The Cure for Sleep: Impossible Objects
Season 3, 005: Tell the story of an object in your home (or one you remember from childhood) which holds great and uncertain emotional power...
Welcome to Issue 5 in Season Three of The Cure for Sleep on Substack: this companion project to my memoir of waking up, breaking free and making a more creative life. It’s a place where you can explore your own most important memories in the company of others who are also interested in the art of life-writing.
I’m writing this month’s edition in the weeks after my mother’s death and graveside service. As well as being wrapped in the blanket I made in the ten days spent nursing her, Margaret Annie Dunn was buried (as she wanted to be) with one of two brown handkerchiefs belonging to her great lost love: a man she put aside in error in her 37th year and missed ever afterwards.
Those handkerchiefs are among several objects of compelling and uncertain emotional energy I’ve placed throughout The Cure for Sleep, having always been fascinated by the way things so often carry the weight of our longing to have to and to hold. To possess. To make sense of our place in the world, our value in it. Or to keep close a person gone beyond us, in life or in death.
The two objects I invoke from my own past in the book - and which recur then as motifs, as metaphor, at key points in my adult life - are the Weather House (a barometer in the form of a Swiss Chalet) and a willow pattern plate. In both cases, these objects are part of how young-me handles desire and discomfort once my father has left home, and my mother develops severe OCD:
The Weather House…
My favourite toy these days? What was it? Go fetch. I ran away, animal-glad to be released from the cold stone seat and dark bramble hedge behind it. My cautious habits cast aside.
There it was behind my rubble of egg boxes and other mud-pie making stuff. House within a house. Smelling of the soap scraps I’d collected from a wooden shaving bowl in among the heap of leavings. Pink smell of violets, now more dear to me than the man who had reappeared, bitter with smoke and engine oil. I rushed back and handed it to him.
‘A toy, I said. Why bring this?’ My father frowned at it, but my words came pouring out, a snowmelt, now I’d been asked something I could answer. Because how I loved them, the little man and wife who were always there when I visited! What care I took collecting the best seeds and petals to push in through the lady’s door so she could bake a cake! The amount of little twigs I snapped into tiny pieces so the man could keep the stove going!
I did not say it had been my whole body’s wish – hands, heart, tummy – to make them come out at the same time, and how many hours I spent trying until I learned that they could not and would never. Nor did I tell him about lying stiff and wakeful beside Mother in the double bed at night, willing myself small enough to sleep inside the chalet with a bed of my own, able to wriggle when I needed, with the man there to check for noises when they came. None of this I spoke aloud, but what I had said was too much. Father’s voice got loud.
‘This isn’t a toy.’ He took out a small yellow-handled screwdriver from his overalls. ‘It’s a barometer.’ I reached for it and was pushed away, my skin prickling like it did when Mother pulled a jumper full of sparks and static over my head.
‘It’s broken.’ He put the screwdriver away and left the back of the chalet hanging off. I began to understand what would happen next, but was too short, too slow, to stop him.
Could only look, mute and useless, as he hurled the man, the wife and their house far into the thick, thorned hedge.
The Willow Pattern plate:
[Mother] began to rise earlier and earlier, exhausting herself – and me, hearing her – in a forensic daily dust and hoover of our every square inch. We’d always lived to a fixed routine, but the new household rules were stricter still. I left too many sticky marks (even though she had begun to wipe my face and hands between each bite of food) and so was not to touch, any more, objects from the mirror-backed china cabinet I’d press-ganged as companions: cheerful yellow coffee cups; willow-pattern serving plate that thrilled me with its story of two escaping lovers who turned into birds at the water’s edge to escape their families.
It’s a sign of how much I have always trusted objects over family relationships that those ‘cheerful yellow coffee cups’ are on a shelf beside me now as I write: a wedding-day gift to my parents who divorced before I was four, still giving me comfort now they are both dead and I am almost fifty. Strange and slightly tender to admit (as so many of our stories are).
your invitation to write
In 300 words or less, tell the story of an object in your home (or one you remember from childhood) which holds similar great and uncertain emotional power...
Use the comments field below this post on Substack to submit your words.
[Please read the guidelines for contributors if this is your first submission to the project.]
about tanya
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I have an old brown leather purse that belonged to my Nan. She died when I was 11 or 12. I;m 59 now and the purse is still in the drawer next to my bed. It has a certain smell and it takes me back to when I used to visit her with my mother. She was in her 80's then and I would sit in front of her patiently like a dog waiting for her to give me some sweets. She always wore the same brown zip up slippers and an apron and her hair would be tied back. A sort of Doris Lessing style although she would never have known that. I can see her wrinkled face now and see her hand dipping into her apron pocket. I used to play with her skin on her hand to see how long it stayed standing up. I do the same with my mother sometimes now. She had one of the old-fashioned hearing aids that she would turn off. Her apron smelled too but it was a good smell - one of warmth and love.
Inside the purse are some old pennies in tiny compartments held together by tiny clasps.
One day she was there and the next she was in a home and then she came home for a time and then she was gone. I was too young to see her in her last day or go to the funeral. She's still here in my heart and I'm starting to well up a little now as I type. I'm going to get the purse out again later and take a look and a smell. Go back and see her again. I miss her.
59C
I spotted it with a kestrel’s eye. In a flash, I was on it. I’d been hovering in the museum shop – ‘Street Life’ they call it. It was on a trip ‘home’ with our then young children. A toy bus, but not just any toy bus. Navy blue and cream livery rushed me back to my childhood. EYMS: East Yorkshire Motor Services. And then I noticed the details. A 1970s Daimler Fleetline double-decker: my era. ‘59C Circular via Preston/Hedon’: my route. My ‘not my’ village named. Registration plate AFT 784C. I can’t be certain of that accuracy.
This bus took me home, every school day in the second half of the 70s. A circular route for people who never left. Dad’s patients. Shopworkers and shoppers. But a basket empty of school friends for this direct grant boy, the only one at the ‘posh’ school from my backwater village. Left to my top deck devices, I discovered a love of language forms and structures – irregular verbs, subjunctives, indirect speech. Yes, indirect speech, which I see now as a metaphor for a largely remote, if unhostile, teenage existence, where nothing seemed direct, close, or intimate. Instead, I found companionship in the reliable patterns of accidence, and security in the sounds of the ancients.
I’m looking at my toy bus now. It sits in pride of place on a middle shelf, beside a pot of raptor feathers, one of which is from a kestrel. I used to spot them from the top deck of the 59C, on the stretch beyond the lime trees. The bus is a quasi-talismanic die-cast treasure I’d give away last of my possessions. It tells me where I came from, where I went to, and – fittingly for a circular route – what I never managed to leave behind.