John and I met at the opening of a group show in Whitechapel. He was both an artist and a curator. He had recently been interviewed by a high-profile critic for the Financial Times and was becoming a recognised figure in the art scene. He’d been organising packed events since his first year at university, pulling together work by a number of fêted young artists in exhibitions staged in post-industrial spaces, in anti-squat buildings and shuttered, dilapidated shopping centres.
I wasn’t aware of any of this at our moment of meeting, which took place in front of a portrait of John. The artist – like several of the others in the show – was a school friend of his. The painting, in which John occupied a dark, high-back armchair, had the swollen dimensions of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The style reminded me a little of the American painter Alice Neel, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said that his – John’s – thumb, indecently plain and out of proportion in the painting’s foreground, resembled a flaccid penis. John smiled then, asked who I was with.
I looked him up on the internet when I got home, coming across the piece in the FT first. Heading the short text was a landscape photograph of John’s face and shoulders, which were partly in shadow, his coarse hair flat against his scalp, the bow in his narrow lips cast into dramatic relief by the lighting. I found a longer profile of him in an exclusively online journal. Poorly written, it spoke of the way in which John’s work brought together ‘architectural concerns and virtual reality as a means of merging the real and the imagined’. ‘The relative emphasis assigned to the relationships between each of these elements,’ it continued, ‘depends on the viewer as well as on his or her presence.’ I couldn’t parse it. The other significant artefact was a quick-fire question and answer session on YouTube. Throughout the video, filmed outside Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, John, dressed in a button-down and chinos, was pulling, between responses, on a slim roll-up. A woman – French or Spanish or Italian, I couldn’t tell – was conducting the interview, laughing forcefully at most of his answers, apart from those whose tone requested a different sort of reaction. ‘Wow,’ she said at such moments, the way you might to a child showing you a new toy. He would furrow his brow then, glance down, ash his cigarette. I watched the video a few times, wondering what he was thinking.
I was relieved whenever I reached the end of the clip and found that it had done nothing to shatter my image of John, now part constructed in retrospect.
Our first date was at the Coach & Horses in Soho. John listened closely as I spoke about the writing I was working on, and, without taking his eyes off the table in front of him, said that it made him think of Susan Sontag’s Death Kit – ‘Her second novel, I think.’
I told him I wasn’t overly familiar with her work, that I’d only read one or two of the essays for my undergraduate seminars. I had recently realised, after years of pretending to have read or seen things I had not, that being as specific as possible about any gaps in one’s knowledge had the counter-effect of making you appear sufficiently informed. It was a trick I had noticed men deploying not only in private conversations, such as the one I was having with John, but in their writing as well – and not only in relation to their cultural consumption. The cleverest ones were attuned to, were endlessly articulate on, the subject of their own interpersonal shortcomings. I did not yet know that John’s tactic – the hasty provision of references, of names and titles in lieu of personal, subjective responses – was yet another method of obfuscation.
The synopses of Sontag’s novels and short stories I later uncovered online made them sound dire. As uncertain as I was of my judgements back then, it appeared clear to me that they employed experimental narrative techniques as a means of plastering over Sontag’s lack of feeling for fiction – revolving, as they did, around so-called unreliable narrators and otherwise flat characters defensively styled as archetypes.
So, John had been correct; in this respect alone, Sontag’s fiction sounded a lot like mine – or what it might have become, if I’d pursued it then. The comparison with Sontag is interesting also in that it now furnishes me with some key information regarding John’s first impression of me: superficially over-serious but fundamentally childlike. An open wound, in other words.
What was my fantasy of John? Meeting him, pursuing our relationship – it all seemed preordained. I loved John and, most of the time, early on, felt that he loved me too. But the beginning of our relationship also felt like a negotiation, like a setting-out of terms, which, being young and in awe, I had eagerly agreed to. I did not yet know that their flouting was something that I could – and would – be pulled up on.
‘I never want to be one of those couples,’ he had said, ‘arguing on the corner.’ Meaning: Never dispute me in public.
‘I need my space, a lot of alone time.’ My needs will supersede yours.
I met his friends. I met Jude, his older sister. We went to dinner, to events: gallery openings, screenings, book launches. The adult life I had envisioned began to take shape, all at once. Being recognised as part of a couple thrilled me; I felt legitimised. John had a life, a full life. He had immediate and extended family, people he had known since childhood, school, university. I was surprised to discover that he found it all quite stifling. My own upbringing had been rootless, what with our various moves and my mother’s long and definitive estrangement from her relatives. I suppose you could say that I was unencumbered – I think that might have been John’s word.
One friend of John’s had dubbed me ‘icy’. John told me so with relish, pronouncing the word in a way that made it sound more ‘enigmatic’ than ‘frigid’, more of a positive than a negative. He sounded impressed, and I understood something then about the kind of partner John wanted to be seen with: someone cutting, that was, someone a bit unusual. And yet, someone malleable. Someone whose eccentricities would generate interest that would ultimately divert back to him. (‘Where is she from?’ ‘Where did he find her?’ ‘Young, isn’t she?’) I began to believe that this was what I wanted too.
I had been consumed by other men before, but never in combination with an equity of interest. While we were dating, John would never drop out of contact as those other men had, would never return to my inbox to creepingly ask whether our arrangement could be made, or might remain, ‘casual’, ‘low-key’.
He had just been through a break-up when we first met. We ran into his ex early one morning near his flat in Brixton as he delivered me to the Tube. Isobel was John’s age – older than me by almost ten years – and well put together. I eyed her coat and haircut as she and John exchanged a few words. On his failing to make introductions, she shot a curt hello at me, which felt less like a greeting and more like a swipe at John, before flicking her eyes back to him and arranging her face into an expression that I now know to have been incredulity.
‘I knew that would happen,’ John had said, wincing, as we’d moved off.
I looked Isobel up on Facebook and spent too long assessing what I could about her and John’s relationship by tracing the nature and frequency of their public interactions.
John and I had already started to argue by this point, though always in private, our whispered, tearful reunions only consolidating our bond.
‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ he said once, after a particularly wrenching falling-out.
Two months later, we were married.
The wedding took place in London. Not long after, we moved to Cork; later, to Edinburgh. The moves to Ireland and Scotland were made to follow John’s work. I’d recently begun a PhD based in England, in Sussex, but I could be more or less anywhere for the duration. The only thing I would miss out on was the teaching experience typically offered to doctoral students entering their second year of research.
John had studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade. There, he’d worked on large-scale installations, which had evolved into virtual-reality experiences, subtle engagements with new technologies that soon gave way to more sensational outputs. In one of these, a piece titled Hold Your Applause, viewers were invited to watch from all angles as structural fires erupted at some of the world’s best-loved monuments and museums, and they burned to the ground in real time – the Sagrada Família, the Anne Frank House, the Met, Notre-Dame . . . Applause was described in commentaries as an act of desecration akin to Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, an artwork said to be geared towards challenging the audience’s cultural values. Following criticism from political leaders, however, as well as an incident in which a gallery visitor stamped on one of the VR headsets, destroying it, the piece was retired.
After we were married, John put his own art practice on hold to focus on curating. With his connections to other young artists and his specialism in VR, he’d hit a rich seam in the eyes of the gallery directors. He wanted to reclaim the gallery space, he said in interviews, to progressively ‘withdraw’ it from the ‘clutches of good taste and self-censorship, political correctness and virtue-signalling’. But having initially enjoyed the notoriety his public image had elicited – furthered by articles with titles such as ‘John Munro: Is Edgelord an Insult?’ and ‘John Munro Does Not Like People’ – he was soon keen to shake off the iconoclasm that had earned him the attention of the major gallerists. In truth, he’d been spooked by the controversy his work had generated. I knew it, though he’d never put it into so many words. Applause had been borne of a love for architecture, he’d insist in interviews, the piece’s title wholly ironic. He’d worked through endless technical drawings to produce it, to calculate exactly when Gaudí’s towers would drop, at what point Lassus’s rose windows might burst. Eventually, the line took, and things quietened down, the write-ups now stating that, although no less impish, John’s outlook should not be dismissed as mere trolling. This was evident in his present interests, which were ‘much closer to home’; he was studying the Classical Revival, and the influence of the British eighteenth-century architects James Gibbs and Robert Adam on contemporary life. ‘Such an incredible draughtsman,’ he would repeat, whenever he showed me images of Adam’s work. I liked the images, though they didn’t move me as they did John. We both enjoyed the work of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thompson, however, a pioneer of sustainable architecture in Glasgow. John had grown up in Scotland and had always wanted to ‘get back up there’. When he was offered a job at a gallery in Edinburgh, he was happier than I’d ever seen him, and I felt hopeful.
I felt hopeful for myself too: I had just published my first academic article and soon after received an invitation to speak to students at Oxford. The soliciting lecturer had made much of placing me in New College’s old quarters as opposed to a hotel. It had been blazing hot throughout my stay. I’d felt out of place in the college gardens, among the younger students, and so I’d walked further into town, towards the shops and the Ashmolean Museum.
Inside, the lofty, air-conditioned space had been a respite from the day’s sun. I’d found the Italian Renaissance gallery and stationed myself in front of an early landscape, enjoying the feel of the smooth wooden bench on the backs of my legs. After a while, I’d drifted down to the gift shop, lingering by a display wall of postcards, listening in to the conversations taking place around me. Shortly, I was approached by a man. He was younger than John, nearer my own age. He had noticed me upstairs, he said. Could he ask me about the painting I’d been looking at? Unsure of how to put him off, I allowed him to buy me a coffee and to talk for a while before excusing myself. ‘I’ve got to meet my parents,’ I told him, smiling, moving to leave, my limbs suddenly weak and heavy. ‘It was nice speaking to you.’
Late the following day, after my talk, I took a coach and then a small plane back to Cork. I remember watching the toy-like propellers starting up through the window, the stewards turning the lights down for take-off, and then the feeling of hurtling through the dark, of being delivered back.
Life in Cork lasted three years. Once we were installed, John alternated between phases of self-isolation and something more obdurate, an anger that became the weather in which I lived. We rented a terraced house in Montenotte, a district sensationally named after a Napoleonic battle that took place in the Apennine Mountains. Located on a hill overlooking the River Lee, the area to the north of the city was sharply elevated and populated by lush trees. It had the feeling of being its own village, with its pub, post office and coffee shop, with its lone bus stop from which a trail of residents – all waiting to be ferried into town – would slowly build and diminish at intervals.
John returned to England every two months or so, sojourns in which he would attend openings and hold meetings with artists. These departures were marked by a sudden upswing in mood that was at once relieving and disconcerting. After he had packed, John would seem both impatient to leave and strangely tender, his attitude towards me softened. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he would say, as he waited in the hallway for a taxi to the airport. ‘I love you.’ ‘Me too,’ I would reply. ‘Me too.’ I rarely heard from him while he was away.
Aside from my research, there was little for me to do, and so during the daytime I would either take up in the kitchen or work on my thesis from a small desk I’d tucked into a corner of the bedroom. From there, I could see clearly the sage-green house on the corner opposite, the stuffed tiger in its ground-floor window whose presence I had chosen to take as a good omen when we’d first come to the street for a viewing.
Every now and then I would head out to the Triskel Arts Centre for a film, for a coffee on the Grand Parade. I would walk, making my way via Shandon, pausing there to look at the finer homes on Aubrey Place and the view they shared out over Bell’s Field, a stench of malt emitting from the industrial brewery across the motorway.
I endeavoured to make friends, but none stuck. I felt alien. When he wasn’t away, John stayed in most nights, drinking a bottle of red, sometimes two, by himself. Inevitably, this would lead to his rounding on me. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he would ask me, his face flushed, contorted, his eyes unseeing. ‘What are you doing here?’
When he was forced out for work – for a private view or some other event at the gallery – he was so affable with his colleagues and acquaintances, with the strangers we were introduced to, that I felt mad, senseless, obliged to play along. I realised then that I was the outlet (the only one), that it was through me alone that John could siphon off his resentments, his frustrations. That, in this sense, I was a vital part of his life.
I began waking in the middle of the night, usually at around two or three o’clock. At that hour, I would move slowly downstairs and occupy the sofa that divided the open-plan living room and kitchen. I would snack on things that could be prepared quickly and quietly. I would read or watch the films I thought John would otherwise prohibit. I had lately become taken with notions of purity and its soiling, a preoccupation whose focal point was, for some weeks, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O. I came across the book in a charity shop in Cork city centre, a cracked black paperback decorated with a spare, italicised font dubbing the novel ‘The Erotic Classic’. I was immediately struck by its use of the present tense, by its swiftness and inscrutability. Within the first three sentences, O, the title character, is ushered into what looks like a Paris taxi, though René, her lover, doesn’t say a word to the driver. ‘Here we are,’ he announces, simply, after a short journey in which O has obediently removed her stockings and underwear on René’s instruction. They are outside a château. O is led inside and heavily made up by two other women (‘her mouth very red, the point and halo of her nipples rouged’), after which she submits herself to the sexual predilections of a secret society. She is flayed. She is manhandled and chained to the château’s walls for hours at a time. She is penetrated by one man after another in regular orgiastic sessions. René looks on. During one such session, an associate has difficulty entering O and demands that she have her anus stretched, which she does (after René approves the modification), in increments.
O’s story fascinated me. In her ostensible debasement was an obscure victory that filled me with competing desires. I was turned on, I was repulsed, I was fascinated, I was exasperated. I was judgemental. I was many other things besides. I couldn’t have named all of the feelings I experienced in response to these narratives. To name them would be to flatten and domesticate them. To attempt to situate them within a system to which they never belonged. What I remember most clearly, in any case, is my coming to when I would stop reading, when the room would brighten in time with the sky outside, and I would readjust to my surroundings, albeit with the feeling of having participated in a long and drawn-out purgation.
It was during these wakes that I became aware of John’s emails to a photographer he’d met at a party in London. Joanna Kolasinski. I liked her work. Most of the images on her website were self-portraits, underdeveloped film photographs in which she struck enigmatic poses, gesturing stiffly with her hands and body while her face maintained a seductive, stoic expression. Her most recent series featured the artist posing as a dressage horse in various set-ups: in a cluttered artist’s studio; on an upturned skip in a parking garage; on an MDF plinth, in a field, her long hair pulled into a tight, knotted braid; between the swings in a children’s playground.
Her tone with John was light, friendly, to begin with: this you? read the subject line of her first dispatch. Mainly, the two of them discussed art and films and music, much of which I had never heard John mention before. But Joanna soon became more sincere, her abstractions more directed. I enjoy our conversations . . . she’d added dreamily, just before signing off, at the end of her third or fourth email.
It was something John had said to me that had planted the seed, sent me looking. We’d been watching a film, which he had chosen and which he had liked, because the plot confirmed a theory of his regarding accusations as self-fulfilling prophecies. If you accuse someone of cheating, John had contended, by way of an example, they would most likely cheat. Why? Because they felt they were already paying for the crime; they might as well commit it. I checked John’s inbox every morning after that. Once the initial horror had subsided, I experienced a new affect, a merging of relief and disappointment, when there was nothing new to read. By true morning, the correspondence felt like something I’d made up.
The exchange had ended abruptly when Joanna mentioned that she might be in Ireland for some location shooting in a few months’ time. Should they try and meet for a drink, she wondered. It’s my wife’s birthday around then, John had replied, introducing – too suddenly – a newly formal register. It’s likely we’ll be away. Joanna never responded to that non sequitur, and I allowed myself to forget, for things to still.
I was sure there’d been others. I knew there had been, in fact. Another woman, back in London, before John’s first proper job and the move to Cork. I had chosen to forget her too. She was a friend of his, and had been staying with us, having briefly returned from a new life in France to collect some documents from storage and catch up with friends. Weeks before I understood what had taken place (a realisation that dawned long after her departure), she came into my office and asked whether I could help her with something. Of course I could. She’d wanted to put an old nose piercing back in. I had offered her a seat at my desk chair, and she’d handed me the small silver stud. I’d tucked her hair into the scarf she wore around her head in the mornings and found the tiny indent, trying the stud gently at first. The hole had closed over. I’d said as much.
‘Just push it,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t worry about hurting me.’
I’d done as she’d asked, and she’d looked up at me then, her eyes red and watery, her expression one of tempered exhilaration.
When I confronted John, on a sudden notion weeks later, he was stunned into silence. Finally, he conceded that she’d made a pass at him while she was staying, and that, yes, he’d given in, for a moment, having had a drink, but that he had quickly gathered himself and rebuffed her. I pressed, but I was never able to get any more out of him than that. He told me, further, in tones of reassurance, that she was ‘damaged’, a word that recurred with notable frequency in his accounts of younger women.
I think I agree with John’s speculations on infidelity as a self-fulfilling prophecy, incidentally – only, it seemed to me that John had always been the one to accuse himself. He behaved as someone pinioned from the outset. He had the posture, from the moment I met him, of a man who viewed himself as terminally hard done by. Once his worries about the judgements of his ex Isobel had worn off, I’d inherited the position of arbiter as his self-generated need for condemnation tracked over to me. There was little I could have done to dodge it, to shirk the role I’d been attributed against my will. This desire for castigation was something John experienced both in his personal relationships and in the professional realm. ‘Of course, no one wants to hear what I think,’ he would often say, all evidence to the contrary, when we were discussing a catalogue introduction he’d just finished, an interview he’d given – ‘I’ was not a pronoun here but a name, and the name was his. This was, further, a clipped phrase that signalled the end of an exchange, and as such doubled as a notice that I had said the wrong thing, something to displease him. It might be more generous to say that I’d inadvertently grazed an insecurity, that John was, at the heart of it all, a deeply insecure person.
–
Initially, the move to Edinburgh felt like a turn in the road. We adopted a cat, Mingus, from a friend of a friend, his beauty and benign presence elevating the mood in the new flat for several weeks. We doted on him. Drawn into a tenuous camaraderie by our mutual admiration, John and I began to do other things together: to go walking along the stream near the foot of Blackford Hill; to frequent Summerhall, an old veterinary school turned arts complex.
I handed in my thesis that first winter and immediately began applying for lecturing jobs. The institutions to which I submitted myself tended to be run, at the level of middle management, by other white women in their thirties and forties. It was a fact John never failed to remark on, conflating the women for effect – ‘Bryonies or Kates or Helens . . .’ Initially, the tone of these asides implied that I was in on the joke, but this changed as I became inducted into academia, though he knew full well I didn’t share these women’s background, or what I – we – assumed was their background (middle class, Oxbridge-educated). I’m sure people made the same assumptions of me. I suppose that was the point.
When, after a second interview, I was offered the job I’d hoped for at the University of Glasgow, receiving a phone call on the train home, I rang John. He was mute. I had to beg him to meet me at the pub at the other end. My friends Jay and Aimee bought me a mini bottle of Prosecco, toasted me with their pints. John remained quiet, concave. ‘Of course – though I’m not surprised,’ were his words, when Aimee (via a semi-ironic ‘Aren’t you proud of your wife?’) finally forced a response.
As I reached the age John had been when we’d first met, I began to undergo an internal shift that was slow-moving and profound. This was the age at which the shape of one’s own face, as regarded from unfamiliar angles in candid photographs, is no longer disturbing, no longer a psychic rupture. This was the age of thirty, or thereabouts.
I wouldn’t have been able to identify the shift, at the time. Not in such words. Its main symptom – or perhaps its effect – was a need to reach outward, to speak to other people and to reverse the walling-in I had undergone throughout my twenties. I made friends through my new job, people my own age, including Rowan, who as well as being a junior lecturer at Glasgow was one of the trade-union organisers. They had all liked John to begin with, but he had soon started drinking again – to excess. On such occasions, he would embark on rants, talking himself into a stupor, cutting down anyone who dared contradict his line of thinking. I was embarrassed, and later, at home, scared. Heartbroken.
What I tried to convey to John, several times, was that my love for him had become diminished, in increments, over the years. That with each blow, each transgression, a withdrawal had been made. Without equitable deposits, I told him, the account would eventually be emptied. ‘Where do you get this stuff ?’ he’d spat at me. ‘Films?’ – a barrage that would finally devolve into his wondering aloud what my new ‘right-on’ friends would think of me employing metaphors of finance.
One of the final withdrawals took place during the university strikes that year. I’d been on the picket in Glasgow with Rowan, Stephen and some other colleagues and students, protesting the recent pension reforms. John met us all later, at the pub.
‘Solidarity,’ he spat, after most people had left and the barman had rung last orders. ‘The word sticks in my throat. Makes me choke.’
On another occasion, he had instructed me to be ‘careful’ around Rowan. ‘Watch yourself,’ he’d said, ‘if you’re ever alone with him. He’s a strange guy.’ And then, seeing my look of bafflement, ‘I’m serious.’
Our final weeks in the shared flat were unbearable.
We’d already agreed to a trial separation and handed in our one-month notice. When, however, I told John about a viewing I had for a flat in Glasgow, he wasted no time in accusing me of having progressively carved out the conditions that would enable me to leave. I wondered if this might have been true on a subconscious level, though I hadn’t actively considered doing so until months after I’d started my new job. By that time, a sense of possibility cloaked every one of my solitary experiences, as when I would walk home from Edinburgh Haymarket through the industrial West End, along the Union Canal, a route that I had come to love and would soon miss. Quitting the station’s older, pillared entryway, I would stride over busy junctions, past tall, flashing office buildings, until I reached a commercial development that let out onto wooden decking and, eventually, a quiet canal-side path. Proceeding from its terminus, the canal was lined on one side by barges and the back ends of businesses (mechanics, takeaways, a kung fu gym), and on the other by a corrugated-metal fence guarding a shabby, rubbly grassland. I took plenty of photos of the lift bridge as I crossed it at sunset while heading towards our flat on Holy Corner, a crossroads so named because of its four facing churches.
It was a route one of my new colleagues, Farah, had shown me. One evening, after work, we’d bumped into each other stepping off the train from Glasgow. As we funnelled along the platform and moved up the narrow escalator, through the ticket barriers and over the station concourse towards the exit, it became clear that we were heading in the same direction. On our way home, Farah spoke without pause. Her topic was her long-term boyfriend, whose books, she informed me, were the dominant feature of their small flat. ‘Shelves upon shelves of them,’ she said, including second-hand and rare editions. ‘Remnants of a former life.’
The week before he had come home to find that Farah had been frying fish on the hob. He had become angry and disturbed, had shouted and thrown things.
‘Doesn’t want the smoke to ruin the bindings,’ she’d said, shooting me a nervous glance. And then, smiling weakly, ‘It’s his fear of the abject.’
–
‘It’s a great healing space,’ said Katy, my soon-to-be landlord, as she’d first watched me look round. I’d just told her I was separating from my husband. She knew already that I worked at the university, that my office was nearby. She was herself a curator at the Centre for Contemporary Arts. We had a few people in common – other curators, gallery workers, artists, writers . . . She’d have known John, if I’d named him. Maybe I didn’t need to; she was bright, eager with me.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, taking in the tall windows and high ceilings. The tasteful mid-century furniture and custom-built bookshelves. These features largely eclipsed the flat’s size, which was very small, more or less a single room with a galley kitchen. The windows provided an impressive view of the street: the crescent opposite and the parish church across the road. All of this underlined by bright-red flowers in terracotta window boxes.
‘I’ll be leaving those,’ said Katy quickly, as she saw me register them.
‘I’m not going to make this easy for you,’ John said one morning, bearing down. He meant it. While packing for the move, I would leave the house for more sealing tape and return to find my boxes slit open, their contents disturbed. I had mistakenly taken some of his things, John would inform me, happily. Most of the things were books that I was either ambivalent about or could find other copies of. I let them go. One of the items John retrieved, however, was a small ink drawing his grandmother had made years earlier of her two whippets, Sidney and Daisy, long since dead. She had gifted it to me shortly after John and I were engaged, carefully wrapped in pale tissue paper. As with most of the objects he’d inherited, it was an object towards which John had always appeared indifferent; in every house and flat we’d lived in it had hung above the vintage school desk where I did my work. ‘How can I explain this,’ he’d said when I’d protested, bringing his hands together under his chin, aiming his forehead at me. ‘This picture is part of my legacy. I realise that’s difficult for you to understand.’
On moving day, Katy let me in and handed me two sets of keys, beaming as though I’d won a prize. Once she’d gone, I opened the sash windows, noting again the church, its blonde sandstone gleaming in the sun, before turning to take in the room, the details I’d come to overlook.
The flat smelled strongly of cleaning product that day and for some time afterwards: synthetic mint and something floral, something sweet. The sum of my things barely filled two-thirds of Katy’s shelves. I padded out the empty nooks with postcards.
John and I could rarely agree on where we ought to live, on what ‘home’ ought to look like. My early attempts at decoration were crude, I know that now. I would buy textiles, small things that would make me happy in isolation, but which came to appear cheap and incongruous among the worn objects of John’s birthright: dark hardwood tables and chairs, loom rugs, Italian majolica, original paintings in dull gilt frames. I knew my additions were wrong and yet hate filled me up as I watched John absent-mindedly destroy these imports with staining foodstuffs and cigarette ash, with trailed-in muck. I hated myself for hating that process of mindless destruction, in turn. I hated what I had become, the instincts I had developed in response to my situation. They were displacements of a much greater need – of the need for individuation.
Not long after I’d left, I dreamt that John and I travelled the southern edges of Britain in search of somewhere to live, somewhere we could agree on. We went to various seaside towns, real and imagined, speculated on whether we could live there. We never could. In one of the towns, perhaps the second or third we visited, a group of people were openly hostile to John. A blonde woman was particularly vicious. It became clear to me that John had been involved in a road accident there many years ago: a boy, a toddler, had been killed. The blonde woman was the boy’s mother or possibly his elder sister. No arrests had been made but the town had not forgotten the tragedy. It had a deep scar running through it, and John’s return had caused that scar to beat.
Why bring me here, I wondered, and then I woke up.
Artwork by Ernesto Artillo, Susan Sontag, 2016
