Table of Contents
For Joeski, with love
Acknowledgments
With thanks to my family, friends and everyone who has helped me on this journey. I am also grateful to Seren, for believing in this book; to Brian Tart for helping me share my story; and to Penguin for publishing it around the world.
Preface
Its hard to imagine some journeys.
The kind that happen rarely,
to someone else,
and the kind the heart doesnt want to.
People often tell me that they cant imagine how it is for me.
Mothers especially.
They say they cant begin to understand the things I think and
feel and do; and that they dont know what, if anything,
would pull them through.
Perhaps its impossible to imagine, unless it happens to you.
Because life can be changed in the split of a second, and everything
you think and feel and do changed with it,
changed completely,
changed within,
beyond all imagining.
This journey has a scale of its own,
a space between the lost and found,
that ends where it beginsinside me.
Its almost seven years ago now, the summer of 98.
And still, at times, its like yesterday....
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 116
YEAR ONE
(Summer 98)
WERE HAVING a baby, Alex and I. At the end of the summer. The doctor says that all is well, and my mother says life, as we know it, will never be the same again.
Time is in limbo in Market Road,
hanging around,
waiting.
When I left work and walked home through the city, I came in, put on the kettle and felt like Id left my world behind. I sat for a while at the kitchen table; thoughts of the city, the paper and all its stories, dropping like litter about me.
Alex says Ill be back within the year, that newsprints in my blood, but today, in my stripy top and dungarees, the whirl of headlines has unspun itself, leaving the simple equation of boy or girl, shining in its place.
The city collapses inward,
and is stilled by a tiny heartbeat.
I am between worlds now, I guess.
On the window seat in the front bedroom, I look out on the stained glass arches of an old Welsh chapel, and up to a small patch of sky. I come here a lot now to talk to my big round belly, and to watch the mothers pass by.
When the sun raids the chapel in the late afternoon, its like sitting in a rainbow.
Alex says its exactly a year since we moved into this Victorian red-brick house in Market Road and next month, when the babys born, the rose vine that clings around this window will be full to bursting in a hundred nameless shades of white.
Were growing together, the rose vine and me.
Almost ready, almost in bloom.
I think of Alex often when Im here. At the picture desk in the Western Mail, shirtsleeves rolled up, black hair flopping in his eyes; at the coffee machine, perhaps, making cheerful small talk with the typists; in the darkroom, watching light emerging out of shadow.
He calls from there, to say he misses seeing me across the newsroom. He says it suddenly feels real, having a baby, now were apart.
In his lunch break today, Alex went to the Morgan Arcade and bought a smiling man in circus clothes who swings in a basket under a striped balloon.
The weathers humid, close, like a calm before a storm. When Im buying the paper and an orange ice pop, Sam in the corner shop says: Its gonna break. Its gonna rain, any day now!
Ive not been feeling well of late, just tired and thirsty, which the doctor calls quite normal, and Alex puts down to the heat wave. Were in most evenings, him and I, pottering around half-naked together, playing U2 and watching the telly. Sometimes I sit at the piano and he plays guitar and we make up songs that make us laugh.
We often talk about this child-to-be, imagining some blue-eyed boy with rosy cheeks and golden hair, or some brown-eyed girl with jet-black curls in the tatty, patchwork dresses Ive seen in the shops.
We imagine it will be just like the babies in the catalogs and the adverts on TV.
We can dream our lives away these evenings. The twilight hangs about for hours and the windows are awash with pinks and blues.
Last night Alex rigged up his old Decca player and we danced to the single he bought when he was eight: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Lynn Anderson. He told me he bought it with his three bob allowance money at Woolworths in Reading after football practice one Saturday morning, and when he got home, his brothers called it poncy and said he should have bought Ziggy Stardust instead.
I love dancing with Alex.
He holds me as if Im godsent.
In the study, the quietest room on the landing, we have filled four brown boxes to make room for the nursery. Odd bits and pieces, old camera parts, articles and magazinesstuff we dont need and can live without. Alex has filed all his photographs in one and Ive thrown letters and diaries in another.
They sit side-by-side now,
In two little piles of word and light,
waiting to go up to the attic.
Theres been a sense of recueillie in Market Road, a gathering in of who we are, as weve idled away these hours, sorting through photographs and flicking through diaries.
Alex says Ive had a silver life between these pagesrites of passage to be treasured, he says, like charms on a chain.
The sun rose behind a mountain, and fell in pieces through horse-chestnut trees when I was young, and I followed its orbit, in the middle of a brother, a sister and a big white house called The Moorings in a small, sleepy town by the sea.
Between these pages teachers tell me I have an unusual way of seeing things, Keith Simpson says I look like Marianne Faithfull and my school friend, Angela, says well be best friends forever. Between these pages life is charmed, as Alex says. Silver.
Alex says life didnt really begin for him till he was twenty. When he scraped together enough money driving a forklift truck in a warehouse, to buy a secondhand OM10 and do a photography course. His very first pictures are of a log in the steelworks, a bird on the wirethings he calls alien to their environment, out of place.
He says his life changed the first time he understood light. He was on a double-decker bus, traveling to college from Reading to Henley, when he suddenly saw the way it interrupted the trees, and curved into shadow, and that life became another journey altogether after that.
Alex says people rarely see the shadow; they forget that its part of the light.
We have finished the nursery.
There are psychedelic rainbows on the wall, and a smiling man who swings in a small straw basket under a striped balloon.
Alex puts the boxes in the attic, and before we go to bed, we sit together for a while at the freshly painted old sash window.
Like two small children, watching the city lights die out.
IF WE could only ever keep one feeling, from the whole of our lives, Id choose this one. When heaven lands inside me.
Joe Alexander is born in hospital at 1:07 P.M. on Saturday, August 29, two weeks early. He weighs six pounds and ten ounces, gets ten out of ten in his Apgar scores and has skin the color of a pearl.
