Alex Preston

I came to Jamaica with a broken heart. I was twenty – maybe the best time to have your heart broken. The teens are spent lurching from one emotional train wreck to another, but underlying the pain rests the knowledge that things are not yet serious, that your heart is not yet quite en jeu. At university things changed – relationships suddenly developed a certain seriousness. People went on to get married from here, we thought, as we flirted and dated and fucked.

Hearts only get broken once. The muscle cells of the heart do not regenerate. Each further assault after the first break merely serves to continue the destruction of the organ. Later-life events like divorce and bankruptcy and the death of a child are all tragedies that serve to confirm that fatal original blow.

When my godmother heard about my misfortune, she sent me a ticket to Jamaica. It was early September – we would go for two weeks, stay in a villa that an old friend of hers owned on the northeast of the island. I had been in bed for two weeks reading Rimbaud and Hölderlin. I needed the change of scene.

I arrived in Montego Bay the night before my godmother and checked into a hotel next to the airport. I sat on the balcony and watched the sun go down, sipping at a Red Stripe and feeling a delicious sense of loneliness. I was alone on an island miles away from the world that had so wounded me. Crickets rose their voices to the fiery evening sky. Night birds called out as they flew in swift shadows down to the seashore.

My godmother landed early the next day and we made our way along the rutted track that led to Ocho Rios in an open-top jeep driven by a beaming Rasta called Henry. We passed coves of white sand overlooked by nodding palms, boats pulled up almost to the road filled with fishing nets and harpoon guns. We stopped at Noel Coward’s house – Firefly. It was white and modernist and rather unimpressive. I ate conch from the shell. We finally came to the villa that was perched on a hillside overlooking the sea. We unpacked and strolled down the steep slope for a swim.

The next day we set out to visit a friend of my godmother, Patrice Wymore. She lived on the coconut plantation that she and her husband, Errol Flynn, had bought in the 1950s, just as his career was beginning to fade. We rented a car in Port Antonio and drove under the shadow of the Blue Mountains until we came to a headland where the road described a long curve between clumps of scrub and acacia trees. Sad-looking horses grazed on dusty grass. There was a huge pile of coconut husks by the side of the road. The flesh in some was still rotting and a black shimmer of flies rose up as we passed. We turned off the road and drove up the hill until we came to a lightening-struck tree with a sign hanging from it that read Mulholland Farm.

The house was surrounded by lush trees, swamped with bougainvillea. It had once been white, but had come to take on the colour of the land, dusty and sun-bleached. Pat was waiting for us as we drew up outside.

Errol and Pat Flynn lived at Mulholland Farm throughout the 1950s. The house, perched above the coconut plantation, looked down on a forest of palm trees, and was built to provide an escape from Errol’s dissolute Hollywood existence. He and Pat rode across the surrounding countryside on horses, rowed down rapid-furrowed rivers before drinking sundowners on the beach, lived like young honeymooners even though he was heading towards fifty, and his liver (an organ whose cells are thankfully extremely regenerative) was much older. Flynn’s wild lifestyle wasn’t entirely left behind in LA. He once loosed a crocodile in the centre of Port Antonio market; Pat told me that rumours of him driving into their swimming pool smoking a cigar weren’t true. “He didn’t smoke cigars,” she said.

The swimming pool now stands empty. Errol Flynn died in 1959, aged 50. Pat has lived on the estate ever since. The rooms are dark and full of dustsheet-covered furniture. Birds squabble in the roof. Dust blows in waves across the floor.

Pat poured us drinks and we sat overlooking the concrete lacuna of the swimming pool, watching the sun move slowly across the plantation below. Pat told us stories of living at the farm with Errol. Her eyes misted and she paused occasionally with a distant smile on her lips as she reminisced. When my godmother told her of my own recent romantic misfortune, Pat placed her hand on mine and fixed me with a gaze of extraordinary warmth. “Love comes again,” she said, and she led me by the hand down to a spot where we could see the sea surging up the mouth of a river, bright birds in the trees, mangoes hanging heavily from dark-leafed bushes. “Errol and I used to come and stand here,” she said as the wind whipped around us. “I still come down here every night and look at the river.” A closeness built between us in the thick Caribbean air. We drank some more and then it was time to go.

I found out afterwards that we had visited Pat on the first anniversary of her daughter’s death. Arnella Flynn, a one-time model in Europe, was found by plantation workers dead in her bed after a short life of drug abuse. She was Errol and Pat’s only child. I look at the picture of Pat, hand on hip, smiling, and I try to find that pain, try to locate the sadness she must have felt. And I wonder whether it was her warmth, her kindness despite the crushing weight of her loss, that caused my solipsistic self-pity to evaporate as we stood looking down over the river that evening.

We didn’t really do Gap Years in Worthing. Gap Years were for the beautiful daughters of Kensington millionaires to screw their way through a ski season and then find spiritual redemption in India, or for the double barreled sons of City financiers to dye their already flushed cheeks vermillion in the Africa sun. But due to an administrative error involving a bottle of gin and some incorrectly filed forms, I had to take a year off before Oxford.

The idea of a traditional Gap Year filled me with dread. I had no interest in saving the third world, no wish to find myself. Finally reaching the end of an adolescence whose turbulence would have plucked planes from the sky, I only wanted to be away at university, in a cosy study room, reading Kafka. As it was, my mother put in a telephone call to an old friend, and I was found a job working for my sister’s godmother who was the CEO of a fashion company in Paris.

It was perfect – I lived in a penthouse apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, walked over to the office on the Avenue Montaigne every day, stopping for Le Monde and a noisette at the Café de l’Alma on my way. My task at Céline – that’s the name of the label I worked for – which I accepted with great enthusiasm, was to audition models for catwalk shows. I was in eighteen year-old’s heaven.

On one of my first nights in Paris, I was invited by some colleagues at the fashion company to a party in the Bois de Boulogne. It was a fantastic, glamorous bash and I, drunk and star-struck, finally headed home in the early hours. My taxi surged through empty streets until we were within a few minutes of my flat when we suddenly came upon a stationary traffic jam. I got out and walked through the mild August night, and soon saw the cause of the jam. Directly opposite my flat there had been a terrible traffic accident. An ambulance nosed its way between a reluctantly parting sea of cars, policemen stood, looking slightly bewildered, at the mouth of the tunnel that snakes beneath the Place de l’Alma. I skirted the scene and took the elevator up to bed. Remember that crash, though – I’ll come back to it.

At the end of my year in Paris, it was decided that I should have had at least a taste of the traditional Gap Year. Whether it was my new habit of sporting a flambouyantly coloured cravat at my collar, or when, on a visit home to Worthing, I ordered an amaretto instead of my usual pint in the Half Brick, my father decided I needed toughening up. For the final fortnight of my pre-university freedom, I was sent – with my best friend Julian as a reluctant wing-man – to Kenya.

The sense of shock descended when we landed at Jomo Kenyata airport. I had grown used to a certain way of living in Paris – easy, cultivated, luxurious. I still remember very clearly the swarm of mosquitoes that hung in the flickering halogen glow of the baggage hall. “Malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis” beat a doom-laden tattoo in my head. Where were my monogrammed handkerchiefs? Where was my silver-plated cigarette holder? Where was my shark-skin lounge suit?

Of course nineteen year olds are as resilient as they are malleable. Within a few days I had settled into the life out there and was happily negotiating my way around Nairobi in the back of the Nissan Sunny vans called Matatus that fling themselves along the city’s potholed roads, somewhere between bus, taxi and rollercoaster.

And here I come to the heart of my story. With a few days left to go, Julian and I decided that we’d like to visit Karen Blixen’s place on Lake Naivasha. We’d need to catch a matatu to the Nairobi railway station and then take the Kisumu train northwards. We packed rucksacks for an overnight journey and made our way down to the main road to wait for the next matatu. A black Nissan with tinny music blaring from its speakers pulled up and we were just about to squeeze ourselves into the interior – which already held seven locals on their way to market – when I patted my pocket. I had forgotten my camera.

We had time to spare before our train, and so, with many apologies, we backed out of the matatu and waved it off. Across the entire back window, I remember very clearly, was a sticker – in shiny red green and gold – of Bob Marley. We ran back up to the house, I picked up my camera, and we caught the next matatu into town, having lost no more than five minutes in our detour.

For the sake of narrative tension, I’d like to say here that we felt the windows shake as we drove into town and thought nothing of it, but actually we were blissfully unaware that a car bomb filled with 500 cylinders of TNT had been driven into the secretarial school next to the US Embassy in the centre of town moments before our arrival. Over two hundred people were killed that day – the vast majority Kenyans – and four thousand injured. The embassy was directly opposite the train station. Our matatu pulled over to the side of the road and we walked up towards the plume of smoke that rose from the shattered building where the bomb had exploded.

When we got there, the security forces were already on site. A cordon had been set up and we pushed ourselves to the front. A hundred yards down the road, its nose buried in a ditch, I saw a black Nissan van, all of its windows blown out save the back one, which was held together by the metallic red green and gold sticker of Bob Marley that stretched across it. We went to the bar of the Hilton and got roaringly drunk.

The poet John Oxenham said “life begins at death’s first touch” and I’ve always thought that there was another me, who’d remembered his camera that day, and got into the black matatu. For all I know the people on board escaped unhurt, and anyway there must have been scores of black Nissans in Nairobi with Bob Marley transfers in their back windows. But that day I was aware for the first time of the way that tiny decisions can rule our fate, and the thin line that separates us from death, and the way that our own life as we know it is only one of an almost infinite number of possible lives and deaths that we could have lived.

I said I’d come back to the car crash: it was, of course, Princess Diana who died in the tunnel under the Place de l’Alma that night. Monica Ali’s Untold Story – a better book than the snide critics would have you believe – is the newest in the ranks of counterfactual narratives that pose the great ‘What If?’ around historical events. Her book imagines what would have happened if Henri Paul hadn’t crashed, if Diana had carried on living, just as I did when I patted my pocket, and saved my life.

I read Stuart Evers’ blog about Georges Perec’s  fabulous Life A User’s Manual with great interest (Evers adds a colon to the title of Perec’s novel that doesn’t appear in my copy). One of the bitter shades who haunt that journalistic Abaddon, comments sections, suggested beneath my review of Evers’ Ten Stories About Smoking on the New Statesman website that I gave Evers a good write-up because we were friends. We’re not, but after reading his piece on how we remember the books we read, I’m sure we’d get on. There is a blog to be written about why such a venomous streak of negativity runs through comments sections – Amy Sackville was torn apart by these faceless harpies for – as far as I could make out – having done a postgraduate degree at Oxford and some creative writing courses. I was assaulted here by some pseudonymic buffoon before my book was even published. I’m not against an open forum for criticism; it just seems sad that the anonymity conferred by the Web has spawned so many Ignatius J. Reillys firing their poisonous missives into the void. Anyway…

Evers’ blog picked up on a chain of ideas that I had been following since reading David Shields’ manifesto against the (traditional) novel, Reality Hunger. Shields values short fiction over novels because there is so much “padding” in  the longer form. “You have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.” At first Evers’ blog might seem to support Shields’ assertion (and Evers is, after all, a writer of short fiction). Evers’ argument is that the way we remember novels is as a kind of concentrated nexus of emotions encapsulated in an atmosphere (or, more exactly, a response to that atmosphere) whilst details of plot and character remain sketchy. This atmosphere could presumably, following Shields, be sharpened, distilled and condensed into a short story, a lyric essay, a photograph.

Delillo’s Underworld, all eight hundred and some pages of it, exists for Evers in the exquisite moment when Nick and Marian Shay view the vast installation of B52s in the desert, painted rainbow colours, an image of the postmodern sublime that rings through the rest of the novel: “The piece had a great riverine wash, a broad arc of sage green or maybe mustard green with brushy gray disturbances, and it curved from the southeast corner up and across the north edge, touching nearly a third of the massed aircraft, several planes completely covered in the pigment – the work’s circulating fluid, naming the pace, holding the surface together.” For me, Underworld is Cotter Martin catching the ball at a  baseball game with J. Edgar Hoover in the crowd. But Evers’ point holds true – ask me to describe in detail the plot of this novel, or almost any other, and I’d struggle. Ask me to talk about my emotional response, or moments of sublimity that moved me, and we’d be there till closing time.

Perhaps this says something about the kind of novels I like: labyrinthine, multi-layered, discursive. But I think it says more about how we remember novels. They are, as Evers says, unique – “the art form most attuned to life”. I recognise this as I’m writing. At about forty thousand words, it’s no longer possible to hold an entire novel in your mind. I was teaching at the Faber Academy with the writer James Scudamour recently and we discussed exactly this: at some point after the first thirty or forty thousand words, the novel becomes too sprawling, too variegated to pin down. You have to rely upon knowing the atmosphere you’re trying to create, and how your characters and your plot will work to build this atmosphere, and press on regardless. Indeed, when I start writing, I have less a plot or a theme in mind than a fully-formed idea of the atmosphere and the corresponding emotional response that this should engender in the reader. I judge my success on how true I can hold to this aim. The moments of sublimity – and that which surrounds them – should all be faithful to this original vision.

I think that novels often hang upon a series of moments of sublimity, revelation, violence, that energise and illuminate the surrounding text like flashes of phosphorescence in a dark sea. But to say that the rest of what goes into a novel is useless emballage is daft. The reason that Steve Reich’s music is so hypnotic and compelling is because we are constantly searching for the moments of stunning melody that emerge like lit arrows from the droning repetition. But without the repetition, without the background, those moments would lose their impact. Similarly in Beckett’s prose there are moments of extravagant Romantic lyricism that would be corny on their own. Only amid the wandering aporia do they work effectively – images of those rare moments in life when the sublime shines through.

I, like Evers, hesitate before re-reading books. I keep coming across novels whose publishers push them as “the new Secret History“. I haven’t read Donna Tartt’s book since it was first published and I sat up until the small hours aged thirteen, lost in the rarefied world of Hampden College. It could only disappoint me now. I just re-read Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a book that was my Bible as a teenager. It wasn’t a total let down, but I found myself preferring the book the way I remembered it – a heady admixture of spirituality and adolescent high feeling. I cringed fairly regularly during the course of my most recent reading. And this is the problem: we don’t remember books as we would read them now, but rather we remember them through the lens of the person we were when we read them. Nostalgia is layered upon nostalgia.

I was thinking of Perec recently, having just read W, his bizarre and moving memoir of childhood and metaphor for the concentration camps. I almost posted it on the Guardian website as my favourite French novel (the Guardian are doing a literary tour of the world at the moment). But I hesitated, wondering if perhaps I didn’t prefer Michel Tournier’s The Erl King (my mental image of that book: a twelve-pronged stag charging through the Bavarian forest pursued by Hermann Göring). In the meantime, a hundred other comments had been made, and I felt my post would be lost, and I don’t like comments sections anyway.