Nothing Special

NOTHING SPECIAL For my mother and father, with gratitude ‘You may think I’m not searching and He – Drella – may think I’m not searching, but I’m searching.Which one of us, who isn’t searching, for God?’ Ondine in Andy Warhol, a: A novel. Contents Cover Half-title Page Dedication Page Title Page Contents beautiful town. 2010 a very elegant young woman. 1966 sallad. 2010 every pill listed. 1966 mean big paper. 1967 the queen of freedom. 1985 A Note on the Sources Acknowledgements A Note on the Author Copyright Page beautiful town. 2010 a very elegant young woman. 1966 sallad. 2010 every pill listed. 1966 mean big paper. 1967 the queen of freedom. 1985 A Note on the Sources Acknowledgements A Note on the Author i v iii vi 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 189 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 iv Cover Title Page beautiful town. 2010 beautiful town. 2010 My mother had a book she liked to read to me as a child. She must have discovered somewhere that it’s good to educate your child. She must have encountered that fact amongst a haze of other facts at the time. She might have even once seen a mother and daughter on a bench working their way through the pages of a book, the mother pausing only to kiss the daughter on the forehead. They probably looked like they were having the best time of anyone on the planet. This was the type of image that would have obsessed and overwhelmed her. I think that she got it in a gift shop. It had that sort of sheen, the invariable pleasantness of the gift shop. In the book there were different types of farm animals with various attributes listed alongside them. I guess my mother felt sort of bad about raising me in a city amid the noise and crime. The graffiti scrawled everywhere, signalling mass discontent. The farm arrived late. I was much too old for the book. I understood that even then. I was at the age where I was starting to become aware of the many unconventionalities of our lives – our family arrangement, our dreary, rattling apartment, the aura that seemed to engulf us as a trio, the diner, our dirty and sombre street. My father wasn’t around, and even if he had been my mother insisted he wouldn’t have had any interest in reading. He wasn’t smart. She wasn’t embarrassed by this, why did the men she slept with have to be smart? That’s vanity, my mother declared. She believed many things to be vanity. Like you need to be smart to point at a page. So I never got to know my father, and he never got to know the book in which sheep took on existential qualities. They appeared sinister to me whenever my mother and I sat on the floor together. There was something happening under their dry, calm frolicking. If it was late, if my mother had been drinking, a lot of what she said was unpredictable. She often pointed at a cow and said, ‘That’s a sheep.’ ‘A sheep,’ I repeated. I knew it was dangerous to correct her. I knew, in my heart, that it wasn’t a sheep. A sheep would have had a halo of fuzz encasing its cartoon body. The accused animal stared out of the pages as if to say: I’ve done nothing wrong. It was one of my happiest memories. My mother’s presence and undivided attention was special, irresistible. I think that everyone felt that way around her. I liked being close to her soft face, watching her gentle frown lines, her breath sweet in my ear as she whispered lies. Silence, nothing – my mother’s trembling hands turning the pages. Then she would point at another animal, a donkey maybe, and say, ‘That’s a sheep.’ ‘A sheep,’ I repeated. I went along with all of it. I did until the end. Whenever I was in my mother’s retirement village – they sometimes called it a village as if they were all careening down country lanes on bicycles – and a nurse enquired what my mother and I had been talking about, I simply said, ‘Sheep.’ This is the type of tepid, pointless humour I bring to my daily life now. Where I’ve lived for the last three decades, it’s not about wit. We don’t have those sorts of desires. It’s more a matter of corresponding. I’m having as ordinary a day as you, my thoughts are as standardised as yours. The laughs are chaste here. In the mid-1990s, when my mother and I still weren’t speaking, I became fixated on the farm book. I was having some