Love without thought. Love without conditions. Love without promises. Love without threats. Love without fear. Love without limits. Love without end.
I think she did love me, for a minute, for a second, for the time it takes to remember, for the time it takes to forget. We had twenty-eight days together and then I was gone.
My grandmother went up and down the streets, and it would have been easier to give away a rabbit or a chicken. ‘Nobody wants it,’ she said, but that wasn’t true: the one person who wanted it was the one person it wanted too.
We slept in the same bed; there was no other. They wound the gaping spring round a bit of wood and jammed a broom across the frame. My father said he’d marry my mother if she gave the baby away. Then they could start again. Then they could have a new life. But I was a new life.
It was a long time ago.
– I was born in the year 1632 in the city of York, of a good family, tho’ not of that country …
That’s not me, that’s Robinson Crusoe. Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land. My mother’s body split open and I was the cargo for salvage. I suppose you have to believe there is something worth salvaging, and with me it seems that nobody did.
There are so many stories of barrels and pots and chests and trunks that haul up on to the beach, and they may contain treasure, or they may be spoiled, or they may be just ballast and rocks. The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe – no way to see what’s inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. Spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won’t swing open. Babies are safes on a time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents.
And to make life more difficult, babies who come as treasure bring with them their own magician. Open the box and it may be empty. What’s inside may already have been spirited away. By the time you get to it there may be nothing there. Rot? Evaporation? A vanishing trick? Are all those empty adults born so? Or did something happen in the box?
There I was, sealed and locked, chances of a piece of gold inside me as chancy as tapping a barrel of rum. The seawater gets inside, life is easily adulterated. Only in stories does the thing come out fortunate and clean, gifted and golden. But there’s another story within that story – the toad, the beggar, the silted-up well, the pigsty, the stinking sludge, the dark cave, the wounded deer, the forest where nothing grows. The buried treasure is really there, but it is buried.
Here I am, arms and legs like handles and levers. Open me if you can. Carry me off. Take me with you.
This new world weighs a yatto-gram.
Shipwrecked on the shore of humankind, the baby can only hope that someone will keep it until it is old enough to keep itself. That didn’t happen to me. My mother had the doctor in and he filled in a certificate in flowing blue fountain pen that said I was healthy and normal and that there was no reason why I should not be adopted.
My grandmother took this piece of paper with her on her rounds, hoping that bright eyes and no infectious diseases would persuade a gambler to try their luck. But the initial investment was high – feed it, clothe it, send it to school, and it might turn out rotten, after all.
At night, coming back from my visits round the world, my mother was there, worn and anxious, but I didn’t know those words, ‘worn’, ‘anxious’, I knew only that she cried and then I cried too, not for wet or hunger but for the fear that was slowly darkening the joy, the way a shadow crosses the floor.
There are things that you can do with a baby you can’t keep. You can set off one day and come home without her because she can’t scent her way back like a dog, or make her way home over the rooftops like a cat. Wrap her up well and put her down and there she stays, wailing till some passer-by might take her up out of pity.
My mother set off. We went for a walk. A bonfire gone out but warm in the ashes was burning on the edge of a derelict street. She laid me gently in the ashes to save me getting cold, and went away.
She walked for two hours and came back. I was asleep. She picked me out of the cinders and we went home.
There were other attempts: the conductor saw what she’d done and made the bus driver turn off-route, right round and behind her, and the conductor stood on the open platform, me in his arms, with the bus going at walking pace, in the wrong direction, and me the size of a sardine, watching the shine on the badge of his hat.
She’s walking along, crying, trying not to look, then the conductor pulls her up on to the platform with one hand, and sits her on the torn leather bench seat at the back, and plunges his hand into the bag of coppers and sixpences that is the fare money, and just gives her a handful, there and then, breaking open his ticket machine so that the bus company won’t know what he’s done. She takes the money. She takes me. She goes home.
Love is not easy to leave behind.
The doctor comes back. This place is unsanitary, bleak, damp; the mother’s health is at stake. The baby has a weak chest. No good under the quilt on the broken bed. There’s a place the baby can go, and soon some new parents can be found. It will be better. Better to begin again. This time she won’t have to leave me and falter. This time someone will take me away, and they won’t bring me back. You don’t know that, when you’re a baby. You go with them, you go with anybody, and for a little while, it’s all right, but there’s only one face, only one smell, only one voice. Where is she?
You never stop looking. That’s what I found, though it took me years to know that’s what I’ve been doing. The person whose body I was, whose body was me, vanished after twenty-eight days. I live in an echo of another life.
It’s like one of those shells with the sea inside it. Not every day, not often, but put it to your ear and the other life is still there.
I can hear you – the tide in, out. The rush of water across the pebbles.
Pass me the screwdriver.
So there I was, like a piece of flat-pack furniture, dismantled in one home, re-erected in another. Unfortunately for all my parents, previous and current, the assembly instructions had been translated into English from Japanese.
When I was gone, my mother came running down the street after me. Look at her, like an angel, like a light-beam, running alongside the pram. I lifted up my hands to catch her, and the light was there, the outline of her, but like angels and light she vanished, and it was nearly the last time, but not yet.
Is that her, at the end of the street, smaller and smaller, like a light-years-away star?
I always believed that I would see her again.
El Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfoundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc’d upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found …
The lost and found/found and lost is like a section of our DNA. In the spiral of us is the story we can’t tell – the story we tell in single lines, separated from one another not by neat spaces but by torn-out years.
Emerson said that the rarest thing on the planet is a truly individual action – but I’d set the bar at a story told. It’s why the nineteenth-century writers favoured such long and satisfyingly plotted novels. Some of them – like George Eliot – really believed there was something to tell and that we could tell it. Dickens knew very well that we could not, but he told it anyway, glittering and bravura. It’s one way of defying chaos – the kind of Chaos, with a capital C, that can’t be avoided; the exuberant, unfolding, unpredictable universe, expanding when it should be contracting, made largely of something that is not something but nothing – dark energy, anti-matter. A thing unconfined. What to say when the certainties fail?
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
Her voice was low, strongly accented, Lancashire. A voice made out of hills shuttered up low under the
sky and ribbed with dry-stone walls, stone nearly black from the mills.
Her voice was made out of the mills, too, Manchester cottons, jacquard and coarse weave. Looms as wide as the fortunes they made. Looms that ran racket enough to drown the drone of the bombers. No use shouting. Use both hands dancing like two creatures mating. They all did it, and at the same time spoke the words they conjured from their fingers, as though the words came out of their fingers and palms like card tricks.
‘I’m going to have a baby …’
Spring me out of both your hands, Ace of Clubs, but I never wanted to be the cosh that hurt you.
It’s risky but it could work. It’s our only chance.
My father was a gambler – what else can you be when you live without any hope of the world? Chance is just that – a chance – and the cards offer better odds than the factory.
He won a packet. He was drinking in the pub. My mother was working extra to save for a winter coat. It was already November.
The next day he waited for her after work and took her to a fancy shop with mannequins in the window – all wearing winter coats.
‘Sort thwon thi wants,’ he said, seducing her with wool like a merchant on a sheep road, and perhaps he had been that once, when the Pennines were wool and wood, before the industrial revolution of cotton and coal.
He wrapped her in a coat, then he wrapped her in his arms. They went to a boarding-house that sat in a hill-cleft, and he told the woman who fed them hotpot and tea that they were man and wife. And for a night they were.
My father was soon spent up and back in the factory. My mother returned to the mill. By Christmas she knew she was pregnant, and when my grandmother gave her a swirling drink that tasted of aloes and smelled of death, she went into the yard to drink it and emptied it down the toilet.
On I went, into the freezing cold of January, safe under my mother’s woollen coat.
She is all States, all princes I, Nothing else is …
At liberty in my mother’s kingdom, at sail on amniotic seas, harm was not anything that could happen to me. She did what she could – she gave me a chance at life, as good a gamble as my father took, and perhaps it would pay off.
Twice turned out – once from the womb-world, once from her, and for ever – banishment became its narrative equivalent, a story I could tell. But because of this I know that inside the story told is the story that cannot be told. Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.
It’s late. I am on the Tube, reading a lost manuscript. I am a lost manuscript, surfacing in fragments, like a message in a bottle, a page here, a page there, out towards an unknown shore. It has been the same all my life because my mother set the numbers that way, coded me, programmed me, and although it is possible to play with the numbers, I can’t break the shape. Determinism versus Freewill is a false study – unhelpful, a time-waster. Life has never been All or Nothing – it’s All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.
So, am I blaming my mother? No. There’s no one to blame, no one to hold responsible unless they take responsibility. I am responsible for myself, and I was from the moment they came with the pram and the blanket.
Goodbye, then …
Nobody we knew had a car. Not the woman from the Adoption Society. She wrapped me up, put me into the pram, and off we went, and that night for the first night, I was alone.
Night twenty-nine of my whole life.
Twenty-nine – a room number, a lucky charm, a winning horse, a marriageable age, the number of months it takes Saturn to orbit the sun. Saturn, planet of leadwork and limitation, child-eater, ruler of Capricorn.
On night thirty-two my mother came home from the mill and made a detour round the gasworks to the Adoption Society. She found a foothold in the back wall and hauled herself up, goat-style, to stand on top of the coping slabs and look in through the window. There were several cots, high-sided and severe.
She stood like a lighthouse, like a pulsar, and I was a radio telescope that caught the signal. There she is, a star the size of a city, pulsing through the universe with burned-out energy. I know you’re there, I know where you are, I can track you because we are the same stuff.
She heard me crying, like a cat knows its kitten, but she couldn’t grab me by the scruff and haul my legs out over the wall and away. I tried to get up but had no muscles to do it. A four-week kitten could have crawled towards her, but not me. She was too far away for me to see with the naked eye, or touch with the naked body, skin on skin, like a graft. I lay, she left, and what happened that night, I don’t know, but the night after, they closed the curtains at the window. But curtains, windows, walls make no difference to what can be transmitted and what can be received.
Moon like a china globe, pendent globe-light in the room like a china moon, and my burned-out mother signalling in our private sky.
Is this how it ends?
It isn’t ended yet.
I know she came back to change her mind, but it was too late, because she had signed the papers, and although manuscripts get lost as readily as children, official papers hold fast their dull and damaging life. What’s best to throw away? The paperwork or the love? It’s in the best interests of the child – but how do they know that, or the meaning of any of those separate words? Best. Interest. Child.
A lost world. A traveller’s tale. Drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum. A seabird, a space-ship, a signal, speed of light. A shooting star. Another life. Long gone.
My mother was born in World War Two.
My grandfather came home on leave and got into the soggy bed with my grandmother, and found an hour that wasn’t made of mud and bayonets. And so my mother arrived to the bombing of 1943, and grew up wearing one dress with one knitted jumper over the top. She was small and strong and red; a red tree in a dark wood.
In the wind and cold, and the sometimes sun, thankful for the sun on the stone of the houses, a place to warm your back, a place to lean, she leaned and looked out past the mills to the hills, the Pennines that held the towns like a memory. She walked out, long walks past abandoned farms and scattered ordnance, the remains of the war, uncleared, left for moss to grow on the anti-aircraft guns, and silted earth to fill the trenches. She walked out till she could look back on the city, with its dirty clouds and smoking chimneys, and she marvelled that that was her life because up here, where it was windy and clean, it didn’t feel like her life. She believed she could walk on and away, turn her back, begin again. Later, when I was walking inside her, I believed it too.
There was a place we used to go – her walking on the outside, me walking on the inside, weight-free, like a spaceman.
There’s a track, there’s a stream. The track rises steeply – I can feel it by her breathing. The stream has watercress growing in the fast parts – she bends and eats it sometimes so she won’t be anaemic. When she does that, everything inside goes green.
At the bend in the track, she pauses. She loves the house ahead – an old stone farmhouse, built on the drop to the stream; she drinks from the water barrel by the front door. She looks carefully at the fruits forming on the apple tree. There’s a gate between the house and the track, and we lean on the gate very often, and she says, ‘This is our house,’ and I can smell the woodsmoke from the fire.
Freedom. Walk a little further on. Freedom.
World War Two. Another war to end all wars. Freedom.
And then …
Identity cards. Tracking devices in vehicles. Compulsory fingerprint database. Guilty until proven innocent. No right of appeal for convicted terrorists. Thirty billion pounds for new-generation Trident. Diplomatic-style immunity from investigation and prosecution for all elected politicians. Stop and Search. Police powers of arrest extended to ‘reason to believe …’ End of dual citizenship. Curfew Zones. Routine military patrols in ‘areas of tension’. CCTV on every street. CCTV compulsory in mosques. Chip implants for prisoners on probation and for young offenders. No demonstrations, on-li
ne protests shut down, those responsible cautioned. New Public Order laws, the Freedom Act, to be signed by all citizens and including the requirement to ‘report any person or persons who are or who appear to be acting contrary to the rights and responsibilities of ordinary citizens as outlined in the Act’. Right to enter homes and businesses without a warrant.
To distract from all this, the Government built a super-casino in every city, licensed twenty-four-hour drinking, legalized prostitution and lowered the Age of Consent to fourteen. This was to show that we were secular and tolerant, not bigoted and fanatical.
The Prime Minister made a speech: serious threat – forty-five minutes to destruction, rallying cry like 1939, but this would be a peaceful war, liberate our fellow citizens across the world, freedom war, air-strike war, no nuclear threat. China, Iran, Pakistan. China, Iran, Pakistan. And a picture on the late news of children stretched like a journey across time – except there was no more time. They were dead.
The USA allocated $650 billion to the Pentagon. More than the defence budget of every other country in the world put together.
There was a polar bear stranded on an ice-floe. There were hurricanes, flooding, melting, landslides. There were rows about carbon quotas, carbon capture, carbon trading, as though the carbon footprint was just a matter of dropping a shoe size.
The Pope went mad and appeared in a bonnet to tell the world that the Antichrist was going to return as a peace-loving eco-warrior, ushering in a new kind of Paganism, nature versus the spirit. Catholics were instructed to abandon Green politics and prepare for Holy War.
In America a different kind of religious extremism, committed to Armageddon, liked the idea of the Antichrist appearing as a planet-saving Democrat, and spent as much time and money as they could wasting as much time and money as they could in the name of conservatism.