To Throw Away Unopened
Viv Albertine
To Throw Away Unopened
For Kathleen and Lucien
Some names and identifying details
have been changed.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
I
1 Next morning …
2 I can still picture myself …
3 I wrote the list in my neatest …
4 I closed my eyes.
5 After writing lists and …
6 Vida was so sound asleep …
7 Lying next to Vida …
8 It was the night of my book launch.
9 I can’t recall everything I did …
10 I patted my back pockets …
11 I turned away from the smokers …
12 I stumbled through the crowd …
13 By the time Vida arrived…
14 We ran out of the Lexington…
15 Vida and I sat close to each other…
16 The cab belted along…
17 I asked the cabbie if…
18 We pelted down the corridor.
19 Mum was alive…
20 Mum looked so uncomfortable…
21 Mum’s nose and the tips of her fingers…
22 I detected a bitter glance…
23 Mia was shocked that Pascale…
24 After Pascale refused to move…
25 Maleficence was in the air.
26 The ambulance crew reappeared.
27 I watched with horror as Pascale…
28 It must have been about midnight.
29 I wasn’t surprised Pascale said no…
Death Is Smaller than I Thought
II
30 I closed my eyes and tried to summon…
31 Pascale’s hair was bunched up in my fists…
32 I was in the middle of snatching and wrenching…
33 Mum programmed me to fight…
34 I hoisted Pascale up by her hair and dragged…
35 Mum must have sensed us scuffling…
36 Mia was reduced to a shadow flickering…
37 I was losing a lot of blood from my thumb.
38 As soon as the pit-bull solution…
39 All that effort, all the grappling and grabbing…
40 I plotted from the corner.
41 Trapped in the corner, penned in…
42 I could tell by her slumped posture…
43 Pascale stood up, her hand clutching…
44 I heard Pascale in the corridor talking…
45 Flaps of flesh hung off my thumb…
46 Even though she couldn’t speak…
47 Mia left Vida and me alone in the room.
48 At four in the morning Vida’s eyes kept closing…
49 No scrabbling for air, no gasping for breath.
50 Even though Mum was dead and couldn’t hear me…
51 I kissed Mum’s forehead.
52 Mia lifted Mum’s arm, checked her pulse…
53 When he saw my name on the death certificate…
54 We arrived back in Hackney at six o’clock …
55 First thing I did when we got in was boil…
56 When Vida woke up she said she wanted…
57 I turned left out of Eleanor Road onto…
58 I said a little prayer as I crossed…
59 I lifted two plates down from the…
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
I
To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear + tear of living will not let you become a murderer.
Louise Bourgeois, diary entry, 27 August 1984
1 Next morning, there I was, perched on the edge of my kitchen chair making a list as if nothing had happened. The wooden seat cut into the crease at the top of my thighs but I stayed put, chin in hand, elbow digging into the table, for about two hours. They’re a typical middle-class Hackney-dweller’s table and chairs – 1950s, Ercol. I bought them from Stella Blunt’s in Broadway Market. Don’t bother looking for the shop now though, it’s shut down. Shops and bars pop up and shut down every week in Hackney.
Hackney Wild*
The first time I saw the Hackney house, a fat brown rat was squatting on the doorstep, snout tilted skywards, sniffing the kebab-and-spliff-scented air. I helped my mother out of the car and we huddled together on the pavement to stare at the rat, who, with an unblinking eye, stared back at us. We were North Londoners, the rat was an East Londoner. I felt it had the upper hand. I glanced up at the front door. It was coated in an orangey-brown varnish, with a ‘No Junk Mail’ sticker peeling off the letterbox. I thought that by the time I looked back down at the pavement the rat would have scarpered, but it was still there, staring. Perhaps it was stoned. If it had been a human, even a big muscly bloke, I would have lifted my arm, jangled my keys at it and said ‘Excuse me,’ in a forceful tone. You can’t do that to a rat. The stand-off ended when I emitted a piercing, delayed-shock, half-choked scream. Ratty seemed to understand this form of communication and, with a streak of greasy brown fur, vanished under a pile of house bricks stacked up in next door’s front yard. My mother spent the next half an hour reassuring me. ‘Are you sure it was a rat, dear? Don’t be daft. You imagined it.’
… trying to make out, like most mothers, that things are what they’re not.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925
Mum was ninety-three when we encountered the rat and she knew she was on her way out. After fifty-eight years of parenting me, her volatile, unpredictable daughter, who never did anything at the same time as other people’s children – no milestones ticked off as other parents were ticking off university, job, marriage, house, car, children, grandchildren – she wanted to know before she died that I at least had a home, any home, even this one, next door to a rat.
Christos, the owner of the Hackney house, showed us around. When we arrived on the top floor he pointed out of the back window, across a large paved yard, and said, ‘That one on the corner, Magnus lives there, he’s an artist.’ (Magnus turned out to be my first ever boyfriend from school – he helped me pass my GCSE art exam and I gave him crabs. I found out his number and texted him. Hi Magnus, it’s Viv, please contact me urgently. I wanted to ask him if I’d fit in there. He thought that was funny. We haven’t been in touch for thirty years, he texted back, and now I need to contact you urgently!?) ‘Then there’s Jenny,’ continued Christos. ‘She’s a war photographer; Jo’s a light artist, Kaffe’s a sound artist, and right next door,’ he tapped on the glass to focus my attention, ‘is Gustav Metzger. You know, who started the auto-destructive art movement and was in Fluxus.’ (Gustav died on 1 March 2017.) The house was in a group of ten live/work units, and you had to be a practising artist to buy there. I liked the idea of living in a community. My daughter Vida and I were at a vulnerable stage in life, straight out of a divorce, my ex-husband, Vida’s father, moving out of London and starting a new family, and my mother dying. Not the right time to be insular. I wasn’t convinced about the house though. The corrugated-iron and fibreglass roof had green slime in the gullies – which you could see from the inside when you looked up – and the facade was plastered with rice-pudding-textured, Germolene-pink render.
Half an hour later Mum and I were back on the street. A soiled disposable nappy gaped up at us from the pavement. Neither of us mentioned it but we both lifted our feet up higher than necessary as we stepped off the kerb and headed towards my car. I slid into the driver’s seat and set off for the home that I would soon be leaving, a double-fronted mews house in Camden Town.
* Hackney Wild – a sourdough loaf made at
E5 Bakehouse, London, E8
2 I can still picture myself hunched over the kitchen table, even though it was four years ago. But I see my body from behind, like I’m looking at someone else. I wrote down everything I had to do in an exercise book. I can still remember the main points: register death; call the council; email gas and electricity companies; freeze bank account; choose flowers. Oh, and find a minister. It had to be a woman. I couldn’t bear a bloke getting it wrong or sounding all pompous, that would’ve killed her twice over. I thought I might as well make the calls straight away. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Architects’ Row
I had so many stressful experiences in the Camden mews house, you’d think I’d have been only too pleased to leave it (seven years of infertility treatment, thirteen operations, eleven IVF attempts, one miscarriage, one ectopic pregnancy, my gall bladder removed, one dose of cancer and one divorce, for starters). The property was built in 1988 and designed by Scottish architects Madigan and Donald. The rooms were decorated with Charles Rennie Mackintosh black ladder motifs and had elegant Japanese flourishes like sliding screens instead of doors. The day we moved in one of the removal men muttered out of the side of his mouth that it looked like a Chinese restaurant. The rest of the team sniggered. I over-tipped them to show they hadn’t upset me. On the ground floor, ceiling-height frosted-glass doors slid apart to reveal a wide, reclaimed-beech-floored living room and a semicircle of windows opening onto a tiny minimalist tropical garden. The hallway was dominated by a concrete column studded with tiny chocolate and caramel-coloured chips of stone. It towered up through the entire house like a giant unfurling ice-cream cone. It was a statement house. ‘Architects’ Row’, the postmen called our street. Groups of architecture students wandered past our kitchen window every day, stopping outside the front door to make notes on the house opposite, which was one of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers’s first buildings.
I loved arriving at our solid Anthracite Grey front door and slotting my Banham key into the locks. That’s when I knew I’d left my council-flat-and-free-school-meals past behind me for good. Whenever I had a spare moment I’d stand at the triangular window upstairs, look out over the rooftops and chimney pots towards BT Tower and think, This is London. But I couldn’t afford to live there, especially after the divorce. Most of our neighbours were lawyers and architects, had a couple of cars, one German, one French, and went on three holidays a year. I was an unemployed single mother with a second-hand red Skoda.
3 I wrote the list in my neatest handwriting and if you’d heard my voice when I made the phone calls, you would have been amazed, it was so confident, cheerful almost. Something wasn’t right though, because when I looked out of the window, even though it was a clear day, I couldn’t see anything. I knew the tip of the Shard was out there: I’d seen it hundreds of times. There’s a yellow brick warehouse in the distance and a railway line on top of the arches over to the right, but all I could see was a fuzzy white mist.
Purple
I was so excited when I brought my three-day-old daughter home from hospital to the Camden house that I knocked on the door opposite and asked my neighbour to take a picture of the three of us: Vida, Hubby and me, on the doorstep. I wouldn’t cross the threshold until this momentous event had been documented. In the photograph I’m grinning into the camera, Vida’s frowning with a woolly hat pulled too low over her eyes and Hubby looks bewildered. Funny to think that three months later I would be diagnosed with possibly terminal cervical cancer. That it was in me then, as I smiled into the camera, no knowledge and no fear in my eyes.
The cancer treatment lasted five months. As soon as it was finished and I could stand, I went out and bought a lilac vest, a violet cardigan, an aubergine skirt and a purple fleece and wore them every day. My instinct was to follow the colour purple wherever it led me. I even bought a purple car and drove around town in a little purple bubble. I’m drawn to purple (and turquoise) whenever I’m ill or in trouble. I think my intuition was particularly acute at that time because I had strong maternal instincts. I didn’t question why all I could think of was colour, but apart from my baby, that was all I could get excited about. One of Vida’s first words was ‘purple’. I didn’t realise how often I said it until she pointed at a parked car and called out, ‘Purple!’ Mum and I used to call purple ‘Purps’ when I was young, like it was an old friend. Prince understands, so does Alice Walker. She uses the colour as a motif throughout her book The Color Purple to signify good things and the enjoyment of life.
The author Maggie Nelson documents her attractions to the colour blue in her book Bluets (2009) and describes how she is drawn to blue during difficult times in her life. Reading Nelson’s observations on the link between colour and illness was enlightening and comforting. She also writes about the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was in a disturbed state of mind when he developed his Theory of Colours – ‘Goethe is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment’ – and notes that Derek Jarman and Ludwig Wittgenstein both wrote books on colour while they were dying.* A woman approached me once at a reading after I discussed my love of purple. She was a painter and said that while her young son was very ill all her paintings were purple. I remember confessing to my sister, Pascale, when she called me from her home in Canada, that there was nothing in this world apart from my baby that I could get excited about. I didn’t care about anything or anyone. I was frightened. She said, ‘Try and think of something, anything that interests you,’ and all I could answer was, ‘Colour.’ Not a coloured object, just colour.
By the time the cancer treatment was over we were a week into December. I was determined that despite my exhaustion, Vida’s first Christmas was going to be perfect. I lay in bed every day, still reeling from the chemotherapy, dreaming up a colour scheme. I decided all our decorations, wrapping paper and ribbons would be purple. We bought a ten-foot Christmas tree from the local garden centre and stood it in front of the curved window. I strapped Vida into her pushchair and headed off to the shops, a woman possessed, looking for purple, mauve and lilac decorations, arriving home every evening laden with boxes of Christmas balls, reams of wrapping paper and yards of purple ribbon. The tree filled a third of the room and was so tall that the hairy green tip bent over and brushed the ceiling. When I finished decorating it I stood back to admire the end result but was disappointed. It looked more like a shop-window display than a Christmas tree in a home.
I thought I’d pulled the whole perfect-Christmas thing off until halfway through cooking lunch on Christmas Day, I threw back my head, opened my mouth so wide I practically unhinged my jaw, bared my teeth and screamed at the ceiling as if I was being murdered, no doubt curdling all the (organic) bread sauces being stirred up and down our middle-class mews. Then I stabbed my best ceramic saucepan – the one I was about to parboil the potatoes in – with a carving knife. As the saucepan shattered all over the hob I remember wishing it had been a person (but I couldn’t think who it should be) because then I’d have been carted off to prison and wouldn’t have to pretend to be capable of looking after myself and being married and acting normally any more. I wasn’t strong enough after the treatment to pretend that. All I had enough energy for was loving my baby and thinking about colour.
That night I lay awake mulling over the events of the day – opening the presents, eating the turkey, the meltdown in the kitchen – when it occurred to me we’d forgotten to film any of it. To record Baby’s First Christmas (without the meltdown obviously), the beautiful home she lived in and how big and purple her first Christmas tree was, was all part of the day’s plan.
I stayed awake for hours feeling like a failure. At 3 a.m. I woke my husband and blamed him. He didn’t respond, so I telephoned my mother and cried. I could call Mum any time during the night because she was a night bird (no good calling her in the mornings though). Between us we cooked up the idea of staging Christmas all over again on Boxing Day.
On Boxing
Day morning I retrieved all the packaging from the bin, rewrapped the presents and put Vida in her red ‘Baby’s First Christmas’ T-shirt again – luckily it wasn’t too stained. Mum and Pascale came over to our house and we started filming. We all looked surprised as we opened our presents for the second time and smiled as we chomped through the roast potatoes, vegetables and cold leftover turkey (can’t tell on film). Then we clinked our glasses and yelled ‘Merry Christmas’ at each other. I only got away with the whole charade because of the cancer: for a while there, everyone thought I was going to die (milked it).
Fake Christmas was much better than Real Christmas, there was less pressure and it was funny that we were all in on the conspiracy. I made everyone swear they’d never let Vida know it wasn’t her real first Christmas we’d recorded, but eventually I relaxed and told her all about it. Fake Christmas is part of her history now, along with the drama of Mum’s Last Night.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, published in 1840 in English. Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Colour, 1994. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, published in 1979 in English (I’ve only read Derek’s book)
4 I closed my eyes. Inside my head I could see a dark-brownish-red field, like dried blood, pierced with thousands of tiny bright lights. When I pushed the heel of my hand into my eyelids the red field bloomed yellowish and the lights shot sparks. I knew if I didn’t concentrate, I’d go under. But then I reminded myself, No, you can’t go under. Your next of kin is now your little girl.
Roast Potatoes
Before I was married I’d always rather see Mum at Christmas (just the two of us, baggy clothes, roast potatoes and a lentil bake – heaven) than anyone else. She wasn’t sentimental about it, in fact she was quite happy to stay at home on her own, but I felt it was my duty to see her and anyway, I liked to. When Mum’s last Christmas rolled around in 2013 she was ninety-four and so ill and tired that she couldn’t face leaving her flat. I invited her over anyway, but she said, ‘Don’t worry about me, Vivvy, I’ll be fine at home, you go ahead and do your own thing.’ I had to confess that this was Vida’s year to spend Christmas with her dad and I was on my own, so please would she come. (Fifty-nine years old and no one to rustle up for Christmas Day. Dragging my ninety-four-year-old mother out when all she wanted was to spend the day in bed. Embarrassing.) Even though we both had flu I collected Mum on Christmas Day, drove across town, hoisted her up the stairs and parked her on the sofa. After a few seconds her head drooped, her jaw dropped and she was asleep with an untouched dry Martini and lemonade on the coffee table in front of her. Meanwhile, I got on with undercooking the turkey. Halfway through the afternoon Mum’s head jerked up like the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland and she barked, ‘Don’t forget to cut a cross in the bottom of the sprouts!’