Blue walls. I know we’ve been here before but I need more time. In the corner, floor to ceiling shelves and on the highest a square of revolving blue plastic translucent panels that I wanted to touch and wasn’t allowed to, they must have been an architectural prototype for some larger design, a present to my mother or perhaps she made them, I wanted to take them down from that high shelf and revolve them on their wires. White rose cornicing. Inveraray Castle at opposing ends, one near, the castle in its detail, one far, how it sat with the hills and loch, an ancient dominance. A thin door to the kitchen always open, and on either side running the length of the wall a fantastic set of built in white cupboards, a gap between upper and lower that was a shelf, inset and lit and filled with magazines. Above, the glasses we never used, below storage of records and family albums. The record player in the far corner. Copies of the Architectural Journal and Private Eye piled on every surface, not just the long running shelf, but the low, square, glass coffee table that had lozenge metal loops for legs and was placed between Conran chairs. There the magazines stacked and leaned and toppled onto the long-haired white Habitat rug while on the huge, round dining room table they elbowed for space amongst drawings because this was my mother’s domain, this dining room, it wasn’t where we ate, and the Architectural Journal and Private Eye were her career and her politics. The circular dining room table, a silver band running its rim was surrounded by Chippendale chairs and never clear of her work, the piles of things to be done. This is where she was late into the night. This is where her typewriter, so cumbersome it had its own trolley, was wheeled beside her. Or beside me in the daylight hours when she was at her office and I was home from school and had this room to myself; me and my cat and the Duke of Argyll in his wig staring from between vast sash windows heavy with London grime. A stationary island on wheels brilliant with compartments designed by someone who liked pockets and what to put in them, a place for every item imaginable, a shelf for clean paper, a pen holder, drawers that swung from a central axis. Ideal for me and my need to be useful, play secretary, type strict letters, feel worn out by the task. This was the room in which my mother cried at night, she must have, all mothers do and I was drawn to it. There were photographs everywhere, propped on the shining sideboard that had probably come from my father, us in our growing up phases, a photo cube that I turned over and over. Here I sang along with Sting about the bomb and felt impotent at the window, here I worked on dance routines to ABBA and studied the The Vapours album cover, looking for the people. I kept returning to this room of straight-backed brown sofa and gas fire, Habitat rug and Conran chairs, the magazines falling over. I keep returning to this room of my mother.
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Beautiful. A prose poem to a space and the woman and girl who both occupy it and no longer occupy it. I loved: “brilliant with compartments designed by someone who liked pockets and what to put in them” and “all mothers do” and of course the astonishing “keep returning,” a slender needle that assembles every word which precedes it into a crystallized whole. The room is now unforgettable for one more person. You are a master. Thanks to Adam Nathan for the introduction. I subscribed.
I bought "A Perfect Explanation" and I'm a few chapters in. Suddenly, in Chapter four, reflections of the dining room. I can't convey how eerie it is to encounter flashes of that place surfacing in the novel. It's as if I were the audience volunteer in a magician's show, and rather than pulling a coin from my ear the magician pulls the toy I once played with as a child and haven't seen in decades, scuffed and colored just as I remembered it. I'm not explaining it quite correctly. Maybe it's this feeling: what is my memory doing in your book? The generative powers of words astonish me sometimes.