Lost Between the Notes
A short piece of memoir, which captures what Virginia Woolf calls a 'Moment of Being' - a chance meeting with a stranger teaches me something profound about myself
Last night I joined a writers group and felt inspired to write more memoir, and because I am in between projects - on a deadline for my INTO BEING book and waiting for my novel to be sent out on submission - I thought I’d dig out some old bits of writing… and I came upon this. Reading it takes me back to my marriage and this chance meeting late one night with a mysterious man. I’d love to know what you think
Lost Between the Notes
In my friend’s kitchen I covered the face of my mobile phone, watching the shadow of candlelight dancing on the back of my hand. My children were safe at home in their bed, and me, their mum, in the restless hours, in this house where I once lived, from another time, another life even, when husbands and babies were on some distant mountain. Now, back with my childless friends, I wanted to capture this moment, twist its thread round my fingers, to make my own cradle, one in which I could imagine how things might have been.
I carried this feeling — it was a nice feeling — in my pocket when I slowly put on my coat, slipped into my shoes, and without checking the time stepped out into the winter night. I was well fed; had drank a fair bit of red wine. It felt warm to be me. It was late, beyond when I should have been home, and I hadn’t checked for messages. Most likely my husband will have become dozy in front of the TV and sloped off to bed.
At the end of the street, I stepped off the curb, watching my bus approach the bus stop on the other side, and a man fell at my feet, so suddenly and silently he must have dropped from the sky. His bike landed with him. I stopped, shocked, and he jumped up, standing as quickly as he had fallen. A slight boy of a man, long legs and arms, unsteady on his feet, denim, a green beanie hat, white skin and pale eyes. He laughed and attempted to pick up his bike. Then he tripped over it again, loose limbed like a marionette who had momentarily lost its strings, and a crushed water bottle sprang from his pocket. For a second time, he tried to swing his leg over the bike frame, but fell again, onto his bum, the bike tumbling on top of him.
‘You can’t ride that,’ I said, helping him up. ‘You’re too drunk to get back on that bike.’
I followed by picking up the crushed water bottle and slipped it into his pocket, touching the fabric of his jacket. He grabbed it and threw it across the street, ‘I don’t need that,’ he shouted with mock drama, and grinned.
I cocked my head at him. Petulant child. I didn’t need another one. But I also paused. What was it? I wondered. I glanced up at the sky, the Hackney midnight sky, grey to black to jaundice in the lamp’s glow. Did he have angel wings tucked beneath his denim jacket?
‘I live on Old Street,’ he said, but he didn’t know how to get there. Old Street, Old Street, his laughing eyes drifting in and out of focus. ‘Can you help me?’
I searched the stretch of empty street before us, thinking, I have children at home. A warm bed.
‘Hackney Road,’ he said. ‘I know my way from there.’
I reached for my mobile phone, to check the time, to see whether I’d been missed, but when I pulled it from my pocket the screen was dead. I asked him: can you remember directions? No. Do you have money for a cab? No.
He was too busy admiring his bike, holding it before him by its padded handlebars, so I might admire it too. ‘Do you like it?’ he asked. ‘It was a bargain: £200 when it should have been double. I’m in love with it.’ His eyes closed with his Cheshire cat grin, and he attempted to hug it.
Just as you take my hand, Just as you write my number down, just as the drinks arrive. I was singing almost, echoes in my head. Me and my husband in the car, turning the volume up, transported to wild nights of clubbing, the walls are bending shape… they’ve got a Cheshire cat grin.
But here, with this angel boy. I smiled. He was tall and thin, underdressed, much younger than me.
Before you run away from me. Before you’re lost between the notes.
‘Okay,’ I said, and gestured with my hand. ‘Come on then. I’ll show you.’
‘Okay,’ he mimicked me, and with a slight skip in his step followed my steady pace.
‘So where have you been?’ I asked over my shoulder, as he attempted to keep up. He spoke about Mary. Mary who I love.
‘Is she your girlfriend?’
He didn’t walk, he tripped and skipped, supporting himself on his bike, his pedals tangled up in his legs. ‘You’re being so nice,’ he said. ‘What do you want from me?’
I ignored him, asked what he does for a living.
He sighed. ‘I’m an artist. Left college two years ago, but I’ve done nothing since.’ He told me where he’d studied but I didn’t recognise the name. ‘I’ve been doing up my boyfriend’s flat,’ he said.
‘Your boyfriend?’
‘Yes, his name’s Sam. I’ve been helping him build things, cutting wood.’
‘Cutting wood.’
‘Yes, you know.’
‘You’ve been doing carpentry,’ I said. ‘You’re a carpenter.’
‘Yes.’ He slowed. ‘You could say that.’
He told me that his mother is blind, and his father is a vegetarian. ‘She cooked for him every night. She made him all these meals.’
‘But she’s blind –’
‘After my dad left we cooked together. We worked together, me and mum.’
‘So, your mother’s blind. You live with Sam, but you love Mary. You’re an artist, but also a carpenter.’
‘Yes. All those things.’
‘You’re funny.’ I glanced at him affectionately.
‘You’re funny.’
His hands were red from the cold, so I took hold of his bike. ‘Come here,’ I said. ‘Put your hands in your pockets, get warm.’
As we continued, we eased closer, until our jackets touched. Then I was suddenly in his arms, the bike between us. I looked up to him and it felt both normal and strange. ‘What do you do?’ he whispered down at me, his lips level with my eyes.
I didn’t want to talk about my children. I wanted it to sound more important than that, so I told him about my dreams. ‘I write stories,’ I said.
‘What stories?’ He looked down at me.
‘About people’s lives. Real people, I guess.’
‘And what about your life?’
– What about my life? ‘I got married –,’ I said.
He cocked his head and smiled. ‘And sometimes you get restless.’ I felt tears in my nose. ‘I know what it feels like.’ He shuddered.
‘Are you crying?’ I asked because I was trying not to.
He sniffed. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘But I could be.’
We continued along Broadway Market, our voices in singsong. The bars were closing, but we stopped and spoke to two girls smoking cigarettes. ‘Know where to get a drink?’
We walked over the canal and past City Farm, and I asked his age.
‘Twenty-six.’
‘Wow,’ I muttered. ‘So young.’ We stopped when we reached Hackney Road. ‘Here we are!’ I crossed my arms. ‘This is where we say goodbye.’ I glanced across the road, searched out a bus stop to take me home.
He bowed to me and drew his hands into prayer. ‘My fairy godmother, helping me home.’ He fumbled for his phone. ‘Can I take your number?’ Just as you write my number down.
I told him my number, and my name, and he tried to punch the keys, but couldn’t get it right, so I took his phone from him. Every time I touched the screen the page disappeared. He took it from me and tried again. ‘Bloody thing.’ He looked out at the street and the grey reflected in his eyes, closing to the wind. ‘I live nearby. Just up there.’ He waved to some indefinable place. ‘You can come to mine.’
I couldn’t. I shook my head.
‘I know of a place we can get a drink.’
‘You have a bike, and no lock.’
‘Oh, yes.’ He remembered. ‘My lovely bike.’
But we walked again. I knew I shouldn’t, but I also wasn’t yet ready to say goodbye. At the next bus stop, I tried to be a bit more decisive. ‘Look, I can get home from here. I should go.’ He was shaking now. The cold had got past his cotton jacket and thin scarf. I noticed for the first time, that his buttons were undone.
‘Come home,’ he whispered. ‘I have red wine.’
‘I am married. I have two children. I am ten years older than you.’
‘That’s nothing,’ he said.
I noticed his hair beneath his beanie, and how it caught the streetlights and glowed red, a deep, warming surprise.
‘Hey, who needs a bar,’ I said, despite myself. ‘Let’s get a beer and sit on that step.’ It was a dirty step outside a shop, with drunks hanging about.
I walked into the dazzling lights of the off-licence and picked up two cans, asked for a packet of tobacco, even though I hadn’t smoked in years. He didn’t follow me, and I had a fleeting thought stepping out again that he might have left. But he and his bike came bounding towards me. Together, we crossed the road and circled Shoreditch Church, but the gates were locked. I considered hurling myself over the steep fencing with spikes at the top. But then I saw a wall behind the dustbins. ‘How about here?’ I was half joking, but he was happy to settle there, where he cracked open his can and took a swig. I sat down beside him and rolled him a cigarette.
There was birdsong. A melodious duet in the trees above. I looked up for a sign of life, but there was nothing but bare branches glowing yellow in the streetlight. Leaves fallen. No protection. ‘They must be cold,’ I said to myself. ‘Why would they choose to be here, when they could be just about anywhere else?’
He was shaking, so I tried to help him. I knelt on the pavement, and carefully zipped up his jacket, then to add an extra layer of warmth I did up each of his buttons, right to the top. ‘Am I really mothering you?’ I took a pen from my pocket and clipped it to his jacket. I found two coins, a five-pence and a ten-pence, and placed them in his palm, closed his fingers around them. He watched me all the while.
‘Tell me,’ he whispered.
‘Yes?’ I looked up at him.
‘Are your children an inspiration?’
I turned away, and towards the street, the question settling in my mind. I had never been asked that.
He told me he was dyslexic as a child, that he always felt different, found it hard to fit in. ‘To conform,’ I said. ‘To conform,’ he repeated.
I pulled his hat from his head, and walked my fingers through his rust hair. ‘Don’t forget me,’ I whispered.
I preferred to stand in the shadows, while he chatted unselfconsciously, an amber light opening up his eyes, which showed feeling and thought, lingering when he agreed with me, or hardening when he thought I had it wrong. He had a good face, strong teeth, a dignified nose. There was something discerning about him, despite his slight build and youth, the sweetness of an angel, a tragic angel. He was thin, cold.
‘Come home.’ He turned to me again. ‘Nothing funny. Sam will be there. He’ll love you.’
‘My husband will wake. He won’t know where I am.’
Despite the cold, we stayed on that wall, moving in sync, sitting side-by-side, or swapping places, he on his feet, me seated. He became angry about how difficult everything was, to find work that makes him happy, to raise enough money to live independently. He didn’t know if he loved Sam. ‘Or is it just me?’
I let him talk, and I didn’t react. I simply watched the rain. It came down lightly, carried in the wind, colouring the pavement charcoal. I closed my eyes, felt the soft brush of wet air on my skin, thought to myself: This is it.
Looking up, I realised he’d stopped talking. He was caught in a thought, some distant place, and I noticed his eyelashes, long and glittered with light. I heard the birds again. Then something happened. He turned towards me as if he wanted to kiss, so I opened my arms.
But he rested his face between my neck and shoulder, and instead he cried. I held him. Two lonely people in the heart of the city. It doesn’t need to be more than this. I watched the rain, felt it on my hands, the shifting shimmering patterns on the back of his coat.
*
Later, at home, I lay beneath the duvet and tried to get warm, but the skin on my legs was shocked cold. I didn’t want to disturb my husband. I pictured the man in my mind, or was he a boy? He spoke about how his boyfriend loves him, and yet he can’t return that love. ‘It’s not easy,’ he said. ‘Doubting all the time. Your part in it. Your ability to love. Or maybe it’s simply that there is no love there anymore. Maybe it was never there.’ I remembered what it felt like to hold him, this lost boy, almost as if I was comforting the most private part of myself. As I lay beside my husband and found his hand beneath the duvet, I let him warm me, my breath settling as our heartbeats twinned, my body thawing and leaving the evening behind. I had said goodbye to the boy on the street. We had hugged and kissed as friends, and then I’d jumped into a cab. I didn’t look back.
The next day, I took my daughter to the local shop to buy milk. We held hands and she chatted excitedly, but I was tired and my mind was drifting. That clouded sadness that comes with fatigue. But then my daughter stopped and she said, ‘Listen.’ I looked down at her, and saw that she was in a pool of light, her green dress glistening. ‘Listen, mummy. Do you hear it?’ She asked, cupping her ear to the sound. A bird up in the trees, and two single flute-like sounds, clean and simple: toot toot. I had not heard it before she told me to listen. My daughter responded by whistling, two blows through pursed lips, phoo phoo. And the bird came back, toot toot. My daughter again, phoo phoo. She broke out into a gorgeous laugh. ‘He can hear me,’ she said, eyes shining. ‘The bird can hear me. Isn’t that amazing?’
There’s a Welsh word, hiraeth, that sort of means longing for a place we can’t return to. I wonder if this informs a lot of our writing as we get older. It’s not sentimentality and it’s more than nostalgia. It’s something to do with wanting to go back to the person we were and comfort them. I think. Maybe when we’re young we’re hardwired to look forward. But as we age we try to make sense of what’s behind us. It’s why I seek out work from older writers. Today I made a mental list of places I can never return to because they no longer exist. My secondary school, bulldozed about a decade ago. I had little affection for the place, but it’s odd that it’s now a housing estate. The art dept of Leeds Polytechnic, gone even though I left a bit of my heart there. My nan’s flat, I can’t even visit the site because it was up in the air. The memory of it now floats above a branch of Lidl. It’s the shock of going to a place and finding it so changed. Or the poignancy of returning somewhere, finding it familiar and sensing the ghost of that person you were. I wonder how you’d feel if you sat on that step in Shoreditch again? I don’t know. There’s so much made of living in the moment. I wonder if creatives are able to?
Yes, I like it a lot, especially as I feel exactly the same sort of Hiraeth that Michele describes for my London life that often involved Shoreditch, even though I now live in a beautiful house in a Welsh country town. I miss the chance encounters that do occur in London, against all the odds it might seem. You took me back to being on one of the terraces at the back of the Royal Festival Hall at a big event, when an elegant older man came alongside me to admire the moon … we chatted for a while and he told me he lived in the Shell building opposite … and then after a while I was the one who walked away, and shortly afterwards took a cab home to my husband … what if …?