Listen in the Dark

An exclusive excerpt from We All Come Home Alive

Dear friends,

We All Come Home Alive is out now!

For me, publishing feels both like the summit of a heap of work and the granting of an outlandish birthday candle wish. I can’t quite believe it.

After pouring so many words into this work, I’m ready to let We All Come Home Alive begin speaking for itself. So, here’s the prologue, just for you, my substack subscribers. It’s called, Listen in the Dark - a title which captures how much of this book felt to write.

Thank you for being here for me to write to.

Much love,

Anna

Listen in the Dark

I once asked, What is the worst thing that’s ever happened in your life?

I was thirteen, sitting up in the dark with two other girls, my back against the textured wallpaper of the room we were sharing. It now seems like a precisely thirteen-year-old thing to say, sweet and cruel, a corollary to all that superlative talk of favourite colours and best friends, which occupies the earlier portion of childhood. A question probing for the edge of things while assuming it will encounter nothing too awful, nothing beyond the realm of the sayable.

It was my last night with these girls. We had spent two weeks together on a residential theatre course, from which I can now recall only a single exercise: attempting to wriggle my hand while holding the rest of my body completely still. My interactions with the other attendees are what stay with me, the hunger with which we investigated and provoked one another. We had come from all over the country and sensed knowledge to be gleaned here that was not available at home. One evening, a languidly beautiful girl a year older than me leant against our doorframe and said, I mean, I don’t look good naked, but who does? and I quietly pondered her question from my narrow bed. I kissed a boy whose last name rhymed with buttock in a game of spin the bottle and was annoyed at him for grinning afterwards; I had wanted us to seem aloof after being labelled the most innocent people here. I did not know then how few of my kisses would be accompanied by such unabashed happiness. And I remember this conversation in the dark. Its intimacy and urgency, the way it sprawled into the night, our time together for passing around gems of our lives running out.

A girl I will call Bella was the last to take her turn. She hesitated. The pool of empty carpet between our three beds expanded for a second in the silence.

Then she said, My best friend died.

For a second, I wondered if she was pretending, whether the next thing expected of me would be a laugh or some kind of playing along, as if it were a dramatic scene we were trying out. But she went on. There had been an accident in a foreign country; I pictured her friend lying in a road softened by sun. Bella said that when she was told she had repeatedly thrown up.

We stayed up together talking for a long time that night and I felt very close to both those girls, though I do not know either of them now.

As adults we only ask about worst things by accident.

At twenty-two, I found myself in a single bed, chatting with relative strangers in a dormitory at a theatre course, once again. By then, I had abandoned the idea of myself as an actor who might, say, play Lady Macbeth or a tough but troubled TV detective, but I was still interested in performance. I had come to study for a week with a Polish company whose training involved a lot of guttural singing and running around together in rhythmic step to the point of delirious exhaustion. This method worked on me just once and for a few brief minutes I felt hot and shivery and full of unselfconscious power, as if possessed, but I generally lacked the required coordination and when the other participants threw sticks at me, I just cried. There were four of us in the little dorm, talking our way towards sleep. Someone asked how many siblings everyone had, and a young woman left a small silence before her number.

You didn’t sound sure about that, I laughed.

She paused again before telling us that she’d had another brother, but he had died.

The conversation lasted only a few more moments, in which I may have said, I can’t imagine that.

I would like to go back and tell her that now I can imagine it. Now, I understand her pause in the dark.

I am no longer interested in worst things, which is to say, I have long outgrown the belief that experience can be organised on such neatly vertical terms. But I still want to listen in the dark, as I did in those two bedrooms a decade apart. I am interested in the pause before a revelation, that intake of breath a gap to house a ghost in.

I want to listen in the dark.

And to pull things through into the realm of the sayable. To drop into the silences between one type of reality and another. The places where life shocks us and we must come back different, if we are to return at all.