Heathcliffs I Have Known: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Louisa Young

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       Heathcliffs I Have Known

      Note on the Author

      A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

      This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

       HEATHCLIFFS I HAVE KNOWN

       LOUISA YOUNG

      FIRST ONE WAS THE bloke who hung about in the Woolworths car park opposite the gates of the Juniors. Yes, he had a heavy coat on and his collar up and his stupid willy hanging out, and he looked at me and said, broodingly, meaningfully, ‘You’re mine.’

      I said, ‘No I’m not, I’m my mum and dad’s,’ and walked on home, wondering if I’d got the possessives right. My mum’s and dad’s? My mum’s and my dad’s? Anyway I wasn’t bloody his. I was theirs, and when I grew up I’d be my own.

      I’m not going to get them in order.

      Generally, I gave them short shrift and got off lightly. I never had a weakness for them, thank God. Not like some girls. But I’ll only speak of what I know.

      There was – Christ, I can’t give him his real name, he’s real, but by giving him a fake name I’m protecting him, to which I profoundly object. You can’t win.

      He was younger, we both rode motorbikes. He looked a bit cherubic, not my type, fat mouth and soft hair, big mean eyes, excitable. Once I was riding my Guzzi up the Wandsworth Road and I saw him coming towards me on the other side. I pulled towards the white line and so did he, and we were both in open-face helmets and that was the first time he kissed me, which I thought was well romantic. I went around to his a couple of times, and one time I stayed over because we’d had a bit to drink, but we didn’t do anything. He wanted to, but he was being funny about it, starting and stopping, and I didn’t really want to anyway. After a few weeks I wasn’t very interested in him: he kept ringing up saying ‘What are you doing tonight?’ and I’d say ‘I’m seeing my friends,’ and he’d say, ‘But what about me? What am I supposed to do?’ and I wouldn’t say, ‘I have no idea; do what you bloody like,’ but I would think – twat alert.

      Then one night he drove his Honda 750 through the closed front door of the place I was living, right into the hallway, came into my room, called me a fat-titted witch, took my hair in his hands and banged my head on the wall, put his hands around my neck, and he was saying ‘You’re mine’ – ‘I’m fucking not’, I couldn’t say, because he was strangling me. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’m in love with you.’ My flatmate came barrelling down the stairs, the creep ran up to get hold of him and threw him at the banisters, broke his rib, it turned out.

      The police came around, said, ‘Oh it’s domestic,’ and went away. It was a long time ago. I rang them the next day and said, ‘Oi.’

      They picked him up in a dawn raid, and the DI said, ‘Why