Lucy Holden - Lucid : A memoir of an extreme decade in an extreme generation

Lucid

A memoir of an extreme decade in an extreme generation

Lucy Holden

If you think you know what being young is like now, youre wrong. This is the real, funny, warm, demented, heart-breaking deal.Caitlin Moran

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2022

Copyright Lucy Holden, 2022

The right of Lucy Holden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

Some names have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN: 978-1- 3985-0037-2

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1- 3985-0038-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1- 3985-0039-6

For my parents, for everything.

And to anyone who has ever been made to feel theyre losing it completely.

At times, late on those nights when

the dancing, the slight intoxication,

my wild enthusiasm, everyones violent

unrestraint would fill me with a tired

and overwhelmed rapture, it would seem

to me at the breaking point of fatigue

and for a seconds flash that at last I

understood the secret of creatures and of

the world. But my fatigue would disappear

the next day, and with it the secret; I

would rush forth anew.

The Fall,

ALBERT CAMUS

I walked on tiptoes until I was ten years old.

My Achilles tendons are roughly a quarter of the length of other peoples, so I had to train my heels to touch the ground after I learnt to walk. My dad took me to the hospital appointments, and I remember sitting on a bed with a paper towel topping and a doctor stretching my legs to see what they would and wouldnt do.

More than the hospital I remember walking around the streets of Falmouth with him afterwards, following his verbal instructions with my own. Tiny and with a blonde tangle of ringlets, saying, Heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe, as he did, like it was a thrilling new game, which is how I learnt to walk like other people in the end.

I still walk on tiptoes sometimes, if Im thinking about something else entirely, or trying to be quiet or invisible, like I got used to doing when my dad worked nights, later on, and was sleeping when my brother and I came home from school and we had to be as silent as possible until he woke up. In my twenties, I used tiptoes to sneak in or out of the flats Id tried to make a home while different men slept or raged, quickly learning the creaks of the floorboards and avoiding them, but feeling like my heart beat louder than any step would groan if I trod on one.

The words still run through my head sometimes, silently, as though repeating heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe will get me through anything. Thinking that if that mantra taught me to walk on level ground when I was a child, that it might walk me through whatever uneven time I find myself in again. I wondered whether there was a metaphor in there for a while. Like being born with less of an Achilles tendon than other people might mean I had no Achilles heel, but I knew I did and I knew it came largely down to one man.

When I saw his name on my phone after almost ten years and felt my breath catch in shock and the ground shift beneath my feet, I knew I had two options. I could tiptoe unconsciously or fearfully through what was about to happen, or I could dig my heels in and repeat my heel, toe lines to myself again, knowing it was the harder, more painful way to walk, but understanding that silence wouldnt achieve anything. If Id learnt to walk once before when my body didnt want to, I hoped that this time I could walk my mind to a place it didnt want to go but needed to be.

I sat on my bed and breathed in, to stop myself tiptoeing to the kitchen to get a bottle of wine, which is what I felt like doing. I knew I needed to be completely sober when I sent this message, and I knew Id only get one chance. I stayed where I was and felt the breath sink to my stomach and my jaw clench as I asked the man I hated more than anyone in the entire world for his email address, the muscles in my throat tightening and something like heat creeping into the corner of my eyes. I didnt ask why hed taken nine months to respond, I just waited, and when he gave me what I needed, I opened my email and asked if he had any idea what this was about.

An hour later, he told me it sounded serious, and I wondered whether he really could have no idea; whether that was even a possibility. But I knew he had to say that. I knew he was smart. And this could be evidence, if I ever wanted it to be. I wondered, as I had several times in the past nine months, whether he had read the message when Id first sent it and had been deciding whether he should ever reply. I wondered about the power of the mind to block out memories completely for those who wanted to forget the past. I knew how powerful my own mind had been, most of the time, in building a wall and not looking over it to a house on the coast on New Years Eve, but I knew that Id always known what was the other side, even if I never looked.

I took a deep breath and I started typing, not feverishly, but lucidly; more conscious than Ive ever been. It took less than ten minutes, because Id known for a long time what I should say. Then I read the message three times and pressed send, knowing Id gone over every possibility of a reply and that I had a high chance of not getting what I wanted, or needed.

Even clearer than that was the knowledge that in the old days I would have sent it and gone straight out into the world and sought chaos. Drank and shouted conversation and chain-smoked and followed the night into the morning or the morning after so that I didnt think about anything at all.

But I didnt. Instead, I went downstairs with my heels as close to the ground as theyd go, thinking heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe. I put my trainers on and I walked the country lanes that wove around the blankets of fields near my parents house and I started sprinting.

Id been running away from things for a long time, but it didnt feel like I was running to escape anything this time. It felt like freedom. Like learning to walk.

Every generation seeks to define and understand itself, but I never thought mine would be given a war so fiercely personal and frighteningly public that forced us to sit with our identities in 2020, crystallising our own testament of youth as other generations had in post-war years.

A month after I turned thirty, a pandemic with many of the same conclusions of death, chaos, loss and revaluation either locked us into or threw us out of the lives wed made and I felt my private life break down in the middle of a collective, public collapse. The main difference in this new war was that we werent waiting for bombs to drop and men to disappear, younger and younger, to the trenches. The danger was less tangible and we watched the generals in charge of our fate on TV, ordering Deliveroo for dinner so we didnt have to risk our lives breathing an invisible virus that could kill us outside.