Moving Out

(in response to a passage from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson)

It was a shock, in the end. The wall had crumbled, and the carefully constructed defences were swept away.

Tears? Well of course there were tears. That was to be expected. As for the physical things, the objects, they could be dealt with later.

But right now, it was time to run for the bus. Work wouldn’t wait. There’s no day off just because your life has collapsed.

Jack grabbed his coat, remembered his scarf and spent too long looking for his hat. He hated being cold. It reminded him of waiting for the train to school. White-tipped asphalt, and the winter wind whipping up the train line. And shorts. Shocking now - forced to wear shorts in the Winter. But rules is rules. How he wished he was 4’ 11” and entitled to the warm wrap of long grey trousers.

But Jack’s place as the littlest boy in the school meant he would just have to wrap himself up in his dreams if he wanted comfort.

Next to him was the man he called Sir William, in his head. The pipe-smoking businessman, warm as a Russian bear, puffing like the trains his Dad used to tell him about.

But that was all a long time ago.

Now, warm at the bus stop, but late for work. At least he knew once he crossed the doorway it was work time; and he wouldn’t have to think about it.

But standing still, the traffic sweeping past, strange memories of the life he was leaving flicked by.

I moved out of many homes – or perhaps I should just call them houses. Some were flats. Some studio flats. Single rooms. When I finally settled in Hove with my family, my son and I sat down to count the times he had moved into a new place. It was 6 then, and he was only 10. I then counted the times I had moved. 17. Despite of this, when I think of the words MOVING OUT, I can only think of 2 instances. One was the time I moved out of my parents' apartment, the other was when I moved in my future husband and out of the flat I shared with my sister. I think moving out of my sister's flat was the most painful and terrifying move I've ever had to go through. Because it was more than moving out of a property and moving into another. It meant cutting a chord that had sustained me for the first 27 years of my life. It sounds odd to other people when I admit to it (and sometimes it sounds odd to me now that I'm older) but my sister has always been my best friend and living together for that long felt like the most natural thing in the world. In reality, we only shared a home as adults for 9 years, but I don't have many memories of my life without her, either at my side or in the background.

The day I moved out of the flat we shared was painful because it was the day I was let out into the world on my own, without back up or an armour. I left home at 18, but I stayed in my comfort zone for much much longer.

I have no image of moving out. Strange. I have moved so many times, from one house or flat to another, one town or city to another. Yet nothing, no one move, sticks out in my mind. Rather I remember a visualisation exercise at a rather intense self development weekend in the country, where we were asked to see ourselves in front of our childhood home, saying goodbye to our parents and leaving. I couldn’t visualise it. I tried and tried but I couldn’t take that step away. I felt irrevocably linked/anchored/bound to my mother with a chain of guilt forged over many generations – a weighty umbilical cord that could not be snipped with any ordinary scissors. Her pain, her anxiety, reeling me in as soon as I’d extend a foot out the door. Even if I was on a longer leash, at school or at a friends’s , there was always the weary recall of that cord, momentarily invisible, but ever reasserting itself, winding my way back to her, to the shame of having forgotten her and having had fun.

Nowadays, I still chip away at these chains. They are lighter now at times, usually when she is away on holiday and someone else is looking after her and I feel alleviated of the burden of responsibility for her for a week or two. It’s not a physical care responsibility but an emotional one. A sense of knowing only too well how pained she feels, how lonely and anxious, how dependent. I want to move out of that childhood home; I no longer want to feel the yank of chain jerking me back to that cold place. I want to break the chain; the chain between her and I and the longstanding chain of dutiful daughter expectations passed down for generations before.

Moving on up, moving on up. Ever since that session in the small room three weeks ago when we heard the radio playing pop songs through the window ‘moving on up’ has been playing in my head. I moved out of my mother’s life when I was sixteen. I had taken a train to London to stay with someone I had met at a party. It snowed heavily and all the trains home were cancelled. I remember walking along Piccadilly in the middle of the street, making footsteps through the snow. Snow falling under lamplight. Teenagers in gangs, free, running, laughing, wet cheeks. Somebody knew somebody whose parents were stuck in Yorkshire. We moved into their house and drank our way through the 1970s drinks cabinet. Dubonnet, vodka, whisky, a jar of morello cherries. I kissed a boy called Tom. Word got about and by day two there were 30 teenagers living in this house, sleeping on every piece of soft furniture. I forgot to tell anyone where I was. Did I? They found me in the end. Three days into the siege under the snow blanket. The telephone rang in this house, Bakelite black. It was for me. My father’s faraway voice. “Come home now.”

The snow had melted. The railways sleepers lay uncovered in rows, laid out all the way to Swindon. The train smelt of old cigarette smoke. I dawdled at Swindon station, missed two buses. Instead of going into my house I went into our neighbour’s, sat talking to my friend’s mum for hours about justice, freedom, unfairness., big families where no one noticed you until you did something wrong or marvellous. Eventually I walked in through my front door. They were waiting. My mother said, “I’ll never trust you again.” I had broken something but had no idea what that something was.