Perfect Lives by Polly Samson

Author:Polly Samson [Samson, Polly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632865502
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

MORGANNA

Morganna burst into my life, jingling and jangling armfuls of bracelets and puffing thin cigarettes that she rolled herself, silk flowers scattered here and there in twists of dark hair, fresh from her crisis and still prone to sudden tears. My shoulders were not the kind that usually got cried on: a bit on the tense side, I suppose, what with Simon working all the time and Angus and Ivan like leaky buckets, never full no matter how much I poured into them.

Morganna’s fandango. What a nightmare. Things being thrown: hot cups of tea across the kitchen, Mike’s clothes into Marine Parade, the photographs of their wedding day removed from the top of the piano, put back again, twice, and removed again with such force that the glass shattered in the frames.

She was wild when he left: a river of tears washing over a fortnight’s dismal blow jobs that failed to make him stay. She put half a brick through the window of the basement he was renting one night when he wouldn’t open the door. His girlfriend Elizabeth, who he pretended didn’t live there with him at all, looked up from playing her oboe, straight at Morganna outside on the pavement, and, laying the oboe carefully down, raised her arms to release a long skein of hair from its band, sending it falling and swinging down her back like molten metal, and sashayed to the telephone to call the police.

Morganna’s driving is not improved when she tells me about these things.

I had, though not without misgiving, agreed to put my life in Morganna’s hands a couple of afternoons a week. She was quite bold when she suggested it:

‘Mike did all the driving,’ she told me one afternoon when I’d come with my films to the studio she ran from the basement of her house. ‘After twenty-nine years in the passenger seat I’ll be needing to brush up.’

Her house in Marine Parade was full of stuff: cats and oriental rugs and pictures and mirrors and ancient masks on the wall, and that was just what I managed to glimpse on my way from the front door to the basement. She even had a parrot in a brass cage.

I was there to collect a print she’d made of one of my photographs, from a series of black and whites I’d shot of my cat with a vole swinging from his mouth. I’d managed to capture the medallion-man swagger of the moment, we both agreed. It was hand-printed, silver lith. Morganna held it up so I could admire it, before slipping it between sheets of corrugated green plastic.

‘It’s come out well,’ she said and taped my negative to the outside. ‘So, I was wondering, would you let me drive your car?’ It was so abrupt I thought I might have misheard her. ‘A few times, for the practice,’ she said, looking at me with her head on one side. ‘Just until I remember how it’s done.’

Morganna had been raised by half-baked Maoists

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