Ghost Lake Rising: Love on the Factory Floor
Plus the zoom link for today's paid subscriber lunchtime Write along!
If you’ve looking for the zoom link for today’s write along session for paid subscribers, scroll down to the bottom of this post.
What do we learn from our early experiences of love?
If you’ve read my memoir, The Ghost Lake, you might be familiar with ‘the unsuitable man’. This is not a story about him. But he was the place from which I was fleeing when I met my husband.
Have you ever regretted a decision you’ve made in your youth? For years I thought I regretted being taken in by the unsuitable man. For years I regretted where that relationship led me. But how can I regret a part of my life that led me to where I am today? How can I regret any of the domino falls that took me from the person I was to the person I am?
I left home days after my seventeenth birthday. I was running away from myself, as much as I was running away from work and my life at home. I thought that when I left school and went to work, i would stop feeling so completely out of place in the world. But actually I’d felt even more out of place, even more open to bullying in the adult world. I’d met the unsuitable man while out drinking in town. Within weeks I was running out of my parent’s front door and into the car of this twenty four year old man, who I thought was going to look after me. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t run from yourself. The me thatI hated so viciously was draped around me, a wraith that floated around me no matter how good a job I did at reinventing myself. And I was good at reinventing myself. In order to exist in the world, I was a shapeshifter. I found different ways of being and interacting with life, trying to find the way that was ‘right’, sure I could find a form I could maintain forever, one that would allow me to fit in. As I slipped from the front door of our 1970s semi and into the borrowed Golf of the unsuitable man I shapeshifted into the form of girlfriend-in-love, me and him against the world. And at the same time the unsuitable man, who was also a kind of shapeshifter, shapeshifted into the form of boyfriend-who-will-definitely-turn-his-life-around-for-real-this-time. The unsuitable man was troubled. I was troubled. When two troubled people rely on each other to fix themselves it never goes well. Sometimes I think about him and wonder what he is doing, whether he got away from the life we were living. I hope he did. I hope he found a way to be honest with himself and work on himself. I hope he found a way of loving himself and allowing himself to be loved, to be vulnerable and authentic and open to being love. We were two broken people who happened to bump into each other and something about us stuck together. It gave the appearance at the time to being fixed, to fixing each other. I hope he got away too. Our relationship was fuelled in one way or another around drugs and alcohol. By the time the relationship came to an end it’s all we did. We were both numbing ourselves. We were tearing into each other and numbing ourselves and the cycle could have gone on forever, but it didn’t.
I’d been sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor in the last weeks of my time in the attic flat that faced the sea, in the time after the unsuitable man had finally left. One day I woke up sick of wanting to sink into the earth and disappear. Such a strange time. If I imagine that flat now all I can see is the pink wallpaper and the window on one wall framing a grey-blue sea, the sound of the arcades drifting up from Bridlington promenade. It was the cheapest flat I’ve ever lived in, but the landlord was decent, and it was warm and dry. I had loved sitting there on a morning with my cup of tea and looking at the slate sea, and I had loved the way when winter blew in the weather attacked the windows, how I could listen to the pelt of rain and sea water and how soothing that sound was to me. Sometimes I sat up at night to watch the lights of trawlers coming back to harbour. But it wasn’t home. I was beginning to feel the draw of my real home. Home for me was the valley of the ghost lake, the place where I had come from and lived and sometimes wanted to escape from, and sometimes wanted to return to. I was only elven miles down the road, in the next but one town along the coast, but I’d managed to isolate myself when I was so keen to be someone else.
One day I woke up fidgety with the need to change. I packed my job in at the cake factory, and returned to my parents house, back to the landscape of the ghost lake, and the deep countryside nights and the small villages and housing estates that ring the edges of the long extinct paleo lake Flixton, a valley formed by a glacier; a place that has been inhabited since the palaeolithic. There I was, a pebble, a piece of grit adding myself back into the glacial till, embedding myself again in the place I had tried to extract myself from. Of course, I was still trailing parts of that life with me when I returned. I was 20 when I retuned, and I didn’t settle back with my parents well, having been independent for a while. They had gotten used to having their house to themselves and though I was paying them rent, it wasn’t a great way to live. I got a job almost straight away and began working as a silk screen stencil maker in a print factory in the industrial estate up the road. It was in the same place I had gone to secondary school, and the place I had had my first disastrous experience of work as an office junior. Now here I was back again, never quite able to get away. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. The brief dreams I’d had of being a creative, of maybe one day getting a degree by distance learning had gotten further and further away. I could not imagine myself writing a book. Though I did write, here and there. Poems, a journal, descriptions of the world. Maybe I will serialise my diaries one day, as a working class writer’s experience of becoming a writer. Anyway, I digress.
My new job, was working in the dark room and creating the silk printing screens. Digital printing was in its absolute infancy in those days, which is weird because that makes me sound really old when I am quite obviously not. It was a skilled job that i was lucky enough to be given quite extensive training for.
One day, a new supervisor appeared. He would be the person to rain me. I met him on the shop floor and found him to be cocky and arrogant. Readers, that was the day I met my future husband and I thought I couldn’t stand him.
Initially I could not stand his macho arrogance, his red-top tabloid banter. But we were working for weeks in the quiet of the dark room together and slowly we began to be more authentic with each other. We realised that we shared the same sense of humour and would spend most of our days making each other laugh. He was not at all what he projected to the world. He was really sharp (he still is) quick, clever, interesting, cultured, and under the cockiness, vulnerable. I would watch him leave the dark room and put the man-mask of masculinity back on around his friends and I felt a kind of honour to be the person who he let his guard down with. I wondered, constantly, if this was a man-trick. That he was being who I wanted him to be to be with me. This was something I had experienced often. But then, I had always been someone else when facing the world, I had never been a true version of myself. It took a long, long time for me to let my guard down with him. But we grew towards each other slowly and securely. There were some rocky times. Initially, neither of us was very good at being ourselves, we both felt we had to mask a lot in order to be liked. But we also recognised early on that what we had was special, we helped to make each other better people, we helped each other to grow. It was worth trying to figure out the shitty parts because of the goodness of the relationship. We have always had a very good friendship. I heard someone recently say that the thing that makes that makes good relationships, a good marriage is really just finding a very good friendship. Marriage, relationships, are just very good friendships. I think that bit gets overlooked, sometimes.
He was gentle with me. It never ever crossed his mind to be anything but. In terms of relationships, that was new to me. So new that I didn’t really trust it. When I had periods of the deepest, most profound depression, he led me back. When he had a stroke, I did the same for him. When we lost our daughter, and went through years of IVF and miscarriages and then the investigation into our daughter’s death, we became closer.
If I had to define what home meant, what it was, really, I would say him. He is home, my safe place. I would take all the domino fall where i fell, with him.
I hope valentine’s day gives you some good memories, and a sense of having been loved. x
If you’d like to read my memoir, The Ghost Lake, the paper back comes out in April, you can pre order it here. Or you can buy the hardback from the usual bookshops (and online) as well as the ebook and audio book, read by yours truly.