We Had It So Good (17 page)

“The street people who made the gardens in Harlem were the urban poor, and the poorest of the poor, if they needed materials they had to go hunting in the trash, and the only water they had came from the sky. So I was drawn to go and hang out with them, and help where I could with the carrying and the planting.

“I met a guy named Howard who was lounging in a broken armchair in a tomato patch in a gap on the street where he'd pushed away the rubble of a torn-down brownstone, and he was sitting back eating one of his juicy tomatoes, like a king on his throne. In front of him he'd dug a hole and lined it with plastic garbage bags and when you looked down into the hole, there were six fat goldfish, God knows where he got them.

“A woman named Maisie, who was originally from Detroit, grew huge sunflowers just for the hell of it. She could have sold them on the street but she wouldn't, she just wanted to see those sunflowers reach up with their massive yellow heads, it was a totally piss-off gesture. Someone else gathered rocks and painted them with the flag of their home country, which I couldn't recognize, I don't like flags, and faces like masks. That was not so much a garden as a
sculpture park. These people were so incredibly limited, they had no money, everything was found, and everything would either be stolen eventually—they'd go to sleep in a cardboard shelter on the lot and in the night someone would come and cut down the flowers and take the vegetables—or the winter would inevitably arrive and the earth would disappear under the snow, and the gardens would disappear too. Sometimes they'd return in the spring, they'd come looking for shoots, for some sign that there was a recovery, but mostly the gardens were temporary.

“I went to work as a cocktail waitress for a while, it was all I could get because I didn't have a work permit and it was the sort of place that wasn't very picky about who they hired. My feet would be swollen from standing all night and the straps of my shoes cut into my instep. I had to keep my fingernails and toenails neat and painted, and present them every evening for inspection, as if I was a fucking horse.

“But at that stage I wasn't ready to leave New York. If I had ever been able to sell my origami dresses everything would have been all right, but Americans are so anti-intellectual, it's all the bottom line, you can see their fingers moving, like they're counting their money without even being aware of what they're doing. They're sick people. I mean the white people, African-Americans are very much more human than the rest of us. They understand things without them being explained. I showed them my origami dresses and they took them, one woman tied the cloth round her head and made a huge hat, she had absolutely no inhibitions. But when I went to see the buyers on Fifth Avenue they looked at the dresses as if they'd been dropped down from outer space. And there
was
something lunar about them, you know, they were just very out there, and in New York, which was the one place where they
should
have been understood, they weren't, because the buyers were too stupid.

“I felt like I'd discovered the laws of relativity, and everyone carried on with the old science, the antique explanations. It was just
a dress, but it was the final boundaries of what cloth could
be
. That was what I did and no one cared, they looked at the folds and tucks and said, ‘Well, that's fine for you, but I'd be all thumbs.'

“I walked up and down Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and then down to the Village and to Soho and those dresses didn't sell. All they were were pieces of cloth and a set of instructions about what to do with them, how you could make at least fourteen kinds of dress, and the rest was left to your own imagination, the possibilities were limitless. I was trying to sell a total individuality, because even when you'd made the dress you could add a belt or pull up the skirt to a different length. The idea was from China, from Mao, who made these suits for everyone to wear so you would eliminate the tiresomeness of all that choice, but I twisted it, so that you just had one piece of cloth and a thousand and one ways of making it your own. But when I went into the stores, they just looked at my samples and said, Where's the
design
? This is just a piece of fabric.

“There was one woman I started arguing with, I said it's a concept, and she called me a flake. I'd never heard that expression. I had no idea what it meant. It could have been a good thing, I had no idea, but I found out later that it wasn't.

“Do you ever have the feeling you want to fly? You're with someone and you want to unfold wings from behind your back, and the wings spread out, heavy and white and the air rushes and folds and bears you up, and you just take off. And they're sitting there, stunned because you've done something no one can do, and for a few moments you hover and you're gone. I always wanted wings. When I was a child, at home in Kent, and I could hear my father's footsteps walking past my bedroom in the hall on the way to his study, I used to wish I could fly out of the window and over the valley. I could see some oak trees in the distance and I thought I'd beat my wings really hard until I reached them, and nest with the eagles.

“So in the afternoons I'd be helping the homeless people make their gardens. Howard used to drive the rats away with his slingshot, he had plans to make a birdbath out of a pail of water balanced on a pole if he could fix it firmly enough in the ground. The birds lived very fragile lives and it was hard for them to find food and water, the skinny cats would chase them for food. We found half-eaten birds on the ground among the tomatoes. Then at night I'd dress up in my cocktail waitress costume and I'd go downtown and take orders for drinks from out-of-state businessmen. The management turned a blind eye if you wanted to go further with them, that was much better money than the tips, but too distasteful. A few of them did it, they suggested that there were certain men who were interested in me, men who liked dominatrixes, and enjoyed being tied up, they offered to show me the knots, and it was tempting, I'd have loved to have had some man on his knees, but inside I suppose I'm just a middle-class white girl, because when one night this guy approached me, I ran.

“I only lasted there a few weeks. The other women all had far greater stamina than me, I couldn't take the hours on my feet, I kept sitting down at empty tables, which was absolutely forbidden, and eventually I was fired.

“I had the Harlem apartment as an eight-month sublet from someone I met in Paris who was part of the whole early project of gentrifying Harlem. The neighbors hated me. They were rich black yuppies, dentists and lawyers and professors from Columbia, and they didn't want white people in Harlem. Go back to the East Village, they said, you don't belong here. They were so conventional. They would have
loved
Islington, they would have died and gone to heaven if they could have seen your house, all this dead-salmon Georgian paint. By the time the sublet was coming to an end, I hadn't made many friends in New York, and all of them were from somewhere else, recent arrivals like me, people who came there because we were so absolutely sure that we'd make it, and we didn't.
Some of them wound up selling jewelry from a blanket on the street, it was that bad, I mean these were people who had expected they were going to be hanging out with Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. They were only one jump up from the homeless. A girl I knew became a junkie, and then I heard she died of AIDS. She was an artist, but whatever it was she did no one cared. She was living in a rathole, my place in Harlem was a palace compared to hers even though it backed onto the crack house.

“America threw us out, it picked us up like you pick up a frog and hold it by one of its legs and fling it as far as you can go, it sent us hurtling back across the ocean. Nothing good happened to me in New York, except the gardens, and they vanished. They are buried under hotels and offices now, the seeds and roots are sleeping. I suppose the people who made them are dead too. They weren't well, they would have had it hard surviving the winter. This was before Mayor Giuliani came along and cleaned up the streets and they vanished back into America, if they were still alive, if life still held them.

“It had been a long time since my father had put any money in my account. I kept on checking but there was nothing there, I suppose he must have given up on me, finally, thinking that years had gone by and still I hadn't come home so he was not able to have any control over me other than by stopping the supply.

“I wound up selling my blood. I didn't want them to deport me so I sold my blood to buy my plane ticket and I went to Barcelona, when it was still cheap and you could live an open-air life on the Ramblas. I met a guy and he took me to Ibiza. He had a house there with stables where he bred Arabians, but his main business was a club he owned in town, a discothèque, he called it, where rich Eurotrash came to party. I stayed all the time at the house, which was inland and very peaceful. I would sit on the roof sunbathing and look out across the hills and valleys, the sky was flat blue with a few clouds like a sprinkling of salt and I thought of my old Cuban
boyfriend. He bought me a horse and I learned to ride, and I spent more and more time with the horses. He was mean, but the horses were always very nice to me.

“If I could go back anywhere, apart from Cuba, it would be to Ibiza, to the house with the horses. We usually spoke to each other in Spanish but he'd picked up this English expression, I have no idea where.
Mind your manners
. And he used it relentlessly on me. He was always telling me that I was rude to his friends. I said, ‘Well, you know, I just say what I think and if other people can't handle it, that's their problem.'

“‘People don't like you,' he said.

“‘Who doesn't like me?'

“‘No one. My friends ask me, Why are you with her? She's a crazy bitch.'

“‘Well,' I said, ‘
you
like me because you are always showing me off.'

“‘You spend too much time in the sun,' he said. ‘Englishwomen should not sunbathe, your skin is wrinkling. You lie up there on the roof all afternoon and you are turning into an old lady.'

“I found his hair dye under the sink in the bathroom and I dyed one of his pure-white Arabians with it. He was furious but I thought it was the most hilarious thing. ‘The poor horse,' he kept saying, ‘the poor horse.' But what's the problem? The dye washes out eventually. The shop was out of his particular shade of dye and he came back from town empty-handed. His roots were already showing. Old man! I taunted him. I wasn't in love with him, the way I had loved my Cuban boyfriend, but we had a wonderful life, I'll give him that. The house was fabulous, I had the horses to ride every day. And very good sex. I can't fault him on that.

“It was in Ibiza that I had my second and third abortions. I don't know why you're surprised. The last thing I would do is bring children into this hateful world. If I hadn't been able to get the
terminations I'd have just strangled them as they came out of me, I'd have killed them with my bare hands.

“This was around the time the Berlin Wall came down. I kept wondering what Fidel thought, and made Juan go to the port to buy all the papers, because we didn't have a TV. I made him buy me a radio. I wanted to know what was happening, and could not work out what was going to come next. Now everything was an unknown quantity and I was still very curious. Before certain things had been beaten out of me. I did not expect that I would be so thwarted, I never thought I'd find myself on my knees.

“I wish I'd stayed in Ibiza. It was a big mistake to leave. Juan would have looked after me, he would never have allowed these things to happen. I was happy there back in the eighties, before life turned so strange. I could have married Juan and raised horses and gone to Barcelona every couple of months, which would have been enough. It was Juan who pointed out that I was a country girl at heart. You belong among the peasants, he told me, except you don't think like them, which is a tragedy for you.

“I can no longer remember why I left him, and sometimes, at night just before I fall asleep, a memory comes to me that I didn't leave, but that he asked me to go because of some absurd crime I had committed which caused him to lose face. But if that is true, I really don't remember it.

“I should have stayed out of the sun. I'm always having to have lesions biopsied. So far no cancerous cells. I assume I'm fine, I have no symptoms.”

S
tephen dreamed of his mother's meat loaf with gravy and creamed potatoes. He rebelled against his wife's healthy nutrition plan and her new mantra of eating only when you are hungry and stopping when you are full. He was the rationalist, not she, yet he found her regime joyless. Eating connected him back to his mother's kitchen, to her cake-baking, to his first experiments with the principles of chemistry, and how ingredients like butter, sugar, eggs and flour lost all resemblance to their original selves when combined. But he still enjoyed eating the results of the experiments.

No, food was more than fuel in ways he was not particularly interested in examining. In the BBC canteen at lunchtime, he chose the lasagne, the fish and chips, the quiches, and experimented with English desserts like jam roly-poly and trifle. He learned to like custard and what the British called biscuits. The only thing he drew the line at was Christmas pudding and mince pies, for what was the point of a dessert made out of dried fruit? Had the British never heard of pecans, chocolate? He had inherited his father's wiry frame, thickening now around the middle, but with no tendencies to be a fat man, so why should he not eat what he wanted? He
liked
to eat. What else were his pleasures, when the only drugs were the joints he and Ivan lit at weekends and the occasional line of coke
Ivan brought over for his birthday? Apart from that, all he had left was food. He no longer smoked cigarettes, and sex was irregular, neither of them had the energy.