My Animal Life(82)

I don’t know the ending.





My animal luck (ix)


the dance, the dance


I don’t know the ending. Because there is none, until our planet is absorbed by our star. Our lives are so short, a breath, half a breath. This moment soaking up the sun.

Here and now. The bright shock of the present. I began this memoir two years ago, at St Cuthman’s retreat, near Billingshurst and the ghosts of my girlhood, the village where I lived from seven to seventeen, and I end it in a second retreat, in Hawthornden, Scotland, which is free of memories and ghosts. Perhaps I am free-er than when I started. I look back on the life I have written down, brief bits of a path mostly hidden by trees. I was given much; I have little to forgive.

Another bee fumbles outside the window, a big heavy visitor, trying to get in. All round me, glorious April has begun. Spring is running away towards summer. The buds of the sycamores along the winding drive were like pale yellow pointed light-bulbs when I got here, slanted every which way on the black wire twigs like the snake of lights on our Christmas tree. But already they have burst into pleated green fans, miniature fingers pushing eagerly outwards, and the bud-cases lie like small wings on the ground. I must not think, as I see the sap rising, that if I die at the same age as my mother, there will only be fifteen more springs. Stay in this moment, the budding moment, the day still pregnant with tomorrow.

My animal luck: my living body. The living bodies of my husband, my daughter. The chain of three hundred generations of couples, linked in the dance, in the heat of the bed, all of whom were lucky, who begat children. Link after golden link: my luck.

Thank you, my parents, my grandparents. The two families who joined in me, and before them four, eight, sixteen …

All that fucking. That blood, that heat. That animal life. Quarrels, laughter, but the business of pushing life on got done.

Thank you, my friends, my dearest friends. Barbara and Hilary, my sisters, Jim and Grania and all the others who proved to me what kindness was. Thank you my teachers, who saw something in me, that white-haired, skinny, solemn child with her sudden fits of dancing and laughter. Thank you, Mai, who is just out of reach, and Musa, and André, for saving my writing.

Thank you, Rosa, for being my heart. It is too full to say any more. Thank you, Nick, for giving me Rosa. Thank you, Nick, for my animal bliss, for sharing this life with me, this breath.

Before I go, before you go, I place my story in your hands, the wonder of your living hands.