Extract: Possessions by Davina Quinlivan

My school friend Malika once kissed her teeth at our English teacher in secondary school while the teacher was trying to explain the nuances of Coleridge. She hadn’t meant to curse the teacher, but it was what her body wanted to do, so she did it. We were beyond it at that point. Our headmaster had famously walked off with all the funds and was wanted by the police. For the record, in my fifteenth year, the 1996 Ofsted report for the Hayes Manor School (Hillingdon, West London) is tonally woeful and apathetic:

Whilst the standards of attainment are well below the national averages, they are commensurate with those in similar schools.

It’s hard not to connect that damning line with another few lines which appear earlier:

Forty-three per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, well above both local and national averages… About a fifth of the pupils are refugees, including asylum seekers; the predominant country of origin is Somalia. About a third of the pupils are white. More than half the pupils have English as an additional language (EAL) which is very high, and a significant proportion of them requires additional support to learn English. There are 35 different mother tongues represented in the school population, the main ones being Punjabi, Somali, Gujarati and Farsi… The ability range of the intake as indicated by the end of Key Stage 2 tests and cognitive ability tests shows a strong skew towards the lower ability end with few pupils of the highest ability represented. 1

We were all predicted fails or very low grades at GCSE and beyond. Some of my peers were already retaking the first year of their BTEC specialist work-related qualifications (Business and Technology Education Council) or A levels, if they were lucky enough to be accepted on to the course. I was going to do OK, but we all knew we were destined to work nearby at Heathrow Airport or the local warehouses like our parents. Many of us were already working part-time at the airport, careers mapped out before we had even finished school.

Towards the end of our last year at school, my most eccentric friend, ‘Vicomte de Valmont’, as he liked to be called back then owing to his obsession with the film Dangerous Liaisons, encouraged me to go to an open day with him at the highly prestigious Slade School, University College London. We didn’t know it at the time, but decadence awaited us: Bloomsbury squares and all of their hallowed architecture; blossom on the trees and blue plaques everywhere with names we’d never heard of. The feeling was beautiful, even though we understood it was on the other side of a piece of glass we would never be able to break or fracture with our fists. Beyond that glass was Graham Sutherland, Lucien Freud and Roger Fry, Dora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Paula Rego, Stanley Spencer, Mona Hatoum and Rachel Whiteread. Others had brought their portfolios – we brought nothing but our attention and ill-informed curiosity. Our art teacher had taught us precisely nothing, simply prioritising more important things like smoking a fag or eating crisps round the corner in the room where the pottery kiln was housed. I’m surprised he didn’t spontaneously combust or explode, just like all the other things that went near that kiln.

We listened to a talk about one of the Slade’s most famous graduates, the post-impressionist British artist Gwen John. Despite being currently enrolled on an A level in Art and Design, we’d never heard of John so we just gazed up at the pictures from the projector. We lolled back in our seats and whispered to each other, complaining, albeit half-heartedly, of hunger or boredom. We had no point of reference for John’s Landscape at Tenby (1896–1897) or A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (1907–1909). Deprived of the cultural means through which to understand any of the subject matter, I felt myself fall into the folds of the paintings and they settled and glimmered inside my body, making odd shapes and whispering in gentle harmonies, while the colonial voices inside me nodded and simultaneously criticised John’s use of texture, her affected placement of a chair, her choice of medium (oils). I tried to touch the face of John’s portrait of a little girl who stared lovingly at her mother as they walked along the shore at Tenby, fascinated by her gaze. Then, ‘Vicomte’ grabbed my hand and squeezed it, announcing he had had enough. We bid farewell to the other students (because we were raised to have manners) and then legged it to KFC for lunch.

My friend takes a photo of me with his imaginary camera: ‘Girl in Bloomsbury, 1997’. Which was better, the KFC or Gwen John? One thing sated an immediate hunger, while the other gave me the taste of something new that would last a lifetime. A few years later, we both graduated, him in a black velvet suit and me with my hair down and two little ‘horns’ pinned up, in a bold homage to the hairdo made popular at the time by ‘Scary Spice’.

The Fates spoke to me, as much as they spoke through Malika’s lips. As a joke, I once predicted that a girl called Rajinder was going to marry at nineteen and have many children. I repeated this information to her face. It wasn’t much of a prediction, but she was highly offended. We all knew it to be true, but to speak it aloud as an insult deeply disturbed her. While I had hoped to cheat my own fate, Rajinder would not be able to, and neither would most of my school friends. The laughter, the kissing of the teeth, was a rebuttal of the highest order, emboldened by what I don’t know, fate, perhaps. Failing to produce her homework on Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale’, Malika simply shrugged and made an abject sound which, once and for all, told the Fates to fuck off.

I never forgot the laughter that followed before Malika was sent outside the classroom. She was still laughing in the corridor, blowing a crappy bubble with the Juicy Fruit gum she turned in her mouth. Perhaps she had simply meant to blow a bubble instead of making that slow tutting sound. A couple of years later she was thrown in jail overnight for defending her little brother in the playground, attacking a teacher in the blind fury of it all. Promising to be good, she enrolled herself at Ealing Tertiary College, admittedly a step up from Hayes Manor, and then trained as a nursery school teacher. I like to think of her laughing with a smirk on her face, because she always knew her own mind and I admired that. ‘Knowing your own mind’ isn’t as easy as it sounds. Remember, you also have to know your own body. Malika knew who to fight for and she would never stop, body and mind.

I had broken the rules of space and time and someone had to pay. I should never have escaped my fate (or indeed, for that matter, the UK’s ‘unhappiest town’). My friend had kissed her teeth at the Fates, but it was me who had defied them most of all. They were seething. I was sitting in the imaginary halls of Brideshead as an academic, being paid good money to talk about art and revolution, beauty and desire. Even before I had sat in halls at Kings College, Cambridge, about to give a paper in the French department as a research student, I had somehow ended up at one of those notoriously posh summer balls at St John’s College, Cambridge, thanks to a friend I had met while temping in Uxbridge (we’re still friends). I had betrayed my ancestors and was wearing the sheep’s clothing of a person I had invented and then become through sheer willpower.

Then, a plague arrived in my fortieth year and the laughter got louder and louder in my head. I found myself living in rural England, the furthest out of London I had ever been, where the slumping, weather-worn cows made their archaic, baseline bellowing in the cornfields outside my house while all of the world shut all of its doors. My Padaung ancestors returned the brass coils to their necks and tried to elevate themselves, higher up my body, near my vocal cords, but still they could not get out. A midwife once told me babies tend to turn towards their mother’s heartbeat in utero if they sense she is distressed and now my ancestors were doing the same thing, their little heads turning, turning, trying to hear my bloodlines crackle and hiss, which were also their bloodlines crackling and hissing. They touched their necks and prayed. I couldn’t hear them because their voices still sounded like they were at the bottom of a well.

Another prayed for me too. From the very lips of Saint Sidwella came a call to arms, a loving gesture. She tried to keep me in the living world where the fritillary butterflies landed on pink valerian, sow thistles, nettles; where the ragged foxes slid under yesterday’s blooms deep, deeper still, beneath the newly shorn, blunted hedgerows, the widening shade of the cedars and the elms. Spring arrived and her stalking shadow came by, approaching me from the fields outside my house, her eyes wide discs of light that dazzled and shone, as silvery as the dew on the grass, flecked with their rolling, blinking moisture. She was holding her head in her hands – her voice emanating from the thin spaces between her fingers, which were illuminated with a pure and intense light. This, too, I could not accept because I was no longer there. I was under the spell of my computer screen’s bewitching, myopic gaze.

I heard laughter again from behind the screen I was working on and then all of a sudden the world around me altered from black to blue, to blue to black, and back again. Or, more accurately, all was aglow beneath shifting shades of blue light. Soon, I would learn that the blue light was the colour of an explosion on a battlefield, as my ancestors and the Fates fought to the bitter end, thrashing and gripping each other by the neck, surrounded by an impenetrable ring of blue flames. Whatever it was, it was inside and it was outside. It pulled me in all directions. My body, a battleground. There was no time to talk, yet talking was all I did. The words pulsed and thrummed with their own persistent beat, burning bright blue and vermillion behind my eyes and ears. White noise, blue terror.

Saint Sidwella was still calling me out to the fields, but I didn’t listen so she called upon the rain. The water flowed, the water rose. The floods came, as they always did in these parts of the country where I lived, but I was already under the waterline, inside the streams of data, which were churning out of the technological hell hole I was in – and all that world was aflame. The water, which ran off the floodplains and the moors further north and south of my house, couldn’t put the flames out, nor diminish the scripts of smoke that were rising from my own fingers. The smoke was my past, present and future on fire. Like Saint Sidwella, I found myself with my head in my hands and I was floating in the light of a thousand Zoom meetings. I watched all of my edges and ends being cut away. That bitterly persistent feeling of falling, or being folded, so that I would fit perfectly inside the stammering lines upon lines of those ever expanding, scrolling rivers in the sky.