Emma Unsworth - Adults

I instantly feel harassed. I stare at the text for a moment. As I’m staring, another text from her arrives.

How r u? xx

It doesn’t feel right that someone older than me abbreviates more than I do, but this is the way it is. She texts me approximately once a week. When I ignore her, she turns up in my dreams. The other night she was in the doorway of my room, wearing a pair of wings – fine-boned and iridescent, like a dragonfly’s. They glistened in the moonlight. When she turns up like that I have to remind myself that the visions are only my version of her – the real her is three hundred miles away.

I close my eyes and see it. That house. Mock Tudor. Mock everything. Our street was adjacent to a big-dog housing estate and the kids would come and chuck crab apples at the garage doors. I’d look down from my turret bedroom window, feeling quite the oppressed royal. Someone wrote ‘WITCH’ in chalk on the wall and my mother looked at it proudly while I burned. Thousands of years ago, witches were respected as healers , she said. They were wise women in the community.

And then we got doctors , I said.

Did we, though , she said, did we ever really ‘get’ doctors like we got witches? What I’m talking about is a gift, not a career choice.

In the garden there was a huge laburnum tree where caterpillars grew in the buds and dangled down on invisible threads in late spring. She liked bright plants. Pinks and yellows, for good energy, to ward off evil spirits. Lupins, azaleas, bleeding hearts. She dug up the pampas grass after I told her it was code for swingers. In the middle of the front lawn there was a monkey puzzle tree, its base beaded with grey stones, Japanese-style, after something she saw in a magazine. Other things: the crack-spangled patio, the planters polka-dotted with moss, the eternally unoccupied bird box. I’ve been back a handful of times. Birthdays. Christmases. Odd times off the slingshot of another failed love affair.

I lived in Stepney Green, Kentish Town, Streatham. I saved like Scrooge. I wrote for fourteen hours a day. I was in some kind of rocket mode, blazing a way, trying to escape an old atmosphere. I walked home down the worst of roads in a knitted hat, trying to look mad (un-rapeable), with my Yale key between my first two fingers. I had a contact – one, from a kindly teacher at school. I followed up on it. A trade magazine for a supermarket. It was a start. I ate a lot of sautéed vegetables. I had love affairs with men whose guitars were as badly strung as their sentences. Oh, to be fearless in terrible shoes again, oh so fearless and able to tolerate the cheapest of drinks and the cheapest of shoes. Outlet pleather and bad designs but all that time ahead, all that time, to wear terrible shoe after terrible shoe and wake up on another floorboarded, guitar-lined attic room with a leisurely hangover and all the hope in my heart. I’d leave before they woke, leaving a calligraphic note, and I’d go home and close my own door and feel joy when I saw the pictures I’d hung on my walls. The chairs I’d arranged. The carpets I’d chosen. The paint I’d painted. I started to feel what could be a kind of love of creating my own space. A love that could be nurturing and proud, as well as utterly romantic. A love that felt accessible and, if not quite democratic, then self-made. Empowering. All mine. To share with people I might have round, in varying contexts. I was romancing myself. I was also looking after myself. This was progress.

The first day of my first job, I texted my mother to tell her. She replied:

Good luck xxx

Good luck! Have you ever read a less motherly text? Good luck!

I thought about her at least once every three minutes. I scratched my scalp and sniffed it; it smelled of her. I’d come into my flat and feel her energy there, latent somehow, in a place she’d never been. I missed the North: its winds and mosses; its cool, thirsty cities. I’d look at the weather reports for Manchester and feel glad when the weather was good. I had it as a location to slide past on my weather app. My little darling, I’m glad you have clear skies tonight , I’d think. I sang ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ so loudly on the Tube once, drunk, that someone gave me a pound. I thought about our old living room, telly and lamp on; a cube of light in the vastness of space. I was an astronaut out on the arm of the mothership, umbilicus stretching, stretching, stretching.

Hi, yes, here? Okay. This is a nice office. Plain, but I suppose that’s so I focus on the task in hand, which is no mean feat! What do I think that is? Sorting out my mental state haha. I should probably do more exercise. That would probably make a big difference. I noticed you had a kayak strapped to the top of your car outside, do you like to kayak, or do you have children? [ Pause ] Oh, I see, well I was just making conversation, I ramble when I’m nervous, I suppose that’s music to your ears. It’s like I can’t stand silence and that’s possibly because my mother was loud at home and when there was silence it meant there was a problem. [ Pause ] No, I’ve never had therapy before – does it show? I hate sounding like an amateur. Do you know how long it took me to choose what to wear today? Days. Literally. I was thinking about what might make you like me the most and I settled on something plain but with a few flourishes and I’m glad because I see now that’s very much your vibe. I’m not judging you, I barely know you. I know this is meant to be a socially pure zone but I don’t believe in any space you can hurl things into without consequences – that’s just me. Everything has consequences, doesn’t it? Every act of communication is an act of translation. I should probably have done Philosophy rather than English and Communication Studies. I don’t even really know what Communication Studies is, other than a chance for the lecturer to talk about his days on the broadsheets. He’s no use for magazine contacts. [ Pause ] What’s my relationship like with my mother these days? Desultory. Can I say that? It’s not like she was the worst in the world. She didn’t molest me or anything like that – and sometimes I think it would have been easier if she had. If I’d had something concrete to work with, you know? [ Pause ] How’s it going at uni? Good. Good, I think. Apart from the Communication Studies. It was definitely the right decision to move down. It’s a great uni – and the fact they organise things like this – what do they call it? Pastoral care. Some universities might be embarrassed they’d attracted a load of loonies, but not this one – and I respect that. [ Pause ] Do I have a relationship with my father? No, I don’t even know his name. She’d never tell me. Which gives her clairvoyance skills some credibility, because it’s like she predicted the internet. You know if I had a name I’d have Facebooked the shit out of him. People at school used to tell me he was in prison. Aren’t children delicious? Freeloaders, that’s what my mother calls them. It’s what she called me. It was fucking work, being her daughter. I put a fucking shift in. [ Pause ] I sound angry? Yes, I think I am angry. So that’s the thing to work on, I suppose. The anger. That’s the thing I want gone. [ Pause ] No, she never heard from him, or she never told me if she did. All I know is he called one night when she was pregnant. She was in bed and she answered the phone and he didn’t speak but she knew it was him by the sound of his breath. Sinister, right? In my worst nightmares my father is a perv. You know, an old Rat-Packer. Come over here, princess, and give ol’ Daddio some sugar. I can imagine her going for a creep like that. Allow me a blowsy moment: sometimes I see things – the undersides of sycamore leaves, oily puddles in tarmac – and I’m reminded of a father I never knew. A cellular memory, perhaps. An amino acid residue. I don’t even know how memory works; I suppose no one does – it’s one of the things your lot are working on. When he called that night she was so shaken that her adrenaline surged, and she said she felt me stir, inside, awoken. I often think about that moment. My first encounter with the anxiety the world had in store. I had no protection in place. I mainlined her anxiety like alcohol. But that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing she ever did was leave me to go on holiday to the Bahamas one Christmas. Worst Christmas of my life. I was sixteen. I vowed I’d never let her hurt me again, and I haven’t. She sent me a postcard. I still have it. It’s what you might call a prized possession because every now and then when I feel my resolve weakening, I reread it. I didn’t take it lying down, though. I had my revenge. [ Pause ] How? I staged my own suicide the day she got back. You’ve never heard someone scream so much. It was magnificent. I wrote a note and left it downstairs and then I got in the bath with a razor and some fake blood. I’d say she’s probably seeing her own therapist about it but she’s quite anti-therapy. Gin is her therapy. I hope she rereads the note. It was a really fucking good note. But then, I am a lot better educated than she is. [ Pause ] No, that is no thanks to her. She paid for my education and then she partied all night. What kind of self-sabotaging showmanship is that? Her problem – and she has a whole catalogue of problems, believe me – but her main one is she doesn’t have any true friends. She’s a loner. And that means she has no one to set her straight. It’s not that she lowers the tone; it’s that I don’t think she realises there is a tone …