Lilian Pizzichini

This is Where I’m At

Novel extract

1.

The year Maria died, I was living next door to a young couple. The boy had a name I could not quite get. It was Hassle, or something like that. He was slick, with razor stripes cut through his hairline. Another neighbour, Bella, told me he had just come out of prison. Maybe his first stop had been the barber. He looked the kind of young man who would celebrate his release by sharpening his look. He didn’t introduce himself to me. I just heard his girlfriend calling him, and, as I say, it sounded like Hassle, or it could be that I heard it as that because I had a feeling he would be a hassle. 

Our front doors were opposite each other, and we shared a stairwell that led down to the main concourse. The ringing of his doorbell at fifteen-minute intervals and the pitter-patter of his feet as he ran up and down the stairwell suggested that he was holding kilos in his flat. The doorbell ringing was a runner on the street below requesting baggies for customers. 

Hassle’s girlfriend was a large, dreamy blonde girl with soft, pale skin. She had the slow- moving tread of a girl in a trance. Her name was Maddie, which I heard Hassle scream at intervals when, I guess, she wasn’t listening to him. 

It was ten thirty am and it was my forty-eighth birthday. I wasn’t feeling good about it. My friend, Maria, was in Tulum, doing yoga. She was probably on a beach, striking an iconic pose, greeting the sun. I was in a one-bed flat in a housing estate in North Kensington. Through the partition wall, I could hear Hassle accusing Maddie of some insufferable act of negligence. I sighed, slopping porridge from the milk pan onto my fleece pyjamas. I had not quite woken up. Now with my neighbours gearing up for a bout of domestic violence my shoulders were hunched and I couldn’t get them back down.

I had already called the police once that week. They had done very little except listen to both sides, make a report, and go away again. At which point, when she was sure the police had left the block, Maddie had stood outside my flat and screamed insults at my front door. 

It was my fault her boyfriend was under pressure. If it wasn’t for me, Hassle wouldn’t get so angry. I was the one who was causing trouble. 

Hassle had decided to join in the attack, making capital of the shift in Maddie’s attention. 

‘She [meaning me] needs to get her nose out of my business. I’m trying to live my life here.’ 

I did not want to go through the wringer again so I googled some Tibetan bowls on YouTube. They made whooshing and whining sounds that I supposed were comforting. I sat down to write a paragraph about the novelist Jean Rhys swimming in the Mediterranean at Juan-les-Pins. Every morning, the same thing happened. I was enjoying steeping in the warmth of the Med so much, I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t get out of this pine-fringed resort and onto the rocky road that took Rhys to publication. It was as though I had caught her habit of wading around the purposefulness of writing.

I had long missed my deadline set by a publisher ten years previously. I was still brooding over Rhys’s predicament in the south of France, where she had been sent by her lover, the novelist Ford Madox Ford. She had met Ford in Paris in 1922. They started an affair, despite both being married, and were quite open about it. Ford’s wife helpfully turned a blind eye; Rhys‘s husband was helpfully in a French prison. It wasn’t long before Rhys became clingy, and Ford wanted to offload her. He got her a job as a ghost writer in Juan-Les-Pins. 

I looked onto the skyline outside my window. Its subtle, stripy tones were like the awning of a deckchair filmed in black and white. I was in an old movie-reel, and the shouts and screams from next door were children from the slums on a day trip to Southend-on-Sea racing to meet the tide. Against the black-and-white reel, a pair of wood pigeons were balanced on the branch of a cherry tree, monitoring the bins outside the pub. Their nest overlooked the back door of what had once been the local pub. It was now an eatery owned by a famous footballer. Against the silhouette of its rooftop terrace, a yellowish stain blotted out the sky. 

I had chosen to write about Rhys after reading a slim novel set in early twentieth-century rented rooms and cafés, a fashion boutique and a hair salon. In all these spaces, Rhys’s heroine finds her anxious reflection gazing back at her. It’s like she’s a ghost that only the mirror can see. 

Rhys had been brought up to be very proper. She called mirrors “looking glasses”. Her heroine sees life as a series of looking glasses in which she looks good, and looking glasses in which she doesn’t. It is the mirror that decides how she looks. I knew how this felt. It wasn’t just about being pretty. It was about being respectable. Nothing matters but appearing to be respectable. 

I was astonished to find that Jean Rhys, a Penguin Classics author, asked the question that clung to me like a wet dress. How does a woman who feels her wounds so keenly express herself without being told there’s something wrong with her? The more I found out about Rhys, I saw that she lived this question as fully as she wrote it. 

2.

Jean Rhys was a woman of uncertain status, on a low income, with almond-shaped eyes. She sat in the cafés of the poorer districts of Paris, sipping pastis, and watching the grues and the apaches, the ‘little tarts’ and ‘thugs’, of the demi-monde. When she sat in a bar on Rue Pigalle, she watched Ernest Hemingway bow at her, and Gertrude Stein ignore her. She left her diary with an English journalist who thought it was bold and, at the same time, naive, and divided it into chapters. The journalist called the whole thing, Suzy Tells, and showed it to the writer and publisher of transatlantic review, Ford Madox Ford.

When I read about Rhys drinking with the modernists in Twenties Paris, I, too, was a woman of uncertain status, and on a low income. Rhys was Anglo-Caribbean. I was Anglo-Italian. In London, I sat in a French pub, sipping Pernod,waiting to be discovered by a publishing legend who would reveal me to be a thrilling new talent. I sat there a long time, watching my fellow drinkers, unable to join in their enjoyment of themselves. These were my slim credentials for writing Rhys’s biography. 

“I could be looking at her,” my editor said, after I delivered an emotional pitch. Emotional, but steely. What impressed my editor was my disavowal of the traditional approach.

We exchanged smiles across her desk in what had once been a pantry in a Soho town house. I thought of the joints of meat and the bowls of eggs and pats of butter that had once filled this room. I looked at the woman opposite me, her kind eyes seemed to see everything, and with an easy grace she imparted what she saw. 

I told her, flicking my feathery scarf over my shoulder, “The literary biographer diagnoses Rhys.”

My editor’s eyes creased as though she was not sure whether to laugh or grimace. After giving her time to think about it, I delivered my punch line.

“My approach is to share her diagnosis.”

Inevitably, I had confided to Maria, the advance had been spent “on lipstick and taxis”, and I was stuck. Fatigue weighed me down. I had lead in my limbs and I didn’t know where I was going to find the strength to lift myself from my seat. This is my life now, I thought, as Maddie’s screams grew more urgent. There is no getting away from it. 

I just wanted the screaming to stop, not for Maddie’s sake but for mine. I needed to fill in a form from the Department of Work and Pensions to prove my eligibility for disability benefits. The fifty-something pages of questions were a poll to measure me, so that I could add up to the sum total of my symptoms. To place me on a scale of one to ten, to itemise my physical incapacities, my lack of aptitude for work, my lack of worth. At the same time I was so frazzled, I could not explain myself. The DWP was an ice pick chipping away at my skull. I just wanted it to stop.

And it wasn’t as though there was a space on the page where I could tell them how my legs couldn’t hold me, my arms couldn’t raise me, my head was a jumble of regrets and shopping lists and unfinished sentences. Or how, on some days, I could reach the giddy heights of strolling through the West End, flicking a feathery scarf over my shoulder. Instead I had to answer questions about how many meters I could walk unaided; how far above my head I could raise my arms, and how did I get dressed? The answer was: I didn’t know. I just did, somehow; it was a struggle, but I did it. Somehow, I found the energy. I just had to wait for it to arrive like a rain shower, or a breeze that would carry me forward to the next step. Right now, there was only dense fog with drizzly patches. This was all I could think about: not Maddie, or what Hassle might do to her. But how I could find the focus to fill in this bloody form. 

I had an idea to go the London Library. It works as a subscription membership where you pay for silence. I pictured myself sitting in an armchair by a window that looks onto the gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s. I hoped the picture might move me into action. Then another one arose. I was strolling through deserted iron-grille stacks that house a two-hundred-year old collection of cloth-bound books. Under dim bulbs, they give off the scent of their disintegration. Just by breathing them in, I was hanging out with dead writers.

Heavy thumps on the stairwell alerted me to the arrival of the postman. He knocked on my door. 

‘People shouldn’t be allowed to live up such steep steps,’ he gasped. Like all the locals, he ignored the commotion coming from next door. 

‘Why are you hiding up here? The world will find you out eventually.’ 

I could hear a spiteful satisfaction in his voice. He could not do anything about his bulky mail bag or the violence being done to a young woman. But he could predict my comeuppance. 

This is what I dislike most of all in people. Cowardice. I looked at him knowing that he saw in me a woman who lived alone, and as such, had failed the marriage test. Although that could be how I saw myself. For all I know, he saw me as a brave Amazonian elder with wisdom to impart who had not quite woken up yet. I took the package from his hands without saying anything. This was my cowardice.

In letters to her friends, Rhys often admitted that she wanted to take a machine gun and empty a round on whoever was passing. This honesty was what made her so compelling as a person. What crowned her literary achievement was the scene she described of a madwoman banging her head against the walls of an attic. She did this in a novel that prequels Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In it, Rhys goes back to the childhood of the madwoman and how it was she ended up in an attic. 

Instead of contemplating Rhys’s passage from being a ghostwriter in Juan-Les-Pins to becoming the champion of the first Mrs Rochester, I thought of Hassle sauntering along the concourse, rolling his shoulders without a care in the world. I considered following him with my sharpest kitchen knife and stabbing him in the back. Before he knew what had happened, I was relishing the squelch as my blade as I twisted it into the flesh around his kidneys. 

These were the moments I missed Maria. Her shining, coppery face would gleam as we cackled around the cauldron of our thwarted desires.

“What shall we do with him, Maria?”

“Cast him into the seventh circle of hell.”

“What happens there?”

“Harpies will eat him.”

I managed to propel myself out of my chair and across the tiny passage into my bedroom. I had hung lace shawls from a rail because I couldn’t be bothered to fix the blind. Sunlight picked through the filigree to make patterns in the gloom. I looked onto the concourse. Bella was coming out of her flat, doing her morning routine of knocking on doors to make urgent appeals for cigarettes and companionship. She was in her flannel dressing-gown, with a plastic comb stuck in her short, stubby hair. I watched her disappear through the door of Alfonso’s flat. He was an old man who smiled a lot. When she came out, she was flourishing her prize, a cigarette. I got dressed and stepped onto the stairwell.

‘I saw you clocking him,’ Hassle was shouting. 

Maddie’s reply was a ‘No-oo’ that echoed a wail that had once poured out of me when I couldn’t understand what I’d done to make my boyfriend so angry. I was sure I hadn’t looked at anyone. But he insisted I had. Maybe he was right. Maybe I had looked at a man. 

On the street, I couldn’t see anything except my angry boyfriend rising up like a ghoul trying to possess me. I had to catch my breath. I opened my eyes, and scanned the glazed blue tiles and sweep of Homefield House as it stretches to Kensal Town. So many souls installed in units behind those walls. I knew social housing was meant to be generous. I was not feeling grateful. 

As a girl, I had visited a schoolfriend who lived in leafy Surrey. My schoolfriend’s house rambled over four floors. She had a father who worked in the City, a mother who made us a Victoria sponge, and three goldfish in a pond. This glimpse of how others lived plucked at me: the garden, the house, the pond. They still enchanted me because they were hiding places where I could feel safe and when I came out, I could reinvent myself. 

I crossed the squat bridge across the rail tracks, and began the slow haul down Golborne Road. My legs were like fallen tree trunks that I was trying to pick up from the road. My ‘issues’, at least the physical ones, caused me to make a pit-stop outside a hat shop. I admired a fascinator made of spider’s webs.A few steps later, I rested by the clay-oven, sourdough pizza joint. It made me sad for the days when I lunched with friends on triangles of glistening tomato that we dangled into our open mouths. 

I couldn’t afford the hat shop or the pizza place, and my favourite caff, Al Waha, run by Ahmed, had closed due to a hike in rent. I missed his old-fashioned courtesy. Ahmed had understood the need for vegan wraps, and when I passed his shopfront, we would exchange bows. Mine were done from the neck; his had more of a flourish. 

Now, Al Waha had been transformed into a furniture outlet. A distressed armoire stood against a black curtain. The owner, Jerome, sourced architectural pieces from rural France. Turning onto Ladbroke Grove, the mood changed. This was chicken-shop territory; a place where PCs and mobiles could be exchanged or repaired. The graffiti wasn’t commissioned by socially inclusive councillors. It was spiky and pissed off with the council. Several years after the Grenfell disaster, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was sending its tenants customer-satisfaction surveys. Their communications team had commissioned the surveys from a PR Strategy and Activation Agency. After ripping mine to pieces, I threw it in the bin. 

Most of the protests had been scrubbed off the walls of Ladbroke Grove. I was pleased to see the council had missed some. Tattered posters fluttered like shreds of cloud. They asked for justice. ‘RIP Grenfell’ was sprayed on the shutters of a newsagent. Black-sharpie pound signs stamped out the regulations printed on an RBKC noticeboard. This is what kept me going as I paced the length of Ladbroke Grove. It was speaking out. In the Sixties, the Black Power movement had been launched from the houses that lined its sides. At that time, they had been owned by a slumlord. He was famous for sending his henchmen to beat the rent out of migrants. The same houses were now owned by RBKC. Like weather-beaten sailors, they bore witness to the force of the wind that whistled down from Kensal Town. It brought leaves and litter, which disappeared by the time it landed in Holland Park. Here, the blistered Victorian houses became pastel cottages in a cobbled mews setting.