The Story Of A Desk

I have a new desk. I don’t subscribe to the idea that a writer must have a desk, A Room Of One’s Own, but this desk is very meaningful to me. It sits in a bedroom, facing the window of a ground floor tenement flat in the west end of Glasgow. I’ve known this flat for almost two and a half years, but until now I couldn’t call it mine.

Beyond the window is a scrappy right-angled triangle of grass. It hasn’t been mown yet this year, so the dock leaves and buttercups are calf-high. A washing line is strung overhead, and blue recycling bins are lined up neatly against the wall. Fuschia-pink roses climb high above the black railings, and elder trees are heavy with flowers. When I lived in Northumberland, my oldest daughter would forage for elderflowers and make sticky cordial. I’d find bottles in the fridge, half-filled with a golden liquid. I think the foraging was the point, not the drinking. She hasn’t foraged since we moved to the city.

I like looking out onto the back court, running my eyes up and down the drainpipes. Every window represents a different story waiting to be told. For a few months last year an opera singer poured arias into the air that bounced off the tenement walls. I didn’t live in Glasgow back then, and her serenades made my double life feel even more surreal. As I type today, the soprano tones of a John Taverner song soak through the flat. I wonder if it’s possible that I have conjured the opera singer with my words, but when I open the window, I hear only the white noise of drizzle on leaves. The music must be floating through from the living room, where my quiet daughter is reading with our cat, and the Glaswegian is working.

I’ve had a few desks over the years. The first one was a white Ikea table that sat on the landing in the Northumbrian house where six became five. Often a daughter or two would perch at the end as I typed, colouring or drawing or doing puzzles. There were no curtains at the window, so I could see out over the rooftops when I forced myself out of bed while the kids were still sleeping. I watched the sky growing lighter and obsessed over the moon. An old bookcase that my parents gave me when they downsized ran beneath the windowsill and I would run my finger over the spines of books, knowing that I was writing one of my own, but not daring to believe it would one day sit alongside them. I’d painted the landing yellow while I was still married, and after he’d gone I wanted to cover the walls in another colour, try to wrestle back some autonomy, something that was just for me. I chose a calamine pink that felt fresh and calm and clean, and I wrote Twelve Moons at that desk, watched myself appear on the page.

The year Twelve Moons was published, I moved myself and my kids across the back lane into a slightly bigger terraced house. There was no landing, and I couldn’t fit the Ikea table in my bedroom. I asked a friend to build me what was no more than a wooden ledge in the corner of my bedroom. It was barely wide enough for my laptop, but it was something. I wrote Unschooled at that desk. I have a thing about needing to see the sky when I write, I think it helps me to dream. This tiny ledge afforded me a view across different rooftops, beyond which the North Sea tugged on the sand, and in the morning sometimes the world would burn pink and I would feel my wildness simmering inside me.

I moved to Glasgow less than two years later, and maybe the story of that move is my next book, although most people I speak to tell me that Memoir Is Dead, which I don’t understand because I have never felt so alive.

But this brings me to the desk I am sitting at today, in the flat that I couldn’t call mine until now. In the literal sense of ownership, this flat is not mine. It does not belong to me. But I also don’t own the flat I live in with my kids, and yet we call it home. It doesn’t feel like home, but we call it that because it’s where we live. My kids are my home, and the guy sitting in the living room playing melancholy songs is my home, and I am his.

The walls in this room, in the ground floor tenement flat, are also calamine pink. Until a week ago they were a kind of olive green. The green was harder to cover up than the sunshine yellow in Northumberland, but the Glaswegian has never shared the bedroom in this way before, and the walls were stubborn to let me in. But now it’s calamine pink, and there are several pictures on the wall that are his, one that is both of ours, and some gaps where we’ll put some more that are mine maybe, that currently sit in storage. I’ve put peonies in a vase and stacked some of my books next to them on the window sill. I brought a spider plant over from my flat, and its babies hang from the wardrobe. My cat, who is staying in this flat at the moment, jumps from my new desk onto the wardrobe and nibbles at the spider plant’s leaves.

The desk itself is precious. I have never properly owned one, only the cheap table and the pieces of wood screwed into the wall. I found it on Gumtree, and drove to an industrial estate in a little town north of the city to collect it. I paid £140 in cash to a guy who had salvaged and restored this desk that feels grainy when I stroke the surface. There’s a leaf that drops down, and I can extend the desk by pushing two pieces of wood out from underneath. It can hold coffee, candles, toast books, laptop, a speaker, everything I need.

I’d like to write a whole book on why I don’t live with the Glaswegian in any traditional sense, and this essay only scrapes the surface of how I live and love. But I can say it’s important to me that we painted this bedroom pink, and that he cleared away thirty years of history so that I could put this desk against the window and write. It was his way of telling me that I am his person, and also that my words matter.

I’ve written before about how I am the sunshine to his night sky, and even now he just walked in and asked me why I had the blind pulled right up, why I had revealed so much of the world. I told him I need to see the sky, to imagine endless possibilities, and he told me he prefers the dark, as if I didn’t already know. It’s one of the big differences between us, the way he holds everything deep inside him and I am an open book.

I can’t sleep in this room very often, so my desk feels like a place holder. The other day he told me he sat down at my desk and his long legs wouldn’t fit comfortably underneath it, and he realised that this desk can only be for me. I like that it makes him think of me when I am not here, though probably he doesn’t need a desk for that.

My life is still turbulent, as the economics of being a carer and a single mother threaten to trip me up. And it’s why this space is especially important at the moment. I can sit here and plant my feet on the floor and feel grounded. Held, even. If my first book was an attempt to write myself back onto the page, perhaps my third one is an attempt to stay there.