Oxford
by
Rivkah Mc Kinley
I’ve been struggling to find somewhere in my circular life to fit the difficulty. There is memory, footsteps well trodden into softer soil, where banal and benign flowers grow, my children. And those things, memories, are only a view like the view out the back window, where everything is all right after all. It is true that I’ve traded ambition and independence for leisure, but I don’t see an issue with this, this impermeable happiness, that gives me the glazed eyes of a stranger to carry. I stride cheerily among the human/inhuman mess, and I think: I understand you, I understand you all. (Is it a good thing, to understand?) I struggled, for a while, with the remainders of youth, but then I fed them to the soft smiling void, the increasing thickness of that inevitable velvet touch, and I was none the worse. None of us are. My meanings are gentler now. Troubles passing. Weathers I live in and out of. My thoughts, when I think them, are only the thoughts of the well. There is no such thing as a wasted life, and in any case it wouldn’t be a sin.
I’ve been living in Oxford for ten years now, which is less time than most. There are those that pass through, but they are a different kind. I lecture in classics, the only subject in any way worth studying. In classics the ‘what’ triumphs over the ‘why’; and innovation triumphs over tradition, as any real classicist knows. Innovation, the living and dying mind, is the eternal. Innovation is what frightens the body into blood and sun-breaking pleasure. In the ancient world what survived was what mattered to the body; was the meaning of form. Oxford is, on the contrary, a formless disembodied intricacy; a delighted, repressed tautology, a senseless kind of play. But I live on the outskirts. I keep my pleasures tightly woven around me, and far from the scourged youths and their excellently clear skin. I live amongst the people of the body, the people who have no other choice.
No place is any good until you have fallen in love there. Has anyone ever fallen in love here? I think that even among the children it doesn’t happen. Only to those who go home for the holidays, forswearing literature having come to see in it an enemy to the singing body, a blunt tool for the reshaping of the sorry head, that had only wanted pleasure after all, and would have sacrificed even joy.
Maybe there are unrequited, Chaucerian feelings in those who are over-sexed by Middle English words, those false intellectuals who are not fakers but only too true in their direct and ready sentiments of glory; those who are building on the shoddiest basis but yet one that is the hardest to disrupt, as if those splintered thoughts and feelings get lodged in them more firmly than anything real ever could.
I walk the streets when I must, the centre of the city having banned cars, travel, places, impolite prayers. There are none of the rhythms of love here, no momentary redemptions in the form of another’s life. The bodies slings for everything but sex, which is just another whimsy to them. It is still what it has always been, a city without women.
Deeper in the living circle of pain. There are people in the walls I cannot find. I stand at the centre, the lapsed faces, the forgetfulness.
When I get home to my husband we don’t talk very much, not because we have nothing to say to each other but because both of us feel that we are dying here. Whoever asks first, ‘What will we do about dinner?’ is the one both of us want to kill. And then we soften. He has learnt not to ask, ‘How were the kids today?’ We have learnt to try to make of each other havens in which we do not live.
***
I teach mainly public schoolboys, who sexually harass me fairly incessantly without noticing. They are handsome-repulsive or ugly-repulsive, nothing in between. They are men with large shoulders but they do not give me dreams. Of all beings, I would least like to be raped by one of them. They wouldn’t dare. I am five-foot-ten and strong. My breasts are large and firm like two extra muscles. Anyway the overt metaphors of colonial force (I’m Irish) have gone out of fashion. I suspect they would choose weakness, some poor English girl with a brain but who has never used it to insult the queen. And then marry a big blonde demon with sharp bits, and one of those daddies who has to remind himself not to pat this one on the arse. (The strange sex of English hands.)
And yet I’m scared I’m here for the same reasons as the rest – some combination of privilege and incompetence. I must write for money, so I sometimes do. I write about the things the Greeks thought and felt. I write what I think about them, or rather what I think about the things that are thought concerning them. I write what I think about thoughts about thoughts about thoughts about thoughts concerning them. I elaborate, I regress, I complain. I climb into the web and I pretend that I am spinning. Then, when I have a paper, I climb out, I get drunk or take MDMA, which lets me experience heaven and hell but neither division nor sleep.
At night we get drunk and watch television, slowly and luxuriously transitioning into the more complete oblivion of sleep. These are the things that we love. His whiskey straight and mine with orange squash. We like watching things that are considered affronts to the mind. (We do not find them so.) We like the bodies that we are allowed to scrutinize so openly. We drink them in with greed for hours and hours.
I feel this confinement, this loss. I wonder what I could have been, had I not been successful. What I could have felt. I could have been destroyed by now; freed.
***
We go on long holidays to places and we pretend that we are there.
***
My husband’s business has been a success also. He restores furniture, an acceptably British occupation, but he does so in a Dublinese several shades stronger than mine. He’s been accepted – he amuses. People bring him old ugly things from that time in between the ancient sun on the body and the tv set. I know nothing of this time, want nothing from it.
My husband’s body is not tall but broad and messy and hard to classify, a stunted weed. It is full of odd corners, hard with bits of soft. And yet, this is simple: the rib, the elbow.
There was – and is – so much dead time, flapping futilely on the dumb wind of the present. It’s hard to say no to a good job.
I miss the Dublin misery, the drunks, the crowds, the hoarse laughter. The hideouts of sun and dirt. A history consisting of the joys of desecration. My husband, who belonged to the city more than I ever could, spent his childhood riding horses in the inner city. Pony boys. One earring, bareback riding, tracksuit bottomed – a whole other design. When I was a child, I knew that these were people I would never get to know. I knew it implicitly – that there were people I shouldn’t see or talk of. That there were wild, loud children riding around the city wearing addidas and swearing. Pony boys don’t exist anymore – the government cracked down on them during the Celtic Tiger, calling it animal cruelty.
***
In memory I am looking out a window on someone else’s life. Three little blonde girls lined up on a lawn, while a loud ugly woman from Belfast told us about Christ, trying to make it into a game where she got angry if we cheated – only we didn’t know the rules. Daddy picked us up in the evenings from that Barbie-pink house he’d grown up in, the house that smelt like a stranger no matter how long we spent there. My grandmother stood on the gigantic steps, waved once and went inside. I think that was what I didn’t like about it – pink and grey. Pink and grey are the colours of the loneliest kind of dust.
I told Mark about this at some stage – not knowing, and I still don’t, why it hurts. I know there was something missing, and that it had to do with a bigger lie, one I told myself incessantly. I know I thought it was safety for a while, so I abandoned safety. But it didn’t work, the lie was still there.
I don’t know why childhood is a lie. Is it because it’s impossible to admit how small you are? Is it because you think you don’t believe in God but really you do, you believe in everything there is? Or because you think you don’t know what sex is, but really you’ve found your body’s gateways, found it lurking beneath your clothes and your mortified flesh, where only you can get at it.
Am I old now? I am thirty-two. Mark wants children.
That I am not the old lady at the window, that I am one of the three blonde sisters, I do not understand. That I could once stand in that garden and not be blamed. Though I thought often then of the ugliness of the angry woman. Later, of her stupidity. The sun burning on the little blonde heads. The will to live and end. I share nothing with those girls now, it’s as if we had different parents to each other. We share an agreement, perhaps, on how those parents are to be spoken of, but they are different objects. We only choose to share, like actors, this way of talking. We play the games laid out because it is not yet time to think of different ones.
Three little girls under the burning sun. The feeling of a suburb. That feeling that lands everywhere, intractable. Saturday a different kind of day; the other children not ‘them’ but ‘us’. The little girls of whom it is yet impossible to say if they will be beautiful, if they will be clever. In terms of goodness, it seems like often the best are destroyed, and the worst become good. I know now that I am the bad one that became good by chance. Maybe someone coming from far away enough would have been able to see it. Someone incapable of understanding what we understood. At that time we saw what was there instead of what was coming. Daddy would pick up Amelia like she was air, and we would carry on down the drive. Someone at the window watching, but it couldn’t have been me, because I was there walking beside them and there was no one left for it to be.
It was all so feminine between us. I think that later we all chose manly men in an attempt to counterbalance. We needed someone who could touch dirt, eat with their hands, forget about things. They stayed in Dublin and I wrote books, here.
***
To have children just because you exist.
To trade yourself, half for money and half for something called love but which can be halved without even having to talk about it.
Never to talk to the void like it is some doctor, limping to its edge and releasing your vice where it will safely not matter. Never, homesick for an impossible warmth, to crave poverty; never to look for sex in a body that has been shunned by all you have had to be. He didn’t want me back at first, in fact not for a long while. I was always attracted to him, to the knowledge in his posture, which hadn’t attained total ease but had accepted even this.
You let your memories, their nonexistence, grow and die all by themselves. Layering lie upon lie and digging with corrupt fingers through this plagued soil. It feels as if you have touched too much, too little.
Sometimes I think of this and words resembling it break from my mouth, and he gives me that look that turns so easily to sex. Looking enough to see that you can’t look, a question that slowly ignites the flesh turning it to hands, to helpless lips. A question that turns me back to him, driving me into a faster, heavier breath, like being human again. We are soon forgotten. I forget my life in this unraveling and remembering of happiness.
He and I are both middle children, unobtrusive blessings. Psychologists say something like: middle children are free, are evil, are strangers to gentleness. I agree with them, I agree with psychology. Except that Mark mostly has sisters, and he thinks women are real. He expects me. And he expects to be the son of his parents, it is only a background to the life he’s in. His philosophy of talking, smoking. One that makes me feel easy and real. He smokes a joint in the garden before he goes to sleep. I look in the mirror, brush my hair, clean my face. Know he’s there in the darkness, think of myself.
What does this sex mean, which comes after all these questions, that I can’t remember it? Is it that I am in it that I can’t remember it, or is it something worse. He has to tell me afterwards, if we have reason to speak about it. If there are matters of technique, and one rides along technique, after all, like a violinist.
I am strange, for a classicist, I lack all compartments. I have no knowledge that is contained, just things that rise up, like emotions, responses. That is why I don’t lecture, I only converse to myself while they watch. It takes a long time to wear down innocence, sometimes innocence is stronger. And if you can’t see any of it happening?
***
My mind is a living destroyer, tall in my tall body.
***
An hour and a half to central London by bus and the taste of Oxford has finally melted away. We take the bus to London so we can drink. We don’t like London but it’s a city, there will always be something beautiful to it.
One finds things: an empty jazz bar in Soho, where there is usually no one except a failed Scottish comedian and two French waitresses who remind me of the lovely sort of prostitutes, selfless comforters who hug you close and take your money without looking at it. We feel at home here, where it is anonymous and friendly, a haven where you drink things away and dive straight to the soul. The waitresses, the failed comedian, accept us, take us for outsiders in the right way. Which makes us feel like we are. A feeling like the years before: that breath, that nothingness, that life that no one recognizes as such except yourself. Nothingness like a space for you, emptied of words, you look around and feel suddenly that everyone knows, everyone knows after all.
Before Oxford, a few years of wandering about, nothing particular. I could have said ‘I am,’ but nothing further that anyone would know what to make of. Mark says ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He says, ‘It’s all right,’ and I agree, more than anything in my life I agree. But other times, what I can’t uproot is that I am afraid, deeply afraid. I see them seeing me and seeing nothing. I feel, indescribably, that this can’t go on, this wreck, a prostitute without customers. Odd job, drunken night after drunken day, something as stupid as contentment, living for friends. Other times it is more, I am filled with pure joy, I think, ‘This is freedom’. It is freedom when you are alive and freedom is nothing more than that. When you are like everyone else.
My friends drop off, relocate. My mind numb. Wasn’t I brilliant, once? As a child. Is that not who I am, who was a child? Look there.
The life of the mind the only life on offer. What I have is what I know: empires and gods: my personality. And yet hadn’t I belonged where I was, knocking plates onto customers, showing up at the office an hour late, dismaying everyone around me, facing decades of ageing with a gulp. My share in the tragedy.
The people here aren’t Nazis, they are British. They have a polite way of standing on the shoulders of the poor, it’s a unique hopelessness. The triumph of the enlightenment is not knowing who we are. Everyone, both good and bad. I was almost fired once for suggesting a plot to assassinate the queen: Forced to a formal dinner where a man name Richard suggested I felt uncomfortable here.
‘I’m a communist’, I muttered helplessly.
‘But it’s Balliol! We’re all communists here!’
***
Looking for the place where people felt: in books, in misery. All I found was where they hid.
***
To have money. To desire passion without suffering, war without death. No longer at the world’s mercy, desire with nowhere left to go. I was glad I had fallen in love – it was like knowing, at last, what people feel. The ones I grew up with said I love you only as an unavoidable part of the language, the control system. Mom, at least, never said it, being as bland and sad in her language as she was in her actions. She talked exclusively shit. An inhuman disease that kills so many. Talking so long that you are trapped inside your words forever. Too busy and scared and stupid talking shit to notice anything that ever happened – the eruptions from her womb, the sportsman’s affairs of her husband. No one was ever supposed to imagine her, and she didn’t imagine herself. An animal of so many words, but apparently inattentive to anything that moved inside her. I’m sure she would have said I love you had the setting ever been right. But she would never bring about those settings. All she did was watch objects stir themselves around her, and state them. This, to her, was what language was for. Her husband’s statements were true because they came from a large, recognizable mouth.
But overall she was too far gone, she couldn’t stop talking. You could sympathise only briefly or you’d be destroyed. Perhaps not destroyed the way she was, but destroyed nonetheless.
Always she came to me when I was ill and burning. Approached with her transparent fingers. Usually I could withstand her ministrations so little that on her approach I would promptly become well. Mothers are like a distant sound of suffering that you can neither make out, nor escape, nor abide. The pain in my stomach ten times worse now that she was here, the one I always wanted until she finally came and broke the fantasy. I was always humiliated by the boredom and falsity of her approaches. Who’d told her to come, what was she doing here? I’d wanted to scream at her, ‘Get out!’ I wanted to break her, unable to realize that she’d already been broken, there was nothing left. I used to imagine that if I finally broke her it might all pour out: love, hatred, affection. I imagined people as containers then, rather than habits.
A lot of loneliness always in everything. A lot, then, of trying to persuade the hand of friendship from: shadows; bruises; fragments of limb caught slantways or in a mirror; one’s own feet, who obey so hesitantly from a distance. And a lot of looking at the ground for things that seem to live in spite of it all. A lot of thinking that litter must mean as the abundant colour of a flower must mean, must speak. All moving silence, and my begging of it – searching for another mind within my own. Poems, horrible, endless, unable to see the problem. Attempting to speak with someone after all of this is horror, is solitude multiplied and rebounded. I could never offer anything but my own rich-girl manners. I see such types now in Oxford, caught so early that perhaps they will never be redeemed. They’ll find instead, here, patient and innocent lovers. What they need is a sudden and violent attack, to break up once and for all the slowness that had wormed its way so deep. What a useless pile of memories.
This place is full of Victorians – virgins in their twenties, loneliness secured by success. The place they thought it would end – where everyone else would be like them – is the place it truly begins. Tea is drunk, novels discussed, manners practiced and yet closeness not achieved. Rarely does one witness any form of touch, friendly or otherwise.
***
So even here and now, terrors gone, I can’t sleep. My mind ticking away like the slowest of bombs. Even though I know that all that is coming for me is peace. How does one age so quickly. Passion displaced so quickly. I am retired, wearied by the smallest of things now.
Of course we begin, ‘I just want’ when we never just want, do we?
I can neither get used to being loved nor keep myself from wanting more.
I know lies and I know corruption: chasing one’s desires without acknowledging what they are. Glimpses of this, in my own childhood, being driven through another city wide-eyed and suddenly feeling full, excited, hopeful or else destroyed with longing, knowing that by the time I made it back to this street on my own terms I’d be what to a child is old, body-heavy and with a different perception of danger. ‘Where was that?’ I’d ask only when such a street was past, when it was beyond their ruining it. They’d never know the place I’d meant. When I was a bit older I’d search on foot for this place that had the power to make me feel, but I’d never make it far enough, it took hours to get to the other end of the river or across it. Where we lived people had large gardens, gates, one’s heart would already be broken by the time one got past a few of these houses and you’d just want to be back in your room where the pictures on the walls whispered soft things to you, made promises.
The good thing about being surrounded by all that wealth was that I never wasted time wanting it. The good things to eat in the kitchen and the emptiness of it and the silence of it only made me heavier, unfit, further than ever from the fortitude it would take to get me across town, which I also feared because I also knew that the truth of it was that over there I’d be lonelier than ever, as wrong there as I was here. That even if there were better things and that taste of freedom and warmth and living that was living and not this monstrous dead seal of money over life, stifling it into nonexistence, it would shut me out as long as I was alien to its hardships and its hardnesses and losses, as long as I had this scared look in my eyes and the sheen of money on my clothes. I knew what would happen and what then did, which was loneliness hitting me harder than I’d ever dreamed it could, a pain I’d thought I already knew inside and out now confronting me as something unknown. Loneliness can always come on as something more than you’d imagined, one of those nightmares that doesn’t strike everyone’s life and if you are lucky only comes a few times. But it isn’t an emotion like any other, it’s never just a feeling but always your whole life made real and poured into some dirt you then have to scrabble your way out of, or try to disappear from until once again, like the ordinary person you’re usually allowed to be, you’ve forgotten.
So I go see the old people here, Mark laughs but I do it because they are the ones who I feel like I’ve been and understand, maybe perhaps a little I’ve been the young but more I’ve been the very old, the ones without spouses or children, and I can feel how what they’ve known, which is nothing, they can’t speak of. In their fear and loneliness they speak only of gentle meaningless things, afraid of meaning something and having never found a way out, they speak of animals cakes flowers and weather. I am along with them and I know how to do this just in the way I don’t know how to speak to children, who require responsiveness, colour and life rising up, Mark speaks to children and I speak in deadnesses and stale sweetnesses in bored lonely ways to those who it makes feel safe.
Feeling nothing, I am lovely, they find me lovely, and they see my kindness under the façade of kindness, they accept its bored and fearful way and know that this is the only line in me between what is real and what is not real. I never push them, never push myself, but we carry on in the innocence that loneliness yet can reach and must reach, all else taken out of them, all those forms of knowledge that come with love and being part of the world. Still I can be something to them if I only speak in this way, this way that I can, so I go to them on Tuesdays, where they wait shameless in the backroom of a church, where I don’t know the difference between giving and taking, it is all just slight adjustments and subtle exchanges between warm bodies.
Where I’m from you tell other people what you have so they can feel what they lack, or you tell other people what you lack so they can feel what you deserve.
Their longing is not for a body of muscles taut with things done and to do, only a musculature of attainment.
Mark’s body is a mess of hair and freckles and secret patches of paleness where a knife might dig. All is uneven and odd and ready for my searches. I can’t ever find it because its history and mind run way beyond my reaches and beyond the failure of my dreams and deeper than what I thought I wanted. My desire keeps running and turning, in other words. It keeps up and I am strange enough for it and confused enough for it and my confusion remains, something I can turn to. His muscles just messes belonging to the things he’s done. I can kiss them and kiss life, dragging away from my coldness.
I guess in my hatred of them I still succeeded in some way because I kept wanting what they weren’t, and what I’m not, still feeling some love or something like it such as need for them powering me on and driving me through in a hurt that keeps you going even when you stop. Your rebellion and your weakness in tandem. Not that there is ever success as there is only what one can be.
Oxford Story
by
Rivkah Mc Kinley
I’ve been struggling to find somewhere in my circular life to fit the difficulty. There is memory, footsteps well trodden into softer soil, where banal and benign flowers grow, my children. And those things, memories, are only a view like the view out the back window, where everything is all right after all. It is true that I’ve traded ambition and independence for leisure, but I don’t see an issue with this, this impermeable happiness, that gives me the glazed eyes of a stranger to carry. I stride cheerily among the human/inhuman mess, and I think: I understand you, I understand you all. (Is it a good thing, to understand?) I struggled, for a while, with the remainders of youth, but then I fed them to the soft smiling void, the increasing thickness of that inevitable velvet touch, and I was none the worse. None of us are. My meanings are gentler now. Troubles passing. Weathers I live in and out of. My thoughts, when I think them, are only the thoughts of the well. There is no such thing as a wasted life, and in any case it wouldn’t be a sin.
I’ve been living in Oxford for ten years now, which is less time than most. There are those that pass through, but they are a different kind. I lecture in classics, the only subject in any way worth studying. In classics the ‘what’ triumphs over the ‘why’; and innovation triumphs over tradition, as any real classicist knows. Innovation, the living and dying mind, is the eternal. Innovation is what frightens the body into blood and sun-breaking pleasure. In the ancient world what survived was what mattered to the body; was the meaning of form. Oxford is, on the contrary, a formless disembodied intricacy; a delighted, repressed tautology, a senseless kind of play. But I live on the outskirts. I keep my pleasures tightly woven around me, and far from the scourged youths and their excellently clear skin. I live amongst the people of the body, the people who have no other choice.
No place is any good until you have fallen in love there. Has anyone ever fallen in love here? I think that even among the children it doesn’t happen. Only to those who go home for the holidays, forswearing literature having come to see in it an enemy to the singing body, a blunt tool for the reshaping of the sorry head, that had only wanted pleasure after all, and would have sacrificed even joy.
Maybe there are unrequited, Chaucerian feelings in those who are over-sexed by Middle English words, those false intellectuals who are not fakers but only too true in their direct and ready sentiments of glory; those who are building on the shoddiest basis but yet one that is the hardest to disrupt, as if those splintered thoughts and feelings get lodged in them more firmly than anything real ever could.
I walk the streets when I must, the centre of the city having banned cars, travel, places, impolite prayers. There are none of the rhythms of love here, no momentary redemptions in the form of another’s life. The bodies slings for everything but sex, which is just another whimsy to them. It is still what it has always been, a city without women.
Deeper in the living circle of pain. There are people in the walls I cannot find. I stand at the centre, the lapsed faces, the forgetfulness.
When I get home to my husband we don’t talk very much, not because we have nothing to say to each other but because both of us feel that we are dying here. Whoever asks first, ‘What will we do about dinner?’ is the one both of us want to kill. And then we soften. He has learnt not to ask, ‘How were the kids today?’ We have learnt to try to make of each other havens in which we do not live.
***
I teach mainly public schoolboys, who sexually harass me fairly incessantly without noticing. They are handsome-repulsive or ugly-repulsive, nothing in between. They are men with large shoulders but they do not give me dreams. Of all beings, I would least like to be raped by one of them. They wouldn’t dare. I am five-foot-ten and strong. My breasts are large and firm like two extra muscles. Anyway the overt metaphors of colonial force (I’m Irish) have gone out of fashion. I suspect they would choose weakness, some poor English girl with a brain but who has never used it to insult the queen. And then marry a big blonde demon with sharp bits, and one of those daddies who has to remind himself not to pat this one on the arse. (The strange sex of English hands.)
And yet I’m scared I’m here for the same reasons as the rest – some combination of privilege and incompetence. I must write for money, so I sometimes do. I write about the things the Greeks thought and felt. I write what I think about them, or rather what I think about the things that are thought concerning them. I write what I think about thoughts about thoughts about thoughts about thoughts concerning them. I elaborate, I regress, I complain. I climb into the web and I pretend that I am spinning. Then, when I have a paper, I climb out, I get drunk or take MDMA, which lets me experience heaven and hell but neither division nor sleep.
At night we get drunk and watch television, slowly and luxuriously transitioning into the more complete oblivion of sleep. These are the things that we love. His whiskey straight and mine with orange squash. We like watching things that are considered affronts to the mind. (We do not find them so.) We like the bodies that we are allowed to scrutinize so openly. We drink them in with greed for hours and hours.
I feel this confinement, this loss. I wonder what I could have been, had I not been successful. What I could have felt. I could have been destroyed by now; freed.
***
We go on long holidays to places and we pretend that we are there.
***
My husband’s business has been a success also. He restores furniture, an acceptably British occupation, but he does so in a Dublinese several shades stronger than mine. He’s been accepted – he amuses. People bring him old ugly things from that time in between the ancient sun on the body and the tv set. I know nothing of this time, want nothing from it.
My husband’s body is not tall but broad and messy and hard to classify, a stunted weed. It is full of odd corners, hard with bits of soft. And yet, this is simple: the rib, the elbow.
There was—and is—so much dead time, flapping futilely on the dumb wind of the present. It’s hard to say no to a good job.
I miss the Dublin misery, the drunks, the crowds, the hoarse laughter. The hideouts of sun and dirt. A history consisting of the joys of desecration. My husband, who belonged to the city more than I ever could, spent his childhood riding horses in the inner city. Pony boys. One earring, bareback riding, tracksuit bottomed – a whole other design. When I was a child, I knew that these were people I would never get to know. I knew it implicitly – that there were people I shouldn’t see or talk of. That there were wild, loud children riding around the city wearing addidas and swearing. Pony boys don’t exist anymore – the government cracked down on them during the Celtic Tiger, calling it animal cruelty.
***
In memory I am looking out a window on someone else’s life. Three little blonde girls lined up on a lawn, while a loud ugly woman from Belfast told us about Christ, trying to make it into a game where she got angry if we cheated – only we didn’t know the rules. Daddy picked us up in the evenings from that Barbie-pink house he’d grown up in, the house that smelt like a stranger no matter how long we spent there. My grandmother stood on the gigantic steps, waved once and went inside. I think that was what I didn’t like about it – pink and grey. Pink and grey are the colours of the loneliest kind of dust.
I told Mark about this at some stage – not knowing, and I still don’t, why it hurts. I know there was something missing, and that it had to do with a bigger lie, one I told myself incessantly. I know I thought it was safety for a while, so I abandoned safety. But it didn’t work, the lie was still there.
I don’t know why childhood is a lie. Is it because it’s impossible to admit how small you are? Is it because you think you don’t believe in God but really you do, you believe in everything there is? Or because you think you don’t know what sex is, but really you’ve found your body’s gateways, found it lurking beneath your clothes and your mortified flesh, where only you can get at it.
Am I old now? I am thirty-two. Mark wants children.
That I am not the old lady at the window, that I am one of the three blonde sisters, I do not understand. That I could once stand in that garden and not be blamed. Though I thought often then of the ugliness of the angry woman. Later, of her stupidity. The sun burning on the little blonde heads. The will to live and end. I share nothing with those girls now, it’s as if we had different parents to each other. We share an agreement, perhaps, on how those parents are to be spoken of, but they are different objects. We only choose to share, like actors, this way of talking. We play the games laid out because it is not yet time to think of different ones.
Three little girls under the burning sun. The feeling of a suburb. That feeling that lands everywhere, intractable. Saturday a different kind of day; the other children not “them” but “us.” The little girls of whom it is yet impossible to say if they will be beautiful, if they will be clever. In terms of goodness, it seems like often the best are destroyed, and the worst become good. I know now that I am the bad one that became good by chance. Maybe someone coming from far away enough would have been able to see it. Someone incapable of understanding what we understood. At that time we saw what was there instead of what was coming. Daddy would pick up Amelia like she was air, and we would carry on down the drive. Someone at the window watching, but it couldn’t have been me, because I was there walking beside them and there was no one left for it to be.
It was all so feminine between us. I think that later we all chose manly men in an attempt to counterbalance. We needed someone who could touch dirt, eat with their hands, forget about things. They stayed in Dublin and I wrote books, here.
***
To have children just because you exist.
To trade yourself, half for money and half for something called love but which can be halved without even having to talk about it.
Never to talk to the void like it is some doctor, limping to its edge and releasing your vice where it will safely not matter. Never, homesick for an impossible warmth, to crave poverty; never to look for sex in a body that has been shunned by all you have had to be. He didn’t want me back at first, in fact not for a long while. I was always attracted to him, to the knowledge in his posture, which hadn’t attained total ease but had accepted even this.
You let your memories, their nonexistence, grow and die all by themselves. Layering lie upon lie and digging with corrupt fingers through this plagued soil. It feels as if you have touched too much, too little.
Sometimes I think of this and words resembling it break from my mouth, and he gives me that look that turns so easily to sex. Looking enough to see that you can’t look, a question that slowly ignites the flesh turning it to hands, to helpless lips. A question that turns me back to him, driving me into a faster, heavier breath, like being human again. We are soon forgotten. I forget my life in this unraveling and remembering of happiness.
He and I are both middle children, unobtrusive blessings. Psychologists say something like: middle children are free, are evil, are strangers to gentleness. I agree with them, I agree with psychology. Except that Mark mostly has sisters, and he thinks women are real. He expects me. And he expects to be the son of his parents, it is only a background to the life he’s in. His philosophy of talking, smoking. One that makes me feel easy and real. He smokes a joint in the garden before he goes to sleep. I look in the mirror, brush my hair, clean my face. Know he’s there in the darkness, think of myself.
What does this sex mean, which comes after all these questions, that I can’t remember it? Is it that I am in it that I can’t remember it, or is it something worse. He has to tell me afterwards, if we have reason to speak about it. If there are matters of technique, and one rides along technique, after all, like a violinist.
I am strange, for a classicist, I lack all compartments. I have no knowledge that is contained, just things that rise up, like emotions, responses. That is why I don’t lecture, I only converse to myself while they watch. It takes a long time to wear down innocence, sometimes innocence is stronger. And if you can’t see any of it happening?
***
My mind is a living destroyer, tall in my tall body.
***
An hour and a half to central London by bus and the taste of Oxford has finally melted away. We take the bus to London so we can drink. We don’t like London but it’s a city, there will always be something beautiful to it.
One finds things: an empty jazz bar in Soho, where there is usually no one except a failed Scottish comedian and two French waitresses who remind me of the lovely sort of prostitutes, selfless comforters who hug you close and take your money without looking at it. We feel at home here, where it is anonymous and friendly, a haven where you drink things away and dive straight to the soul. The waitresses, the failed comedian, accept us, take us for outsiders in the right way. Which makes us feel like we are. A feeling like the years before: that breath, that nothingness, that life that no one recognizes as such except yourself. Nothingness like a space for you, emptied of words, you look around and feel suddenly that everyone knows, everyone knows after all.
Before Oxford, a few years of wandering about, nothing particular. I could have said ‘I am,’ but nothing further that anyone would know what to make of. Mark says ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He says, ‘It’s all right,’ and I agree, more than anything in my life I agree. But other times, what I can’t uproot is that I am afraid, deeply afraid. I see them seeing me and seeing nothing. I feel, indescribably, that this can’t go on, this wreck, a prostitute without customers. Odd job, drunken night after drunken day, something as stupid as contentment, living for friends. Other times it is more, I am filled with pure joy, I think, “This is freedom.” It is freedom when you are alive and freedom is nothing more than that. When you are like everyone else.
My friends drop off, relocate. My mind numb. Wasn’t I brilliant, once? As a child. Is that not who I am, who was a child? Look there.
The life of the mind the only life on offer. What I have is what I know: empires and gods: my personality. And yet hadn’t I belonged where I was, knocking plates onto customers, showing up at the office an hour late, dismaying everyone around me, facing decades of ageing with a gulp. My share in the tragedy.
The people here aren’t Nazis, they are British. They have a polite way of standing on the shoulders of the poor, it’s a unique hopelessness. The triumph of the enlightenment is not knowing who we are. Everyone, both good and bad. I was almost fired once for suggesting a plot to assassinate the queen: Forced to a formal dinner where a man name Richard suggested I felt uncomfortable here.
‘I’m a communist,’ I muttered helplessly.
‘But it’s Balliol! We’re all communists here!’
***
Looking for the place where people felt: in books, in misery. All I found was where they hid.
***
To have money. To desire passion without suffering, war without death. No longer at the world’s mercy, desire with nowhere left to go. I was glad I had fallen in love – it was like knowing, at last, what people feel. The ones I grew up with said I love you only as an unavoidable part of the language, the control system. Mom, at least, never said it, being as bland and sad in her language as she was in her actions. She talked exclusively shit. An inhuman disease that kills so many. Talking so long that you are trapped inside your words forever. Too busy and scared and stupid talking shit to notice anything that ever happened – the eruptions from her womb, the sportsman’s affairs of her husband. No one was ever supposed to imagine her, and she didn’t imagine herself. An animal of so many words, but apparently inattentive to anything that moved inside her. I’m sure she would have said I love you had the setting ever been right. But she would never bring about those settings. All she did was watch objects stir themselves around her, and state them. This, to her, was what language was for. Her husband’s statements were true because they came from a large, recognizable mouth.
But overall she was too far gone, she couldn’t stop talking. You could sympathise only briefly or you’d be destroyed. Perhaps not destroyed the way she was, but destroyed nonetheless.
Always she came to me when I was ill and burning. Approached with her transparent fingers. Usually I could withstand her ministrations so little that on her approach I would promptly become well. Mothers are like a distant sound of suffering that you can neither make out, nor escape, nor abide. The pain in my stomach ten times worse now that she was here, the one I always wanted until she finally came and broke the fantasy. I was always humiliated by the boredom and falsity of her approaches. Who’d told her to come, what was she doing here? I’d wanted to scream at her, ‘Get out!’ I wanted to break her, unable to realize that she’d already been broken, there was nothing left. I used to imagine that if I finally broke her it might all pour out: love, hatred, affection. I imagined people as containers then, rather than habits.
A lot of loneliness always in everything. A lot, then, of trying to persuade the hand of friendship from: shadows; bruises; fragments of limb caught slantways or in a mirror; one’s own feet, who obey so hesitantly from a distance. And a lot of looking at the ground for things that seem to live in spite of it all. A lot of thinking that litter must mean as the abundant colour of a flower must mean, must speak. All moving silence, and my begging of it – searching for another mind within my own. Poems, horrible, endless, unable to see the problem. Attempting to speak with someone after all of this is horror, is solitude multiplied and rebounded. I could never offer anything but my own rich-girl manners. I see such types now in Oxford, caught so early that perhaps they will never be redeemed. They’ll find instead, here, patient and innocent lovers. What they need is a sudden and violent attack, to break up once and for all the slowness that had wormed its way so deep. What a useless pile of memories.
This place is full of Victorians – virgins in their twenties, loneliness secured by success. The place they thought it would end – where everyone else would be like them – is the place it truly begins. Tea is drunk, novels discussed, manners practiced and yet closeness not achieved. Rarely does one witness any form of touch, friendly or otherwise.
***
So even here and now, terrors gone, I can’t sleep. My mind ticking away like the slowest of bombs. Even though I know that all that is coming for me is peace. How does one age so quickly. Passion displaced so quickly. I am retired, wearied by the smallest of things now.
Of course we begin, ‘I just want’ when we never just want, do we?
I can neither get used to being loved nor keep myself from wanting more.
I know lies and I know corruption: chasing one’s desires without acknowledging what they are. Glimpses of this, in my own childhood, being driven through another city wide-eyed and suddenly feeling full, excited, hopeful or else destroyed with longing, knowing that by the time I made it back to this street on my own terms I’d be what to a child is old, body-heavy and with a different perception of danger. ‘Where was that?’ I’d ask only when such a street was past, when it was beyond their ruining it. They’d never know the place I’d meant. When I was a bit older I’d search on foot for this place that had the power to make me feel, but I’d never make it far enough, it took hours to get to the other end of the river or across it. Where we lived people had large gardens, gates, one’s heart would already be broken by the time one got past a few of these houses and you’d just want to be back in your room where the pictures on the walls whispered soft things to you, made promises.
The good thing about being surrounded by all that wealth was that I never wasted time wanting it. The good things to eat in the kitchen and the emptiness of it and the silence of it only made me heavier, unfit, further than ever from the fortitude it would take to get me across town, which I also feared because I also knew that the truth of it was that over there I’d be lonelier than ever, as wrong there as I was here. That even if there were better things and that taste of freedom and warmth and living that was living and not this monstrous dead seal of money over life, stifling it into nonexistence, it would shut me out as long as I was alien to its hardships and its hardnesses and losses, as long as I had this scared look in my eyes and the sheen of money on my clothes. I knew what would happen and what then did, which was loneliness hitting me harder than I’d ever dreamed it could, a pain I’d thought I already knew inside and out now confronting me as something unknown. Loneliness can always come on as something more than you’d imagined, one of those nightmares that doesn’t strike everyone’s life and if you are lucky only comes a few times. But it isn’t an emotion like any other, it’s never just a feeling but always your whole life made real and poured into some dirt you then have to scrabble your way out of, or try to disappear from until once again, like the ordinary person you’re usually allowed to be, you’ve forgotten.
So I go see the old people here, Mark laughs but I do it because they are the ones who I feel like I’ve been and understand, maybe perhaps a little I’ve been the young but more I’ve been the very old, the ones without spouses or children, and I can feel how what they’ve known, which is nothing, they can’t speak of. In their fear and loneliness they speak only of gentle meaningless things, afraid of meaning something and having never found a way out, they speak of animals cakes flowers and weather. I am along with them and I know how to do this just in the way I don’t know how to speak to children, who require responsiveness, colour and life rising up, Mark speaks to children and I speak in deadnesses and stale sweetnesses in bored lonely ways to those who it makes feel safe.
Feeling nothing, I am lovely, they find me lovely, and they see my kindness under the façade of kindness, they accept its bored and fearful way and know that this is the only line in me between what is real and what is not real. I never push them, never push myself, but we carry on in the innocence that loneliness yet can reach and must reach, all else taken out of them, all those forms of knowledge that come with love and being part of the world. Still I can be something to them if I only speak in this way, this way that I can, so I go to them on Tuesdays, where they wait shameless in the backroom of a church, where I don’t know the difference between giving and taking, it is all just slight adjustments and subtle exchanges between warm bodies.
Where I’m from you tell other people what you have so they can feel what they lack, or you tell other people what you lack so they can feel what you deserve.
Their longing is not for a body of muscles taut with things done and to do, only a musculature of attainment.
Mark’s body is a mess of hair and freckles and secret patches of paleness where a knife might dig. All is uneven and odd and ready for my searches. I can’t ever find it because its history and mind run way beyond my reaches and beyond the failure of my dreams and deeper than what I thought I wanted. My desire keeps running and turning, in other words. It keeps up and I am strange enough for it and confused enough for it and my confusion remains, something I can turn to. His muscles just messes belonging to the things he’s done. I can kiss them and kiss life, dragging away from my coldness.
I guess in my hatred of them I still succeeded in some way because I kept wanting what they weren’t, and what I’m not, still feeling some love or something like it such as need for them powering me on and driving me through in a hurt that keeps you going even when you stop. Your rebellion and your weakness in tandem. Not that there is ever success as there is only what one can be.
Rivkah Mc Kinley is writer living in Dublin. In 2020 one of her stories was featured in the Globe & Scales anthology.