A Woman of Parts

‘Men find limps attractive,’ a good friend told me on Thursday. She was hugging me goodbye. She is a film director, back in London to pick up her visa before returning to New York. She was looking very well: blonde, green-eyed, clear-skinned. As she held me she explained the theory.

‘Men see a woman who limps and they think they can catch her.’ She kissed my cheek and smiled. ‘They like that.’

I considered this as I cycled away. Does this explain the great success I’ve had attracting men over the past 18 months? I’d thought it was my hair.

Because I do have a limp. And it’s been getting worse. Or, using my friend’s equation, better. (The worse the limp the greater the attraction? Is a bed-ridden woman irresistible?)

I dislocated my hip in a tobogganing accident when I was 22 and had successful surgery. It healed perfectly.  Within six months I was able to run a full marathon, cycle across the Rockies in summer heat and swim Lake Ontario. Of course I wasn’t so bloody stupid that I did any of these bloody stupid things, but I was able to.

In 2007 I was doing yoga, came out of a deep bend and screamed. And a few months later, walking with a friend in an orchard in Kent I first heard the words ‘Are you limping?’

I hadn’t known it then. But now it’s impossible to miss.

I was out with a man this summer, a guy I hadn’t seen in years, and the limp grieved him. He talked about it. He mentioned it. When he held me in bed he said ‘Is this your sore hip???’  It was more painful for him than for me. (He was the man I shocked by whistling as I came down the hall from the bathroom, returning to bed. ‘Was that you, whistling?’ he said as I walked in, his eyes wide.

‘Oh yes yes, that’s me. I’m sorry’, I admitted, crawling beside him. ‘My whistling is annoying. People tell me, I’m sorry.’

‘No, no. Not annoying,’ he said, thinking. ‘It’s kind of sexy.’ He waited a moment. ‘And off putting.’

My producer Chris maintains that’s why I never saw him again. ‘He’s not going to ring! Why would he ring?? You know what he calls you? You’re the whistling gimp.’) (She obviously doesn’t subscribe to my director-friend’s theory.)

When I got tired of seeing the grimaces of pain on the faces of my friends, I went to see a doctor who referred me to a surgeon who within six weeks agreed to see me unconscious under his able, gifted, slicing hands. On Tuesday, 29^th  November, he’s putting in a new hip.

I am so excited I can hardly tell you. I am going to be walking, dancing, ROLLER BLADING again (this I will do, can’t wait, on my birthday, you’re invited). And before I go under the knife I have given myself a quest.  I stand on a cliff top, shielding my eyes against the rising sun of my new Hip Life and scan the horizon. For someone. Some brave one. Some brave man, in fact – who will just put his fingers against the skin on my hip, as it is now and say ‘Ah yes. This is how it is. I will remember…’  And promise to always remember.

Or at least lie and say he does.

It’s not that I mind scars. I quite like the original one, in such a discreet place that you have to know me very, very well before you see it. It’s just that I don’t like change. Or, rather, changing. Once the scar is there, I will love it because it means I can walk. However, in these days before it arrives, I feel nostalgic about the as-yet-unblemished skin. I told two friends last Sunday in a pub that this part of my hip I happen to like very much. I like most of me quite a bit, if I’m honest, but these 10 centimetres at the top of my thigh – they are jolly nice.

And I want someone to recognise this.

Even if I have to pay him.

My pub companions, two young men, were very receptive. They were friendly – and charitable enough – to have sympathy for my plight and immediately volunteer their services.

‘I want someone,’ I said, turning in my seat and putting my fingers on my denim-ed outer leg ‘to just – feel – this part of me, and then to – ‘

‘Photograph it??’ said the handsome, long-haired musician I’ll call Bill. He’d had several beers by this point. So had his equally handsome, saturnine friend Ben.  They gazed at me, weirdly sober seven pints in. Or behaving weirdly sober, at any rate.

‘Yes!’ I said, not daring to hope someone would actually be able to get a camera close enough to those ten centimetres without embarrassing us both and making it look like a home porno movie.

Bill was on it.

‘I’ll feel it and Ben can take a picture!’

Ben scowled.

‘Why do I have to take the picture? Why do you get to feel it?’

‘I have softer hands,’ Bill said. He shrugged, philosophic.

‘You have softer hands?’ Ben guffawed. ‘What? You’ve been moisturising?’

‘You have hands like a rhino,’ Bill shouted.

At this point I realised they were no longer acting as sober as they seemed. And neither one has since mentioned this service they were willing to offer when under the influence, so I suspect they a) don’t remember or b) have re-thought the propriety of my request and decided, understandably, all is best passed over in silence. So, sports fans, I am back on the trail.

But I know what I want. I want someone sensitive, decorous, poetic – and with a camera. On his phone. That’s fine.  Someone young enough to be around in later years when I ask ‘Do you remember how I looked without the scar?’ and have him smile at me fondly – not, you know, creepily – and say ‘Yes. I remember it well.’ And if some day he’s not there I can look at the picture he took – his sensitive, decorous, poetic picture - and remember myself.

I am ready for this newer, faster, fitter me. I am ready to hike the coastal paths again, ready to skate for hours while listening to Ron Sexsmith sing ‘I’m A Late Bloomer’. It will be spring, maybe April, maybe my birthday. Trees will be bursting into blossom, light will ricochet off the Serpentine onto the sunglasses of the happy tourists eating ice cream on the benches, and I, on my roller blades, will push forward, stride after stride after stride, gaining momentum, faster and faster and faster and I will think on my director friend’s theory, about men who like women who limp. And I will realise this is irrelevant to me now. I will speed past boats and trees, past other girls on bikes sailing beside me through Hyde Park, and I will know, in my new ceramic replacement bones, that I am ready for a man who is fast enough to catch up.

S. Young - Artistic Director will return as soon as she is conscious. Enough.

Getting it Right : The Art of Taking Notes

Anna (not her real name) (so I could I call her Pallas Athene. Jocasta. Ankehesanamun [queen of Egypt BC 1348]) (yeah, I could, but it’s £$** hard to type)  is not only a dear friend she is my first reader.

She receives my scripts as they appear, freshly lasered, or pixelated into early drafts on the screen. She is the source of the best comments and editorial suggestions. She confirms Christine’s opinions and, as a writer herself, translates them into equations I can solve technically.

Equations that can begin ‘I hate Gladys’ if, say, I had written a script about someone called Gladys. ‘I hate Gladys,’ she would write, and at that point I would know where she stood.

Once I was writing a mildly autobiographical piece and the sentence was ‘I hate Stephanie.’ Very bracing let-me-tell-you. And she was right. Fictional Stephanie was hateful. So I changed her name (and pretty much everything else).

And she always begins with praise. What works and why. What she enjoys, what moves and amuses her, what engages her. She then examines, with surgical precision, what doesn’t work. Sometimes it is a very simple note with far-reaching consequences – ‘What motivates her?’ or ‘You haven’t earned this’; sometimes it’s just simple: ‘Cut that.’

But sometimes, as in the ‘I hate Stephanie’ moment, she is inspired to comments with a full-bodied energy and passion ‘ I wanted to slap her, who would date THAT? She’s ungenerous and unkind’ – that, trusting her wholly, she knows I will ride as an expert surfer does the high wave to the pacific beauty of a Much Better Draft.

I don’t mind the passion.

What I dread is the quiet.

The small sentence.

The blood-chilling phrase  - ‘Shall we meet?’

Then I know I’m fucked.

When I was at university I lived with a girl called Maureen, the only daughter in a tribe of older brothers. She described, with remarkable good nature, the abuse she underwent on a daily basis – kneed in the chest, drooled over, used for Nerf ball target practise, and, generally, the focus of casual assault whenever one of her five siblings was around.

‘My brothers tackled me. All the time. Because I would do something – like, spit in their milkshakes – no, believe me, they had it coming – and I’d take off down the lawn and one of them would be behind me. And I’d be ripping, I’d be tearing down the grass, heading for the fence, I’d hear him behind me. I’d hear him running and I’d be running and he’d be running, thump thump thump, and that’s fine. The running is fine. The bad moment was when the running stopped. Because I know where he is. He’s in the air. And he’s in the air because he’s leaping and I know where he’s going to land…’

This is the dread I feel in the quiet of Anna’s brief email response. No passion, no hatred;  just something in the air and I know where it’s going to land.

Last month I met Anna on a hot Saturday afternoon in her local park to get notes on the rest of the pilot episode of HOME MOVIES – the 21 minutes that follow the seven minutes we have filmed. The dread had receded and I was beginning to look forward to the relief I knew her comments would inspire. I have always said that, in art, you cross the bridge of poo to get to the grassy knoll of truth (‘Grassy knoll?’ Chris said once. ‘Do you have to evoke murder in Dallas?’), and Anna was leading me across that bridge.

We sat on our favourite hillside overlooking a verdant playing field, leaves falling weirdly in the 27 degree October heat. She glanced around nervously.

‘Who are you looking for?’ I said, following her gaze.

‘You know who,’ she said. ‘He lives – somewhere - here.’

‘Ah!’ I said, understanding. And panicking, myself. I looked down the paths for the familiar, well-built shape of Stretch Williams [not his real name].

Stretch Williams is the only person in my whole life to whom I have ever said ‘I do not want to see or hear from you again.’ He dated my friend Carol and when she ended it, he couldn’t. He called her mates, he arranged coffees. To talk about her.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love to talk about her. I just also like to think at some point in the conversation someone is going to realise they are talking to me. Even if it is about her.

After three such coffees when Stretch rang I said I didn’t think things were working out and I ended it. 

I now run into Stretch as though he is some messenger from an Underworld, the kind your mother threatened you with if you didn’t accept dates from the lanky, greasy, Star Trek enthusiast who fancied you when no one else would. ‘Sell when you can, you are not for all markets!’ my mother shouted – or would have if she had known Shakespeare said it best.

(Lanky Tom Buskard went on to a hugely prolific publishing career as a science fiction writer. So. You know. Who’s laughing now.)

I’ve run into Stretch so often it’s become a kind of parallel social reality – as though we really are friends and have planned to meet. He is always gracious but, after ten minutes, he can see the flecks of foam forming around the sides of my mouth and lets me go.

I cursed myself for choosing this patch of ground. I wondered if we should skulk off to a café when Anna, with remarkable focus given the potential for imminent social danger, turned and looked at me. Steadily.

‘So,’ she said. Her voice resonant.

The air whistled, birds sang.

‘So,’ I muttered.

She kept my gaze.

And, as full awareness descended, eyes-wide and heart-pounding I was able to say ‘I have to re-write the whole thing,’ and feel Anna nod before I heard her voice, half-strangled, half-desperate, announce ‘Stretch.’

And I knew this wasn’t a spiritual suggestion.

I looked up and there was the pleasant face of the gym-visiting, yoga-practising, ex-girlfriend-obsessed Stretch Williams.

Swiftly, before standing, Anna turned and whispered, intensely ‘It has to get much more real, there has to be something else between the women that accounts for their relationship, you can’t sustain a half-hour with the tone you’ve set up in the first scene, you need separate motives for what they do that keeps them connected and then we realise somewhere that’s all they’ve ever had.’

I memorised her words as you would directions from the Troll indicating the Way Out of the Forest of Death, saw her turn to Stretch, kiss his cheek and suggest a walk.

She took the bullet.

I transcribed the notes.

I’ve said it before. Writing is a collaborative process, informed by the wisdom that a plurality of hearts applied to a question reveals an answer the single perspective would not have seen. You need your friends/editors/directors/ producers – even, or perhaps especially, if they hate what you’ve done and can tell you why.

Anna returned without Stretch.  She sat down. My pen was raised for the next string of pearls but she wasn’t thinking about me.

‘He’s publishing a novel. Faber and Faber.  He’s got a big deal in the States.’ She paused. ‘He didn’t mention Carol.’

I reeled. I was full of a begrudging admiration and thought about this unfortunate tendency I have to repel men who later become hugely successful. But, even in my regret, I awarded top marks to Stretch.

He’d obviously, somewhere inside, taken notes.