The Damned, the Possessed and the Beautiful

Ali Millar

after Louise Bourgeois

Lately, I have begun to suspect I have lost the thread of something larger, a friend writes in a message to me. When I read it back, this is not what they wrote at all.

This is the problem: there is always distance between what is written and what is meant. Worse still, there is always the distance between what is meant and what is read.

I begin to think we should refrain from writing at all and instead take up speaking to each other again.

I begin to crave phones attached to the wall. These phones would have rotary dials that run the risk of skipping entire numbers, connecting you to the operator or the police station when you are simply trying to call your friends.

Nevertheless, lately, I have begun to suspect I have lost the thread of something larger.

See, what I am saying here is that I will read what I want to into whatever I want to.

Here I would like to begin to tell a different story. This story would act as a convenient distraction. In it, I would tell the story of how I came to be in possession of my grandfather’s old films.

It would be convenient to tell how I came to be in possession of these while neglecting to tell why I came to possess them.

Lately, I am beginning to understand I write entire books as a way of avoiding saying anything at all.

I am writing a new book and because this book is made of many threads and because I have lost the thread of something larger, I take myself away from my life to a different city, where I continue to not write it.

I suspect I have been taking myself away from my life for a long time, which might explain the fact that now I live as far south as it is possible to live in the UK, where the light is cold and hard and white. For a time, I called this light strange and pure and now it is simply cold and hard and white.

Before living here, I had begun to crave white in the same way I now want rotary phones attached to the wall. I wanted white walls and white bedlinen and white curtains and white kitchen drawers that closed silently; I wanted this white to create the type of tedium I would chew through my own arm to escape.

Now I have the white light, I am looking for the blue light I knew as a child.

Some types of light, they work their way into you, and living in your body as they do, they are impossible to escape from.

In London, I go for drinks with a man I once believed I was in love with. I have these drinks with him in the hope it will help me to get over the man I was last in love with, as if people are interchangeable things. My plan fails. And all that happens is I prove what I already knew: you cannot substitute one person for another. Each person possesses their own this-ness, and it is this this-ness that keeps you needing them and only them.

It is the fault of this last man I was in love with that I come to be in possession of my grandfather’s tapes. I say it is his fault so as to absolve myself of any culpability in any of it.

Yes, it is easier to call it his fault than mine. Easier still to call it fate than anything else.

For a time, I was making a film with the man I was last in love with. Sometimes, he would remember this project. Other times, we would sit up late talking it over, but by morning he’d have forgotten it all.

I think his addiction helps him avoid intimacy but creates the illusion of it, I write to a friend, and I try not to think how well his addiction suits me. I try not think how convenient it is to tell things to a person who will forget it all.

I do not want this film to contain the harsh light where I live. It needs to have a specific type of blue I can only find on the west coast instead of the light I can no longer tolerate.

I make notes about the film I plan to make, timings of sunrise and sunset, and plan how far west I need to be to capture this blue.

All summer, I watch the light fade in various Italian cities. There, the sun doesn’t so much set as disperse. I watch as the light slowly goes, and I don’t feel sad in the way I often do at sunset. These soft sunsets return the west coast of Scotland to me, the long summer twilights where the light barely goes at all.

I will take myself west to capture this light. I will return to the coast, to the sea that gave me nightmares as a child, when I dreamt of incoming tides and sand dunes too steep to scale. I have wondered at times if this type of dream was a particular affliction of coastal children. I wonder now if it was perhaps just my own individual affliction.

There is something wrong with people who possess too much of a love for the sea, as if something so unpredictable, so changeable, could ever be trusted. As if they themselves have crawled from the blue, and I try not to think of my own eyes, both blue and green, depending on how much I love the person I am looking at.

My ex-husband is surprised by this fact; your eyes are only blue, he tells me, refusing to believe it is possible for a person’s eyes to change. Some people put their faith in fixed things.

I refuse to think of my own inability to stay away from or out of the sea.

Back on the west coast, I buy a pack of cigarettes, sit smoking them in the graveyard.

I cannot settle.

I walk and walk. I smoke and smoke.

I sleep through dawn, drink through dusk. I cannot commit to this search for blue. I squander my chances of capturing it. I will not give it to the man I was in love with. I think I will take greater care over who I give things to in future. Having neglected to capture this blue, I need other ways to bring it back to me.

I remember then the library of tapes my grandfather made over the years. Old VHS recordings the colour of memory. I think perhaps he too was in search of blue, although I do not know who for.

In telling you why I came to be in possession of my grandfather’s tapes, I have neglected to tell you what the films contain.

This has not been a mistake.

Eventually, it is time to show your hand.

Eventually, I message a friend, I love him, but I cannot let myself be in love with him again.

I am seven and my mother is reaching across to stop me picking at the loose thread of the hem of my skirt, careful, she says, pull one thread and it’ll all come undone.

In returning to threads, I return to a memory of the summer solstice, or winter solstice, depending on what hemisphere you are in.

In returning to the summer solstice, I return to my father, in the same way I thought of returning to his continent on this last summer solstice, when swimming in the sea off Sardinia. With nothing between me and Africa, I thought of him doing his dying there, on the summer solstice four years previously. Or my summer solstice in London, his winter one. With him, things were always the wrong way round.

I lie there in the curious water, sea glass green, watching swallows fly overhead, thinking how they flit between continents, neither or both home, hard to tell. Maybe we’re all just in search of enough to sustain us.

I have done well to make the memory of the solstice sound like it is only of Sardinia and not four years earlier.

Or I have done well until now at least.

Here is the hand I need to show:

The night my father is busied by the business of dying from an illness he staunchly refuses to believe in, I sit in my garden in London, where bats brush past my face and vines I should have cut back last winter run the risk of catching fire from the matches I strike one after the other. For a time, these matches staunchly refuse to light, until they decide to and then run the risk of never burning themselves out.

Before I light the matches, I unpick the seams of my wedding dress. The thread quickly breaks as I run the seam ripper up them. After, I cut the dress into pieces. To stop myself wondering what it is I’m doing, or worse what it might mean, I tell myself this is an experiment.

All of life, a set of complicated internal checks and balances.

The material is made from silk and polyester. The silk is highly combustible, whereas the polyester presents a danger to my skin, in that it melts rather than burns. If it melts on skin, it fuses there; the only way it can be removed is to take the skin with it, creating subcutaneous burns so severe they pose a threat to life. I watch the silk fly into the air, the polyester balling itself up. It is difficult not to touch it in the same way it is difficult not to touch things marked HOT or DANGER OF DEATH or PRIVATE PROPERTY. Eventually, my mother learnt it was safer not to tell me not to touch the oven.

It might be that it barely gets dark or it might be light pollution, but as I sit there, it feels as if I am at home. I am not sure if the feeling of at-home-ness arises from the similarity of light or the familiarity of setting fire to things. After the burning, I return to the house where it is dark. Next to the record player my husband has left a glass of wine. I take it to the kitchen, rinse it and put it on the draining board.

I go back to the record player, take his record off and replace it with one of mine.

I plug the headphones in and turn the volume up until I can no longer hear. After, I will take a sheet from the linen cupboard and spread it over the sofa, where I will sleep. I have slept like this for months. I use the excuse of work. I work late at night and early in the morning. I tell my husband I do not want to disturb him.

Under the sheet, I am naked, but still too warm in the midsummer heat. It is during this fitful sleep I dream of a fox. On waking, the specifics of the dream blur. Either the fox was stealing my food or I was feeding it. Because the whole meaning of the dream hinges on this detail, I spend half of the following morning trying to solve the dream. I am still trying to solve it when the South African prefix of my cousin’s number flashes up on my phone.

She tells me my father is dead. She does not say if it was quick or if it was painless or if he knew what was coming. She does not say and I do not ask. Instead, she tells me about the drive to the hospital. How the road and the sky stretch on and on into the veld and monotony, and I do not tell her this sounds like precisely the type of boredom I have been both in search and possession of.

I hang up the phone and stare out over the front garden. This is where memory decides to trick me. The leaves in the garden are rain slicked, creating a riot of green Lorca would envy, but the garden the night before is dusty and dry. The night warm, the morning wet. I look out and for the first time in the 20 years since I found my father, I feel a sense of relief.

The following day, when my cousin calls again, she tells me the last joke my father plays on his death.

As far as jokes go, it’s a good one.

It is this:

The day after he dies, his wife of nearly 30 years calls the hospital in Bloemfountain from their home in South Carolina. She says she would like to arrange for the body to be sent home. But Mrs Fleetwood, the receptionist says, you cannot be his wife. His wife is here collecting the body already.

See, he would say, how they fight over my dead body. His American wife and his South African wife, neither with any knowledge of the other until that day. There is a flaw in his joke, in that he doesn’t realise that when they discover each other, neither wants his body.

Days later, they cremate him. This cremation gives rise to a type of unquiet. I cannot help but think of what they might have set free when they burnt him. I think of phoenixes and ashes.

I cannot sleep without thinking of him.

I cannot look in the mirror without seeing fragments of him looking back.

When I hear they threw his ashes to the bottom of the Vaal, my worry intensifies. They should have kept him in the urn, the lid screwed tight, placed it on the top of the mantelpiece, keeping him in full view.

If not that, buried him six feet or more deep. In a steel coffin, padlocked shut.

When I tell my husband about the two wives, I begin to laugh. I laugh so much I start to cry. I am wiping tears away when I see how he is looking at me.

That’s not funny, he says, you don’t have any morals left, do you, he says, before going back upstairs to his meeting.

I am done with feeding wild animals.

I am done with picking at threads.

‘The Damned, the Possessed and the Beautiful’ was originally published in Gutter #33

Ali Millar is a writer and journalist. Born in Edinburgh and raised in the Scottish Borders, she now lives in London. She is the author of The Last Days and Ava Anna Ada.