Stimuli

I’ve lived in this house all my life. I was born here. (Recently I witnessed my birth, the images of mum in labour, overlaid over my husband in the present, reading a book by the small Ikea lamp). I remember many things that happened to me in this house, standing on a drawing pin, the tears of my grandfather when they had to put Cindy to sleep, falling downstairs and breaking my arm, the smell of the barbecued burgers in the summer, the sound of the fizzy cherryade, (how it left a pink tide mark in my cup) when my father left us, when my mother died.

It wasn’t long after I had come out of hospital that I saw fine images of me as a girl running upstairs. Doctors and various experts said it might have been the effect of the tumour on my brain, even after removal. Other images followed; mum on the settee, having one of her migraines, the phantom bedroom door opening over the present closed bedroom door, dad getting up off the settee to change the channel.

One evening, above the hearth, I saw a patch of the old brass ornaments we used to have on the wall. The image hung there for over a minute. It was, at the time, the longest manifestation I had seen. I asked my husband to look but he couldn’t see anything, although, he could smell a faint burning. Although they didn’t originally last more than a fraction of a second and the images were almost transparent, they became more defined over time, hanging around for longer. Recently I’ve started to hear disembodied sounds as well, just snatches, sometimes in the same room, or maybe an echo in another room, a cough in the bathroom, a ‘you what lad? in the hallway. I’d been drifting off to sleep one early evening when I found myself almost responding to my brother’s voice, coming from the 1980s, inviting me to see something outside, or whatever it was he actually said. I even got up and went to the door, before forgetting, and wondering if I had dreamt it. I’ve noticed smells too, cigarette smoke, as if someone (my dad perhaps) had been smoking in the living room all day, boiling hempseed, plaster, dust, mum’s old lipstick.

Sometimes the memories and moving images from the past are so defined that they overlay so deftly onto my present space. I went into the kitchen in the middle of the night once and when I turned on the light, just for a second, I saw my mum as a girl, in her school uniform, eating a piece of toast, as the morning light leant in through the windows. When I switched the light off and back on again, it was my normal kitchen. In the present. Sometimes I see granddad as a teenager fixing his bike in the hall or mum and dad, before they had me, courting, flirting.

There’s images I can’t explain also. My gran being kicked by my dad, granddad comforting my sister, whispers, hushed tones, soft kisses, an old television blaring away downstairs. Jim Reeves records. I awoke one night because I heard an old, thunderous argument between my mum and dad coming from downstairs. It went on so long that it didn’t seem a great surprise or expectation when my mum came in my room, sat on my bed, told me to go to sleep and cried, like she used to. One morning, not long ago, I was startled by a younger version of myself waking up. Her bed was smaller of course, and in a different part of my bedroom. For a second, maybe longer, she noticed me, she saw me as I am now, as I will be, then we faded out of each others lives. It’s no longer just shades of the past I see, I can see things that are coming, things that have already happened, maybe the old woman I saw staring mournfully out of the bedroom window into a grey, autumn outside, superimposed over my present summer is me, or my daughter. Sometimes the house is silent, sometimes there’s laughter or tears, in all time-zones. Sometimes I sense it’s bare in the past, preset and future, there is no-one here, like we were never here. I can feel the cold and smell the dust. I remember. I remembered. I’m beyond the stage of hysteria. My husband is beyond it. It was all so long ago, after the operation, but before the operation. Always.

Illuminated by early evening Satsuma globes on vertical concrete arms, the estate lay still. There were no kids out tonight. The lights behind the net curtains of the flats, bungalows and semi-detached houses were so dim it was as if everyone were purposely keeping a low profile. In the distance I heard the driver change gear in one of the Little Gems. At the doorstep mum said, ‘Where’s your key?’ Dad was out. No refreshment was offered or an explanation of my whereabouts required. Was ignorance a punishment?

The convex instrument in the corner burped out images of the News at 5:45. Had my mum and dad really furnished this modern build house with ancient artefacts? The walls, were they always so bare, like the kitchen cupboards? My imprisonment this time was self-imposed. I stepped upstairs to the little box room, I expected would house just a small bed and little else. There was a faint smell of urine. How many years would I have to live like this again, a slave in my room, an accessory to my parent’s till there was chance of escape? How long would it be till the madness of knowing what the future held, how it could be changed, how I could get it all wrong and mess up my present? How long would it be before it would take effect? Nothing would change in this house, in this past. It would only age. People would die, others would move in and cover over the cracks, carpet over the blood, piss and tears and hide the arguments, domestic violence and the dominating feelings of indifference that had hung over the place since 1976. It would change in 1984, maybe disappear fully in 1996 when Dad would die here, but for me it was a lifetime away. The council would still own the estate, decide how we lived and hold our lives to ransom much, much longer.

Steam bellowed out whenever he spoke. He acknowledged my appreciation for the Russian classics. It must have been due to the November frost that he was shivering. That’s why he talks funny, I noted to myself, unless he’s bad with his nerves. Could be medication. I had to say something, as I felt he was being insincere. Unfazed by the steam that escaped my own mouth I asked, ‘You’re not familiar with the Russian classics?’
‘I work as a Probation Officer. I’m used to legal documents.’
‘You must never underestimate the power of the Russian novel!’ I barked, firing him an intense glare. ‘Never.’
‘I’m always interested in what inspires our writers.’
Our writers, were the writers in his writing group.
‘I don’t know anything about the intricacies of law and legal documentations, but if I were your chairman, I would be willing to consider your passions, should you present them to me. Oh…I would.’
The Chairman shivered, his face partially obscured by the steam. Perhaps his eyes were streaming as well. His voice sounded as if they were.
‘Your novel was not accepted by the group. Not..er…not… because of its influences but because you… wouldn’t allow the fellow writers in the group the opportunity to give your work feedback, to suggest adjustments, to, to, to guide you.’

I punched my fists in my greatcoat and sulked.

‘That bump emerging from the wall… it fucks with me eyes, it fucks with yer mind,’ is not an abnormal response.

If you’ve seen Source Code, Anish’s work is that massive mirrored bean in Chicago city, that the fucked up Gyllenhaal stares into near the end. At this exhibition there’s sort of a miniature version of that piece or is it a scaled up version of an actual bean? Who knows? But you can’t touch it or anything else. In other areas the wall has been canon-blasted with wax. It looks like red vomit, an after-birth, traumatised bodies…Then there’s the hall of mirrored plates. Kapoor wants us to confront ourselves as distorted forms, like the proverbial mirror held up to society. Probably. In another room, on a plasma screen I think I half hear Kapoor tell Alan Yentob that no-one knows much about anything. We did learn that the massive silver bean in Chicago cost $23 million though.

I enjoyed the use of colour, composition and the scale. I don’t have a clue what any of it means.

The London Boys had a dream, a ‘harlem desire’ as it were, for ‘no more fighting in the streets/ close this crazy nuthouse down’. I’m not sniping actually. If only most pop records made society’s ills as fun and pulsating as this, whether it hails from Europe or Britain. I couldn’t agree with The London Boys more. ‘Just one night of peaceful sleep’, and delivered to us with two euphoric choruses. I yearn for the days when European pop music’s naiveté was endearing as it was entertaining.

I want my nose to face yours. If that means that our backs are turned on everyone else then that is the way it must be. I need to be nose to nose with you, if only it seems to all the others, that we are seeing eye to eye. It must appear that we are almost one; that we are together, albeit separated by slight distance.

If I should ever find that my nose is not facing yours, that you have turned your back on me, I shall feel rejected. And lonely. Being next to you would still be enough. As a compromise we could just be side by side, as if we were shoulder to shoulder in our views and cares.

I may be older and smaller than you but if we were nose to nose it would be more convenient to regale you with tales of old, offer you the benefit of my advice and experience, in the knowledge, that to the others, it would appear that you are listening and learning. I want to shine but I am dull. I would rather we shine as two. You are, after all, one, and I am the other. To have one without the other would be such a pointless existence to me. A life I couldn’t bear. I would rather someone have their back turned to me than to point my nose towards nothingness.