sheer might of personality, to be somehow contingent upon her. She’s here now—not physically with me, of course, on this train of pain, but with me nonetheless. And even that’s in character: affrontingly omnipresent, she always got her own way. And she never did change.
Which all makes it sound like I hate her. That I despise and reject every wretched facet of her five-note emotional range. And I do. If I heard on whatever grimly whispered grapevine that my estranged wife had been murdered I would turn myself in at the nearest police station, convinced I was guilty on grounds of mere thought-transference. That she’d perished telekinetically, as it were. But all this doesn’t explain why, on a daily basis, for the past three months, as regular as the milkman, I have been poleaxed, soul-hindered, by the most innocuous of phenomena. A vintage VW outside the post office near my Kentish Town flat can cause untold internal disturbance. A tall jar of pimento olives in the supermarket as I make my grisly bachelor rounds is a morning-sabotaging obstacle. A cause of shrill physical pain and panic, like the moment of childhood drama when you realise you’ve let slip your mother’s hand in a crowd. The wife introduced me to olives. By the end of our three-year tenure I was an olive gourmet; an expert on shape, size, contour and colour in the multifarious universe of the olive. I was an honorary Spaniard, or, at the very least, an honorary Greek, since it was at the orange-tumbling all-night Cypriot grocers that we embarked on our odyssey of olives. I’m certain that their bitter, briny, delectable tang will eternally conjure the potent myths of her cooking; her mother-learnt spice-knowledge, pulse-knowledge, olive-knowledge. I am convinced that, at eighty, the insatiable saltiness of an olive (mostly green, sometimes black) will rein me back to our three varnished, vanished dream-vivid years of marriage; with all chronology lost—every day at once in photographic detail.
And that, I suppose, is a terrible thing. If a jar of olives in a shop can do this to me now, what damage is it going to exact in the future, when the raw edge of memory is submerged? When the soul waits for an object, a perfume, a snapshot to stir a scene from the past, like a focus-puller zooming a blurred frame into crisp, clarified profile.
I am powerless in the face of these impingements. And it’s not just olives, those madeleines with a stone at their centre.
Only the other morning, for instance, I was on the lower deck of the unfamiliar bus to the shop, i.e. to work (you thought I made money from writing? Are you mad?); un-breakfasted, separation-crippled, bloodstream ninety per cent cheap red wine from the previous night’s saturnalia, when I whooshed past the park where we used to walk the dogs. And I got it all, right between the eyes, all at once. A Nagasaki of recall, and of helpless insight into that recall.
O mister bus driver, if I knew you were going to do this to me, I surely would have walked …
We used to have two little dogs. Well, we fostered over the years what seemed like a vast zoo of animals great and small, but these two—two chihuahuas—were, how can I put it, lovers. Like humans, their love was initially courtly, then fantastically, detailedly carnal. And it’s these two satanic rodents I remember most potently. Their names were Concepcion and Fidellino, or Fidel for short. I had no choice in their naming, as I had no input into holiday destination, TV channel, emulsion colour, gas versus electric, white versus red as a choice for alcoholic imbibition, side-of-bed-to-sleep-on, variety of supermarket, or what to wear in any given weather. They had to be her names. They had to be Spanish names, too. Unsuitable, unpronounceable, unmemorable to even the most fastidiously tuned canine ear. No Rover or Growler for her .
Of course, they never came when you called them. She claimed it was in the nature of the breed to be
Which all makes it sound like I hate her. That I despise and reject every wretched facet of her five-note emotional range. And I do. If I heard on whatever grimly whispered grapevine that my estranged wife had been murdered I would turn myself in at the nearest police station, convinced I was guilty on grounds of mere thought-transference. That she’d perished telekinetically, as it were. But all this doesn’t explain why, on a daily basis, for the past three months, as regular as the milkman, I have been poleaxed, soul-hindered, by the most innocuous of phenomena. A vintage VW outside the post office near my Kentish Town flat can cause untold internal disturbance. A tall jar of pimento olives in the supermarket as I make my grisly bachelor rounds is a morning-sabotaging obstacle. A cause of shrill physical pain and panic, like the moment of childhood drama when you realise you’ve let slip your mother’s hand in a crowd. The wife introduced me to olives. By the end of our three-year tenure I was an olive gourmet; an expert on shape, size, contour and colour in the multifarious universe of the olive. I was an honorary Spaniard, or, at the very least, an honorary Greek, since it was at the orange-tumbling all-night Cypriot grocers that we embarked on our odyssey of olives. I’m certain that their bitter, briny, delectable tang will eternally conjure the potent myths of her cooking; her mother-learnt spice-knowledge, pulse-knowledge, olive-knowledge. I am convinced that, at eighty, the insatiable saltiness of an olive (mostly green, sometimes black) will rein me back to our three varnished, vanished dream-vivid years of marriage; with all chronology lost—every day at once in photographic detail.
And that, I suppose, is a terrible thing. If a jar of olives in a shop can do this to me now, what damage is it going to exact in the future, when the raw edge of memory is submerged? When the soul waits for an object, a perfume, a snapshot to stir a scene from the past, like a focus-puller zooming a blurred frame into crisp, clarified profile.
I am powerless in the face of these impingements. And it’s not just olives, those madeleines with a stone at their centre.
Only the other morning, for instance, I was on the lower deck of the unfamiliar bus to the shop, i.e. to work (you thought I made money from writing? Are you mad?); un-breakfasted, separation-crippled, bloodstream ninety per cent cheap red wine from the previous night’s saturnalia, when I whooshed past the park where we used to walk the dogs. And I got it all, right between the eyes, all at once. A Nagasaki of recall, and of helpless insight into that recall.
O mister bus driver, if I knew you were going to do this to me, I surely would have walked …
We used to have two little dogs. Well, we fostered over the years what seemed like a vast zoo of animals great and small, but these two—two chihuahuas—were, how can I put it, lovers. Like humans, their love was initially courtly, then fantastically, detailedly carnal. And it’s these two satanic rodents I remember most potently. Their names were Concepcion and Fidellino, or Fidel for short. I had no choice in their naming, as I had no input into holiday destination, TV channel, emulsion colour, gas versus electric, white versus red as a choice for alcoholic imbibition, side-of-bed-to-sleep-on, variety of supermarket, or what to wear in any given weather. They had to be her names. They had to be Spanish names, too. Unsuitable, unpronounceable, unmemorable to even the most fastidiously tuned canine ear. No Rover or Growler for her .
Of course, they never came when you called them. She claimed it was in the nature of the breed to be
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