Our quiet sidestreet was a warm-walled canyon where children played ball games in the road and went to bed while it was still light in the summer months. My parents had been children during the confused decades after the war, and raised me without religion, politics or convictions of any kind in the hope that I would make up my own mind. After their weekly fight they would buy me a small gift to make amends for what I had seen and heard.
Over the years, the gifts got bigger.
By the time I was seventeen there was no cupboard space left in my bedroom for new clothes, and I couldn’t take any more of their fighting, so I left home and moved into the flat over the shoe shop where I had a Saturday job. I dated the manager, but when I finished with him he had me thrown out of the flat.
I knew Gordon because he visited the store as a sales rep, and I started seeing him because he wouldn’t leave me alone. After my marriage I was transferred to Kimberley Road, Hamingwell, where the children were posted indoors at their games stations and arguments were whispered because they could be heard through the walls.
The streets were as silent as those of my youth, but now they were filled with people-carriers, experimental parking layouts and signs on poles explaining penalties. Burglaries and car thefts and waves of graffiti rhythmically appeared as if a high, dirty tide of rebellion had risen and receded in the night. The residents organised teams to watch houses, to secure gardens, to scrub off the effluvium, fighting to maintain the area’s postcard appearance, but the communal effort robbed us of community, and we retreated suspiciously into our homes. We grew sick of digging sharpened screwdrivers out of high street flowerbeds.
After that, the only time I glimpsed the city again was looking out of department store windows. I couldn’t see that marriage was shrinking my world. You don’t notice changes when they happen incrementally.
The only existing postcard of the town where I spent ten years of married life shows a yellow brick parade of shop-fronts, a laundrette, a butchers, a newsagent, a green bus garage and a length of empty black tarmac beneath an improbable blue sky. The card had been produced when the parade was newly built and the town just completed. There’s a sense of bareness in the picture, of infant exposure to the world. Constructed on the expanding border of Kent and Greater London, Hamingwell sprang up fully formed. One day it was a mud-tracked building site, a black gap on an aerial night photograph, the next it was an official destination-board, a hotspot of shimmering yellow lights, its junctions freshly marked, its young trees nested in, its starter homes filled with slightly puzzled strangers, and I had been one of them.
I was nineteen when I arrived there, two months a wife and six months pregnant. It was the first time I had been any distance from my parents’ house. I’m twenty-nine now, one week away from thirty, a birthday I won’t live to see.
If you lower the postcard and reveal the scene behind it all these years later, you’ll find the laundrette boarded up, the butchers turned into a charity shop, and only the newsagents remaining in a dingy enervated version, its cracked windows pasted with faded lottery stickers. The bus garage is now a tower block and the road is full of fat-wheeled Japanese jeeps. The meadow from which the town took its name has been concreted over as a one-stop shopping plaza, and that, too, has failed. Thanks a bunch, credit crunch.
The town lost its innocence; a schoolgirl was raped, a toddler went missing. The hopeful couples who came to Hamingwell moved on when the economic downturn hit, but up until three days ago I was still there. Ten years married and still childless, still cemented to the same man. My unborn boy had died, and the infection damaged my ovaries enough to make Gordon lose faith in fatherhood. In towns like Hamingwell, to be without children after a decade is to hang a sign around your neck saying ‘Incomplete As A Human Being’. With a little rearrangement, the town’s name spells ‘Am In Hell.’
People stand up in meetings and admit I’m an alcoholic, I’m a shoplifter, I’m a Binge Eater. For ten years I was a Housewife – I’d tell anyone, not that anyone asked. On the rare occasions that I voiced any dissatisfaction, Gordon reminded me that at least he had married me, meaning that he might equally not have bothered. For years I kept the postcard on my bedroom table, to remind me that I was once as hopeful as the scene in the picture.
I kept a clean house; scratch that, I kept an eerily immaculate house, so tidy it looked like a show home, because it had never been stained by emotion. Spotless sofas, price stickers on my wine glasses and yellow tie-tags on my scented bin-liners. I realised I was in a rut when I noticed that our cat’s diet was more varied than mine. At least his dried food came in three types. I kept busy. My husband worked late. My sinks smelled of pine. My surfaces shone. My days were full and my nights were bloody quiet, I can tell you.
I used to be kind, but I became indifferent. No longer sentient. Once I looked up the antonym of ‘sentient’ in my dictionary and it simply said ‘dead’. Finally I turned into someone else entirely, someone as beaten as a piece of veal, as boring as a supermarket leaflet. How long does it take for a life to change beyond all recognition? Try ten years and a fistful of days. You could say I only had myself to blame, that there are women twenty years older than me who are still cool and slender and sexy, but they always knew how to be like that. When I was nine my mother told me that I would never be able to survive without a man. Thanks a lot, Ma.
Sorry, where was I up to? I wish I could have a cup of tea, perhaps some plain digestives or a Hobnob. It would calm me down. I’ll tell you everything, I promise. Just the plain simple facts from now.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Art of Speed Acquisition
O
N THAT FISH-TANK-GREY
autumn afternoon when I discovered the earring, I went shopping. Actually, the term ‘shopping’ hardly seems adequate. I couldn’t have done more damage to my credit cards if I’d driven over them. What I did was blast through Selfridges like an armed witch on a mission. I arrived in front of the building like Caesar at the gates of Rome and swept past the doorman with a look that said ‘I’m about to jag a spike in the monthly national consumer index, so don’t even
think
of fucking with me.’
Spending money is an intimate thing for me, so I made sure I knew the entire history of the places where I shopped, just as it was a point of honour to memorise the names of all the assistants who offered me their services. I was such a familiar face in Selfridges that the store detectives kept an eye on me, thinking I must be part of some long-term thieving reconnaissance party. I didn’t look poor, of course, so they suspected me less. I always dressed for shopping as if going on a date, smart beige patent-leather heels and a sleek chocolate-toned skirt, never jeans or trainers, because I was anxious to be noticed and treated with respect.
It was not a good idea to shop in a highly emotional state. I was one thin step away from sitting down in the middle of the street and screaming. Convinced that shopping in quantity released pheromones, I tick-tacked at a furious speed across the marble floors, ankles flashing back and forth, charm bracelet jangling, begging the buzz to kick in.
The remains of the summer season fashions had been left on the shelves like hard centres discarded in a ravaged chocolate box, the sales staff as listless and fractious as children trapped in class. As I circumnavigated the territory, a hunter-gatherer on a search for hangered prey, I pushed ever deeper into the undergrowth of my desires.
It was a good way to spend the day.
Lately I had become fascinated with the textures of fashion fabrics, and as I walked I mentally alphabetized them into alpaca, astrakhan, batiste, brocade, cotton, calico, cambric, cheviot, chiffon, chenille, crepe de chine, cretonne and corduroy. By the time I arrived at damask, denim and dimity I had already made my first purchase and lost my place in the lexicon of luxury.
It’s never a good idea to shop when you’re angry; you’re liable to buy a kitten just so you can have the option of strangling it. As I agonized over proof of Gordon’s infidelity I got close to collapsing onto a stressed-leather browser-sofa to gulp noisy sobs into a Kleenex. Shopping only works as a displacement activity if you do a lot of it, so I metronomed at speed through the city-block-sized department store, brandishing my handbag like a Spartan shield.
I covered the territory as thoroughly as a soldier flushing out snipers, a hunter-gatherer on a search for spangled prey to flay and wear. I had no fashion agenda in mind. If I was subconsciously looking for a new look, it was to look as invisible as possible. There are women who want to be mistaken for celebrity WAGs, those tanned Twiglets who can prevent their skin from drying up but not their column inches. Fame wasn’t for me; I wanted to be mistaken for one of those Knightsbridge trophy wives who have nothing better to do with their days than creep around retail outlets haranguing staff before heading off to rabbit-nibble a handful of greenery and pine nuts at the kind of restaurant where you can actually smell the hatred of the waiting staff. I just needed to fit in. Somewhere. Anywhere. I have control issues. I am a very, very, angry... I can’t... I want...
Wait. Calm. Count to ten... where was I? Oh yes, killing – but first, shopping.
I refuse to buy from the internet. Clicking and dragging isn’t a sensual experience. Shopping at Selfridges is a hot bath, a cool rain, a sudden flush of heat in the cervix. I love the ceramic faces of the cosmetic clerks, underlit by ice-blue counters. The frozen tableaux these vacuous mannequins form at their work stations make me feel like the heroine in the stage-play of my life. The lives of salespeople are probably even duller than mine, but I can see the attraction of their job. How could you resist the dramatic tungsten spots and arctic sets that effortlessly place you at the heart of a noir thriller? When that shopgirl was shot dead by her boyfriend in Selfridges a few years back, an act that would have seemed grotesque anywhere else felt entirely appropriate in such a location.
The cyclamen zephyrs that drifted over me from the perfumery inflamed my membranes. The staff drifted about me with testers and face brushes as if wielding sacrificial tools in some arcane, forgotten rite.
In housewares, the hanging crescendos of copper pots tightened my chest muscles until I could barely breathe. There were no stains in these stage-kitchens because no food was ever cooked. Sometimes I pulled open the counter drawers and breathed in their emptiness. I studied the beds covered with purple-beaded casbah cushions, the pastel French cotton sheets imprisoned in plastic as smooth as plate glass, the polished maple dining-tables laid for guests who would never ruin everything by turning up. When I touched the smokily elegant vases too slender to hold grocery store flowers but perfectly designed for a single aurum lily, I felt safe in the arms of manufacturers.
After shopping, I always wanted a cigarette and a soapy wash, because obviously the entire process was about sex. Buying an inappropriate dress is the equivalent to a thoughtless one-night stand, whereas designer shoes constitute a long-term commitment filled with recrimination and at least one decent orgasm. I hadn’t been penetrated for over eighteen months. At first the dull ache of desire would not go away, but after a while it no longer bothered me. These days my clitoris was located somewhere near the top of Harrods.
As I swept through Oxford Street’s great cathedral of expenditure, I pondered on the verb ‘to spend’. It had a sexual connotation, of course, to empty the juices, to flush out, but I wondered why people talked about ‘spending days’, as though everything was currency. I felt spent. The world felt spent.
On I went, past the TV monitors of starved catwalk girls dipping at the turn of the runway, up into menswear, a square acre of wood, chrome and marble where everything smelled of citrus, musk and leather, all the things I never smelled on Gordon, who only smelled of cigarettes and computers. Soon I was carrying so many purchases that the bag ropes left Japanese-prisoner-of-war marks on my arms.
On through the food hall with its aged hamhocks hanging like the thighs of long-dead chorus girls, past rows of shocked fish arranged on ice like jewelled purses, past the jars of exotic pickles as mysterious as foetuses in a medical museum, to the perfume counters patrolled by women like bony cats, where I stood paralysed, breathing deep the smell of frangipani, honeysuckle, gardenia, jasmine, lavender, carnation, eucalyptus, lemon, sandalwood and ambergris. The atomisers, sprays, sachets, pomanders, powders, potpourris, balms, gels, oils, soaps, lotions, sticks and fixatives pumped such a sweet cacophony into the air that the hall shimmered and slipped in my vision.
On through departments of casual wear that looked as though the clothes had been randomly assigned pages of a Pantone colour chart, through to the designer collections so monochrome that I wondered if my eyes had suddenly switched to cat-and-dog vision. By now I was carrying enough purchases to stock a third-world department store.
I made it home, and set about cooking a meal to calm my nerves, a plastic M&S box containing a chive-coated fish-brick surrounded by concrete yellow sauce. I heard Gordon stop in the hall to check the bags I had dumped inside the front door. The longer he took to examine the dresses, shoes, CDs, jewellery, makeup, underwear and the furry rabbit pyjama-cases I’d bought for no reason at all from a shop in Kensington Church Street, the more I knew we were in for a fight.
I could tell he was angry by the way he walked into the kitchen, with his heels going down first. I hoped he wouldn’t see the rest of the bags wedged under the table.
‘You can’t control it anymore, can you?’ he said. The last time he had pointed this out, I’d tried explaining to him that shopping was citizenship, an essential part of belonging to the consumer society. It didn’t wash then, either. I knew we were about to have the kind of fight all addicts have with their partners. ‘This time you’re going to take every last one of them back.’