This last week
these last few years
What they don’t tell you when your babies are born, is that there will come a Sunday when you will be sitting on the floor of your daughter’s room, faced with an impossibly large mountain of picture books and you will take it upon yourself to tackle this mountain; first dusting it, then sorting it into piles of ‘grown out of’, ‘might want’, ‘won’t want’, ‘will want’. You will open every single one of these books in the guise of cleaning them, you will spray them with the cleaning spray and then you will wipe them down and every single one of these books will reward you with a memory; they will act as a sort of Aladdin’s lamp, rubbed too well. I loved that story as a child, there is a picture somewhere of me reading it, I am sitting with my feet tucked under me, my hair baby blonde still, the evening sun streaming into our south facing sitting room. I am sitting like that in this photograph and it is a memory I recall without need of the photograph, because I remember the nightmare that preceded it, I remember dreaming of Noah’s flood - a dream I dreamt often - and hyperventilating after I woke, and being surprised it was still light outside and staying up to read this book. My mother laughed at my frowning, warning me of frown lines, but I was young enough for those to exist as future tense and she took the photograph and either I have stolen it to remember it this well, or she still has it somewhere and I simply have tucked it away as a memory, or a composite one perhaps as probability dictates that more often than not I would be photographed with a book. I have no idea where that book went, but I do know we both tucked our feet under ourselves as we sat, our knees out at awkward angles, angles I am old enough now to feel in the same way the frown lines are no longer future but present tense; I am not sure if this way of sitting was a gift of genetics or mimicry, either which way, it is how we sat and it is how my children sit still, and it is how I was sitting the Sunday I came to be sorting through my youngest child’s picture books, every single one of them a memory - some handed down from her brothers, others from her big sister, others still from me.
And there it is, the first book I ever owned. I love this book. I take it from any of the possible piles and decide it is for my library alone. It is ripped in places, there are scribbles in others. Inside the front cover, my mother has written my name. How she has written it is curious. She has written my full name, and not the abbreviated portmanteau agreed between her and my father, nor has she used his surname, although at that point, it was the one I was to be known by. When she writes my anglicised name alongside my Hebrew one - as if these two parts could sit in perfect harmony - her writing is stiff; she uses a hand I am not familiar with and from this I realise she was not either. I look at the other books in the pile, the habit I have of writing names and dates inside the inside cover, lifted no doubt from her, and I see I have done the same with each of my children. That sublime moment when their names are still a mystery - you do not know who you have named or how really to write those names; you write them with a flourish the same way you write the name of someone you have recently fallen in love with or hope to admire, these names so new under your tongue you want to repeat them all the time, you to see how they sound in your mouth, and the same when you write them down. The first time I wrote my eldest son’s name it felt like such a mystery I was ever writing it at all that I developed a kind of compulsive habit where I wanted to write it on everything; sometimes still I repeat my children’s names to myself in a kind of stupefied awe that these names in this precise combination have ever come into being at all, and via myself; how can this fact of their existence, so beautiful yet mathematically so defying of any logic, be in any way, true.
The pile of books grows; and it is then I find buried in it, a box photographs from when I was a teenager. There I am, bleach blonde in a short skirt with my best friend, ready for the school ball. It gets cancelled the following year on account of certain (my) behaviours; there’s a photo of my foot in the park, a coke bottle half full of vodka in the corner of the frame; there’s the Parc Monceau and the Tuileries and there’s my sister crawling out onto a roof to watch the boys in the pool and there the Twin Towers still are and there somehow, there’s a cow in the garden and there I am on the Southbank, eclipse glasses on and time’s doing the collapsing thing it does without you asking it to as you sit there that Sunday afternoon, the now becoming then, and so it is, you stand up and go for a walk, in the hope then becomes now again but the thing is with walking, is it wakes your brain up and it is while out walking, all the then and all the now meet, almost impossible lines of convergence crossing each other, as shipping routes do on the Cape; and the first line of a manuscript you both thought and knew unwise to write is right there, knocking, bursting at the base of your skull.
No, you tell it. No, you repeat, go away. You return home, you dream of the sea, the sea you dream of is too full, too close to land. You wake and do not need a dream analyst or anyone with much of a brain to interpret this dream for you. It is five am, and the sky is empty. No moon. No stars. No dawn. No seagulls. You would like every 5 am to be like this. The first line is still there. No, you tell it, knowing this is not at all how it works.
By 6pm the following day you have written 6,000 words of the thing you do not want to write. You know by then this is the thing you have been writing all your life. You know it is the thing you were born to write. This absolute conviction, no matter how wrong it is, must possess you at least once in your life, otherwise how will you ever write the thing you do not want to write. You find yourself drawing lines and equivalencies between things you never thought possible and as you do you know this is not because of anything special, they might call it magic, but you know to call it a long time; a book does not get written overnight, nor does it get lived in the space of a few years, it is the tip of an iceberg of the life it’s taken to live before any writing of it is possible, from the first moment my mother wrote my two names on a hard cover, this book was being written; this book is the cows in the field and the cancelled balls and the Twin Towers still there, it is the pile of picture books on the floor, it is the winking sea telling you to follow it, it is the blue on the wing of a Swallow whispering you to come this way; it is magic, to find yourself there, one Sunday sorting books on your child’s floor and feeling that pull of adventure again and letting your small control freak self submit to something much much larger, grander and older than you are.