I Live Here Now

Product Information

It was strange to see the light shining from behind the triangular shaped gap in the curtain, as if the woman was still inside the room. We cross the Golden Lane estate where she used to live, and where I stayed with her whenever I came to teach in London. I looked down at where she was digging and noticed that the tarmac next to her was bulging and cracking as small buckthorn saplings forced their way up through the road, splintering the surface.

Nadia, me, my children — to and fro and round about with the person opposite and the person by your side and then moving as a four, on to the next line. He was born in Odessa, into a family of Jewish musicians and mathematicians whose careers had been blocked or put on hold by the official and unofficial anti-semitic prejudice of the Soviet Union. I had written about the women I watched through the windows in the rooms above, and also, once, about the woman in the basement. But I trust that they will grow back deep and soft, and cover the stone once more, keeping their company.

I think of the encumbrance of having a well-known surname, but of how this matters less in Scotland, and even less in the international collaboration of our Crown Letter, remembering how glad I was when Dettie first mispronounced my surname, the relief of remaining unrecognised, keeping me safe and hidden, distinct from my father’s name. I wondered if this was intentional, to leave the light on, or if the forensic team were just too exhausted and forgot to turn it off.

And I look on, making notes, remembering watching the woman of the basement, reading that morning on her bed, wishing but doubting that she could be more peaceful now, resisting imagining that darkness. We headed home through the park in darkness, to the sound of speeches from an impromptu rally taking place in the children’s playground.

Thank you for your wonderful comments about my walking drawing resource and it’s lovely that you’re inspired to try the process out. My dreams snap shut on me on waking, I try to put a finger in, as though prising into a mollusc, to prod the flesh of it, but the very act of trying to touch seems to provoke the snapping shut. They had found a source, almost on the grounds of a nuclear power station, looking over to the islands of Arran and little Cumbrae. Her practice, ranging from drawing, photography and performance to sound and film installation, draws upon historical events, semi-biographical stories, and eclectic cultural references to create visually charged environments that summon memories of the past and negotiate aspects of contemporary existence.

I look out at the flats opposite, whose windows sealed me in for so many months, whose rooms set the pace and provided daily diversion. I hold on to these traces of his voice, the slight breaks in its rise and fall, the pauses, as marked on my memory as the rhythm of creaks on the stair in the house I grew up in, where I lay in bed and heard him climb the stairs to his study at night, to prepare for his performances.Many of the larger lumps had taken flight, descended to the pavement, and there were bare gaps where once there had been bouncy hillocks of green.