How I Left the National Grid (11 page)

In the early light the city looked brittle. I didn’t find the glass buildings ugly. They were new surfaces I could find a new face in. The slate had been wiped clean.

I called Nataly. Agreed to meet her outside The British Library before her shift.

Started to wonder if I’d done the right thing. Without your friends, without your partner, the world is harsh.

I bought a coffee from a kiosk and sat on a concrete bollard in the square off Euston Road. Amongst that clear morning light it was like a sandblasted utopia. That square glowed with an almost religious quality. Sun rose over the skyscrapers, lighting the square gradually, making the buildings look internally ablaze. The glossy windows framed this fresh white light, and I felt as new as the edifices around me. They hid the ugly past of the city, and amongst this cleansing light I felt I had buried my past.

Outside the sombre café a bearded bloke in a hunting cap lingered by the bin. A policeman chased him along and he went, reluctantly. I knew there were hostels in Spitalfields and Whitechapel, for homeless men. Was that me, now?

I wondered if she would even come, or if I’d have to go home. Face up to it all.

At that moment, Nataly was the only person in my new life.

She was early, and walked towards me quickly. I was glad I hadn’t rung when she was in a hole. She stood at a distance as she greeted me. Her hair longer now, shot through with a red strand.

‘What is going on?’ she said. Something twitching in her eyes.

‘I know it’s weird, turning up like this.’

She shook her head.

‘I’m glad you thought of me.’

‘Why?’

She wasn’t having it. ‘You look like you need a good meal, Robert.’

We walked to her flat. It wasn’t far off Holborn. I didn’t say much on the way there, just looked at the skeletal trees. It was like ancient London round there. Another world. Nataly lived in an upstairs apartment, overlooking this tree-lined square. Her parents had money, that much was obvious. Everything was beige, brown shutters on windows. Charcoal self-portraits everywhere. Her in her undies, or with veins popping out of her arms.

‘Do you live alone?’ I asked, as she boiled the kettle.

She pursed her lips. She’d wondered when it’d come up.

‘My boyfriend’s gone to Canada.’

‘He still your boyfriend?’

‘No. He’s working there. Most of his stuff is out.’

She took our drinks into the living room. Canvases on the floor, most of them turned to the wall. A mannequin wrapped in her mum’s chocolate-brown fur coat. Degas postcards, prints from Fellini films. That world she’d sketched out in her letters, laid out in front of me.

I could walk amongst it.

Frankie never had any of that, I thought. Just mild curiosity. But Nataly’s got this whole world, pushed under the surface. Vibrant. Richer than mine.

I want to live in it, I thought. No one’s given it the time of day and she keeps it in here, behind these shutters. It’s not like mine. Tattered, badly thought out. Her world is clear, crystalline. It has its own landscape that only she knows. She’ll make it.

If I don’t stop her.

She had a funny look on her face. ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve just realized something. The landlord’s left. His son has taken over since Mike’s been away.’

‘Mike is your boyfriend?’

‘Ex.’

‘So why are you smiling?’

She looked me square in the eyes. ‘Because his son will think you’re Mike, won’t he?’

I looked at the records.

‘Don’t you see, Rob? That’ll help with you trying to keep a low profile.’

I looked at the records.
Low, The Scream, Faith.
All perfectly preserved in aspic. Pillars in her world.

I could live here.

I took the drink. ‘What makes you think I want to?’ I asked.

She sat on the sofa. ‘I’ve seen you in better states.’

She tucked her legs under herself. Muscular, caramel-coloured. ‘You going to talk to me then, Robert? What’s going on?’

I put the coffee down, watched it cool.

I’ll ruin this place, I thought.

I stayed at Nataly’s a few months longer than I should have done. She left me to my own devices in the day, and once I’d grown a bit of a beard I started walking round the frozen suburbs. I walked round and round them as if, bit by bit, I could tread off my problems. The suburbs seemed to have their own sense of loss, and I left something in them. I learnt them as if they were my own set of prayers. Walking eased the tension in my mind. Even in rain, sleet and snow I pressed my problems into the pavement and left them to hum down there.

I knew I’d lost weight, but I was still glad no one recognised me.

Gradually, this new Robert emerged from the ashes. In my mind I had got so battered that I’d eventually been forced out of one life and into another realm. That was what it felt like, Nataly’s. Like this netherworld I’d slipped into, where my concerns couldn’t reach me. The legal battle with Exit Discs, the problems with Frankie and the band, they were like night terrors that I’d managed to almost forget. I felt like going back to my previous life would be as stupid as attempting to relive a nightmare. Nataly gave me access to the bank account Mike had left, and I started drawing money out of it. With those few possessions Nataly was able to give me, I started again.

It is amazing how little you need to get by. How much one person’s benediction can sustain you. After a few weeks Nataly stopped looking at me with fear in her eyes. She picked up on this new calm in me, and I sensed a plan coming together in her head. One windy afternoon,
while the gusts shook the window frames in her kitchen, she brought out her acoustic guitar. When she offered it to me I held it like it was someone else’s baby. While I ran my hands up and down it she showed me her notebooks, with these ideas for songs sketched out in them. ‘A lot of this is unfinished,’ she said, looking at them like a doctor with a prescription pad. In small italics, there were lyrics on one page, mirrored by details about production on the other.

She performed each, on the edge of her bed, in a husky voice, miles away from the commanding tone she’d had on stage. Occasionally pain would be writ on her face as she’d hint at some coda. In her stay-pressed white shirt, her hair pinned up, it was strange to see some office worker putting across such a vortex of emotion. It took me a while to realise what she was doing. She was giving me a banquet to feast on, by slowly encouraging me to step into my own imagination once again.

I could see why she had closed the blinds for so long. Even how she crashed from time to time. Her inner world was so strong, so detailed, I think she’d have felt it indecent to spend too long with the outside world, and all its dead alleys. These sketches that she then played to me were almost ready to be introduced to the world. At that moment in time she was a minor musician, but one who was gradually gaining more and more attention. The world knew of maybe five or six songs she had written, and I knew even they had taken years to write. But Nataly had so much more than that to hit them with. That afternoon I learnt that in her red spiral-bound notebooks whole albums were sketched out. Not one album she was pouring it all into, like me, but a whole sequence. She walked me through their brittle landscapes, hesitantly at first. She used female characters for her songs. Catherine De Barra and Becky Sharp were two of her favourite mouthpieces. Through them the anger she felt, at all the sexism, apathy and corruption, was expressed. These characters gave her, three verses at a time, new territories on which she could map the unspoken. One song in particular made my heart stop, showed me the real Nataly. ‘White Tiles’ expressed, in a few minor chords, this hidden bathroom culture she’d felt trapped in as a teenager. Self-harming to let out mental pressure whilst schoolgirls giggled in the
toilet mirror. In another, ‘The Gale Through The Trees’, she recast herself as a widow, living in a spectral house on top of a hill. Drawing freezing water from a well every day and spending the nights praying for forgiveness. This was Nataly doing what only a true artist can. Seizing her phantoms, one by one, and trapping them in songs.

A new ritual emerged. As soon as she came back from work, before she’d eaten, she would come through the door and pick up her guitar. It was up to me to join her, sit and listen. To stop whatever odd activity I was caught up in, and be an audience. On the occasions I didn’t, when my head was stuck somewhere, she’d stop after a few verses and it would be hard to get her to speak again.

I realized then that I was playing an essential role for her. One that she would probably die without. I was her inner audience. As she played, flat city light filtering through the blinds of her bedroom, I could imagine whole arrangements for these songs. I told her what I thought, in a low voice after the final note ended. She’d look up at me, excited and expectant, and I had to get my verdict right, otherwise her mouth would twist into disdain. But if I was accurate in my assessment she’d nod, or say ‘Oh god, yes,’ and make notes in the margins of her notebooks.

In the end there were four of them, lined up on the small shelf above her bed. Four albums. Her future legacy, stacked in a space that took up less room than an average tea-set. ‘Those notebooks there,’ I’d say. ‘Will outlast anything I’ll do.’

There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.

In return for this intimate tutorage Nataly shopped, cooked and fed me. She never asked why I couldn’t do these tasks myself. She knew that if she didn’t I’d grow thin, and waste away. Sometimes I thought she didn’t want me to learn how. If I did, it would be the first step towards me leaving.

When night fell, we’d listen to records. Lying on the floor of her
front room, under low lamp-light. Seeing how reverently she chose tracks made me remember why I had even wanted to be a musician. Not out of anger, or some weird need to be famous. But because I truly believed that these sounds created whole worlds that, unlike the world outside our window, endured. I remember watching Nataly, kneeling in paint-flecked shorts and a vest top, tugging this lock of hair from her eyes as she studied the sleeve to Kate Bush’s
Never Forever.
One of her favourites was The Cure’s ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ and at night I’d dream of her lilting voice, absently singing it as she cooked. We never talked about the unusual way we were communing with one another, through songs.

Other nights we’d drink a glass of red wine while The Cocteau Twins’
Lullabies
built a spider’s web around us. The woody, scarlet world depicted in the cover art the same texture, in my mind, as Nataly’s world. I realized that records were living spaces, and that if you allowed yourself to you could exist in their architecture. Even if they were cold and foreboding places, like mine. Full of twisted metal, and out-of-control machines.

One day, Nataly came home from work and gave me a blank notebook of my own. ‘What’s this for?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Take your time.’

I only wrote one, slow, shifting song. Thumbing chord after chord, a few phrases leaking in. When I played it back to her, Nataly said, ‘Oh, Robert. That’s one of mine.’ And she opened up her notebook, and showed me.

When that didn’t work she tried this different approach. One day I came back from my walk to see a Nikon camera on my bed. This bulky one, I could imagine some journalist taking to Beirut.

That afternoon she finished work early, and insisted we walk around Spitalfield market while it was busy and vibrant. Nataly wore a red anorak, and as she browsed delicatessen stalls I took photos of this beguiling, dark-haired woman playing the character of a rich heiress, with her hands. She laughed and joked with the market traders, and when one juggled two cherries to make her laugh the sound reverberated
around me, like a beautiful ocean wave. The photos I took were of a new woman. Less a strained ballerina, and more a glamorous damsel from a murder mystery. Her tousled, dark hair sticking to her nylon dress, and a touch of colour reddening her lips. I saw then how I was shaping her too with my lens, in the moments I captured her. Styling her for a future that I was perhaps imagining. We were both at the age were such thoughts seemed important. When the world still felt like a playground. When we believed that what we did was significant, a debt paid to the future.

There’s this one picture of Nataly that I took that afternoon that I still take everywhere I go. We took it in a Victorian tearoom that she dragged me to.

In the shot she’s standing next to a vase of roses at the counter. Behind her are plump cakes in glass domes. Nataly is looking just off-centre, smiling. Her hair has fallen over one eye and the other is smeared with glittering eye shadow. In this picture I can smell the fresh sponge cake, the rich scent of brewed coffee.

The Nataly depicted in it was never fully realized. She never completely embodied that mellow, satisfied Nataly, whose face portrayed thoughts about the future. When I look at that picture I think how I would do anything to will that Nataly into existence. I knew even then that one day I would trail around London, looking for traces of that afternoon. For a remnant, a hint, anything, that recalled the Nataly that fleeted in and out of reckoning that day. That afternoon a shard of an imagined future had fallen into our hands, and at that point we hadn’t yet squeezed it so tight that it drew blood.