The Passengers, page 5
I ran up to whatever floor it was—I think it was floor 4, floor 5, something like that—and asked to find out where he was and just as I was asking a nurse, he got wheeled past me on a hospital bed, tubes in and out of him and everything else. He was about to go into theatre. And the woman explained that he was gonna need a triple bypass and that this could be the last time I’d ever see him. And she asked me if I had anything I wanted to say. I paused and looked at him and said no, I didn’t have anything left to say to him. Partly cos I couldn’t think of anything but also because it would’ve felt insincere and cheap, I think.
Anyway, he went into the operating theatre and for the next couple of hours I assumed he was gonna die—cos you know, triple bypass, I’ve been told he’s got like a 5 per cent chance of making the surgery blah blah blah. I’m outside on the riverside bit in that garden, very upset and confused. I was confused as to why I was upset. I thought I didn’t like him and then suddenly I’m grieving for him and it was a very confusing time. I went through the whole gamut of emotions, from anger to denial to grief to crying, thinking about the future. I imagined my entire future without my dad. I was gonna dedicate my last art project to him, I was gonna then have to get a job to look after my half-sister, all this sort of stuff.
To cut a long story short, he recovered. And at the time he recovered, I actually wished he hadn’t recovered, because it made everything far more complicated, him actually staying alive. And all of this new life I’d imagined seemed so much more attractive to me, and so much more a place where I could exist outside of his presence and outside of his influence, and kind of ascend to his position of authority in the family. So when I first saw him in the hospital and he was smiling and saying, Hi, I’ve survived, I pretended I was happy, but actually I wasn’t.
54.
My grandmother [died] when I was two. Obviously really sad—she was only fifty-six and left my grandpa, my dad’s dad, left him completely heartbroken. She was the love of his life. She was, by all accounts, quite a wonderful woman, from what I can gather. I was the only grandchild at that time. Because he’d lost her, my mum and dad basically wanted him to have me as a bit of a distraction. So I used to go and stay with my grandpa from when I was really, really young. So as a result of my grandmother’s death, I actually ended up having a really, really close relationship with my grandpa. I have these most amazing memories of my grandfather as a result of that. I always used to sleep in this double bed in his spare room, and he used to put me to bed and then sit there and just wax lyrical for hours about his time in India and his life and my grandmother and how they met. He had this really wild personality and imagination.
He was also a really snappy dresser. He always used to be absolutely immaculately turned out, not a hair out of place. He used to go and have his nails done, his hair done. Loved shopping and actually loved shopping for me. Even from being very young, when I used to stay with him, he used to take me shopping and I could choose whatever I wanted. Much to my mum’s disgust! He’d want to buy me a full outfit—shoes, the whole shebang. It was like a showing—he’d like to see all the options, he’d have to see everything. I remember I had this absolutely hideous lurid, bright pink dress from C&A with frills and bows. And my mum was quite cool. She’d bought me OshKosh B’gosh dungarees and stuff to be a cool child and I wanted to wear this lurid pink dress. Mum would just be like, [mouths] What the fuck is that?!
He actually ended up getting Alzheimer’s in his old age. But I think he always sort of had that—he was always really eccentric and talked too much. He was a bit mad. And just got more and more honest as he got older. I remember my cousin went to see him before he died. I think it was when I was pregnant, cos I was actually pregnant with my little boy when he died. And she said, Oh, you know __’s pregnant? And he said, Oh yes, I know. She’s my favourite, you know [laughs]. She’s like, Oh yeah, we know, Grandpa! He just didn’t care by this point. My cousin R_____ , her husband has got the same birthday as me and one year—this was probably about ten years ago—[Grandpa] sent [him] a birthday card with a picture of me in it [laughs]. Like, a photograph of me! And R_____ rang him, like, Thanks for [my husband]’s card but why’ve you sent him a picture of __? He was just like, Oh well, I thought he might want to remember what she looks like. I mean, she is very beautiful.
55.
There’s a quote that I really like and I can’t remember who it’s by, but it’s by a snooty foreigner who said that the English don’t like music, they just like the noise it makes. I think that completely describes my relationship with music. I have no understanding of music but I do like the noise it makes. And I feel the same about photography. I don’t understand photography in the way that a university-educated person might, but I like the way it looks, and I don’t think that’s a flippant thing to say about either of them, actually. The thing I like most about music is its timbres—it’s the textures, it’s the surfaces, it’s the way that this incredibly abstract art form can change your state of mind and get you into worlds that don’t exist. Just a load of waveforms in the ether. And exactly the same is true of photography, whether it be abstract or not—patterns on a screen or a piece of paper, textures and colours and things that are not that dissimilar from sounds can get you into a space that nothing else can.
One of the things I say about photography is that if it’s not better than being there, it’s not worth it. So if it’s just a record of an instant, if you’d been there you would’ve seen that. Fine, great, there’s a place for that. But photography at its finest is when it adds something that kind of wasn’t there—although obviously it was there cos it’s just a photograph. When you put things in a frame, when you cut around experience, that makes it different. It’s about the totality in a way, isn’t it? That everything in that picture is meant to be there. In the same way that everything in a piece of music is meant to be there, even if it’s improvised and there’s accidents and all the rest of it. There’s still a reason why those fluffed notes are there and that’s part of it. And the same for photography. It’s absolutely fine for it to be messy round the edges, or wonky, or whatever. It’s an editing process.
In a photograph, or in a piece of music, all well-created textures are beautiful. You can take a photograph of something horrible and you can make it beautiful through the textures, and the same is true of music. You can get some really harsh, horrible sounds and you can mash them together in some horrible ways, and it has a beauty. And if you can hold the space, as it were, then you can enjoy and appreciate the texture of any photograph—any good photograph, whatever that means. And I guess, if you wanted to be philosophical, you could say the same thing about life, although obviously it’s an awful lot harder when it’s punching you in the face and it hurts than when it’s a piece of paper, or some wave forms. But there is a beauty to all of it, even the stuff that really seems like it isn’t. Although I think that’s too facile a thing to say, you see what I mean? Tell that to a grieving mother. I mean, come on.
56.
I’m almost thirty-five and I feel like I still don’t really know what’s going on with sex. When we were at school there was no concept of consent or respect or anything like that. It was reduced to biology, wasn’t it? If you have sex with someone you might get pregnant or you might get an STD and that’s it. I don’t think we were really given much guidance on the emotional complexity of sex. And I think I’m still kind of confused by that, years and years later. I would love it if I could say that I’ve felt intimate with, or felt safe with, or trusted everyone that I had sex with. But there was definitely a phase when I was in my early twenties, when I was just baffled by life in general, where I think that I actively looked for people that I knew I didn’t want to have a relationship with. That I knew I wouldn’t invest too heavily in [or] fall in love with. And those are the people that I was having sex with. Because there’s less at stake, I guess. [And] the people that I fell in love with weren’t the people I was having sex with. Does that make sense? That sounds really bizarre, doesn’t it?
I think a big part of that comes from the sort of Victorian basis of our education system and the church and things like that, which associate sex with shame. [The] residue of that is that I don’t think we’re very in touch with ourselves. And so it takes all this time to figure it out. And then you get this sort of melting pot of hormones and bodies and emotions and, added to the mix, modern society and technology and all these things. And personally, I think that’s resulted in me feeling really confused for a lot of my sexual adult life.
I think around the time when I first started feeling the confidence to take control of my sexuality was probably when I got into a relationship with my current partner. He’s the first man that I have always trusted and always felt really safe with. I think that’s why we’re still together. And so I think he was the first person that I really associated [with] intimacy and sex and safety and all these things which you want to bring together. I think he was the first person that I did that with. But then I had kids! And kids really throw a spanner in the works for your sex lives. Once they start sleeping, I might have the space to explore that kind of level of agency, d’you know what I mean? But I quite like the fact that I’m thirty-five and I still feel like I’m young in terms of my sex life. I don’t wanna think that because I’m not in my twenties anymore, it’s all over. Or like, because I’m with a long-term partner that that’s the end. We can’t be complacent and be like, Right, I’m with this person now, that’s it. It has to be an ongoing process. I mean, I’m saying this now, but it’s also kind of a revelation for me, because I don’t think I have the mental headspace in my everyday life to dwell on these things, although talking about them I feel like they’re important.
Sorry, I can see the baby stirring.
57.
I’ve always been the sort of person who thinks about life in a straight line, planning everything out. Following the crowd, I suppose—following what people would say is the normal thing. You know, graduating, buying a house, getting a dog, getting married, all that. And then obviously after getting married, trying to think about having a child, having a family. I’ve always been healthy as well—I run a lot, I like my fitness, never really had any health problems. But then when it came to trying to start a family I got seriously ill. And after a year from hell, I got diagnosed with a condition called endometriosis. It’s a condition that one in ten women across the world have. I’d never even heard of it. And from there it’s been a tough year, and a lot has happened, a hell of a lot has happened. I thought it was gonna be a mild condition. I’m having major surgery in a couple of weeks now. I’ve lost a whole kidney, I’ve lost kidney function, I’m having the bladder removed. I’ve been really lucky in life, I’ve had such a nice upbringing, I’ve succeeded in my career, found my husband, and then having something like that happen to your health at thirty years old was a massive knock.
I try and speak a lot about the condition to raise awareness. It’s a chronic condition and I’ve had it since I was thirteen years old, but it’s gradually gotten worse over time. They have said to me if I would have been diagnosed and found out about the condition ten years ago then I wouldn’t have lost my kidney function and I wouldn’t be facing the six-hour surgery that I’m going to be facing. And then obviously again the coronavirus was another setback. It was one of those where the operation was cancelled and I didn’t hear anything for ten weeks, so I had no idea what was gonna happen. The treatment I have to take means that I’m not able to have a child at the moment and to start a family. I have good days but then I have days on end where I can’t get out of bed, I’m in so much pain and agony with the condition. I can’t get out of bed and I can’t eat for seventy-two hours, I can’t sleep for seventy-two hours, and it really has had a huge impact on my life.
Once I’d come to terms with it, opening up about it helped a lot. You realise how brilliant other people are—being there for you and comforting you, and also just treating you as normal as well. I think I was a bit worried about people looking at me differently, or being more mindful of me, especially with child-type things, cos a lot of my friends are having children now. The last thing I wanted was for them to feel they can’t tell me they’re pregnant cos they might upset me, or they’re worried about me meeting the baby in case I’d cry holding a baby, or that sort of thing. But they haven’t been like that at all, and it hasn’t been like that at all for me, either.
D’you know what the strange thing is as well? Even when I talk about it to people, it’s like I’m talking about someone else’s life. It’s so strange. Some days it doesn’t even feel real that it’s happening to me.
58.
My sister is a massive extrovert. She works in psychology and she did one of those personality tests, and they rank you on a number of attributes, and for the extroversion one she got 99 per cent. Which apparently is unheard of. For her, she needs to go out—she needs to go clubbing and go to bars and stuff, and if she doesn’t have that, which she didn’t have for the last few months, she doesn’t feel like herself. She doesn’t feel like a full human, and her mental health suffers because of that. Whereas I found that I personally don’t need that at all. I’m trying to think what my equivalents are of needs that make me feel like me. I suppose I need alone-time to reflect. Since I was a kid, I kept a journal, and I never felt like things had actually happened until I wrote it down in that journal. I needed that reflection time to make it feel like an event, like it happened, and I suppose that was a need. Where does the barrier of need and compulsion stop? For my sister, for example, if she had to go out every night, clubbing, to feel like she was real, people would look at that and say, Hmm, that’s a bit of an issue [laughs]. And I wonder if you could say the same about needing to write things down all the time, to process them, whether that’s compulsion as well? I feel like I’m a bit untethered, a bit ungrounded, if I haven’t done it for a while, but I kind of stopped. I tailed off a bit during lockdown, because nothing was happening [laughs]. Since I started working, I slowed down. Maybe it’s cos I’m busier, maybe it’s because I don’t find what I’m doing as interesting anymore, worth writing down? I don’t feel like I know who I am. But then, if I re-read journal entries, I don’t recognise that person as me either.
We’re twins, did I mention that? So yeah, she’s my twin sister but I never call her my twin, just because I feel like she’s my sister. Yeah, very different. I’ve watched videos of us when we were two or three, and our personalities are already defined, they’re already quite concrete. She dazzles when she goes into a room—she’s a bit wild, is how she would describe herself [laughs]. I think she would say that she was attention-seeking, but I just see it as she’s really fun, really lively and very vivacious. It’s funny, my friends who don’t know my sister think that I’m extroverted, and that I’m quite bubbly and lively, but I never see myself that way, because I always see myself compared to what she is. So I would describe myself as introverted and almost reserved.
It’s hard to know where our personalities start and begin, and how much of it is defined against the other person. I would imagine if she was to choose ten words to describe herself, there would be words that most people would put on that list that she wouldn’t put on, because I have those attributes, and she sees them as me. So I’m the sensible one, that’s how we both see me. And then there’s the line in between—how much am I naturally sensible and how much [have] I had to be sensible to look after my wild sister [laughs]? Maybe that’s my need. I need to feel like I’m looking after someone, so she supports that need!
59.
The secret I want to share is one that I have kept for fifty years and it dates back to when I was at junior school.
There were two characteristics I had in those days. One was that I was very, very fond of war and battles, especially medieval war and battles. I thought the idea of the knight in armour was a really romantic concept, I was really into that. I had lots of toy soldiers who were knights in armour, that kind of thing. And the other thing: I very much liked poetry. I liked jingly, rhyming verse, that was the kind of poetry I liked. And one day I found something in my older sister’s annual. It was an annual from a comic which I think barely anyone remembers now, it was called Girls’ Crystal, the Girls’ Crystal annual. And in that, along with all the comic strips and the stories and so forth, there was a little poem. And this poem—actually I say little, it was quite long, like a page long, with illustrations—combined my two loves because it was a poem and it was about a knight in armour. I still remember how it began. It went, Sir Timothy Tinribs, the knightliest knight / Was questing around for a dragon to fight. It was all about the exploits of this rather comic character, but also very brave, valiant knight in armour, Timothy Tinribs, who fights this dragon and saves a damsel in distress. It really stuck in my mind and I found, without really meaning to, that I had memorised it.
The following week in school, we were asked to write a poem. And I had this one at my fingertips. I was able to copy it out line by line and present it as my own work. And the teacher, Mrs ____ , was really quite taken aback by how long it was, and how perfectly it scanned and rhymed, and the humour of it. She thought it was brilliant. She said, Did you copy this from somewhere? And I said, No, no. I mean, where could I have copied it from? And, certainly, there was nothing in the classroom that I could’ve copied it from. I think she found it difficult to believe that I could’ve memorised such a long poem like that. Very good, gold star, etcetera.
