Free Fullalove by Gordon Burn Page A

of the language of course were instantly lulling, and the Ice Maiden American voice doing battle with the intricacies of English pronunciation – ‘reeelly splendid’, ‘a look of wisdom and bewt-ee’, ‘that was a waaanderful summer!’ – provided a secondary diversion. I came in after the beginning of the story but, by the point where the Boy and the rabbit are tearfully separated after a bout of scarlet fever (I cried), I was engaged enough to feel as if a cooling hand had been laid across my fevered brow (the baby-pink manicured nails; the modest diamond solitaire). In my memory the hand has come to belong to Isabel, the hostess who earlier in the flight had assured me that the chest-pains I was experiencing were not signs of cardiac arrest but most likely the consequence of putting away too many sherbets the night before, and to keep on steadily sipping glasses of water.
    I listened to The Velveteen Rabbit two or three more times all the way through before we landed. That was six years ago, and I have hardly stopped listening to it since – on the tube and in mean-curtained hotel rooms in early-to-bed towns; in pubs and during the purgatorial, drawn-out days of waiting at flower-heaped atrocity sites.
    An Olympic sprinter once told me about the strange sweet feeling that ran through him at the moment he decided to accept God into his heart: ‘Like cool air,’ he said, ‘being blown into my chest through a straw.’ I suppose it could be something like this I am trying to capture with my twin pathologies or rituals: the astringent menthol vapours on my pillow at night; the crisp insinuating kindergartenisms of Meryl in the mornings. (The later are experienced largely as sounds and abstract associations by now – compulsive, reveried, divorced from any story.)

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    I am living in what I suppose, looked at objectively, you would have to call reduced circumstances. But reduced from what? Reduced from how I used to live with my wife, Even, and our children, Tristan and Jennifer, certainly. For instance, the ‘bed’ is not a bed but a grubby tangle of bedding on a sofa: sometimes I clear it away when I leave; just as often I’m relieved to find it lying where I left it when I come home. Ditto the milk cartons and cups and kitchen things that officially live behind a counter in the same room, with the two-ring hotplate and the ‘junior’ fridge that over the years has taken several coats of paint.
    This is a studio flat – i.e., one bedroom, one living room, one alcove kitchen, one lavatory with oppressive, entombing stall-shower. Two of the main items of furniture are lightweight and collapsible, and were probably meant to be temporary when they were first rescued from the pavement by my landlady, Mrs Norstrom: a garden recliner with a rusting frame and wipeable upholstery, covered in a pattern of big, blown red and orange flowers on a foxed-blue ground; an aluminium table with hinges down the middle where grease and crumbs and fugitive food scraps accumulate. There is one picture – a poster-photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge. Plus a copy of the Desiderata on a monkish parchment scroll that my daughter gave me as a present when I moved out of the house and in here about fifteen years ago, when she was seven. It used to remind me too much of recovery programmes and the 12-Stepper’s ‘Serenity prayer’ (‘It’s embarassing but it’s beautiful’) that somebody at the office once slipped anonymously onto my desk with a note saying it was time to forgive myself and get some self-esteem. For a long time I kept it turned face to the wall, with the words – ‘Go placidly amidst the noise’et cetera – glooming out only when Jennifer visited me with her mother. The carpet is the kind of straw stuff placemats are made of in healthfood restaurants, the walls unobjectionable, indeterminate.
    Very occasionally it can look as though Annie Jeffers has come with her recycling bags and dumped the contents in