The air shimmers just below the level of the trees. I’m laying on Clapham Common. It’s like in those movies when you are about to see a mirage. As children a mirage in a movie was cause for much excitement, awe and wonder. Mum gave us an explanation that involved the journey of a hapless traveller desperate for water sighting an oasis only to discover it was nothing but illusion. This just added to the fascination. The unreal appearing so real. The real a devastating disappointment. I figured Mum knew a thing or two. When we sat rapt, watching a Western, she told us, with that serious look on her face, “Not all Indians were bad.” When we watched The Last of the Mohicans, we found out she was right.
I notice a woman pass a bottle to her companion; it’s cherry-red contents resemble something I imagine rocket fuel might look like. A boy holds a girl upside down from the waist, takes stumbling steps forward while she giggles. Families of varying composition stroll past. I’ve been language spotting. So far; Italian, Spanish, Russian and something that might be Portuguese or Polish.
My mind drifts to other parks, gardens, beaches; the heat of the sun the common denominator and this moment becomes the archetypal summers day; footballs, bottles of water, Frisbee, except it is not summer, it is nearly October. Someone passing remarks, “Lovely for this time of the year – unbelievable!”
See my fourteen-year-old self laying in the back garden and wanting everything next week. Mum saying,
“Don’t lie out there too long – you just watch yourself.”
“I am. I’m not even pink. I’ll never get brown.”
“Just give it a few years, you’ll have a lovely tan. That’s enough for one day.”
“Just a bit longer.”
“No. Enough’s enough. Come and give me a hand.”
“But some people lie in the sun all day.”
“Just do as y’told.” She snaps, “Would you put your hand in the fire if other people did?”
In the philosophy of the Tao, pronounced Dao, the basis of Chinese medicine, late summer is granted the status of a season, its attributes being; yellow, damp, singing, pensiveness, sweetness and fragrance. According to this school of thought all seasons have attributes. I’ve been pensive, I guess. For three days I’ve spent the best part of the day in bed in a fugue of ill temper and exhaustion telling myself that it will pass. I’ve been craving chocolate and the colours of the sunset; crimson, peach and tangerine. I paint my toenails bronze, watch films from the ‘40’s full of melodrama, murder and roses. When the feeling doesn’t pass I force myself out, to put a halt to this malaise.
You see, my mother is dying.
Since she told us in April, after the initial shock, I’d been taken over by the preoccupation that Vesuvius would erupt again. It was due, overdue in fact. I’d wanted to go for years, now I’m concerned I’ll miss my chance. I’d read how in Pompeii the lava slid into the sea producing pumice, that as people hid or fled, the acrid fumes filled their lungs and set like concrete, their bodies preserved at the moments of their deaths.
When I walked to the summit of that volcano in the summer, I decided, each footstep will be a prayer for the impossible. Returned with a piece of the dark rock I find at the top, mounted it in a perspex box giving it to Mum hoping it holds my prayer. I didn’t mention the significance. On the phone only the other day she said, “I’ve never felt so good – these steroids – wish they’d put me on them years ago…” There was a crackling under her voice. Though I heard it all I could say was, “That’s great.” Knowing it’s not long now.
The last time I lay in the sun was on a beach in Palermo, Sicily in August. Earlier that day I’d been enchanted, no – more than that – enspelled, by the face of a stranger. He had the look of my last lover, or an aspect of him, that might have been it. That liaison so brief, so intermittent, it begged the term relationship. I saw in him a wild horse, fire and ice in his warm eyes that sometimes darted like those of a lizard. In his embrace I felt like wrapped in summer.
At one point, fleetingly, I imagined if we had a baby she would be the incarnation of Christ. Feet on the ground? Not so much. Making toast with him felt as sacred as when we made love and his words seemed to carry a wisdom I could only barely conceive. Yet there was always an otherness I could never reach. Perhaps his schizophrenia. Aching at the loss, I confided in Mum and she had replied, “Loving is ok, but not longing. That’s the worst thing.”
I wondered if or when she ever longed for someone.
I only caught a glimpse of the stranger, there was something Arabic, African and Mediterranean about his features as if a number of ancient bloodlines had fused in him. I breathed in the mystery; its scent was sweet and charred. His eyes held mine for an instant and burned. I wanted to flee, at the same time I wanted to cast myself into his soul. Fear and desire fought and tumbled in a tremendous frenzy. All I can recall now was the way he seemed to lean to one side, as if slightly off balance, as he walked alongside his companion, a man of similar height and build. I felt like I was losing my footing.
Before Palermo I’d stayed in the two-star Hotel Viola in Naples, with cockroaches the size of Brazil nuts and lace curtains. My base to take the day trip to Vesuvius. They were kind to me though when I explained I’d prefer not to have room service because sometimes can’t get moving early and sometimes go back to bed in the afternoon; this fatigue is nothing new it has accompanied me for some fifteen years now but its quality and intensity changes frequently.
I went to Naples under the tutelage of Walter Benjamin, with whom I’d become a little obsessed, or is it love? Whom I refer to affectionately as WB. Intrigued by his concept of porosity in the 1925 essay about Naple’s life; a mingling of public and private, the “interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer light and inner darkness, street and home.”
I had arrived by train, crossed the Piazza Garibaldi, inadvertently walking through the enormous homeless city that spreads out from the railway station. Some families had laid carpeting between walls they’d made by taping cardboard to the railings. As I noticed this, I felt a mixture of curiosity and guilt that one might when peeping through a gap in the curtains into the front room of a permanent home and wonder what WB would have made of Naples today.
I’ve been making notes of the goings on here in the park since I arrived. Now I imagine WB comes over to me, sits besides me silent. At some point I will tell someone, at a reading at the poetry café, that WB visits me as a ghost in a short story, this story of course. Guess I want to seem the intellectual, avantguard. I remember how once I’d tried to tell mum and dad about my writing when we were slightly tipsy after a make-up drink in a Yorkshire village. Went to meet them, got off at the wrong stop, they were furious having to drive twenty miles there, and back, to pick me up, presumably Dad was gagging for a pint. Unappreciative of my ingenuity to engage the guard of the train to call the station. I’d said, “I’m so so sorry, it was dark, I knew the train stopped but I couldn’t see the platform… couldn’t see anything… I was writing, I’m writing a story, it’s about love, beauty, and the poll tax riot…”
“Never mind that now,” Mum had said, looking anxious, adding with some urgency, “It’s just… you were my first born.” I don’t finish that story; often the way. Perhaps my bipolar. Of course, we don’t know that then, though Mum clearly suspected something was up. I didn’t know what she meant by first born. What, was she trying to say? I still don’t know.
Actually, come to think about it, the last time I lay in the sun was in our back garden about a month ago. Mum came out, pulled up a chair and sat besides me. She was wearing turquoise jogging bottoms, a white cotton tee-shirt and pale green cardigan which she’d pulled across her and held in place with her arms crossed. In the late afternoon light I could see just how much weight she’d lost; her collar bone juts out, the skin of her neck hangs loose. I was laying naked on the lounger close to the back wall of the house. Mum said, “What are you doing right back here?”
“I don’t think they like it.” I say, pointing next door.
They are the new neighbours; Emma, a single parent, the twins and her entourage, a gaggle off friends all in their twenties.
Mum says, “Oh, wouldn’t have thought they’d mind.”
“Hmm,” I reply, “They’re a different generation, Emma just walked past, she sort of looked the other way…”
I’m smiling thinking, I’m forty-one now though it doesn’t seem long ago Mum would have said, “You did what! What about the neighbours?”
And I’d have said, “What about the neighbours, there’s nothing wrong with my body, bloody hypocrites. Bet they all read the Sun!”
Hearing the abrupt reply, “Well I doubt Dorothy and Arthur do, they vote Labour so just cover yourself up in future.”
Emma has moved in to Dorothy and Arthur’s.
“What’s your book?” Mum says.
I hold it up so she can see the cover. It’s Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air. It’s met with a blank stare.
“What’s it about?”
“Well, modernity, I guess, you know… modern life, capitalism, cities, how things have changed…” Mum is frowning. I continue, “It’s based on a quote from Marx, hold on, I’ve got it…” flipping through the book, “ah, here it is, ‘All fixed, fast, frozen,’ no forget that, ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.’ He means…”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Nothing much changes here. A few ‘av died I s’pose… and did I tell you Harry and Maud got onto to the council about Emma?”
“Really, why?”
“About the bin bags. Well, I mean, when you’ve got two littl’uns, same age, running around you don’t have time for much else. So I told him… his nibs,” she nods across the gardens, “If you want ‘em shifted do it yourself, he was right put out…”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. Didn’t even blink. He was the same when your dad told him ‘e ‘ad the Union Jack the wrong way up.”
“Really, so what did…”
There’s a broad smile on my face, Mum has an impish grin.
“It’s not repeatable…” she replies.
Dad, who’d been asleep in the armchair in the living room the other side of the French windows, pipes up with, “I told ‘im ‘e’s a stoopid, naars-ty little fascist. Bloody eedjut ‘e is!”
We can see the flag, it hangs limp on a pole above the garden shed two doors down. We are both laughing silently; Mum holding her side, I’ve got my hand over my mouth.
Mum wipes away a tear and sighs, “Oh dear.”
We hear Dad stretch, groan and heave himself out of the armchair, “Right, I’m putting the kettle on,” he says and it occurs to me that terraced council housing has a certain porosity.
“Harry’s ninety next year you know,” Mum remarks after a while. “And Maud’ll be eighty-five. Would you credit it?”
We both fell silent.
Since I arrived the park has filled up; the ground seethes with children, nursing mothers, couples, groups of friends. My skin, no stranger to the sun now, is already getting darker. That’s why I’m here; this might be the last tanning day of the year. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air lies at my side, untouched. I’ve decided nothing is solid. It was Berman who introduced me to WB and his porosity. It occurs to me life in summer has a porosity – I’ve been watching it all afternoon. Thinking even life and death, usually pretty clear cut, attain porosity under certain circumstances. We all know we will die, but rarely how or where or when. With Mum’s diagnosis the how has been determined, the where and when are proscribed. In this way death seeps into life. They say, don’t they, that nothing is certain but death and taxes. Mum said that a few weeks ago, then I said, grasping for words, “Are you afraid?”
“Well,” she said, “you know you’ve got to go, but…”
My book abandoned I read in The Observer that in Cancun, Mexico, in the blazing heat Lee Kyung-hae, a young man from South Korea, plunged a knife into his heart during a protest at the World Trade Organisation. It’s reported other protesters made a shrine between two concrete blocks at the feet of the riot police, the so-called “ring of steel” designed to keep sanity out of the building, it doesn’t work, the talks break down.
Back in his hometown the tenant farmers of Jangsu come to pay their last respects bearing sticks of incense. The walls of his house are decked in yellow and white flowers sent from agricultural associations, Korean War veterans and old school friends. Among them a message of condolence from the prime minister and a banner that reads, “Stop WTO agriculture negotiations which are killing millions of Korean farmers.”
This is the year of the biggest peace protest in history, some thirty million people assembling in six hundred or more cities and towns in February. Many thought it had made no difference when the bombs started dropping in Iraq in March. Reading about the WTO it’s clear to me we are not defeated but diffused. We are global. I thought the world would never be the same again after the mass protests in February. It wasn’t – after Mum’s news in April.
I cast my mind back to the call for these simultaneous protests announced at the Campo Di Marte stadium in Florence, just under a year ago, after a march of more than a million on a bitterly cold bright day, led by the parents of Carlo Giuliani. The march followed an international conference in Florence organised by The European Social Forum. I recall the defiant proclamation ringing out; questo e la nostra primavera. This is our Spring. Repeated in thirty-two languages.
When I found out the march had been reported internationally frantically tried to find a phone box. Mum was like Zeus in her fury. Predictably they’d heard about it on Radio Four. Finally after my protestations she relented somewhat saying, “It’s not YOU I’m worried about, it’s the police, they don’t mess around over there.”
The police, were conspicuous by their absence. The Italian newspapers the following day ran eight-page articles claiming two million marched. No one really knew the real figure but it was simply to big to attack. At the protest at the G8 summit in Genoa just over a year ago Carlo Giuliani wasn’t the only casualty, many others were gassed and beaten. Guess Mum and Dad heard about this too. How was I to know that? I’d sat there on the sofa next to mum, her knitting needles in hand, Dad ensconced in his armchair behind The Telegraph, she had said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m learning Italian.”
“Oh, I thought you were learning Spanish.”
In this way the plan was revealed. The conference anyway. I took care to detail; that I was going with trusted friends, we had booked an apartment. That we’d be in the company of NGO’s, charities, trade unionists, not just The Left. That it was important.
I recall the social centre the night before the march. The tension, under the strains of the Internationale and Bella Ciao played by a brass band in an open air courtyard, was palpable; we haven’t come prepared, we don’t have gas masks, no one talks about that. We don’t talk about the next day at all. We don’t even have warm clothes, at least I don’t, no one tells me about the march until we arrive plus for some reason it doesn’t occur to me Italy in November will be a mere four degrees.
On the phone I wanted to say, “Mum you don’t understand… I met the partisans on the march, the Florentine partisans, the ones that drove the Nazis out of the city… Some of them are still alive. I spoke to a woman that looked just like your mother.” Instead, hungry and sleep deprived; my mind in a blaze of sensation, new ideas, languages and memory; remembering Dad saying, when we were all drunk at home on a Friday night, “Now yer Mum, if the Nazis ‘ad invaded here, she would ‘ave blown up the train tracks, I wouldn’t, but she would ‘ave tried…”
And Mum saying, “Well I don’t know about that…” Remembering a few years after that Mum telling me gleefully she had found out that The Sacred Heart Convert, where she was schooled, secretly operated a convalescent home for British women who worked the French Resistance, “Those women… those brave women.” Reciting, The Code Poem for the French Resistance by Leo Marx. Which she will instruct me to read at her funeral.
I managed to say, “I’ve got so much to tell you.”
“Just get back safe,” she ordered then softening, “We’ll talk about it when you get home.”
We didn’t. It was lost in a glare and stony silence on the subject.
Something changed though by February. For once Mum doesn’t say, “Just be careful.” When I told her that same afternoon when we came in from the garden that we are going to march again, against Bush in November, she says, “Just remember, I’ll be by your side.” For a fraction of a second I really thought she meant she’d be gone by then. Then she told me about the international patent that prevented Third World countries from manufacturing HIV/Aids drugs at a fraction of the cost. Animated for a few minutes; Dad was watching her, his face a mixture of awe and concern, I looked on, smiling at her fire.
Finally, she added, “Those poor countries, it’s criminal,” and leant back, spent. I scrambled to say, “I’ve heard about it, I didn’t understand it before. I do now.”
I’m not sure she heard me.
As the afternoon draws on I become aware of faint stains of music that float across from the Colourscape festival in a multicoloured, inflatable maze. Wisps of cloud drift above, lanky youths bouncing a football amble past prostrate girls. A motorbike leans by the side of a tree, a teenager takes a piss beside it, walking back to his friends he punches the air. A man crosses in front of me pushing a bicycle, one child balanced precariously on the saddle, another in tow.
In a few hours this heat will be gone, the dispersed camaraderie I feel so distant from will disappear. In a few weeks the leaves will fall from the trees, some are turning already; for now, we all collectively conspire to collude that this is still summer.
“Just carry on as normal.” Mum had said when she told us, “That’s what you can do.” I nodded. She smiled, a weak smile. It doesn’t seem enough yet we do. We carry on leaving things unsaid, talking at cross purposes, sometimes missing the point and occasionally, these days, connecting.
Only after Mum has died will I remember it was her that told me as a teen about Sylvia Pankhurst, Rosa Parks and Anne Frank. Only then will I remember all of us watching our favourite family films together when we were still children; The Great Escape, Spartacus and the Inn of the Sixth Happiness, time and again, during the latter, holding back tears we are afraid to shed in front of each other.
As I watch the cycling antics, amateur acrobatics and kite flying, I’m asking myself what is constant? The sun? Up to a point. Love? Change? Surely that’s a contradiction? Who was it who said, the only constancy is change? Was it Marx? It might have been Lao Tse. The summer will be back, I muse, until the sun burns out. Somewhere walking the streets of other sundrenched cities, there’s a man I will never know but can’t forget, another I loved but failed to understand.
I know where Mum and Dad are. I always do. Whether it was the steroids or the prayer that is giving her an Indian summer, she will be at the corner of the sofa, Dad besides her in his armchair with a pint. Between them the small, round coffee table that belonged to Dad’s mother and the standard lamp he made when he was a teenager. Like always. Except now there’s blister strips of painkillers on the table and behind it two canisters of oxygen lean against the wall.
***
It’s now twenty years today since mum passed and she is still with me every day. I thought last year it was twenty years. That anniversary passed without grief, only love. And strangely I’ve noticed I know her now better than I ever did back then. Sometimes I hear her voice. I remember her obscure sayings that baffled us as children. She still guides me and influences my work and life in every aspect.
Jean Margaret Cooper, née Whittaker, in the centre of the image, Stevenage Old Town, circa 1955, looking not unlike the images of Italian Partisans I found returning from Florence, minus the guns of course. The same skirts, the same hair, the same look of confidence and optimism. Rest in peace mum and thank you for my life.
A shorter version of this story was published in 2012 in the anthology Out is the Word that I curated at SHARP, the Social, Hope and Recovery Project. It was the outcome of The Word is Out, a two year mental health writing project, a co-production of mental health staff and services users. Published with this as my bio at the time, something she didn’t live to see.
Anne Cooper is a writer, poet and educator. For over a decade Anne performed regularly with the group Poets Know It, also appearing in libraries, pubs, and various other venues in London including an art gallery and the Brockwell Lido. She has had poetry broadcast on Resonance fm and the Islam Channel. She is the author of Touched, a collection of poetry published by Survivors Press in 2006, the founder of The Way of Words creative writing workshops and editor of their anthology, And Then There Was Light, published in 2008 presenting the work of 24 Lambeth writers. In addition she has facilitated workshops at Lambeth Mind, Survivors Poetry and coproduced and facilitated workshops for The Word is Out. Anne believes passionately that another world is possible and that, in this insane world, where reason and justice stand on their heads, sanity is being in balance and seeing clearly; writing, yoga, shiatsu and meds help her with this.
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
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