The anniversary, p.10
The Anniversary, page 10
A cry went up. The room was cheering. Ada helped pull back my chair. I stood at her behest and took a few steps. The heels of my shoes sank into the carpet. The music was too loud. The lights were bright and flashing. Flashing then spinning. Spinning then flashing. I couldn’t see a path through the chairs although there must have been one, crumbed, littered with a trail of bread and spilt wine and dropped napkins and handbags shoved against chair legs. I took a few steps, smiling. Everyone was turning towards me. My eyes watered, people’s faces swooned in my vision. I balanced myself by holding on to the chair backs as I went. The lights flashed again, flashing then spinning. Spinning then flashing.
I don’t remember taking the stairs to the stage. I was just suddenly there, behind the lectern, and the spotlight shone into my eyes. I looked out into the audience for the sight of familiar faces, but the stage lights prevented this: all the people were small lumps of black in the middle distance. My heart beat so hard I thought I might pass out.
I knew all too well that I was seen as the dark horse of the shortlist. It wasn’t that I was not known, but that in this particular arena I was thought unlikely to succeed. Maybe I was thought to have enough readers already. Maybe I had published too many books for my age. Maybe they were the wrong kinds of books, all along. And while I had been very successful, my success had not come without criticism from certain corners. Up until that point, I had been known as an author of taut and compelling novels that indulged the anti-hero. Slim books that tended to hone in on moments of disaster or transformation in an individual’s life. But just as they were praised for their acuity, my books were sometimes criticised for being, what some called, forbidding. They were the kind of books that made the reader feel a little uneasy when they weren’t expecting it – books that contained or provoked too much feeling, and often feeling of the wrong kind: exposure, violence, guilt or tremendous love that shifted into something dark and murderous. They were, in essence, too pointed in attitude and too confronting – abrasive, some critic once wrote. Difficult, said another, referring not to the words themselves but to the sentiments evoked.
But however my work had been described, my fans well outnumbered my critics. My publisher played to this, they knew my readers had an endless appetite for protagonists that were obsessive and rich. In the end, though, the words used to describe my writing were eventually the same ones used to describe me, and so despite increasing success – sales, adaptations and all the rest – I somehow found myself drifting away from the particular kind of critical acclaim that relies on gusts of easy reading buoyed by good cheer.
I knew all this. As did the audience sitting at my feet that night. And I knew I had won despite this. I could feel everyone waiting on me, the heat of their attention. I took a deep breath, lifted my hands to the microphone and tried to angle it down towards my mouth. I pushed it too close then and my breathing, amplified, crackled through the room. The piece of paper Ada had handed me was still crushed in my pocket. I rubbed at the paper as one might a tissue. My hands were sweaty and I could feel them turning the paper damp and soft. I took it out then and, standing at the transparent lectern, smoothed the paper as best I could. I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing: a sheet of yellow foolscap with the address of a hotel, and what looked like a shopping list: milk, tomatoes, cat food. I didn’t think the handwriting was mine, although I couldn’t be wholly sure. I knew I didn’t own a cat, that I didn’t like tomatoes because they gave me a rash on the edge of my lips. I looked up and stared into the lights. Ada must have passed me back the wrong piece of paper in the dark. I was trembling. In the lead-up to the ceremony I had asked whether or not there would be a lectern because, I explained, it helped me to decide what to wear, and it was good to know whether or not I had anything to hide behind. And although they told me that, yes, there would be a lectern, no one thought to add that it would be made of clear plastic, and therefore rid itself of the function I expected it to serve, which was to shield me, to give me something that I felt I could at least partially cower behind. Instead, it existed merely as a tall transparent shelf on which I could rest my crumpled piece of paper and, if careful, I could balance my hands just behind this on the narrow ledge so that their shaking might be slightly less visible. Next to the lectern, on an ordinary wooden stand, someone had placed a glass and a jug of water. A young woman stepped up and filled the glass for me. I took a sip, swallowed carefully so as not to drip the water or cough, and put the glass back down on its cardboard coaster. The room fell silent. I looked at the words printed on the paper; some of them were blurry from being caught in the lines of a hard fold, some had small tears through them. I had no idea what to say.
I knew, though, that whatever I said up there on the stage, there could be no middle ground. Too much feeling and I’d be criticised for being soppy and over-emotional. Too little and I’d be, as I sometimes was, accused of a clinical attitude and described as cold. How I longed to be treated as Patrick was, to be granted without question that kind of artistic authority that let him say and do as he pleased and be applauded for it. I had mimicked his persona, to a degree, in the hope I would be treated the same way. For both of us, this inflated and armoured presentation was a cover – a way of existing as an artist in the public arena, establishing a stance or attitude that set the tone for any further critical debate. At home we could be different creatures, a couple who liked to watch baking competitions on television if only to see grown men cry over split batters and soggy bottoms. But in the literary world, well.
I smiled at the audience, then glanced down at the piece of paper. My book had been placed on the stand beside me, next to the water jug, and its bright lettering glittered under the lights. It still seemed strange to me, that I had written this – an expansive and digressive fiction more personal than anything I’d done before. A book I was compelled to write, so compelled in fact that there were times when I felt a little afraid of what I was doing. In the writing, whole scenes would come to me at once, as they had never done before, and I would have to rush to get them on paper. Or I would be going about my business, only to be floored by a sudden memory that surged up so vivid and intense it could hardly be distinguished from real life, and I had no choice but to transcribe this, knowing, as I wrote it down, exactly where it needed to go in the novel. And not only was the material on which I was drawing strange in its vividness, but the sentences that communicated these scenes were made of a different substance entirely. Even I did not know how to properly describe them.
Up to that point my sentences had been tightly focused and well aimed; they satisfied the need of an impatient reader. I had deliberately nurtured a certain androgyny in my writing, eager to uphold the idea of a universal and sexless sentence. Now, though, I see the ruse of this, that the unisex sentence is just the male sentence assuming its universality. For these new sentences – the sentences in that prize-winning book – were languorous, multi-jointed, threaded through with double and triple thoughts. I felt the thick ribbing of their musculature, the weave of tendon and tissue, I felt the strength of this pulsating, tugging, lifting and bending however it needed to make the leap, accommodate the consciousness of the subject. They felt, finally, to be my very own sentences, uninherited and wholly inhabited at last. Everything living seemed to speak to me and through me when I wrote in this way. It was as if this was the book I was always meant to write. The book I lived to write, the book I was born for. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it changed me in the writing of it and made me at last into the woman writer that, for one wrong reason or another, I had long thought I ought not to be.
I cleared my throat. I could feel everyone waiting for me to speak. I knew I had paused too long. I knew that what was written on the piece of paper Ada had passed me was all wrong, that it was not the paper she had meant to give me and that she must be wondering why I was stalling. I pushed my hands back into my pockets and there I felt another piece of paper; this was the dress I had worn on the ship, the last night we went up for dinner. Patrick had gone to fetch our drinks and was delayed by a conversation at the bar. While I waited, I took my notebook and pen from my handbag and started to write a draft of the speech, but because I was not happy with the result I tore the paper from the notebook and, having no bin in which to throw it, shoved it into my pocket as Patrick returned, jovial, with our negronis. It was this piece of paper which, standing at the lectern, I now pulled out of my pocket. Dazzled by the lights and knowing a speech was required, I started to read.
They were not complicated, the words. The sentences were neither long nor polished. There was very little punctuation other than full stops at regular intervals and the occasional comma. Although I had marked, with an asterisk, a section where I could pause and used this then to take another sip of water, before looking out into the audience and remembering to thank everyone who needed to be thanked, using the stock phrases that you hear at the Oscars about the risk of having overlooked someone important and the hypothetical apologies if that did happen to be the case. I had forgotten exactly what I had written that night on the ship, forgotten what was coming. Forgotten that I’d mentioned Patrick in his living state, that I had, in one long and indulgent sentence, thanked him for always being by my side, for always being my biggest champion, my first reader, for being there with me tonight. I thanked him for showing me how to see things through to their end. I thanked him for all his love and care. I had already stumbled into this sentence before I understood what I was saying, and by then, halfway through, it was too late. I couldn’t unthank him. I couldn’t acknowledge to the room that he was not there, no longer alive, not anywhere. Instead I had to just finish it, I had to plough my way through. Pretend the accident hadn’t happened: this one now, and the one on the ship. It would be far worse if I stopped where I was and explained my error. I knew I couldn’t do that, that if I did I would break down and need to leave the stage. To pause there and begin again would mean acknowledging his death and my widowhood – things that I knew everyone was thinking about anyway, but to survive that moment I needed to make-believe, at least temporarily, that these things hadn’t really occurred, or that they were irrelevant in my own moment of glory – that my grief didn’t exist then up on that stage, that it wasn’t my own, that it didn’t become me and was something I could learn to do without. And so I continued to work my way through that long and gracious sentence that dripped with thanks, even though I knew it risked making me look deranged, out of my mind, in the grossest state of denial.
When at last that part was over, I took a deep breath and started to wrap up. Around me a new hush had fallen. In those final, closing remarks I said nothing about theft or corruption, I made no political point, I did not signal my virtue through the support of good causes. I completely failed to advocate. In short, my words bore no resemblance to the speech I thought I might one day give, that I had so often, in moments of rage or splendour, imagined myself giving – the grown-up equivalent perhaps of the teenage girl’s daydream in which she sees herself spotlit on the dance floor, the crowd clearing a space for her, her white dress glowing fluorescent under the neon lights, her hair flapping around her body as she performs gasp-inducing moves. After all, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say I had been listed for prizes more times than I could easily remember, without ever winning. Some of the rumours among the literati suggested that this was due to my marriage: I could not win a prize without this bond being cited as cause for my own rising prestige – that I, in short, had married into direct privilege, into another man’s money, money that had bought me my time to write, that paid for it in the early days, and it would look bad and rouse suspicions if I were to ever be the recipient of the prize and given money which others thought I did not need – charity and merit blurring in the minds of the panel.
Patrick was, after all, my own origin story. Or one of them. It was under his tutelage, before we were a public item, that I researched my final academic project on contemporary noir romance and alongside this wrote, without Patrick’s knowledge, a novella that extended the thesis in dramatic form. I bought into the genre, quite literally, too young to query this, too impressionable, too beholden to my future husband’s praise. It had been some time before this that I’d confessed my desire to write, and he’d encouraged me.
For a while I kept that novel a secret, wanting some things just for myself and thinking, for a long time anyway, that it wouldn’t be the kind of story Patrick was interested in. Then I showed him part of it one day, on a whim or out of frustration because there was a passage that wasn’t working – not smooth enough somehow. I didn’t expect him to read the whole work, just the section I had circled. Can I keep this for the night? he asked, as I was stepping out of the shower at his place, about to get dressed and take the bus home.
OK, I said, but just that bit. I only need help with that section.
Sure, he said.
He called me early the next morning to ask if I’d let him turn the novella into a short film. Do you know how good this is? he said. It has all the right qualities, he told me. It might even get picked up for the festival circuit. Of course I said yes. And then yes and yes again to all number of things I might have refused. The film became a small sensation. We were in London by then and popped champagne in his office when the first reviews came in. Something changed in that strange, buzzing atmosphere of my sudden success. I say ‘my’, but it was only this in private. It was not in the interests of publicity, they told me, to broadcast the fact that the film was based on my thesis, or to widely publicise that the writer was me. They would instead, for obvious reasons, draw attention to the stars of the film, the beautiful men and women, and to Patrick as the director. They had to change the end to give it more finality and make it a little less morose, more of a sting in the tail kind of thing they told me, but otherwise they reserved the good bones: the storyline, the features of the main character, the clever plot twists.
His movie, people came to call it in the press, and in those many corridors through which he walked. On that day when, in celebration, we got drunk in his small, very un-soundproofed office, I gave him a blow job while he relaxed in his wingback chair. Towers of books were placed around my feet. I shuffled sideways a little, to get a better angle, and knocked a pile over. Afterwards I sat in that same chair and he took a photo of me. I look a little flushed, rather pleased with myself, a flash of wickedness in my slightly raised eyebrow, my tilted head. My lips look glossy, almost doll-like, and this became the photo that was used on the dust jacket of my first book, a slim volume published by a tiny independent press. Not the novella, which as a text never saw the light of day, but the one after that. Anyone who knew my husband in his capacity at that university could recognise the scene of the photograph, the scene of the crime: the bookshelves in the background, the filing cabinet, my slight frame too small in the man-sized chair. It had never occurred to me not to use this photograph; my publisher was only thinking of how I looked, the image they wanted to present. I didn’t know any better and no one thought to suggest that my alliance with Patrick would pit people against me, form quick and powerful enemies: the rogue scholars who would sit on the funding boards or chair the prize panels, the women who were outraged by what they considered to be Patrick’s moral laxness and who made the assumption that I was wilfully benefitting from this liaison. After a certain number of years spent passing through one prize list and another, I came to expect to be overlooked in a certain kind of way.
None of this was written on that damp and crumpled piece of paper that I was reading from. And in reality I well knew, and had always known, that this was not a story I could ever tell. At that moment, standing under the lights in front of the crowd, trembling behind my transparent lectern, part of me wanted to say, Here, keep the prize. I needed it years ago, but not now, because my life now is another story, one I do not know, one I have not imagined, one I could not have foreseen, one I cannot write, and cannot tell you about, because I am in a place I cannot speak from, because the struggle is too great, because it is all that I can see, all that I can feel and I have no idea, any more, how I am supposed to hide this, what I am supposed to be for you. I had mustered such will. I had had to find within myself such endless reserves of strength, casting the bucket down over and over as one might into a deep well so often low in water, the cavity dug into the side of a rocky hill in an arid landscape where there was rarely rain, but still I went to it, thirsty, determined, finding at long last what I needed in order to finally write the book that brought me to that moment in my life, standing behind that lectern, accepting the prize. I lifted my chin a little and steadied my gaze. I felt the audience staring back at me, stilled, stunned even. And I understood that in this moment of greatest triumph I was again – and perhaps always would be – overshadowed by Patrick, maybe now more than ever. Even in death he had the power to eclipse my own achievements. For as I looked out over that room of people, I knew that they were only partly thinking of the book I had written and of my achievements as a writer. Worse yet, perhaps they were no longer thinking of me as a writer at all. I realised then that in the wake of the accident I had become his widow, above and beyond anything else.
I lifted my glass, toasted the crowd and drank. Someone turned up the music.
10
I woke the next morning in my hotel room, the alarm ringing. Daylight sheared the edge of the curtains. Had someone carried me here? I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember. My muscles felt so heavy. I rolled over – dim memory of the things said the night before – and pulled the crisp white sheets up to my chin. The pillowcase was cool and smooth. But maybe I didn’t say them. Maybe those words were only thoughts. Through the fug of sleep I was aware that I was still in my party clothes: dress, stockings. I pressed the snooze button. My head hurt, the bones around my temples ached in a strange way. I remembered the lights shining in my eyes. I felt incredibly thirsty, my tongue rough and thick. I needed water. There was a glass there, on the nightstand, half full. I remembered drinking the other half hours ago, just before someone switched off the light, after the pill got stuck in my throat, its bitterness rising up. I had swallowed it down hard and then a woman’s hand – Ada’s I assumed – put the glass back on its coaster, under the lamp. The alarm went off again. Through the crack in the curtains the day looked too bright. I felt the headache start to spread into the back of my skull. I was so tired. So very tired. I couldn’t think. The alarm went off again. And once more still. I moved slowly to the bathroom and peed. Then I lay down again. I reached for the water beside my bed; a piece of paper was tucked under the glass. I pulled it out: Call me when you’re up. Love A xx.
