Lost Property Read online

  LOST PROPERTY

  Also by Laura Beatty

  Fiction

  Pollard

  Darkling

  Non-fiction

  Lillie Langtry: Manner, Masks and Morals

  Anne Boleyn: The Wife Who Lost Her Head

  Lost Property

  Laura Beatty

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2019 by

  Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Laura Beatty, 2019

  The moral right of Laura Beatty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The picture acknowledgements on p. 265 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 738 3

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 739 0

  Printed in XXXX

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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  26–27 Boswell Street

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  ‘The brain is a metaphor of the world…

  [It] can be seen as something like a huge country:

  as a nested structure, of villages and towns, then

  districts, gathered into countries, regions and even

  partly autonomous states or lands.’

  The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist

  ‘The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed.

  It was all in our heads.’

  Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich

  Before

  At the midpoint of my life, I found myself in a dark wood.

  Dark as a blanket.

  I think, I did not want this.

  The woman who lounges on a nearby step as if on a sofa, her carrier bags bunched round her like scatter cushions, looks up as I pass and says with surprising lucidity, ‘I can relate to that.’

  She is always here. I have often hurriedly, as if doing something I shouldn’t, dropped a few coins in her cup but without eye contact. Once, in the early days, I did greet her. She looked so familiar. She looked like someone from a book I once wrote. It doesn’t matter whether she is or not. Books are not real. But still, I thought, she looks unsettlingly familiar.

  ‘Do I know you?’ I asked, stepping into the fog of her smell. I clattered my coins in her cup and she sparked a lighter and held it up in response, its flame almost touching my nose. She opened her mouth, with its dark interior and its teeth like solitaire pegs. She said something incoherent about waves and slaves and her voice was grating and several passers-by stopped to watch. I turned quickly away. Their attention made me somehow complicit and I didn’t want that. I must have been mistaken. I didn’t know her after all. Of course I didn’t; a bag-lady, out on a doorstep.

  ‘Never. Never Ne-ver,’ she shouted behind me, as I scuttled away, head down.

  I haven’t addressed her since. I hurry past, trying not to look. But out of the corner of my eye, last week, I noticed she now has a little sign, propped up like a birthday card in front of her. It says ‘BritAnnia’ in wonky writing.

  Day after day, like everyone else, I pass with my head turned away; all these people heaped like trash on the streets of our cities with their bags and their lighters and their various sad and private madness, we just pretend they don’t exist. But she is hard to ignore. She is always there. And now today, wearing something on her head like an upturned coal-scuttle, she has a road-sweeper’s broom in her hand and for a moment she is lucid. It is the lucidity, not the fancy dress, that makes me stop a second time.

  Then, because I am looking, I read the names on her bags. Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that. They say Boots and Boots and Mothercare. Mothercare, Mothercare, Boots, just as I once wrote when I first started out, when I invented my Anne, my Everyman.

  You what?

  I steady myself with one hand against the wall. The woman on the step: did I, or didn’t I make all this up? I mean, am I in my head, or out of it? We need to sort this out. Because we’ve made so many copies of life, all meant to be useful. We’ve written so many books and drawn so many pictures and made so many films and taken so many photographs that we’ve got confused. I can’t tell any more what’s true and what’s not. Where exactly is it we are all living?

  I check no one is looking and lean in to ask her, ‘Look, who are you and what exactly are you doing?’

  ‘BritAnnia!’ she says, hissing through the solitaire pegs.

  I put my face in close. ‘You’re not Britannia,’ I hiss back. ‘You are plain Anne. I know. I made you up.’

  Maybe her condition is catching.

  ‘That’s enough,’ my rational self says to my other, my heart panicking into close quiet. But I don’t know now whether she is herself, or just more me. At the midpoint of my life. Out in the street on the way to the shop to buy something as innocent as milk. Dark as a blanket.

  I go on again, as if with purpose but it’s lonely not knowing. ‘Hello?’ I put my hand out unsteadily, as if hoping for a rail. I need to sit down for a minute. ‘Can anyone see a step?’ I think I need a guide. I look round for the little flare of BritAnnia’s lighter. ‘Show me a light, can’t you? I know you’ve got one.’

  ‘Hello?’ Into the darkness. ‘Hello? Is anybody there?’ And while I wait for an answer, I stand still.

  Where am I? Because I can’t see. The dark is crowding at me now. Is it universal – this dark – or just mine? Have you noticed? I stand still and I look up and, looking up, I find trees – are they trees? Or are they tower blocks, the light only barely making it through – hemming me in, pushing skywards, casting their obliterating shadow. No air to breathe, no light. This savage city – or is it a forest? – that we have wandered into by mistake. This make-or-break place of wolves and cut-throats. So the stories are true, or have taken over, because this is how it happens. This is how you get lost. Where the shit is the path? You know, the path we were all on together? I thought we were in this together. Because the path was so clear when we set off – remember? – when we made our promises and took our places and set things up for life, booming with confidence in the thoughtless certainty of morning.

  Idiots.

  Nothing in response. Just the rustle of paper blowing, or leaves, a noise so small I might have imagined it, just something dropping unnoticed to the floor. I hold my hand out in front of me, my writing hand. It is dimly visible – as, at my feet, are birds: pigeons, hobbling, and little, brittle, fume-caked sparrows. All of these seem solid.

  Is my writing hand to blame? Because this is a place I didn’t intend. I thought writing was there to throw light on the way we are, so that the way we are could change. But the change hasn’t happened, or something else has taken over, because look, our dystopias seem to be coming true and now our eyes are too tired, or too dark with imagined disaster, to protest. ‘Yes,’ we say sagely, with told-you-so voices, ‘we knew it would be like this.’

  ‘Keep going,’ tradition booms, or is it only the blood in our own ears? ‘Push on. Put your best foot forward.’ Tradition always speaks
in clichés. ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ it says. ‘Chin up. Keep moving.’

  ‘But which way?’ you scream into the shut mouth of the wood, or the city. ‘Which way? I have children to think of. Quick, we are desperate.’ Forward or back? To the Left? Or Right? All look equally wrong. Things are worsening so fast and I really don’t think there is time.

  Now there is only a crawling, bent-double passageway anywhere you look: under things, over things, rotten logs – or are they really people? Is this a wood or not? Everything has gone feral. Sour buddleia growing in cracks. There are drains and bogs and sump-holes you could break an ankle in. We’ve been over it all before. It’s all so fucking wearisome.

  Luckily we are a resilient and hopeful species. We don’t give up, thinking it out till the last – you too – trying a new angle, speeding up brightly along what looks like a possible pathway. Somewhere there are settled people who function thoughtfully together. I am sure of it.

  Somewhere there are societies where the world and its image communicate usefully; where the image’s authority is only borrowed because the world is still solid and pre-eminent, and where real things don’t get stared through or denied just because we have addressed the reality of their problems in our imaginations.

  But the track that looked so promising founders again, in the quiet. Just the sound of your own breath faster and faster, and your own shuffling footfall among these mouldering generations of litter, of wrappers, of leaves. It’s so dark. We’re lost. This time I think we are really lost.

  Tradition is dumb. It assumes progress is linear. It takes no account of the fact that life is full of spirals and arcs. Circles exist as a definite possibility. We might, if we aren’t careful, make a wide parabola, skirting the edge of whatever this is and turning inwards again, away from the light. We learn nothing, as it turns out, from books, from history, from thought, or from art. After all this time, it is possible that out of exhaustion and disillusionment we might just give up. We might just end up sitting down on a log, or a person, in the unending filthy shadow, in this tacit submission of all things to forgetting, ignoring the warnings of what happened before. We might just shrug and let ourselves be consumed by stillness till we crumble and sift down, to be scurried over by those mice that appear so dangerously on the rails when you wait for the Underground. If we don’t fight, it is possible that we might never come out again.

  ‘So are you saying we should fight?’ my one self says to my other, desperate enough for anything. Turning my head back and forth, straining for advice. ‘Is that what you advise?’ Because it’s true, there is always revolt, both private and public. You can take up an axe, you can hack yourself a clear-way back to the sea. That at least would be energetic. It would be something to do, other than talk, and blood-letting can be cathartic.

  Hesitating in the moment of decision, because revolt has its own life and you have to have the stomach for it; revolt turns things so that the earth replaces the sky. We know this. We cut our own king’s head off once upon a time. It’s hard not to get lost inside violence. It will push itself up, blooming like a giant mushroom, bigger, deadlier than we could ever remember, or ever have imagined. It will topple the trees – or the towers, it doesn’t care which – while the people who released it cry and run for cover. It will grow until its canopy, just like the wood in the first place, umbrellas itself above our heads, and our sky, from horizon to horizon, is just gills the colour of decay.

  As the trees come skittling down – as the sky mushrooms and darkens and the bedrock is revealed – what do you suggest that we do?

  I SAID, WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST WE SHOULD DO?

  God has gone very quiet.

  1

  Let’s start again, more calmly.

  In the world of poems or stories intractable problems find their solutions in some sideways step to a parallel reality, a place that is elsewhere but companionably alongside. Think of Dante and Gulliver and Gilgamesh. Think of the fairy tales you were told as a child. You take a journey by foot or ship, or you open a door in a wardrobe, or you take the proffered magic cloak, or the proffered hand of Virgil. Whichever way it is, you slip round the back of the wind, or down through the circles of Hell, and if you pay attention, and you don’t drop it or give it accidentally away, you come out holding the answer. Often the answer you hold is simply acceptance. So you could say there aren’t any answers. There isn’t even understanding a lot of the time, but still parallels can be a comfort – they offer connection between things that will always be separate and they allow, in fact they thrive on, difference. That used to be the point of books. They provided the parallel.

  Something is lost and I can see now that it may be me. The world, both human and planetary, seems to me to be broken and instead of fixing it we have simply removed our lives into some other, better, curated reality – inside screens, in the printed text, to a world we have made, like children, out of words and pictures. And I have fallen into the gap between the two.

  If my condition is normal for my time of life, if it has a name and a little pill to match, then I don’t want to know it. I feel as though it’s the world that is sick – just that no one except me has noticed. Cassandritis, you could call it, and as I do so I can’t help hearing, with a shiver of rightness, the name hidden in that second syllable.

  So I’m packing up and making a change. Nothing unusual about that; it is quite normal to take a sabbatical. I’ll just go for a year and come back wiser, or quieter, or more calm. I don’t expect, in midlife, to be offered any cloaks and I don’t think Virgil will stir himself for less than an epic poet, but I could put my faith in parallels. I’m not expecting things to be better anywhere else. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Hope perhaps.

  Now that I have made the decision, now that I have resisted the pull to give in to the madness of it all, as if in reward, in these wide and graceful streets the sun is shining. London can be a lovely city when you are leaving it. Brisk light and shadow on the grand nineteenth-century buildings, and I am going to buy storage boxes, to put my life into.

  The trees are in their autumn beauty and many people are out, holding hands, talking languages, walking. Nothing looks especially wrong. The homeless have been tidied, as far as possible, out of sight; swept into dust-heaps on every corner under the humps of their nonetheless stinking blankets. The newspapers, as on most days, cry outrage as though innocent, but everyone still has a hand to hold.

  ‘Don’t look at the down and outs. Don’t look at the hoardings,’ my one self says. ‘It may not be as bad as it looks and there are reasons for everything in life.’

  Shops are reassuring places; I am immediately distracted.

  I could buy a laundry basket that folds away, a peg box, a desk tidy in leaf print, an elephant-foot waste basket. The solutions are all here. Here you can look better, live better, improve your cars, kitchens, skin, hair, partner, clothes, desks, waste management, character. Everything is new. Nothing yet has failed or been spoilt. Nothing has betrayed its initial promise and there is everywhere so much well-lit space and so much choice. The swing doors open and shut continually, wafting the smell of factory-newness out into the street to tempt those outside to come in. Come in. Come in. And in and out again floods the obedient crowd, hurrying home to be better.

  I start grazing, gathering up armfuls of new stuff before I’ve even reached the department where I will buy the storage boxes to put the old stuff in. This is exactly what I’ve always been looking for! And it is beautiful! And this! And look at this!

  I come to my senses in the home-storage department, glazed with picking things up that I don’t need. ‘Put it down,’ my one self says to my other. ‘Put it all down. This too is madness.’ I reluctantly put away the desk tidy. I put away the elephant’s foot and the peg bag. Instead, I buy plain see-through plastic boxes with lids, for ten pounds a throw. I go home and put my clothes into them, folded carefully. They are pitifully visible through the sides of the box. I al
so put in my knick-knacks, pencils, notebooks, all my other belongings. I look at them too. The process is oddly ceremonial, like a burial, but ‘Nevertheless,’ I say to myself, ‘go on.’

  The mansion flat where I live has an outside balcony with, at the back, a little room that used to be a privy, now a walk-in cupboard. The stuff that will fit will go in there. Someone else will have my room. The flat isn’t mine; it belongs to my aunt who is away in St Petersburg. So now I have no fixings, no place at all in this country of my birth, and this is a hard thing. I am sweeping myself from the surface of my life. Nevertheless, I go on. I carry the boxes out and stand them in a stack in the cupboard.

  Down on the street, the woman with the carrier-bag three-piece suite, who thinks she is Britannia, hasn’t moved. I can see her out of the window each time I pass. She is still sitting among her belongings on her step. So I stop my packing, pull my phone from my pocket and look up ‘belongings’ and ‘belong’. The word has such emotional charge in English. I look up French, Spanish, Italian, German, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Greek. Only the Bulgarians have a word that has the same root for both. Most differentiate between possessions and people. They use two separate words. None of them use one that contains within it an equivalent of longing. Being and longing and belonging.

  ‘Belongings,’ my one self says, with authority, to my other. I like to pontificate. ‘Belongings don’t matter, whereas belonging does.’ But there’s no comfort here. My other self is hurled abruptly into mourning, among the drifts of possessions, and the see-through containers. Belongings do matter. They are little weights that tie us to our lives in time and place. These vases with frogs and flowers were given to me as a child. This pot with a cow on it my son made when he was seven. This picture I bought with my first earnings. These things are hooked and weighted like anchors, holding me moored to the fact of my life, my past. Who will I be when I’ve cast off?