twenty-six

“Determined to do everything myself, I turned independence into a weapon. I thought of it as a strength, but it was a faultline along which I fractured. I resisted taking other things too – love, advice, knowledge – even if it was good for me, even if I wanted it. Like my troubled relationship with food, which always felt like too little or too much, this refusal – a fear that merging with another would result in the loss of my hard-won self – was old and it ran deep.

sixty-eight

“I had felt that if I moved, if I spoke, if I breathed, everything I valued and everyone I loved would be destroyed. But with my analyst’s belief in me, that suicide vest packed with the explosive that is shame started to loosen. The heaviness in my chest eased, and I drew breath. The weight had not only been despair, it had been rage. Frozen rage. The ice-fire of helplessness that I had finally turned into words, clumsy words, but because they had been spoken to a man who could hear them for me, a glacier shifted, moved by the melt of tears. It’s been said that there are no monuments to rape survivors. The only memorial I can build is this one, fashioned from words.

II: River Esk, North Yorkshire, 1920

“Lost, along with the privacies that form the real biography, never recorded or known; then countless inner adjustments we make to be in the world, to accommodate our loneliness, our ache for reunion.

III: River Westbourne, London, 1951

“What was the city to me? It was rain, narrow streets with lovers hiding in dark bedrooms opening their clothes to each other for the first time, the warmth, the shock, the gratitude. It was snow on the black roofs, the blush of light as it fades, lamps coming on across the square. The chairs carried out to the garden, the table too small for dinner, plates balanced on laps and left in the grass.

IV: River Orwell, Suffolk, 1984

“At the back of the shop, Peter sat at a large table, the Anglepoise leaning over him, as if searching for errors in his work. He heard the front door open, with its bell on a hinge, and a voice call out:

‘On Amsterdam Island, it’s 4:01 p.m.; in Perth, it’s 11:01 p.m.; in Alert, it’s 10:01 a.m.!’

He looked up. Thank God. She was home.