Love needs an object 07_02_09

Love needs an object.

It was love at first sight. Not only did I know, in that deep knowing that’s nothing to do with knowledge, it was as if it was already a fait acompli. Journey’s End.
I knew, not just that I was going to live there, but that this was already my home. This house had been waiting for me. I knew how it would feel to live there and that I’d be happy there. That I would meet again the myself that was the true myself there.
If I allowed it.

From a photograph on a website. Before I’d even seen it in the real. Before I’d smelled inside it, walked around it, creaked a floor board, felt the heat of the sun bursting windows, stood in the kitchen desperate to cook, breathed the salty coastal air, or seen the living room view. I knew.
And like all fallings, I couldn’t wait to see it, be with it, welcome it, dive into it, have my scents in it and its scent on me.

Love needs an object.

It was the first house I saw online the Wednesday my flat sold, same day of the week that I was born.
First love at first sight.
Again.
Full of woe maybe.
Ah, but I had the time of my life.
Saturday, I drove there.

I hadn’t felt like that since the day I had met him at the airport. Another March day, exactly two years before. A man I knew, from the moment I saw him, that we were for each other in the eternal, have to have and to hold and to hell with everything else, ‘From Here to Eternity‘ wave splashing way. This man, all the way from London, to be with me.
This man who made me want to be my true myself.

Love needs an object.

I arrived two hours early, and saw it looming over the road into Banff. That great Busby Berkeley sweep of a road from the bridge where the Moray Firth makes you scream out loud at the beauty, swooping up to the High St, and there it was. My house.
All dark and Heathcliffy, beside its creamily harled neighbours, the parietal equivalent of an Irish wolfhound. Saturnine, dark, broody, salt and pepper good looks, not given to following the common herd.
Just the way I like ‘em.

The first house on the High St, raw dark-stoned with a red door. A brass lion door-knocker, and an ancient holly tree. That it had an ancient holly tree was a major selling point for me. ‘Of all the tress that are in the wood…’ And ivy at the opposite side of the garden. Balance.
There are a lot of them up here. Holly and Hazels. Beech and Birch. Not so many oak trees as south of Aberdeen. The Gaelic for holly is Chuillen. Cullen, just along the coast, may well have been named for the local holly wood.
It’s the tree of unconditional love and sacrifice. The blood of Christ, the crown of thorns kind of love.

Love needs an object you see.

That Saturday last March, I walked the town for a while. See what was there. Not a brand name store in sight on the main street. No Starbucks, not even a Boots the chemist. All independents. A High street, off it a Parisian steep hill - without the Parisian stairs - called the Strait Path - down to the less salubrious Low St. Much of which is the worse for wear. With the compulsory Tesco. And the glorious Admiral Gordon‘s House, one of the many admirals from Banff.
‘Up and coming’, I thought. It’ll be the ‘Stokie’ of the North one day. First comes the city folks, then comes the health food stores (High St one is opening this month, told ya), then comes the over-priced delis with pink ginger beer, ten varieties of mayo, tatties in baskets (therefore 200% more expensive than tatties on shelves) and sun-dried tomato bread.
But for now, you can’t get artichokes in Banff.
Or Chorizo.
Or a vanilla pod.

Love needs an object.

That Saturday, I had been too excited to eat before I’d left Aberdeen so I went for breakfast to a local café. Plain fayre I think describes it best. Fayre is probably too fancy a word to describe it actually. Rural Scotland, the place where salad still means a whole round lettuce leaf, a whole tomato and a slice of white gluey bread and butter. The menu was basically, every Scottish recipe for a heart attack from rolls and sausage to all day breakfast (no beans up here).
There is no such thing as a latte in Banff, there is a ‘mug of milky coffee’. ‘Coffee’ being used in the broadest sense of the word. There is no fear of sleepless nights from coffee drinking in Banff.
Roll on the deli incomers.
I’ve not had a decent coffee here yet, apart from the ones I make myself, with my 99p milk-frothing-plungey-thingy from IKEA.

Locals need an object. To stare at.
Being stared at, by the majority, is a feature of being new in a small place. Being a single woman buying a big fuck-off house to live in on your own, has some eyes popping out of their permed heads. Stage whispers in Tesco, a man nodding at me and commenting to his wife, ‘that’s her that bought that house.‘
I’m not sure why that hurt my feelings so much, but it did.

There are the self-appointed ‘pillars of the community’, first with a teapot and rattling a collection tin, always women, always married to men who have the look of someone who has had the stuffing knocked out of them. The too permed, too talcy-scented, thin-lipped, never look you in the eye before looking at what you‘re wearing types. They wear beige. The types who look like they are permanently noticing a bad smell.
They walk at you, rather than toward you, and initiate the pretend chat to try to find out everything about you. I’ve almost got the hang of it now. Two choices, be vague, or shock. That’s the key. Shock is my favourite, it works fastest.

It helps if they ask first ‘And what does your husband do?‘ Head cocked, one crinkled eye blinking at you faster than the other. The machinations of the pecking order of what husbands do visible in the rolling of an eye over my extraordinarily sparkly aquamarine ring (I didn’t spend it all on wet rot).

The retort, ‘I’ve never been married’ and the faux innocent stare-you-out look of, checkmate. Yes a woman, a single woman and I bought the big fuck-off Heathcliff house, usually has them stumbling backwards unable to speak. The eyes narrowing as they take in that not one day of my life have I had to put up with what they have put up with just to get a house. Not one day.
Pecking order?
Right out of the water.
I have come to live by the sea.

Terror ensues. It’s not natural. Then there’s the look. The look that could persuade you to believe that we actually are all reborn at the same time, in cycles, to meet and be with each other again and again and that she was once one of those who pointed and with one rolling eye blinking red and mad cried, ‘Witch!’

Actually, I surprised myself buying it. I believed that I thought I’d have to be married to have a house like this, to afford the mortgage. That a man would have to be involved. Until I realised that it hadn’t been a thought, it had been a hope.
What a lot I have found out about myself, just by moving house.

But love needs an object.

And when you find it, you only have eyes for it. ’Welcome to 1 High St’, the agent said.
‘Yes’, I thought. ’My home.’
It was everything I thought it would be and more. It even smelled right. I had thought I’d be afraid living in an ancient house. All those energies, lives, loves, quarrels, make-ups, boring dinner parties, clock-ticking breakfasts, tizzies, fracas, sleeps. Deaths? But there was nothing like that.
I only felt ’it’.
That feeling.
The Universal YES!
The man you love takes you in his arms and kisses you out of the blue and you know, he feels it too.
That feeling.
The yes.
Eyes across the room as he dances towards you. The ’lean’ towards you and you towards him. Peaking. Swaying. The smell of him. Him smelling your hair. Twirling dance of not looking straight into his eyes in case they swallow you up, whole.
Yes
All the things that add up to ‘the knowing’.
No, that’s not it, they are the joy of exercising the knowing.
You already know.
The yes is the yes is the yes.

’I knew it!’
’I knew you’d take my hand.’
‘I knew you would smell good.’
‘I knew it would be like this.‘
‘I knew we would be lovers.‘
I did.
And when he wouldn’t take her a scarf I had touched,
I knew he would never leave her.

Love needs an object.

I bought the house in Iceland. That is to say, I was in Iceland when I bought the house. Between local surveyor ennui and lack of pro-activity on the solicitors part, events overtook, and the last few days of what had been a stress-free surety became a flurry of phone calls a la Queen of Hearts.
’Heads will roll’, if I lose this house. Lesson is, never feel smug on getting 40k off the asking price, it just means other people will want it too.

Like all forms of love, especially the most fucked up forms, there is nothing like someone else wanting what you have taken for granted as yours, to focus and hone the emotions. I found that out twice within the year.
A neglected man,
A neglected home.
Another woman.
With a prior claim.

Except this time, the prior claim was mine, and fixed price or not, in Scottish law, I had the interest noted first so had first refusal. And like all ardent lovers, I was never going to refuse.
Sometimes, the dance just all comes together. It doesn’t mean it will last, but you will always have had that dance.

Love needs an object.

How glam am I?
On the phone in Iceland, on the bus from the airport to the hotel
‘Okay, just offer the price.’
‘Hazel are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure, just offer the price.’
‘Leave it with me then, have a nice holiday.’
I like to tell that story. It’s not often I feel cool. That story makes me feel cool.
Cool as a cucumber.
In Iceland.
In March.
Now that’s cool.

In Iceland, I shopped for the house. Like George Bush moving into the White House, I was making it real, drawing all the energy to me, in that sacred magical land. A Blue Lagoon white bathrobe for my new white bathroom. The dream bathroom, that’s big and warm and has a heated towel rail. Warm bathroom, hot water, warm towels. The first warm bathroom I’ve had in my whole adult life. Are there any more boxes that can be ticked?

Love needs an object.

Unlike other loves, this one hasn’t changed after the initial wowing wooing. It has got better and better, more and more comfortable, more and more ’me’. Deeper and deeper still. And the longer I’m here, the less I need to be. It was the doing of it that was the thing. To find out what I found out.
Just to move.
Just to move.
And be moved.

For the first five weeks I lived here, the wet rot work meant bedlam. Carpets were up, walls were down, I had to make more tea than is natural for the men working in my house, all my furniture was in storage and all I had was an air bed, a month’s worth of clothes, a washing machine on order, a laptop to work on and a broken heart to finally let go of.

I cried every morning, noon and night for those five weeks. I mean on my knees, snot tripping me, sobbing crying. Wishing he was in my house with me. Coz I thought I was meant not just to be with him, but to stay with him, forever.
And I wanted him to be the man in my house, drinking tea, drinking me.

Walking the beach, feeling spaced out, in the most spiritually purifying way, but still, wild wave oceans to the left of me, wild wave oceans to the right of me and oceans coming out of me. Water, water all around.
I have come to live by the sea.
And it’s that free rhythm that stops me worrying.

When my furniture arrived, it all fitted, it all matched, it looked like it had been here for years. All the colours were my colours, nothing mismatched. Stuff stored in the old hall cupboard and the garden shed found its place at last.
I looked around and saw that I had been making a hope chest for this house for years.

And I have come Home.
At last.

Oh but Love needs an object.

And when the object disappears, then love needs time to grieve.
And to buy a big fuck off house by the sea.
And do it up exactly as you like, coz if you’re gonna be single, BE single.
No compromises.
No guilt.
No living small.

First big purchase for dear house.
King size bed.

Love may need an object, but it’s Hope that springs eternal.