In Which The Convenience Of Bodies Scares Us

The Verdict of Cairo

by HEATHER MCROBIE

PRO: The elevators, I’ve always thought, are like how H.G. Wells imagined time machines. So rickety, so brassy, buttons like old saxophones and levers like The Future. The way the past imagined the future. I know logically it’s because I don’t live in Cairo. When I lived in Amman the elevator just signified nuisance, especially after that time it broke down, 3:30 p.m. in late summer, in an air-conditionless purgatory and my useless fists hitting at the door. It felt like a sign of my uselessness in those years, that I’d be using my energy punching things while obsolete engineering suspended me between two actual places. 

Cairo elevators, as a novelty, are the opposite of purgatory — you are in the past and future together, up and down all at once and with such handsome structure for the journey. When the doors close the stutter noise is so elegant, like the machinery is speaking a second language it learned at a school where uniforms were compulsory. You get in and your companion is a neighbour still smoking indoors or someone coming to fix something else inside the building or just your daydreaming. If the elevator is going up, your daydreaming is that you are Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, except instead of chocolate you are being given the gift of an evening. If the elevator is going down, your daydreaming is that you are plunging, like Jacques Cousteau, in a complicated apparatus whose confines are a small price to pay for the endless expanse it buys you, to explore — a sea, a city. In this Jacques Cousteau daydream Cairo is a coral reef wide as the side of Australia, street corners covered in star-fish. Elevators are the second-best thing made out of iron in this city. The first best thing is bed-frames.

CON: In a taxi, this is not in any of the many views I respect The Way To The Airport.

PRO: The stray cats have never forgotten that they were once worshipped. Like many people on the periphery of my life, I get the tingling sense that they are biding their time — that they know their turn will come again. They have never gotten into the elevator with me, the way they did with my friend. Instead they get me just outside the door, tail-up and too-clever and insistent. When I lived in another Middle Eastern city, the rule I had with my housemate was that a cat had to follow me all the way home — cross the threshold like a bride — and then I’d be allowed to keep it.

Here both I and the cats are too proud to make the necessary moves, and instead share lunch and afternoons as I take cigarette breaks too often between my solitary report-writing. But since I do not have a companion or rule-making housemate here, I indulge them in my afternoon-daydream literary allusions. I talk about Colette’s cats, and T.S Eliot’s. And the other Eliot. My favourite George Eliot novel is the unshowy, graceful Daniel Deronda, a wrought iron elevator of a novel if ever there was one. But even in her maturity Eliot gives in to the literary clemency that cats inspire. The house cat in Daniel Deronda, the opulently-named Hafiz, offsets the handsomeness of the human characters, a single pure indulgence. In breaks from my work I talk to the creatures on the doorstep about which works of contemporary literature would have been improved by the presence of cats. The unanimous verdict we reach is ‘all of them’.

CON: In a taxi, I think of all the people who may have opinions on the act — perhaps doctors or bureaucrats.

PRO: Some of my friends here laugh and others roll their eyes when I tell them that I have come up with the name the ‘Ikhwan Ice-cream Van’. It is the truck that goes round in the run-up to the December constitutional referendum, telling the neighbourhood during the lull of the afternoon that “the people demand the implementation of shari’a”. This is a reworking of the Tahrir Square cry that “the people demand the overthrow of the regime”. Like a bad 2012 remix. The ‘Ikhwan Ice-cream Van’ truck drives up and down the streets with its loudspeakers and its lack of tact. The neighbourhood replies with children running around in groups of five or six, the voices of soap operas tentacling out of windows, and the dissenting mewling of the cats. I love this neighbourhood; it is the first time I have stayed here. It is also the first time I have been here since the revolution. I love it even when, living-alone and lost in my thoughts, I hear things in the night that make me hold the edges of anything I can touch. I should probably state here that the Muslim Brotherhood did not — as far as I am aware and according to my sources — hand out any ice-cream to Egyptian citizens in the run-up to the December constitutional referendum. 

CON: In a taxi, I curse — of all things — my fingernails.

PRO:  My landlady lives in the same apartment building, some floors directly above. With the complications since Morsi’s decree in November and the referendum in December, prices of things have warped, the economy buckled like scrap metal. As it gets colder, the price of staying warm goes up. I know this from the newspapers and from friends but still my landlady tells me I need to stay warm, she has a spare electric heater. From high up in her apartment, she lowers it down to me in a basket, making a pulley system which we also later use for me to send paperwork up to her. The basket dangles past my window. The basket makes me think idly about Moses. This makes me think idly about scrolls. I unwrap the packaging of the sweets I’ve bought like they’re sacred. I lie back into the blank-page of the iron-framed bed. In text and in reality, it is one of the best afternoons the world has given me. I dream that everything I have to write will be sent to me from baskets, from stone tablets, or via elevators. Delivered to my door as certain as a cat.

CON: In a taxi, I make prayers I don’t believe and no-one else believes and even if they did believe they would say it was too late anyway. 

PRO: I met you at the church at just the time you said — the traffic mushed all over the bridge couldn’t keep me. Evening was falling in great chunks like stubborn shop-front shutters: a section of sky, and then another, and then another, dimmed itself in turn. Cafés are opening now like oysters or like flowers or like scrolls. Café after café unfolds. The streets are thick with people and also some roadblocks and also some cats. I tell you about my research and all the things I didn’t write properly. I tell you about all the places I haven’t seen or should have seen more properly. In general my way of looking is — all there is still to do, to be done. This is early-evening thinking. You look like early evening too, lashes falling. You look like Moses baskets falling from the sky, the way your eyebrows shoot up when you are explaining something. You wave your hands around like palm trees. You laugh like copper or brass. We go into one café where I take photos and you laugh at me. We go to another one where I’m really feeling all these things so then you don’t laugh at me. When we walk back out and into the thick of the street the church makes a noise like pearls or the sea or something and I don’t want to leave. I explain to you about coral reefs and cats and Costeau diving-suits and the Moses baskets and all the everything-all-at-once that I love. At least, I try to explain things.

CON: In a taxi, weighed against all of that, is the inconvenience of bodies.

Heather McRobie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Oxford. She last wrote in these pages about Leonard Cohen and Montreal. She twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Roy Orbison" - The Magic Numbers (mp3)

"Thought I Wasn't Ready" - The Magic Numbers (mp3)

In Which We Are Just A Fragment Or A Scrap

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.

"House for a Broken Heart" - Heather Peace (mp3)

"Forever Drowning" - Heather Peace (mp3)

In Which We See What Our Neighbors Are Up To

Ivy's Girls

by HEATHER MCROBIE

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher and her death last week because it is too easy. A decade’s worth of left-wing friends from anti-war protests, student demonstrations and poor romantic life choices cascaded my internet with invitations to parties. This has been spectacle in the making for a generation — ding dong the witch is dead, this one’s for the miners, and all that. Hatred is easy as performing romantic gestures: men from years ago email, let’s meet in London, Manchester. Hatred is easy as a three minute pop song: everyone played everything, The Smiths, The Specials.

Three electoral terms is a good way to learn the lesson that many things rhyme with apartheid but few things rhyme with Greater London Council. Hatred is easy as hating women: language the day she died smelled so Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer-ish—witch, bitch, harridan, hag. It’s true, to pretend to mourn would feel like a pantomime, British-ly, like a grotesque end of the pier show. It’s true, to pretend her decisions hadn’t ripped through our worlds or families or loved-things would be what was expected of us, Thatcher’s children, too stewed in greed to feel human feelings at words like these: Brixton, teachers, Liverpool dockers, General Pinochet.

Lots of things were true, in that way, the day she died and people made all this noise with words we hadn’t used for a while. I thought about calling my dad and talking about the miners or my memory, aged five in 1990, of him single-parentishly manoeuvring his children through the poll tax marches. We shouted Maggie Maggie Maggie Out Out Out in the style of The Larks. Most weekends he took us down to Covent Garden in a single-parent grab for free entertainment. But it was too easy. What would we say now, ‘She stole our milk?’

State education served me fine, since a Religious Studies teacher caught me reading for pleasure and sneaked me copies of The Guardian while helping me concoct excuses to get out of gym class. I could call my best friend, a teacher who still keeps a first aid kit in his work desk for when the only openly gay student gets the shit recreationally kicked out of him as a substitute for his gym class. We’d make noises about how those were the dark days and I’d tell him about my holiday. I try to reminisce with my friend until I realise — that didn’t happen in my life or your life, that happened in a film with the plotline of Billy Elliot. False nostalgia and reconstructed memory are two creepy twins like the snubbed-nosed sisters in The Simpsons who are always sitting too close to you on the bus. And hatred is easy. I eventually settled on listening to Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’, not so much to commemorate the institutional racism, fear and dislocation as because I’d like to go to 1990 to kiss Sinead’s lips in that video and then feel all kinds of guilty about it. I cure myself of all the Anglo-Saxon hate-words I hear that day by trying to remember by heart all the best kisses in My Beautiful Laundrette.

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because there is already Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because when I do I think about the years I lived as a girl in Runcorn, which is half-mythologised Billy Elliot posturing and half real actual things with smells and love and secrets and twitching synthetic net curtains to see what your neighbours are up to and the feel of chalk on red brick and stories about injuries you get in factories and the National Children’s Home collection tin set on the mantelpiece and threading my blind great-grandma’s needles for her so that she could darn socks and clumpy gravy and the school rumour that went round once that we were bastards and the Avon lady who sells cosmetics always ringing when you’ve just sat down for tea and being stopped on the street and being asked 'Are you one of Ivy’s girls?' and feeling so proud to say yes.

It was a complicated question. My sisters and I were living with my grandma but since grandma Ivy had worked in the orphanage and as a dinner lady the lines of who were her children or grandchildren were slightly porous like the sponge in Sunday trifle. On big occasions there were all these not-real aunts and not-real uncles. But my sisters and I knew we were separate, indulged — barely any rules except when we visited Nan, Grandma’s mum, and Grandma got us to keep quiet by jamming our mouths with lumps of treacle.

I could write some more sentences like this about the north to win Brownie points or trifle or treacle but I’ll spare you. I will say though that Thatcher and my grandma had both perfected the art of the well-placed brooch, and that it was partly Thatcher’s work that meant my dad was down in London while my sisters and I rattled around like useless things, ghosts allowed out to play with my father’s and uncle’s childhood train-sets and 1970s Beano comic collection. We knew we were echoes of the generation before, the shadow of a half-mythologised John Lennon narrative of the one who makes it out, and we recreated most the stories we were told about these giants with mythical childhoods except the one that involved the boys going up to the moors to dig up unexploded second world war bombs, left over from the time when locals had set fire to the hills around Liverpool to distract the German planes. I could write some more sentences like this but I’ll spare you.  Also if I talked about Thatcher and funerals I’d have to talk about that time I stood orphan-feeling next to my dad outside the red-brick church the week I’d just turned twenty-one and then I’d have to talk about all the things that feeling anchorless bought me, the far-away places I got given because I was anchorless and whether it was better that I left just after that and anyway the point is Thatcher’s dead and I don’t go back there.

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because there is already Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because she was a chemist. Oh unsexiest of all the sciences, you move me so much it means I can’t even participate in a harmless little One Minute Hate for a dead neo-liberal with quite frightening teeth. Physics is romantic and physicists the most charming in many respects, everybody knows that. But it is the un-mindblowing rhythm of the calculation of lattice enthalpy that will always undo me. 

Last year, well into the thick of adulthood, I took my first voluntary chemistry class. The world and people’s lives were getting complicated around me and as a defence mechanism I wanted to draw diagrams of things.  Reduce things to their elements or something. I didn’t ever quite understand the Born-Haber cycle but I do know that once you know how to compare the relative stability of ionic compounds you get used to seeing things in phrases like ‘relative stability’, and that’s as good a way as any to deal with the limbic-response humanness of all the blobs of history-and-flesh bouncing off each other in your personal life. After my chemistry tuition I’d walk past the courtyard where Thatcher lived when she arrived here in Oxford to study chemistry in 1943. 

When I came here to study history sixty years later, there were still some professors on staff who had protested when female students were allowed to join the college. This is one of the stories you tell friends who visit, like the one about the secret society that writes graffiti on walls in Latin and other members of society sneak out the following night to correct it, or the one about the carved wooden door outside Brasenose, next to the lamppost, that inspired C.S. Lewis to write the Narnia books, and every long-dead person who once got drunk and vomited down this side-alley or that. But I never mention Thatcher to friends who come to visit.  I don’t think it is because of politics but because I want to keep it separate from these stories of who did what where, the buttoned-up girl looking out of her window in Somerville, in her unlovely virginity a Queen Victoria of sensible shoes, our lady of Tupperware and test tubes, squeezing the world so precisely into pipettes. To study chemistry, you used to have to learn German as a prerequisite.  It suits her well, I think, an echo within it of Prince Albert — English girls unshowily manoeuvring variously empire and the principles of the Octet Rule.

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because there is already Martin Amis’s Money.

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because I get images suddenly flooding in no order and they go like this: the Pet Shop Boys in the back of a London taxi playing with the sexual frisson generated by the British class system; cracked-smiling hostesses rattling round Home Counties front rooms handing out vol-au-vents to party guests; gin and tonic; brass bands; the onomatopoeic punches of tabloid headlines thudding down in a pile thrown on the steps of a newsagent — Gotcha! Gotcha! Gotcha! — as you look up in a public library’s only atlas where are these things called Falklands Islands. 

Then there is the lurid throb of the Channel 4 news sign beaming like a pixelated gem in a 1990s Nintendo game; slack-jawed alternative comedians; racist chants on the back of the school bus. Then there are also things like after you were twenty-one and far away from this and in the same week these conversations happened: at a checkpoint a taxi driver shouted ‘Balfour Declaration! Balfour Declaration!’ and you thought ‘Yeah, you have a point’ and just later someone shouts to someone else who was just becoming their friend ‘Fuck off I barely know you, why should I tell you what happened?’ Then there is now and where I sit as I write this, shiny heart of the old centre, with all its heavy imagery — Brideshead, An Education. American tourists stopping you because you look like Harry Potter. My own psycho-geography of the city a map mainly of stupidities — the café where we shouted that year we were both being religious, arguments in pubs with boys with easily-stereotyped names who represented things, in libraries chewing pens and dreaming of being out in the world, being out in the world and being treated as a symbol and an easily stereotyped thing. 

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because there is already Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up!

I don’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher because I don’t want to talk about things that are personal in that way that your stories are not only yours and people in a group can be such a mush of unreliable narrators. And also because not very long ago someone in my real, un-cultural life died and they had big red hair set in that mid-century way and a smile that covered cracks of war and being an unglamorous daughter in some broken time and suited words like ‘grocer’s’ and she had a picture of the Queen on her wall thousands and thousands of miles away from here and her handwriting on letters, when the letters arrived, was not handwriting that any school teaches anywhere any more, just residue of colonial flotsam. She wore brooches too and did that Thatcher thing of scolding the world through her choice of footwear.  There is some church in the middle of I don’t know where that has things with her name on and other places where her writing stays: probably notes tacked on to newspaper cuttings and scrawled on piano sheet music. 

There are rumours and gossip that tore through lives that no longer concern anyone still living. Not that long ago lots of people in my life sent angry and sad and angry-sad emails to each other and I vomited in the toilet of the library. I felt far away, like news of a Prime Minister’s death in the southern hemisphere, portraits of the Queen hanging anywhere, all of them all at once, like the sudden rush of white skirts and petticoats hurtling through the undergrowth and unspoken desires of Picnic on Hanging Rock. Victorian hysteria plays out twice as bad in the heat, the red rocks and the rust and the clamp-clamp sound of Kelly’s metal helmet stuttering down on your mind all at once while you’re half-way poised and cool on a suburban veranda and half-way Jenny Agutter’s blazing body in the middle of scorching nowhere. 

If I talked about Margaret Thatcher I would have to talk about that and I can’t talk about that because it does not make sense in any world in any history that in the dizzying heat and stifling provincial gossip of a specific place somewhere a girl who looked so much like her once sang so far away that there’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow when the world is free.

Heather McRobie is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Oxford. She last wrote in these pages about the pros and cons of Cairo. She twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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