In Which We Attempt To Change The Day We Were Born

Odd Numbers

by HEATHER MCROBIE

You love Jerusalem the way you love your father. You have to, it’s like God. Golden and eternal and looming down, only there are no shadows to hide in when faced with it, not in any quarter. You submit to its logic, its walls weighted with allegory and tiny little tucked-away dreams, scrolls upon scrolls of little insignificances, lost in the stony face of the city, hills like smoke mixing physical geography and parable. Its gates open and close – announced and regularly – but beyond your control. It’d be as useless to resist as it would be to remove the pattern of your fingerprints on your fingers, or change the day you were born. You’re nothing in the face of it – at best, you’re a little unoriginal replica or a conduit that it moves through. It exists, complete and eternal, irrespective of you.

You love Tel Aviv the way sometimes in a café on either side of the Mediterranean you’re the just right temperature already, there is heat and breeze in the right combination already, unholy and earthly and just-right, some shitty music of just the right kind and some faint laughter from teenagers outside, and then at some inexact point in the afternoon you see someone suddenly and – you were complete before, you understand; it’s not that you need anything – and yet you are suddenly blurred in love, in a smudge of watermelon flavour and soft alcoholic edges and the Dopplering mush of music up and down the beach, none of which you needed until it was suddenly there.

Jerusalem is saying never to forget that you alone are just a fragment or scrap and you won’t even understand the enormity of the page you come from. Tel Aviv is saying – through its neon and its Bauhaus buildings, which you don’t need and which don’t need you but just curve and curve and curve – that you don’t need to live in your worst moment forever; that you can construct yourself anew, enamelled and glistening with careless, improbable joy.

Perhaps, too, both are saying to you – do not think of the other half of the sentence. Jerusalem in its achingly solemn eternity, Tel Aviv in its miraculous hurtling to the future, say together, as opposites, as twins – don’t think, just for a moment, what buys this beauty, what’s hidden and erased now, what and who have had to pay for all of this.

This isn’t a story about either Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. It is not really a story anyway. It’s a little exercise in not becoming too enamelled and not making everything a story. It’s difficult to keep things light. It’s difficult not to draw constellations out of an arrangement of lights. This is what I wanted to explain about Tunisia – not golden iconic Jerusalem, not neon miraculous Tel Aviv, but a place as a place, breezily intangible, that wouldn’t ask to be decoded.

23

The summer I was twenty-three I won a writing prize only five other people had entered with a story that grew into a novel, which was published and froze my embarrassingly unformed juvenilia in place out in the world like a pre-historic bug trapped in amber, or like some kind of pinned not-quite-butterfly. I wore a white dress to the book launch and, drunk in front of my Dad for the first time, I told a real grown-up writer that I was wearing white because “because, maybe, maybe this party is like…my wedding, and maybe it’s like, my books will be my children? Maybe…” I trailed off, imprecisely. The real writer and my out-of-place Dad laughed at me as though I was twenty-three and unformed, and I remember I felt ashamed.

25

The summer I was twenty-five I was studying on the same course as this guy, and I moved in with him because I was lost by all the fractures and codes and loaded surnames of where I was. This guy with a specific passport and a specific surname and of origins of no relevance here crucially once threw my clothes out of the window of the apartment we were staying in, and said something about ‘smashing my teeth in’ because of something to do with the length of my skirt and something to do with my passport, and really there is too much that isn’t mine in this story for me to try to explain it. To stop being trapped – in Novi Zagreb, ugly part of a pretty city, miles from the cool of the Croatian coast – festering in the building with this guy I’d once liked and his fists and sudden changes of mood, I made a bargain with him. I’d write his thesis for him if he would leave me the summer alone and unbruised, and let me keep the apartment while I do it.

I was writing my thesis too. July and August were a blur of decoding graffiti on concrete footbridges and my attempts – alternating with my own thesis – to write in the voice of the man who’d left. I felt detached and professional, numb enough to slump by the electric fan every evening and watch the dubbed and dated soap operas and without feeling affinity for one character in particular. I thought I was mastering the art of getting the overview of a situation, though I wasn’t.

My thesis was on writers persecuted by the state, why we need writers, how literature expands our empathy. The thesis of the man who’d once found a cockroach in the apartment and thrown it at me because I took too long coming back from the shops was on the idea there’s no such thing as morality. Once, after he’d left, I walked back from the bakery stocked up on sirnica and individually-sold sachets of ‘Nescafe’, and briefly appreciated this symmetry between my thesis and his. It was more difficult than writing a novel or building something you believe in, trying to write like him – thinking which avenues of arguments his mind wouldn’t walk down, which subtleties he would have smashed through. Bluntly, because I was feeling bruised and needed to nourish myself with anything I could find within me, I liked having to think of which book he wouldn’t have read, how to limit the thesis’s arguments accordingly.

If that sounds unkind and intellectually snobbish, the guy with the surname had had plenty of educational opportunities, and also once spat in my face and called me a whore for speaking to [ ] because [ ] had a passport from [ ] country. Also, he was willing to have someone else do his work for him.

Like many overgrown boys full of anger, he claimed to be a big fan of Nietzsche. I quoted the philosopher in the thesis I was ghost-writing for my freedom, but – as a subtle, feminine act of resistance – I always made sure I did it slightly incorrectly. Just like you can deliberately sew a button on wrong: not so it comes off straight away, but so it will not hold.

At the end of the year what matters isn’t the graduation ceremony – which was Italian in medieval redness and embarrassment, or the party afterwards – which was Southern in an outline of broken glass and Yugo-rock – but just that my thesis on literature and empathy got a higher grade than the Nietzsche-thesis I’d written for him. This simple fact secretly sustained me the whole winter after I came home and tried to find a palatable way to explain this period of my life to old friends.

I no longer feel very ashamed of this. After all, no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Know who said that, overgrown violent boy? Friedrich Nietzsche.

27

The summer I was twenty-seven I went to Tunisia because I was sort of studying the political situation and recreationally in love with an improbably good-natured visiting French student whose father was from Tunisia though he, my smiling sort-of boyfriend, had never been there himself. When I emailed my friend from neighbouring Libya, she wrote back: ‘Tunisia, so cool so blue so white so nice.'

Although it wasn’t completely spared the pilfering imaginations of colonial-era writers – there’s Flaubert’s Salammbô, which he wrote in an overgrown-boy sulk at the French reception of Madame Bovary; and Andre Gide’s The Immoralist, which treats the country as static backdrop for the Frenchman’s awakening to bourgeois hypocrisies – Tunisia at least wasn’t subjected to the same malignant obsession that France held for Algeria. It was colonised, it was abused, of course, but as it wasn’t anointed as the jewel in the delusion crown of imperial conceit, it could, it seemed, sometimes, just quietly be. I’d learned in the ugly part of beautiful Zagreb that there are few benefits to being an abuser’s chosen object of fixation. Tunisia was comfortable as a country among countries, not stewing in the story of itself. That summer the visiting student and I drank in the Salons de thes and ate makrout and swam and talked about going to Libya but of course weren’t going to Libya, Tunisia was cool and blue and fresh and smelled of jasmine and its revolutionary cry had been for ‘karama’, dignity, an unembellished, unassuming plea.

There were few ‘isms’ and factions in the newspapers, not the political Rubik’s cube of the international arena or the aching fault-lines that split on either side of here, the demand had been the way someone just gives you a look when you’re being unreasonable and you stop being obnoxious. It’s a beautiful word, ‘karama’, because what can you say in the face of someone asking for dignity? It just says, don’t be unreasonable.

Don’t be unreasonable, just go to swim in the sea, make more makrout, let’s not argue, why does it matter, come to bed, never mind we’ll go another day, go to Carthage if you want but these aren’t ruins like Jerusalem’s, electric with live history, these are just beautiful things to be set on the table of a mind next to jasmine and blue-and-white-painted streets. Since I thought of this summer as the French student’s story – visiting his father’s country, seeing the food he’d eaten at home at street vendor stalls, the town south of Tunis that had his surname – I didn’t read meaning into everything. I’d sometimes seek significance in things on his behalf, point out a phrase he’d use that was also spoken here or a repeating pattern in the architecture, and he’d say “but why does it matter?” and it wasn’t mine to make matter or not.

21

I didn’t always know this about places and people and things and languages. The summer I was twenty one I’d gone alone to Israel, and though I didn’t catch Jerusalem Syndrome or get drafted into one of the cults comprised of lost backpackers, in my aloneness and my twenty-one-ness I read everything into everything, in every way all at once until it exploded meaning, by which I mean I think I became unwell, in a way that didn’t get cured until the summer six years later when I was happy.

For the first few days I was just practicing the alphabet and practicing how to be alone. But soon the dead sea scrolls were speaking to the synagogue from Kerala that had been dismantled in India and shipped across an ocean, to be rehoused in a national museum, the great trade routes of empires were springing up in my mind like a global cat’s cradle that I had to consciously hold in place at all times and mustn’t ever let slip, the signs of every newspaper reporting every event in every adjacent country, the languages whose alphabets were cousins of each other, the histories upon histories, each event ricocheting off each other, each genealogy of reminiscence, each side of each story and each collective memory all at once, languages I hadn’t heard of that suddenly I needed to know – who knew about Phoenician, where can I study Assyrian, where can I study all the ways these all interlink and all at once speak to each other. All the little hurtling pollen of history landing on and blossoming in the Biblical and futuristic present – golden Jerusalem and glistening Tel Aviv together – I lay awake at night with notebooks for practicing alphabets and with several books open but not reading any of them because I didn’t know how I would fit everything into my mind all at once so that it was complete.

I think this is what going mad is like, more than thinking a book launch is like a wedding because your unwritten books are like unborn children, or like writing someone else’s work for them to put their name on, or choosing to love a completely inappropriate person, although none of those are very wise choices. The French visiting student would sometimes say to me when I was thinking through something I was studying or writing “but why does it matter? It doesn’t matter, okay.” I had rational views about how the revolution might turn out, based on the newspapers I’d developed the habit of reading, the -isms and factions I’d learned to trade in, but emotionally the idea grew that it works best when a place is a place, so cool so blue so white so nice, and with none of the colours or the names too painfully heavy with meaning.

+

If this story wasn’t about growing up exactly it was about an un-stitching from how you’ve threaded yourself into the codes of the world too intensely. Or a little loosening from that quest to mythologise everything around you – load every name and letter and alphabet and dress and swinging shop-sign and little symmetries of hand-movements of the person sitting opposite you and the major and minor notes struck every time a person laughs and every diacritic and every birdsong or mobile phone tone or date of email address and every airplane ticket and every geographical point and every funeral hymn and every goodbye and every beginning with this weight. It’s very hard to be unsymbolic, not see everything as part of its own language, with a grammar you could learn if you just applied yourself more completely.

It should be easy. For every constellation you make there’s a pattern-less un-remarkableness that you could draw just as easily, if you chose to, or chose not to choose. The summer I was twenty-two I photocopied in an office and baked carrot cake but not very much, the summer I was twenty-four I wrote a bit but not a lot, I don’t remember anything that happened the summer I was twenty-six and I just wasted this whole year I’ve been twenty-eight vaguely thinking about what it would be like to kiss someone I’m not completely sure I’d want to kiss anyway. There don’t have to be patterns. What contentment could come from no longer looking for them, even just for a while.

Heather McRobie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a novelist living in London. She last wrote in these pages about Ivy's girls. She twitters here and tumbls here.

In Which We Falter In This Apprenticeship

Second Haunting

by HEATHER MCROBIE

When I was speaking to some twenty-two year olds in a university bar in England last week I made sure I was kind, in a 27-year old way, to their post-college references: F. Scott and whiskey, blank-canvas silent female icons who the 27-year old female knows are more than conduits for the male imagination. I didn’t say “I’ve heard this before” or even make a face that said it, the way people do to the young. This is not only because I spent a year in my twenties being laughed at unkindly by people five years older than I was. It’s because I remember my own post-college precipice of self, and I did more than just quote a few obvious reference-points. Twenty-two years old was the year I moved from England to Montreal to make Leonard Cohen fall in love with me.

“I’ve heard this before” didn’t come for a while, five years ago — even though thinking back everything I was doing was beyond-obvious. It didn’t come through all of September. There is an old CBC interview of a precipice-of-self Leonard Cohen in the 1960s, where he is shedding the snake-skin of ‘poet’ for ‘singer’ and blitzkreig’ing the CBC interviewer with pre-feminist-revolution charm. He claims with a faux-boldness reserved for male poets that he’s going to change his name to ‘September’. Watch the interview on Youtube if you want to feel all these feelings at once: (1) desire; (2) a feminist urge to reclaim the mid-1960s cardigan-wearing interviewer from the role of nervous, obedient good-girl being teased by the heroic subversive man, encourage her to find her own voice; (3) a desire to tell the young version of Cohen ‘don’t lay it on so thick, we know that you know what affect you have on women’; (4) sad desire. I haven’t watched that CBC interview for years.

That September in Montreal I was still fresh as the blue sky and green copper on the Catholic Church spires, bright as the red rust down by the port. I’d heard it before, of course — this Montreal I consumed hungrily in those first weeks I walked around the city — in my English college bedroom, through the Leonard Cohen songs that seeped out from under my door until the Estonian boy down the corridor complained. That had been June. Here I was autumnally now a European gasping at a new world — adulthood, like the sight of land from a ship.

I walked up and down Mount Royal as its neon cross worked like a magnet on my precipice-of-self heart. I walked up and down the streets that had French road signs that, in France, they write in English: Arret not Stop. I found ridiculous symmetries in everything, 22-year old-ishly. The old and over-varnished Yiddish shop signs were speaking to the new Vietnamese take-away without me translating. The mouth of the port and the tip of Mount Royal were speaking to each other. The Catholic Church spires and the synagogues were speaking to each other. I was speaking the awkward English-schoolgirl French of Europeans at un-impressed Quebecois locals who took pity on me as I struggled at late-night kiosks, buying my first packet of Belmont cigarettes with currency that felt like Euros and from which Queen Elizabeth’s familiar face stared out imperiously. 

I read books in bed about the Quiet Revolution and the novels of Mordechai Richler. I believed everything everyone told me about Montreal whenever someone started a conversation with me in a café. The city dominated talk and thoughts, this secret grotto and grubby sanctuary, a smuggled gem that sometimes, in my 22-year old mind, sort of spoke port-to-port to Naples and Marseilles — an under-ocean thread of swearing Latin sailors, transacted in ships’-bellies – and other times seemed a sister-city to New Orleans — secret America under America, coded in liturgy and a sponge of sacred curses, extravagantly mythologising itself.   And all anyone wanted to talk to me about was Montreal. Montreal Montréal! You could write it with or without an accent — what a city; double-city. Did you know Montreal has a bagel war with New York? I wanted to know many facts like this — as in love with Montreal as the city was, it later darkly emerged, in an aching kind of love with itself. But particularly I wanted to know one fact: where would I find Leonard?

Okay there were signs, when I asked that, that they had heard it all before. But to the 23, 24, 25-year old fully-formed impossibly-composed new friends to whom I made these enquiries, it was alright. Music was one of Montreal’s mythologies in which we all participated. It was 2007, a Montreal moment. Do you want to come and see the church where Arcade Fire recorded their first album, one new friend asked. Do you want to come back to mine to listen to The Stills? Do you want to come and see this new band you haven’t heard of? We went to see Bjork play — her song ‘Declare Independence’, new that year, set off a wave of Quebec-nationalist cheers in the audience that I needed someone to translate for me. We went on picnics — right through to October. Like we had all the time in the world for picnics.

For although Montreal has four full seasons, there was a further axis, over English-French, around which I had to contort my young and new-found freedom: summer-winter. I look back on those September days now through the glazed-window of what came later — evenings of rose wine and port-meandering buried forever beneath the winter I’ll never forget. When people warned me of the winter when I first arrived I thought they meant coldness, weather.  It turns out, though, they meant timeless moonwalking heartbreak.

The friendships we made in the autumn, post-college groups made for going to parties, to the cinema and into too much detail too quickly, constricted like oesophagi as the snow set in.  Sometime in late autumn a new friend who had grown up in Montreal explained to me that he had ‘summer friends’ and ‘winter friends’.  Summer friends lived in other areas of town, you met up with them for Frisbee and open-air jazz and trips out of town. Winter friends you wintered with. Wintering felt a bit like how my friends who liked to live in the heat described their months on kibbutz, or a bit like marriage or a bit like American graduate school. Getting through Montreal winter with other people (you could not get through Montreal winter alone — although, also, everyone got through Montreal winter alone) was less friendship than folie a deux. Or trois. There were three people in our apartment and three regular visitors. 

In autumn I’d moved into the building just off Rue St Denis which, I was told as an extravagant mythology, had been a brothel in the eighteenth century. It had stairs leading up to the front from the outside, just like I’d English-ly dreamed of. Every morning I had to throw salt on the ice-covered stairs so I didn’t break my neck. This, I found out, is how Montreal breaks your heart.

As the snow set in, in those first weeks, time still worked and the novelty of snowfights and Montreal mythology buoyed us through numb-toed drunken stumblings back from the Casa del Popolo bar. In the weeks that followed, time got snowed in too. I’d ask my warm-faced, wrapped-up flatmate whether he’d mind being the one to go out today, to pick my books up from our friend two streets away. He asked me two days later if I’d be the one to go out and buy more gritted salt. Evenings were wide as the prairies I had never seen — would never see, now that time had stopped and the concept of westwards was covered over with the moonscape of the city that we watched from our windows. We really did watch from our windows.

We listened to the Arcade Fire song ‘Une Année Sans Lumière’ with no discernible sense of irony. We played things on vinyl, because we were 22 and thought we were the first people to appreciate a variety of things, including wooden floors and theories of translation and our old telephone. Our landlord from upstairs would ring the phone at unsociable hours because all hours were unsociable and speak Quebecois French that I brain-translated into my-French then brain-translated into English and I have no idea what it meant but I think it meant, “Are you cold?”

We called into work or university sick or university or work called into us sick — let’s just not move, either way. We made a lot of fried eggs and took it in turns to moonwalk out to the dépanneur two blocks away for cigarettes. I wore my yellow knitted socks and my pink silk dress and my grey woollen jumper and had my first encounter with the brain-dentistry of clinical depression. Once we didn’t leave the apartment for three days. The experience snowily, sleepily dusted all surfaces of human interactions — at breakfast: “We haven’t left the apartment for a week!” This was conversational exaggeration and at the same time possibly true.

Because we were twenty-two, we read a lot of books self-consciously and some sincerely, and talked about them as we cooked terrible food. People fell into morbid, miserable love affairs of the kind that can only happen when you are enclosed in a room with a person with minus-twenty on the thermometer. We listened to jazz, blues, 1990s triphop, Broken Social Scene. But underneath it all was Leonard Cohen, the ache for him, the presence of him, the absence of him. We didn’t actually listen to him that much — not the way I had a year before, when ‘So Long Marianne’ and ‘Anthem’ and his album Dear Heather which had my name so it was fate of course (a twenty-one year old thought) filled my college bedroom. There was not much point actually taking the lid off him while in the thick of his shadow. We listened to everything in the mood of him instead.

I skipped a season here: if I can go back to autumn — which I can’t — there was a time in my early Montreal months when I walked up and down around Rue Rachel, thinking of the moment I would meet him. Cohen had lived in California for years, cloistered in Buddhism and late-celebrity, but there were extravagant rumours about his periodic migration back north. His migration back home, surely, for Leonard — to his Westmount childhood and McGill student fumblings, somewhere between the time he was Leonard Cohen and when he became ‘Leonard Cohen’.  

It finally hit me the third time I found myself waiting outside his mythologised local newsagent in Parc du Portgual. I saw the other girls who were looking for him, waiting. A French girl in a skirt, another girl in jeans and a red coat. And through them I saw, too, the historiography of Cohen, the decades there must have been of women walking up and down these streets, looking for him. Decades like sedentary layers of moon-surface Montreal — the women who had come from Winnipeg and St. John’s, women who had come even from New York and from Europe. The dust of Leonard. The weight of dreams of girls from eras where marriage was creeping up, was stalled, was receding. Even in the later decades of this line I imagined, of Leonard-longing girls, there was something burning in the thought of their dreams melting, get on the bus go home become an adult. I wasn’t ready to accept its inevitability yet, but the image of the line of those who’d come before me pressed itself into the thoughts I carried through the streets. I stopped looking for him after that, sickened the way a 22-year old is at the realization that they are a footnote to a stronger story.

Back in the apartment, though, we always returned to Leonard — his early poetry as a McGill student, that post-war open-mouth shock of young men whose thoughts are full of Eichmann, and then his love poetry preceding — precipitating, I liked to think — the sexual revolution. His first novel of young-man Montreal, his second novel of still-young man desire. A lot of people don’t know Leonard Cohen was a novelist before he became a songwriter; everyone I met in Montreal did. We read the writers who inspired him, were inspired by him — A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, an enclosed Montreal dialogue. The rest of the world hadn’t heard of them; Montreal didn’t care.

And then I felt the second haunting, in the second-half of winter. The ache I felt at the thought of all those years’-worth of young women who had come to this city hungry for the love of him was answered — or mirrored — in the swollen presence, suddenly, of all the men who were not Leonard Cohen.  There were so many men who were not Leonard Cohen here. I knew this because I used to notice them as I walked up and down Rue St Denis looking for his face on every figure — you’re not Leonard, you’re not Leonard, you’re not Leonard. I thought of all the men in this city straining under the weight of not-being-Leonard, of listening to his music as they kissed girls, lyrically cuckholded. I pictured entire marriages conducted in the shadow of his poetry. Those girls who’d come to Montreal on buses from Winnipeg and St John’s and New Jersey and wherever else in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s — did they find not-Leonards, close-enoughs, and settle down? 

Leonard loomed over us like grandfather time, like the neon cross on Mount Royal, like the snow-unfurling skies. I listened as the young man who was one of our ‘winter-friends’ and lived three streets away — that is, we were in Montreal-love and deluded and snow-psychotic together — told me at some hourless dinner in our sealed-off apartment how he sometimes narrated his thoughts entirely through Cohen lyrics, and navigated the city the times he numbly ventured out by reference to Cohen-points. We were all echoes, marginalia to someone else’s golden burning life. I realised lazily over a month into winter that my friends were tightrope-walking between depression and delusion the way that, in the city, you turned the corner and the language on people’s mouths suddenly changed from French to English. The boys had started waking up at 6 p.m., cooking meals then throwing them straight in the bin, reading the same book twice. This is one of the last things I lucidly noticed. 

Because it was just after that that my own delusion set in. It was about spring. Spring, I decided, was never coming. I tried to explain it to my housemate when I was going to bed and he was waking up at 3 a.m., in the kitchen full of books and the residue of omelettes. This was it, I said with the calmness of someone who has laid in bed with a book for a week. It would stay winter forever. The seasons decided to stop. I decided to stop.  At some point my flatmate took me aside through the fog of the window-staring sadness and told me he thought I should call my family. “I think you’re not well, Heather,” he said.

So I didn’t make it to spring, and for all I know it doesn’t ever come, or something miraculous happens that I’ll never know, to make it stop being the way it was like the moon or pre-history during those fogs of weeks.  I went back to England and asked people not to ask me about what had happened in Montreal. But I did finally see Leonard Cohen, I think. It was one of the early nights of Hannukah and I was walking to this bar not far from my apartment. I was moving so fast, like he sings in ‘My Secret Life’. This was the moment I’d been dreaming of — he’d see me, he’d notice me, I would become stitched into song. I overtook him on the street before I knew it was him, turned around just by chance and saw it — his Leonard-face, those two deep lines either side of his mouth that he’s always had, that you can see on the cover of The Songs of Leonard Cohen.  

But it was all wrong.  Because that night, for once, I had somewhere to be and other thoughts. I was going to a bar to meet my friend from three streets away and my thoughts were full of him, a real person in my real 22-year old life. I suppose it is a victory, for the not-Leonards who have for so long lived in his shadow, that at the moment I saw the singer himself turning the corner, his brow furrowed, scarf-wrapped, in his Pablo Neruda hat, I was thinking about another man.

One of my favourite Leonard Cohen lyrics is when he sings to Janis Joplin at the end of ‘Chelsea Hotel No 2’ – “That’s all, I don’t even think of you that often.”  I don’t think of that winter often. But when I do it is not Leonard Cohen that I think about, but all the not-Leonards trying to be and to make, faltering in their apprenticeship as I faltered in mine, in that first failed venture out into the world. When I meet 22-year olds in college bars in England, I think of them there in the snow — unfamous and without the magic power to make everyone fall in love with them through their words. I either love them so much or at least want, so much, to love them so much, for getting through the winter without being Leonard. Human and clumsy and with no magic powers, they are almost as defenceless as girls. 

Heather McRobie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and journalist living in Oxford. She twitters here. 

"Chase the Light" - Palace (mp3)

"Settle Down" - Palace (mp3)

In Which The Dandelion Clock Strikes Midnight

Bouquet

by HEATHER MCROBIE

Running alongside the events of those years was like in the cartoons where the animated out-sized character doesn’t realize he’s run off the edge of a cliff, until he looks down and so – to comic, cartoonish effect – suddenly starts falling. 

Sometimes I thought of Tahrir Square like a coral reef, everyone moving as one, shoals darting between the barnacled city walls.  Sometimes I thought of breezy, light Tunisia like a dandelion clock that all the young people and sad people blew at once, scattering the seeds of it everywhere, like this would be the first and last birthday cake whose candles we’d all ever get to blow out. At other times I thought of it like a grapevine, each bunch ripening in tandem, and at other times I couldn’t believe any of it at all.  A lot of metaphors also ripened during this time and because we were still growing up we overused all of them, and I’m sorry for that.  There are lots of stupid, easy things to say about spring.

The man I was in love with then did algebra and never used a metaphor, which I respect now more than I did when things were starting. For the purpose of this story I’ll use his brother’s name, Ibrahim, not so much for anonymity but more just because things between us were always a bit dislocated like that, like someone forgot to carry the one in an equation.  Something always got left over from the last thing, or nudged down one unit in a row.

He wasn’t Brahim, my friend from early Cairo-unbelievableness, with whom, in the infinite possibilities of this outside-time year-zero, I carved out a perfect friendship uncorroded by the complications of politics and sex.  “Guess how short my skirts are when I go out in London? And guess how short they are when I go out in Manchester? And guess how short my skirts are when I go out in Liverpool?” Brahim would put his hands to his face like two giant leaves covering the centre of a sunflower but you could tell from the glow that peaked out that he was always laughing.  We were laughing in our language classes and laughing on the balcony and only not-laughing when he took me to the cemetery and even then afterwards he made jokes, of a kind. 

The man I was in love with who studied physics and was bemused by all of this came with me on a boat to Tunis where we imagined all the ancient Greek shipwrecks that must lie between his port-city home and the port-city someone with his surname had once left for the lower-lip of southern France.  We became professionally annoying with our photographs: every flag and every protest, me taking my dress off in our bedroom in the heat (later after Ibrahim left I was working at home in my underwear because it was too hot and heard the clicking of a camera by an amateur creep who was peering in through the window). We photographed the hospital and photographed the morgue and photographed the bars called “Facebook” and the cafes called “Twitter”. I sent emails to professors in Europe and North America telling them all their theories were outdated now, after this miraculous blossoming of spring. I mainly got out-of-office replies.

Since Ibrahim grew up in the south of France but studied in Paris I came to understand a relationship that had nothing to do with me, a north-south tension that didn’t play out in my life.  The ‘grandes ecoles’ of regimented Napoleonic education and the starched northernnesses of his classmates were as alien to him as they were to me, and he moved around Paris as half-bemused as he was half-bemused in Tunisia, home of his father.  I thought of him – because I loved him and he loved mathematics – as the mathematically-precise centre-point between these two, Paris and Tunis, held comfortably in his smiling certainty that this would all turn out alright, don’t worry my love.  I started to think of the Mediterranean like a mouth, with southern Europe as the upper teeth and north Africa as the lower teeth, how they had once slotted together, before some tectonic shift exposed the wet middle of sunken Greek ships.

Years later in Odessa I thought similarly and differently of the Black Sea: Ukraine glistening above and Turkey propping it up assuredly from underneath.  The heartening enclosed-ness of it all.  I liked to hold on to enclosed things, after the places and events since the start of the revolution that unraveled and just kept on unraveling.   I thought maybe the Mediterranean Sea was Ibrahim’s mouth beaming in the sun and the Black Sea was Amela’s mouth in that period when I thought about Amela’s mouth all the time, when she’d sit out by the library, and say funny and clever things and purse her lips in between so that they looked, improbably, like an exact map of Australia coloured in with lipstick.  ‘Amela’ is also a fake name for someone whose identity I need to smudge into imprecision, but her lips really did shape themselves, perfectly, just like that.

The best and worst thing about growing up motherless is you have to learn the artifice of femininity really carefully, like you’re learning algebra – when to carry, when to drop, when to press a little, when to stop.  I remember thinking of this in the Tunis hospital where the blue corridors were casually lined with dirty bandages.  How the hands of the nurses wafted at me in unison like seaweed in some sticky, maternal mauling.  How had they learned to touch bodies like that? It seemed as definite as maths but whole in natural-ness, precise but organic, like a starfish.  They sent me back to the apartment in Tunis with my own bouquet of bandages.

Ibrahim grew up in a town in France that had the same position as the town I grew up in in England: unromantically run-down, un-special, near to a famous port-city.  Walking around it in the spring before the hospital I remember thinking how at least the Runcorn of France had palm-trees, and there was something to be said for what sun can to do wash away any kind of ugliness.

Much later I stood in a central station looking up the bus schedule to Tripoli and I realised that my period was late because I was looking at schedules; later I was looking at the bandages that lined the blue corridors of the hospital and realised we were all too late.  But I couldn’t tell anyone because the doctor was so kindly and quietly explaining to me that it wasn’t meningitis, I was probably just overcome by events. Everyone was overcome by events. 

Three years after the revolution in Egypt, Bassem Sabry, the brightest, truest young writer of those times, fell to his death from a Cairo balcony and I couldn’t stop thinking of him.  I re-read his recent writing, shocked that he had touched something now as complete and grown-up as death.  I couldn’t stop thinking of him and of how everything just tumbled like that.  As the revolutions buckled under themselves everything was either the swollen pregnant pauses of the curfew or the sudden internal caving-in of blood.

All I want to remember from these years of my life is that night when he and I were taking pictures of each other in the dark.  This was in Tunis before the hospital visit and before I found out that I needed glasses and I didn’t know how the pictures or anything else would turn out.  I thought that it was going to be something blossoming and abundant – like spring, or a revolution. Instead of what it really was: something mutant and unsustainable – like a miscarriage, or a lie.

Heather McRobie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Oxford. She has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement and Salon. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Sumeja Tulic.