Extract from my second novel, Weeping Glass
Sometimes when she woke up, when her mind was still dreamy and fluid, she believed she was lying in her childhood bedroom as it used to be. The door was to her left, the casement window ahead of her, by the desk, the cupboard to her right (with its door reassuringly ajar, to prove that the cyberman wasn’t hiding in it.) From her cosy cocoon of sheets another universe spun out. She felt she could get out of bed, walk three steps to the window and open the curtains onto the back garden. There would be the trellis and the swing, the row of elms and the fields beyond. She could picture doing this vividly, imagining the movement of her body and the texture of the wooden floor. She could count the spots on her curtains, she could see precisely its shade of cobalt blue, bury her face in its fibres and smell its bricky scent. She could leave her bedroom, walk four steps along the landing, pass down the uncarpeted staircase, glancing out at the front garden as she passed a small round window to her right, to reach the lobby and the hall. She could visit each room in turn, in detail, and in the garden there’d be grass and flowers, clouds and sky. So vibrant and solid and sensual was this house and its gardens, and the views from every aspect, and the smells in the kitchen (bacon, chocolate whip, ribena) and the books on the shelves, and the grain in the parquet floor, and the smudges on the window panes, and the pencil marks on the wallpaper where one of her sisters had scrawled ‘Poo Winnie’; she felt that it must exist, it must still exist somehow, somewhere. But the council had knocked it down to make way for a supermarket carpark.
When she opened her eyes, and came back to the present, to her real bedroom – the double bed, the door to her left, the windows looking onto a road – the change was physical and sudden, as if she’d been tossed and spun through a time vortex and her stomach blenched in a kind of fourth dimensional vertigo.
Once in her passage through this memory house, she’d tried to move a book. She’d taken it from the shelf, smelt it (paper, printing, hot plastic), flicked through it, watched the dust eddying out, and placed it carefully on the dining room table. When next she looked, it had sprung back to its original position. As an experiment, she’d tried to break a sugar bowl. It bounced. Nothing was breakable there. Nothing could be changed. And she never saw another person, she was always alone in the house, and if she looked down, she saw not feet, but floor.
If she tried to remember a person in such detail as she remembered this house, she only managed glancing, vanishing slices of them, or else they were still, as in a photograph. In fact, she couldn’t distinguish between memory and photograph. Or maybe the image was neither – it was invention. She wondered why this was, when she could easily animate her memory with other living things. People are too mobile, too growing, too changing, yes, but also too individual, perhaps.
These thoughts came back to her when finally she discovered what had become of Paul Fox. The carefree twenty-something PhD student – the man who’d bought her tequilas, carried her sleeping bag, drunk coffee with her, helped her onto buses – had become the major shareholder of an arms dealing firm, with interests in Angola. Her soul revolted. There was a picture of him shaking hands with other bloated suited millionaires.
She wondered if this future had been latent in him. If she’d looked more closely, could she not have seen the clues? Was his greed, which now clothed him in a supersize Armani suit, was it evident in his relish for burritos, his generosity in the pouring of drinks? Or the arrogance, which now snarled his features into contemptuous folds – could she have deduced it from his confidence, his decisiveness, his certainty – the very qualities that had attracted her and made her feel so safe with him so far from home? Had he actually changed, or had his natural development been distorted by events? She’d thought him kind and just. He cared about politics. He hated Thatcher and opposed the Falklands war.
The new information changed her memory of him. Now those fond recollections which had dawned on her at the Glastonbury festival were tarnished. Because the past may be fixed, but history changes. She’d known this in theory – probably at ‘A’ level she’d learnt the precept – but now she understood it.
These thoughts disturbed her.
Inside every young person is an old one waiting to come out. To know someone takes time; maybe it takes all the time you’ve got. Maybe the reason youth is so desirable is that people can hide in it. Maybe her failure to find a soulmate was nothing to do with luck; maybe she couldn’t deal with knowing someone. Did she know herself, for instance?
Once she’d seen a photograph of Hitler as a young man. He’d been quite handsome, sexy even.
It was safer plumping for an older man, she thought. As long as he didn’t use Botox.
