Identity Fraud

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.                                                          

On Sunday Kaddy and I shop for a new frock for the launch of her first collection of poems, Milk Fever.  We reject all the safe choices and Kaddy goes for a lovely crepe knee-length dress in teal – apparently this is the name for the subtle greeny-blue of the cloth.  We choose it because it blends nicely with the colours of the book cover.  Kaddy likes it also because it’s different, and because it suggests the possibility of a new self: ‘I’ve never worn anything like this before,’ she says.  ‘Do you think I should wear my hair up?’

This morning I’m at the hairdresser’s.  ‘How are you?’ Steph asks.  I’m – what?  Looking forward to seeing the chemically restored real me emerging in the mirror.  At my back (I watch her reflection) another customer is trying to explain to her stylist the meaning of ‘solipsistic’.  That’s Cambridge for you – no nonsense about holidays and Christmas shopping in the gossip here.  But I’m feeling out of place.  Since returning from Argentina, I can’t find the Cambridge I loved as a dreamy twenty-something, or the person I was – or thought I was – forty years ago, or even forty days ago when the last trip began.

In fact, nothing is as it seemed.  Those we made our idols prove to have feet of something nastier than clay and the list of names of fallen heroes continues to grow.  The weird thing is, no one is surprised.  It turns out everyone knew all along.  Everybody I speak to has a Jimmy Saville story.  Today, walking back from the shops in a blustery dusk and watching the leafless giants swaying along the edge of Jesus Green, I remember a children’s television programme which taught you how to shade the trunks of trees, and think of all those fresh-faced presenters in that innocent black-and-white world.  How many more are we going to have to re-evaluate, to look at with eyes of experience and say, Well of course, I always knew something wasn’t right.

I suppose we all pretend, or try to fashion an identity that sits right with the setting, time or place.  My first memory of the Portobello Road dates from my student days, when a girl I hardly knew glanced at my oversized black sweater and Indian scarf and said ‘You look like you belong here’.  It wasn’t intended as a compliment, but I remember feeling perversely pleased.   Buenos Aires is famous for its addiction to analysis, which I guess might be about discovering the real you, and also for its reliance on cosmetic surgery.  One regular face on the tango scene there (although no more Argentinian than the rest of us) is notable for its immobility, the skin stretched to a fixed, open-mouthed grin.  It’s easy enough to distance ourselves from such obvious nips and tucks.  Still, those of us in thrall to the tango addiction squeeze our feet into exotic creations with five-inch heels, women who wouldn’t be seen dead in stilettos in the cold light of a Cambridge or Cumbrian afternoon. 

I believed in Jimmy Saville.  For longer than I should, I believed in fairies, and then god, and then the communist party.  Contrary always, or so my mother would say, I continue to defend the much accused, suggest that their good works, whatever shape they took, can still count as good, rather than be dismissed as fraudulent; or even, which finds still less favour, that those capable of a dogged attachment to evil are also capable of good.   As I hold forth, with examples, I watch the face of a friend crumple when my list of perpetrators includes one of her all-time greats.  ‘I had no idea,’ she says.  ‘I think I’ll choose not to believe it.’

At the other end of my contrary continuum, I cling to a silly belief that those closest to me are as I wish them to be: true to their word, unswervingly loyal, immutable in their regard for me.  I don’t know where that word – immutable – came from.  It’s not in my usual lexicon, but it has me scouring the bookshelves for an old paperback copy of Shelley’s poems.  I know it’s there somewhere because I remember reading his ‘Mutability’ at the funeral of a dear friend whom I loved, in my intense and erratic and ultimately faithless way, all my life.  We are ‘as clouds’, Shelley says, or ‘like forgotten lyres’: the only enduring quality we have is that we can’t stay constant.   I had forgotten that the book was a gift from this same friend.  I find his unmistakeable handwriting on the flyleaf: For being there, it says. 

I was sort of there, although I’m still disappointed by the mistakes I made, the small self-deceptions that enabled me to – well, live with myself.  In pretty much the same way, perhaps, as any abuser of the truth will construct a narrative that sanitises motivation, and helps sleep to come at night.  Being an unreliable narrator in my interior world, I’m drawn to the convention in fiction.  I’ve just devoured MJ Hyland’s wonderful Carry me down and This is how and marvelled at the way her central characters begin to learn to tell the truth about themselves, to themselves.  I’m hoping I’m haven’t left it too late.

I search YouTube for a glimpse of The Who performing ‘Who are you?’  Written by Pete Townshend (another fallen idol) and based partly on his alcoholism, the song has long been a favourite.  The video features an impossibly young Roger Daltrey and is intriguing for the evident embarrassment of the band around the business of backing vocals.  I’m particularly struck by Keith Moon who in my mind earns every adjective given to him – crazy, exuberant, destructive, creative, furious, posturing – but who here shows an endearing sense of mischief, infectious laughter.  The album, also ‘Who are you?’, was released in September 1978, three weeks before Moon’s death.

Did you have a fantastic time? Is it nice to be back? Kaddy asks.  Well, I’m not really back, I say, not really here.  Or perhaps I mean not really me.