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Those were the reasons, that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh,
and that was called ‘love’ for the workers in song;
probably still is for those of them left. – Chelsea Hotel #2. Leonard Cohen.
I didn’t get a lot right.
I know what you think of me, because it’s what they think… thought… of me. Shallow, self-absorbed, selfish. Cruel at worst, useless at best. I reckon you’re even wondering what to make of this. I don’t blame you. It’s not like I made a name for myself as one of London’s great introspectors. That’s the thing about death though; it lets you see every single one of the hundreds and thousands of choices you made that stacked up into the sum total of your life. So I can tell you, with absolute clarity, that whatever they’ve told you about me, whatever you think of me, I am… was… all those things. All those things, but also more. Worse than anything you’ve assumed; better than you want to believe.
I didn’t get a lot right.
When I was five, I told Ted that I wanted to live a hundred lives because one wouldn’t be enough. I used to go to sleep at night wishing an adventure would happen to me; that I would be kidnapped by pirates, or stolen by a selkie, or that I’d discover some other world waiting at the back of one of the caves along the coast.
When I was fourteen I heard the Rolling Stones on the radio, and from the very first chord I knew that was what I wanted; I wanted music and flashing lights and to get lost in the roar of a crowd, to let the screams of thousands of people drown out every thought in my head. I wanted to wear beautiful clothes, just like Marianne and Chrissie and Anita. I wanted to stand at the side of a stage, smoking endless fags, and then I wanted to go to some party where there would be incense burning and people drinking champagne from the bottle and musicians telling everyone about their next great hit. That was the adventure I’d been waiting for; a life no one understood. That was why I felt like I was ready to scratch my own skin off; I had never fit. It was why I’d never been able to do all the things I was supposed to do or be the things that people wanted me to be. It was why I’d watched the people around me moving through life as if it was water in the harbour on a calm day, barely causing a ripple, when the inside of my head felt like a January storm, the worst kind that crumbles houses from clifftops, and blows catastrophe onto the shore. It was because I always knew that there was going to be more to life than St Mawes; that there was something bigger, something wider, than a tiny fishing village in a tiny corner of a tiny fuckin’ island. I used to look around at the piles of decaying fishing nets and the lobster pots, the boats with their chipped paint and the people living and dying by sun and tides and the size of the day’s catch, and all I could see was zombies, washed colourless by brine and an easterly wind.
Do you know what really pisses me off? I wasn’t the only one who felt like that. Ted did too, for a while. He got out as fast as he could, disappeared into the army and tried to make more of life than being a fisherman’s son. Everyone always forgets that, but he heard the same call I did, once; felt the same tug of fear that his life would never really get started if he stayed, the same lure of great, grand adventure waiting just beyond the horizon. He felt it too, but then he came back, and he married the girl he’d always loved and took the job that had been waiting for him all along and forgot what we both knew; that St Mawes will suck the life right out of you, until all you're left with is fuckin’ grey skies and wet sand and conversations about the weather.
That’s why I married the first one. It wasn’t stupidity, it wasn’t selfishness. It wasn’t on a whim. A new dress. I know that’s what they say. It was self-fuckin’-preservation. I met a man who was kind and I thought you could take me away from here. And that’s exactly what he did. I don’t know if he thought that he could love me hard enough to make me stay, but I reckon he knew the truth all along; I was always going to leave, even when it looked like I might bide a while. A man who blows into town with the fair can hardly have high expectations of the girl that blows back out of it with him. I like to think we were in it together. He turned me into Leda Strike; the girl who escaped, and I kept his name so I didn’t forget him, or what I owed him. The adventure. My freedom. The rest of my life.
After that, I couldn’t have gone back, even if I’d wanted to. The world was as big and wide and full as I’d thought it would be. It turned out I’d been right; you couldn’t cram it all in if you had a hundred years. All those people and places. All that shimmering, pounding music, weaving through the atmosphere like spells cast by sorcerers. And him. Johnny. The most magic of them all. He could pull words and chords out of the air and craft them into something that seared itself into your soul so deeply that it left a mark like a brand.
I know everyone thinks it’s me that pursued him. I know they think that I considered him the crowning bloody glory of my achievements, the near pinnacle of my ambition. They never reckon that maybe, just maybe, he’d have been equally fuckin’ delighted to say he’d shagged the Leda Strike, and no one- not a single soul- ever reckons that there might have been more to us than just that. Just like every other bleedin’ aspect of my life, you only get half the story. And what does half a story amount to really? An impression, and nothing more.
Johnny and I moved in the same crowds; we went to the same parties. We knew each other; you might even have said we were friends, once. That’s the bit that everyone misses out, when they’re busy making the whole of my life sound like some drugged up orgy. Johnny and I liked each other, for a while. We recognised something in each other. Neither of us wanted to be pinned down; we had a restlessness in us that no one else understood. Me and Johnny Rokeby was as simple as like calling to like. I never meant to get pregnant, but when I realised I was I knew that meant I got to keep a tiny little piece of him, always. A baby, one with his eyes or his hair, or his smile, would be the thinnest of threads tied between us. A scrap of evidence that the most magical man in the world loved me, once. If only for fifteen minutes. Everything that came after, the fights and the DNA test and the money and fuckin’ Gillespie almost didn’t matter, because I had the one thing that did.
I didn’t get a lot right.
I used to think I’d be a half decent mum, because I liked babies. I liked their smooth, perfect little faces. I liked the way they smelled after a bath. I liked how they looked at me like I was the very centre of their world. I thought that would make it easy. I used to imagine taking Corm to gigs, letting him sleep in the green room surrounded by leather and sequins, guitar lessons from Keith Richards or Eric Bloom, getting my friends to help him when he decided he wanted to be a musician. As it turned out, I wasn’t cut out to be anyone’s mum; motherhood was one more of my many and varied failings. The worst one of all, most of you are thinking.
Maybe I was never able to bring myself to really believe I was a mum. I never really felt like one, and that made it so easy to leave them when they reminded me of the life I actually had, or got in the way of the life I wanted.
Maybe Mum was just one more new thing I could try on and discard if it didn’t suit me, like a bell-sleeved dress or blue eyeshadow.
Maybe a woman who could barely look after herself was never going to be cut out for looking after anyone else.
Maybe it never occurred to me that kids are always leaving you, and that having them is the one way to guarantee a broken heart. From the second they’re born you have to start letting them go.
Whatever it was, it’s obvious I didn’t have it in me; whatever that thing is that means you put them first; that they become the sun around which you orbit. That thing that means every wish, every desire, every dream you ever had ceases to matter, because all that matters is them. That thing was missing in me.
Luce knew it. She knew it from almost the second she was born. They put her on my chest, and she looked at me and through the haze of whatever drugs I’d asked for I realised that she just… knew. She saw right through me. This is not the woman who’ll keep me safe. This is not a mother to be trusted. This is no mother at all. I don’t know how she knew; she just did.
But him.
Him.
My lad. My boy.
The pride and joy of my fucking life.
I didn’t get a lot right, I know that. But him? Whatever I did, whatever fuckin’ horrible mistakes I made, however I… ended… I can’t have fucked up entirely, can I? Because I made him. Because he knows I loved him, as well as I was able.
And I did make some horrible mistakes.
I know you’re dying to ask; I would be. Was it him? Did he do it? How did it happen? I wish I could tell you, but that’s a puzzle for finer minds than yours or mine to work out.
What I can tell you is that I really did love him.
You want me to tell you that I didn’t, that I was enthralled or bewitched or just shagged senseless by him. That’s what everyone always thought. The word love doesn’t seem to be a word very many people associate me with, but it's at the heart of everything, all of it. Just because he was the worst mistake of all doesn’t mean I didn’t love him; it doesn’t mean I didn’t worship the fuckin’ ground he walked on. I would’ve scratched out eyes for him. I would’ve given him every penny I owned, if I’d owned any by the time he came along. I would’ve walked over hot coals right into Hell for him, and how he made me feel when he looked at me. Those eyes could make me forget the lines that were beginning to show around my own by the time I’d met him. I could forget, when he looked at me like that, the glimmers of grey that caught the light in my compact mirror. When I stood at the side of his stage, watching him prowl and snarl at the crowd, I forgot that I wasn’t twenty anymore. For the length of a set, my best years weren’t done. I wasn’t past it, some ageing relic of a dying era; I was that rootless drifting girl again. No one could look at me, standing beside a man as young and alive as him, and think it was time for me to start acting my age, to settle down, to grow up. To start being a mother to my kids, even though it was a bit late to start by that point. Corm hadn’t needed mothering since he was ten years old and when Luce left for the last time with Ted, I knew she wouldn’t be back. And the little one… my baby boy… well… He was wasted on me and his dad, wasn’t he? There’s something we can all agree on.
I didn’t get a lot right.
You might think that would mean I have a lot of regrets, but I don’t. That’s rock n’ roll darling; t’was ever thus. Everything I did, every mistake, every bad choice, every selfish decision was a smear of vivid colour on a life that could have ended up a wash of grey. It’s not likeable for me to say that, but I’m too long dead to care about being liked. My only regret is such a fuckin’ cliché you've probably already worked out what it is...
I’ve been watching him, watching things change for him; tectonic plates rumbling and settling into new places, changing the landscape of his life so slowly that he won’t recognise it until he’s standing on an entirely new continent, surveying a new horizon. All that shifting bedrock is making him think of me in ways he hasn’t done in years. Don’t think about it, hasn’t that always been his way? But he doesn’t have a choice now. There’s something about change that takes us back to the very beginning. Sometimes it feels like I could just reach out and touch him; as if all his thoughts of me could bring me back to being, could summon me up from the wisps of his fag smoke. I’ve watched him struggle, watched him hurt and be hurt, watched him make mistakes that are mine and his father’s in the making. I’ve also seen him smile, watched her slip gently into the hairline cracks in that great granite front he likes to show the world; watched her ease them into crevices first, and now to fault-lines, opening him up in ways he'll barely recognise until she’s shone light all over the darkest parts of him, changing him at his very foundations. I like her. Maybe that’s another thing we can agree on.
So what are the things I regret him not knowing?
What would I say to him?
Things only a mother- even a sorry excuse for one- could say.
I love you. I loved you harder and better than I loved anyone else. I loved you before I knew how to really love anything.
You were owed better than me.
Tell her. Tell her because it’s the one choice you can make that will change everything. Tell her because you know it’s true, because she needs to know it’s true, and because when she tells you it’ll be the truest thing either of you will ever know.
I didn’t get a lot right.
I didn’t get a lot right, but I don’t think I got everything wrong either. I did the best I could, with what I had.
Can anyone ever say they did better than that?