hit. We made our way to the bar under the dropping beats, pale green flashing lights, and the flailing arms of possessed dancers.

The glare of the sun hit our contracted pupils and opened them wide with light when we finally ventured outside. The world looked like the result of a disposable camera or a watercolor. The trees were greener than before, the sky bluer and the water in the canals followed us peacefully down the street. The apartment buildings are varying heights, shapes and shades of coffee and ochre. With no spaces between them, they give the impression of being merely a facade with nothing beyond the slim depth. The building on our corner was green, and like Gatsby's light we would look for it when we needed to find home. Everything was beautifully hazy, yet clear. I felt like I had returned to something familiar but long forgotten.

At 7 a.m. we made our way through the quiet streets to go home. At the airport my friends dozed on the floor using their backpacks as pillows. We all sat in a silent row with droopy eyes eating Callipos at 8 a.m. An old man stared and we laughed at his overly aggressive expression. When it was time to leave I left my unfinished ice lolly to my friends, hugged everyone and walked away to the sound them shouting, "Bye!" three thousand times to my back. My roommate told me later that she nearly cried. I slept fitfully on the way home, waking up to watch the world whir past the window. I listened to The Middle East on repeat the entire time. I bought an apple pie and some ice cream. When I got home I went to bed after my grandmother told me I looked "a little jaded."

Emma Kempsell is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Aberdeen. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Miles on a Car" - Rachael Yamagata (mp3)

"The Reason Why" - Rachael Yamagata (mp3)

"You Won't Let Me" - Rachael Yamagata (mp3)

The new album from Rachael Yamagata, entitled Chesapeake, was released this week.

In Which We Watch Our Empty Silhouette

The Waves on the Sea

by EMMA KEMPSELL

I found an old home video recently. It was of my father’s 40th birthday party, which was also his last birthday.

It was the biggest party my parents ever held and I understood later that its purpose was probably to give everyone the opportunity to see him feeling well for the last time. I prepared myself to hear my fathers voice for the first time in 10 years, poured a glass of wine and put the tape in. It begins with darkness and laughter: the only light comes from the candles on the cake. The camera zooms in and the flames glow and blur, just like the memories of my father do. Everybody sings Happy Birthday without trepidation, but there’s a tension hanging in the air. Amidst the clapping when the candles are blown out, all the kids, myself included, shout for the lights to be put back on. The old dial is turned and the lights flicker on as if they are unsure, as if the darkness was in some way better. Smoke lingers and the camera accidentally zooms in on my dad’s head: on the hair growing back over the new scar above his ear. Five months after the party, the real darkness came.

My father died after a five year battle with cancer on August 8th, 1999. As a nine year old, I had a knowledge about death but a profound lack of understanding about what it really was or could mean.

On the day he died, I walked down the narrow hospice hallway with my mother and older brother. My mother was in the middle with her arms around us both; a wall of crooked heights, we supported each other. When she asked if we wanted to see him, I said yes. Of course I wanted to see my dad. My brother answered no, and so we walked on, my mother seemingly ignoring my answer. I didn’t say anything, and remember thinking later that he got to decide because he was older.

It was only years later that I realised my mother's action, or rather, her inaction, was above all induced by the hope of protection. I didn’t have the capacity to understand that I wouldn't have really seen my father; not the father I knew. There would be no sign of the joke teller, the dancer, or the reader of bedtime stories. The worker in the white shirt kissing me goodbye each morning before school; the man who made me proud in front of my friends was no longer in that room, and hadn’t been for some time. If my mother had allowed me to go into the room, I would only have seen more of the glimpse I had stolen through the curtains: a grey, lifeless, bloated lump. His face would be vacant. Even more so than it had been for the last few months. It would hold no trace of the smile that was previously ubiquitous around us. The trauma that engulfed me throughout my adolescence would have doubled.

Alongside my naiveté, I operated within my childish sense of time, judging it only by the seasons: summer sprawled but was perennially cut short, school started in autumn, winter was too long, and school stopped in spring. I understood that death meant the end of things, but I didn’t understand I wouldn’t see my father again, or that at times in the future I would desperately want or need to.

For a short time after my father died, I thought that what happened to me was normal. I knew that everybody eventually died; my friends’ fathers would die, too. When it became apparent that my situation was different, it wasn’t long before I became bitter. I started wishing that it had been my best friend's dad instead of mine. Her life was so perfect, and mine had been, too, before. This produced another layer of feeling too dense for a child to understand. I knew this was a cruel thought, I knew it was wrong, and on some level I hated myself for it.

Of course I was right that everyone dies eventually, but I was also horribly wrong: what happened to me wasn’t normal. Only 4 percent of children in the Western world experience the death of a parent, according to Science Daily.

I grew up in the middle class suburbs of Glasgow. Within my extended family and circle of friends, there wasn't even a history of divorce. I didn't meet a classmate from a single parent family until high school, and even then, their dads had left, not died. I still couldn't relate; it's not the same. Throughout my teen years I isolated myself because I believed that no one I knew could understand. None of my friends could ever feel the pain or the emptiness I was capable of feeling. This produced an absurd combination of self hatred and arrogance. I was different and no one was capable of understanding me.

My mother told me that when my dad died I became less confident, more angry. I know that I feel owed a debt by the world. Something magnificently integral has been taken from me: what feels like essential organs, my insides, have been ripped out. This should be acknowledged and I should be repaid. So when other significant things went wrong, when my mum moved on too quickly for me, when I felt ignored by my family, or when I was bullied at school, anger filled me. I might have been able to deal with such things if I still had my father. Under attack, I became defensive. I know that the world isn’t attacking me, no more so than it attacks anyone else. I know others have it much worse than I do. The world is simply, utterly unfair. I know this, but I still feel owed.

When someone dies, a common phenomenon is the employment of magical thinking. For example, if I was running a race in the school sports day my inner monologue would read:

Run! Run faster! If you run fast you’ll see Dad!

When you get to the finish line Dad will be there!

Imagine you’re running to Dad! If you win you’ll see Dad!

I would do this with any kind of competition or test, and as a perfectionist, I used it a lot. Of course, these are merely fantastical thoughts. They do not work in either of the intended ways. I knew so as I thought them and I never won anything. I realise now in writing this that the pain of losing was then compounded as it was associated with losing my father and my inability to bring him back.

Another aspect of magical thinking is the ability to imagine seeing the deceased alive again. There can be moments when you see a lookalike across the street and for a second believe that a vast conspiracy is being played out around you, as in The Truman Show. The thought process reads:  

Dad isn’t really dead!

This has all been some weird experiment, and it’s finally over.

Look! He’s right there!

And then the man turns around and you see that the man is a stranger, and you always knew he was a stranger. Slowly, these thoughts become more and more untenable, despite being utterly unrealistic in the first place.

The thought of seeing him diminishes, until it can only be found in dreams, photographs, songs, smells or forced imagination. By “forced imagination” I mean forcing yourself to see something that isn’t there. This is not the same as mistaking a man on the street for the deceased, but rather, projecting his image onto something you know not to be him. For example, I would sometimes stare at the back of my stepfather’s head in the car and pretend it was my dad. This only worked at night because my stepdad is bald, and my dad had a full, thick head of hair.

We didn’t talk about my dad much after he died because we couldn’t without crying, and we’d done enough crying. I was too young, and I have no real time memories, nothing that isn’t triggered by a photograph or a smell or a song. I can’t play out a scene in my head. I don’t hear my father’s voice until I hear my brother say, “Hello” on the phone, and even after that word, that’s it, it’s over. I rarely dream of him, and when I do living without him the next day is worse than the day before. The absence is intensified. But once that day is over I still long to repeat it. Over and over again, to be with him even for a second in a dream is worth being turned back to the cruel joke of reality. Because that’s where I’d be, anyway.

My life is split in two. Before and after. I have a utopian view of my childhood. Everything until that sunny August day, that rainy funeral and the blur of years that follows it, is perfection. Nothing can compete, and I constantly want to return to that place of home that only exists in my heart. My family will never be whole again, and neither will I.

I live in his absence, in the crater left in his wake. I watch other fathers, and it makes me smile before it begins to ache. At the Brooklyn Bridge Park on a Saturday afternoon I watched a young man play with a child no older than two. Or, maybe older than two, but no bigger than two. (I cannot guess children’s ages.) This is what I wrote:

She is tiny. He spins her around in the air, holding her wrist and an ankle. She squeals in delight and he lays her down softly on the jaggy green grass. She lays on her back and so does he, beside her. After a minute she gets restless and she climbs on his chest, her face in his neck and her legs only reaching where his belly button would be under his shirt. He wraps his arms around her; she is so small that his arms fit around her and himself, and his hands find his sides easily, his finger tips grazing the grass. They lie like that for a moment and I want to tell him,“Don’t let go. Don’t let her go.” But she squirms, and it’s too late, they’re up and she’s in the air, the colors of his red shirt and grey shorts whirring past her eyes.

When the tape of my father's party finished, I took my drink outside and lit a cigarette. It was a summer evening, the sky was pink and warm. I heard someone yell something that sounded like my name, and within five seconds, my mind tried to convince me that it was my father.

Once when I was a child my brother and I ran to meet someone we hadn’t seen for years. I want to dream that it was him. I run down the street that we grew up on. We used to walk it together, his hand enclosed around mine. I see his figure looming in the distance, it has been years, but it feels like forever. My hand drops from my mother’s and my feet slap hard, painfully on the ground, my hair flying violently behind me. Tears are running down my face as quickly as I am running towards him. But it feels like slow motion. Purple flowers in nearby gardens blur and the sun is shining, like it always did, as he gets closer and closer. My blue eyes are swimming. Everything is a hazy mess of gold light, green, and purple flowers. I see him clearly, wearing jeans and an old red sweater that I still keep in my closet. I can almost feel him hugging me. How small I’ll feel, enveloped in his arms, my eyelashes wet, and the smell of his neck. But we don’t live there anymore, and no matter how hard I try, I almost never dream of him.

I am left wondering what difference having a father makes. There are studies that say teenagers without fathers will be more promiscuous, more rebellious, they will do badly in school and they will have a reduced chance at every kind of success. Every case is too different to be comparable. When we are taught that grief ends, we are being lied to. Grief is like a river: it moves through us and through time. Sometimes it is bearable, and other times not; sometimes it feels like drowning. Grief turns us into water: it slips through our fingers but makes us stronger, strong enough to hold up a ship.

I know that the findings in any study are not my story; they are not me. My story is one that I am making for myself, and I can feel it firmly in my hands. I live with and in his absence, I try to live wholly with an emptiness that I try to fill only with success, and with more love. I live the lessons he taught me when he was alive, and those I have been forced to learn since his death: to be strong and to be yourself, and to be unyielding in that; to be sensitive to your own pain and to the pain of others, to live as best you can and to do things that scare you, because those are the best things you can do for yourself. That, and it will all be over too quickly.

Emma Kempsell is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Glasgow. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about ending the cosmic friendship.

"Solsbury Hill" - Peter Gabriel (mp3)

"Mercy Street" - Peter Gabriel (mp3)

"Losing My Religion" - R.E.M. (mp3)

"Try Not To Breathe" - R.E.M. (mp3)

In Which We End The Cosmic Friendship

photo by Amanda McCleod

I Took From Her The Love I Want
And Turned It To The Sky

by EMMA KEMPSELL

She was something that I clung to because she had been there for a long time. Even when she wasn’t and we fought a lot, she was there in the background. She was a friend I didn’t want to lose hold of completely, or rather, I didn’t feel ready to let her lose hold of me; the option of having her there was something that I didn’t want to pass up because at one time, it had meant everything to me. It’s true that we fought a lot. Somewhere between 2004 and 2006, and for most of 2008 we didn’t speak at all. I don’t remember most of the details surrounding why.

We met on the first visit to high school in June 2002. She had a Nirvana patch stitched onto her bag, so I knew that we would get along. We waited all summer to meet again and then found ourselves in the same class in August. It would be easy to attribute something cosmic to our friendship, if you believe in that sort of thing. We lived in the notoriously boring suburbs, like a waiting room for teenagers. Our houses were ten minutes apart, separated by a hill (later a housing development) and our high school.

We both hated high school, like our punk rock heroes told us we should. When we weren’t getting high, we would walk to the park or the supermarket for a lack of anything else to do. In the park we would play music from speakers, lie down, smoke, drink Diet Coke and run on the grass in our bare feet. I would wear baggy shirts and tight jeans. When we went to the supermarket, she never bought anything, but simply accompanied me while I bought the abundance of fruit my mother wouldn't. It wasn't that she (my mother) didn't buy fruit, she most certainly did, but the long list of fruit and vegetables I required was beyond usual amount requisite of mothers. I would buy that, and then Diet Coke and crackers, for when the fruit and vegetables didn't suffice.

When I confided to my friend years later that I had been purposefully under-eating, she said that she had always known, and I felt betrayed. A better friend would have confronted me, or at least struggled with the decision to confront me.

photo by Amanda McCleod

In 2007, our decrepit high school building was demolished and replaced with a new one, adjacent to the old plot. For the first month while we waited to be assigned a class, we wandered the new, tunnel-like, white empty halls. We joked about it being the Death Star. For someone reason we would sing the few lines we knew of "Stayin’ Alive" by the Bee Gees, just to make each other laugh. We would sneak past classes at work and find ourselves on an empty staircase before it would fill with the aggressively jostling bodies of our peers who we would have to join for the rest of the day.

When we were finally put into a French class, we sat at the back, and resolved to do no work. We were there for two months, and for those four hours a week, we would doodle and quote Alan Partridge. That is the only thing I remember about any classes that year.

We both dropped out of high school the same week in October, a year and a half before we were due to graduate. We handed in the paperwork to our guidance councilor at the same time, and she was visibly disappointed. She demanded a hug from each of us, and as we walked away we laughed about her bad breath like the bitchy fifteen year olds we were.

There was never an awkward silence between us. We didn’t find it necessary to talk on public transport, so any time we got on a bus or a train, we automatically put headphones on. Perhaps it was a subconscious need for some distance. Years later when we had actually become distant, we evolved this need for space into a need for closeness by showing each other what we were listening to and sharing headphones; once on a school trip, the teachers sitting in front of us on the bus said we were adorable.

In the summer of 2007 we rarely hung out because I was working, but when we did, we’d go into the city to shop or watch movies late at night. I'd cross the hill and pass the dark, empty school to get to her house. We'd drink a couple drinks, and smoke out the back door and after the movie was finished she'd walk me half way home through the empty and silent suburban streets.

We would run for no other reason than to feel free in the streets where we were usually contained. Everything was orange and black, like Halloween, and we'd usually end up taking an hour to walk what would normally take ten minutes. The accumulation of betrayals, misunderstandings, and a lack of trust and care are what caused me to eventually sever the friendship for good around this time last year. I didn’t end it because of a fight, just the realisation that I was tired of holding onto something so fraught with complications and underhanded bitterness.

After a while, and after so many fights, our closeness became something that instead of keeping us together, drove us apart. It was a weapon. "I know you too well to know when you’re lying," she once said. "I know when you’re lying, but I just don’t tell you that I know."

There is something inherently creepy about this, and it made me uneasy; it still does. Still, I have no regrets about our friendship or its demise. The fall out doesn’t really matter because the memories of our good times are stronger than any other memories of my teenage years. We spent a lot of time wishing things were different, and wishing that we were different, waiting to get out. Now we are and I don’t know much about her life, but I hope that she’s happy. I always did.

Emma Kempsell is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Glasgow. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Amanda McCleod and the author.

photo by Amanda McCleod

"Watch Our Shadows Run" - Joseph Arthur (mp3)

"This Is Still My World" - Joseph Arthur (mp3)

"Over the Sun" - Joseph Arthur (mp3)

photo by Amanda McCleod