The tulips are too excitable

Sylvia Plath//a death//tomatoes and potatoes

The summer I was 12, I read the line above. That summer felt like the first of my life. Sure there were others, but they were full of grass cuttings mixed with the smell of creosote on fences and melting tarmac, of long days spent on my bike, swimming in the river - and it wasn’t wild swimming then, more like poor swimming, the river being free and the local pool, not - collecting snails and eating dinner in the Wendy house, grudging every early bedtime, every rainy day, any time spent inside; but I turned 12 and there is was, a different sort of a life stretching forward. Maybe something switched, likely it had been waiting all along, suddenly those days of motion didn’t seem so attractive. It happened first on a beach in France. We’d gone Euro-Camping for the summer. Three weeks for the price of two if you went before the English school holidays. Before the warmth too. Not that it mattered, everywhere else is warm when you’re Scottish. Second week and I’m lying on a beach in France. One of the D-Day ones, to keep it educational. School wasn’t out, Mum had probably used this excuse to the teachers. We’d been to a lot of museums, seen enough death for the summer. The cliffs were spongy red clay, as if at any moment they could be shaped into something else. I couldn’t stop touching it; it stained my hands. Maybe I’d been in the sea. Probably. I was tired. A new kind of tiredness. We should’ve seen it coming. The signs weren’t good. I slept and woke with my leg burning. I do not sunburn, unless say I sleep on a beach in France at midday. But it wasn’t the burning I felt. It was the guitar line blasting from further along the beach. A collection of punks, if that’s the collective noun -Mum probably had a better one for them- grouped round the stereo, beers in hand, pink green blue hair on end, piercings glittering in the sun. In the order of worldly things, punks were pretty high on the list. I was terrified by them but intrigued by their music, by the time the drums kicked in 8 seconds later I was a hopeless cause. A couple of songs later, and Mum left to get water or sunscreen or something to cover me up, and I edged over to them, the kind of men I was never to talk to, asked them in my scrappy French what they were listening to.

Kurt Cobain was a gateway drug, the rest of my teens soundtracked by him, or at least until I stopped listening to music. A whole year: no music, no books, no films. Just a void, thinking it paid to keep myself hungry. And this was when Nirvana weren’t popular. At least not in a small village in the Scottish Borders. They were exactly the kind of unpopular that would rub any kind of shine off a kid. Some kids don’t have a shine to begin with. Doc Martins and handknitted green jumpers will not win you any friends. It didn’t matter, they were in my head anyway. I’d lie on my bed and listen to the contraband tapes I’d smuggled into the house with different names on, slightly holy names, just in case they were discovered. And I’d pollute my ears and my mind on repeat, and then I discovered Joy Division and it was game over, with my Ian Curtis poster above my bed. And somewhere along the way, I found Sylvia Plath. My mum’d already eyed Ian Curtis warily with a no wonder you’re so depressed, but Plath was the last straw; always so death obsessed. Excellent, I thought, an ally, the same as I thought when she raised her eyebrows at Catcher in the Rye, murmuring something about John Lennon, and she really liked John, although by then she never played the Beatles anymore. Something to do with them making her wear short skirts and fall in love with inappropriate men.

All that summer, it was Nirvana and books and poems and I wrote my own bad ones then. I wasn’t new to the dark art, having started when I was about eight, struck by inspiration in the bath, repeating the lines until I got out. I’d write them for my grampa and he’d read them approvingly, pointing me in the direction of real poets who might be able to help: Longfellow, Yeats, Whitman, an education of sorts. Enough to get me started, but it was Plath I couldn’t leave alone.

I think, somewhere along the way of that hot summer, many nights spent with the window open, lightning licking the edges of the never quite dark sky, reading all night long, I confused Plath for my dead aunt. Perhaps this isn’t entirely as insane as it sounds. My aunt died by suicide either a few days short of her 30th birthday or a few days after - in the years to come I became obsessed with this point, and yet can never remember what way round it goes. This inability to remember a simple fact is a tell I would rather did not exist.

I came to think my aunt looked like Plath, with her long thin face. Maybe I thought they both had sad eyes. She wrote poems too. Some of them were collected in the attic. When she died, I didn’t know how she died. I guess it’s not the kind of thing you tell a child, and as the child grows up, you either forget they didn’t know or you forget how to talk about it. Certainly, everyone forgot how to talk about her.

Photos of her appeared around my granny’s house, sort of memento moris. I used to run past them if I was in the room alone with them. Some of them puzzled me. There I was, with her in the them, and yet I couldn’t remember the texture of her. I cannot recall how she smelt or how her voice sounded. How do you remember a sound, I’m not sure. I can remember how she made me feel, which was uneasy, a fact I felt guilty about for years.

Perhaps the source of this unease is to be found in one of the photos. A photo I am convinced I remember the particular circumstances of but equally might have fabricated as I try to piece her and me back together. In it, we are in a rowing boat on the river, Durham cathedral in the background. She is in the middle, her curls blowing slightly, an aran jumper on, my sister is tucked under one arm and I am tucked under the other. This is a rowing boat. No one is holding on to the oars. I am holding my doll and smiling widely but I am also holding the hem of my skirt with my left hand. This means I am worried. I am worried specifically about the oars. In the memory although not the photograph, we become stuck on the river or on the riverbank, and someone is taking the photo, so perhaps there is no reason to worry, but my aunt laughs and my sister does too and so do I, even though I do not want to. I have since become an excellent rower.

The last time I saw her, or more specifically, the last time I remember seeing her was at Durham station, were she waved our train back north goodbye. Even now, I struggle to go through the station. I always make myself look out at the cathedral, fix my eyes on it and not the car park opposite, not where she is only ever waving goodbye. Sometimes, I will travel the extra hour up the west coast line and across to Edinburgh from Glasgow just to avoid the station altogether.

A few years ago, when I was feeling particularly morbid and trying to shake my own flirtation with death, I realised I needed to know how she had died. After she died, I used to sit in her house and imagine what had happened. I made a hundred different deaths up for her. I invented time lapses and disappearances, filled in gaps that didn’t exist, became afraid to use the bathroom, became convinced of a presence near the stairs. There are many ways to be haunted by a person.

After she died, my grampa became depressed. I state this as if it was a simple cause and effect and not that this perhaps was a condition he experienced for much of his life. I thought for a long time this was a normal response to her death when I took him tea in bed, long after everyone else was up, when I sat in the greenhouse listening as he told me about the tomatoes, when he wouldn’t go for walks with everyone else and me and him would watch a film he’d taped for me, and I thought him perfect when everyone else just said he was sad. Now I realise my conception of after is likely wrong- I found a bundle of letters written by him to my grandmother when he was in an asylum, written years before my aunt was born. When I asked my mother about this, she said he was in hospital with a sore foot. My guess is no one is in an asylum with a sore foot. I sometimes think my grampa had the wrong life. He loved art and the theatre and film and making things and acting - and did very little of any of it. He also loved growing tomatoes and potatoes and did both so well that I now have an aversion to supermarket tomatoes and potatoes, as well as a life long love of art and theatre and film although I am mostly very bad at making things. I often think about the other life he might have had, one with all those things in it, and not him alone in the sitting room listening to his jazz records with his headphones on, his long fingers tapping the beat. I have inherited those records, the record player too, one day, I’ll get them fixed up.

In an effort to solve the riddle of her death or at least to stop myself fixating over it, I phone the records office one summer. Because I am not certain when she died, they have to check two volumes. It takes several phone calls over the course of a couple of weeks before they track the death certificate down. At no point do I think of asking my mother, some silences are so absolute they cannot be punctured. The death certificate arrives one hot day, when the children are bundled into the car to go to the beach. I’ve packed a picnic. I feel organised, invincible, curiously and satisfyingly grown up when the post van arrives on the gravel and there it is, the envelope with the local registry stamp. My hands don’t shake as I open it, slip the certificate out. Dates. Causes. Coroner’s name. Not when I thought. Not what I expected. My hands begin to shake. Later, I look the coroner up. He’s done some big cases. I think of him being one of the last to see her. I think of him passing judgement, ruling other causes out. I think I do not know how you recover from that, I think I am not sure they ever did. I am not sure any of us did.

It is still a thing to remember. It is perhaps still the thing I write around. I think of it today, 62 years after Sylvia Plath died. I think of it because I’m writing a novel inspired in part by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; the blame he incurred, how much we love a dead woman, what right we have not just to the dead, to any of it. This is as convenient a screen story as any other. I am writing about her and I am writing about my mother and I am writing about myself. the holy trinity again.

I’m not sure what right I had to my aunt’s death certificate. I lost it soon after. I put it somewhere safe and in the way it is with most things I want to keep, I lost it. I don’t remember the specific dates. There’s just a week every year around the autumn equinox where something’s wrong. For the last three years, I’ve spent this week in Scotland. It helps. The train journey. The chance to look out the window. A time to replay memories that might be true. Might not be. Mine at least.