This trip did not begin on my arrival in Belgium or even on the Eurostar from St Pancras. It started about ten days ago in Camden Town. It was mid-afternoon and I just finished reading the most saddening and difficult e-mail of my life. It was an ending.
I panicked; I was shaking; I needed to leave my father’s office. I fled downstairs with no other certainty in my mind other than that I needed to find a place where I could be alone and scream as wildly as I liked. I found my bike lock; slung it round my waist, jumped up on my bicycle and shot off. Delancey Street – Parkway – Regents Park Round: a necklace of signposts and street names strangling me. How close and cozening the velvety touch of familiarity felt to me then: there was no-where clear for my mind to rest.
At last I let my bike wrap itself into a whorl on a bank of grass on the St Johns Wood side of Primrose Hill. I couched myself in the grass and performed a kind of funereal lament: rocking myself into a ball like hedgehogs do when they are frightened or the way that flying insects do before they die.
I had just finished reading an essay by Sebald about the cult beliefs in afterlife held by the people of Corsica in the last century. And so, as I expiated, as I rocked and cradled and cried out, I heard my voice rising in tandem with the sounds of thousands of other vampyric-like women in bed-chambers and living rooms in the Mediterranean – howling in an accord which formed a kind of crest of pain.
The rainbow of my grief peaked and fell; my crying subsided, the only clearly defined thoughts I found were the two mantras: ‘Do not build on crooked foundations’ and the imperative ‘Build’. Now that I think about it, these two mantras are an oxymoron; but it did not appear like that to me then. It also struck me then how similar the labour of death is to the labour of birth. Both involve expulsion; but death is not about expelling a jelly-like human being (more abstract than concrete), death is about expelling ghosts and memories. Mourning is a more timely process: extracting deep memory, the memory of touch, of another person’s body, buried away in the skin and deep data-files of the body.
Having expelled at least some of my grief, I returned to my bike and climbed to the top of Primrose Hill. Suddenly, and for no particular reason than a desire to be mobile, I decided to perform a tour of my origins.
I started just there: at the foot of Primrose Hill, where I attended primary school and where I saw the school’s caretaker Ron Holding, standing calmly upon a ladder and doing some work on the roof.
Up I cycled, through Belsize Park, past a hairdresser I used to go to, past old school friends’ houses, along Belsize Park Road and up Rosslyn Hill. I skated down the narrow side-road to the Royal Free Hospital where I was a regular guest for some years in my adolescence. Then back up to Hampstead, past old school haunts, birthday drinks locations. I suddenly realised how ridiculously privileged I was, how privileged I had been all my life and never really known it. Then, as though I had planned it (which I hadn’t), I returned suddenly and inexplicably to the Hampstead Antiques Emporium – where my mother works. I had returned to my real origin, to my omphalos, to my omega. To a modest market-stall in a line of busy, chatting women. Then I saw my mother — beautiful still, eyes glittering with pleasure and thanks — and I knew I should stay there for a while.
833 words a day 