Serpentine Gallery 24-hour Experiment Marathon

When I met Lisa White she had been in the city twenty years, living quietly in one of the four storey houses on the hill which overlooks the harbour. People still gave her space. They all knew her story-- the escape to Europe at 13 years old in the hold of a decrepit supertanker. The wreck. The loss of her younger brother James, the black marketeering, the subsequent film career as Ashley Camella- Norton. She was a tallish, rather gaunt woman by then, full of an energy that rarely showed. A heavy smoker. She liked to walk in the gentrified dockyards, where postmodern art galleries have replaced ships, and restaurants the old dock furniture. She had a daughter, three or four years old. We went out a few times. Then one morning she telephoned me and said:

"You don't ask me anything about it."

It was hard for me to begin, I told her. I knew her feelings about memory, repetition, simulation. I knew her book, Insurgent Dawn. I felt disqualified by her history, as if I had nothing to ask that could match it.

"No one likes to pry," I said.

"Are you dishonest, or just naive ?" she asked, and hung up. Perhaps an hour later I called her again. "I'm sorry," I said. I thought she would put the phone down again but instead she said: "I don't see my brother any more."

"That's a curious way to put it."

She shrugged. "You have to understand the world of oil. We were down there a long time."

She still dreamed of the supertanker hold, she said. "But I don't see James any more. He isn't visible to me. I don't miss him now. He's just one of the fictions that lived down there." Then she said: "Why don't we go out later ? Then you could come back here ?" But when we got out of the cab that night, the daughter woke up. She was disoriented, at a loss. She was determined her mother would cure this. She howled, a long, unassuagable, grinding howl, a noise of absolutely no hope in the middle of the night. I sat there listening to that noise, then fell asleep on the sofa.

When the Insurgent Dawn fetched up on Chesil Beach, Lisa White said, an old woman was standing there with a whippet dog, as if she was waiting, but not perhaps for that.

"To her, it must have been as if the world had burst." There was a storm, a false sunrise, weather suited to other countries. The old woman craned her neck. The changing light revealed the prow of the supertanker, a fifty foot overhang in the rain. Shingle fountained up. Glare and blackness, strobing into sudden silence. Through the hole poured a wave of oil, and on it a foam of goods and artefacts--white goods, cheap goods, advertisements for goods, paper goods, invisible goods, goods in the sense the political philosophers use. Wagons and containers spilled out--orange, yellow, pale blue, pocked with rust, full of toys. The entire ship's medical depository spilled out, shedding sterile dressings up and down the shoreline, along with ampoules of high quality morphine and a very thin nurse who looked a little like Annie Pink in the second of the Vendetta movies. War spilled out--as trucks loaded with boys--as flashes in darkness--as sudden loud noises which ended abruptly, along with the listener. War spilled out as an advert for very cheap food. The old woman stood there while all this material washed past her, swept her dog away, soured the beach, and flowed inland as if the fields were lower than the sea.

Two huge children had been washed in on the wave of their own story, which was in some way the story of hitching a ride, or predicating your escape, on oil. They were getting smaller as she watched them. The boy was already dead.

"People think that the older one holds things together," Lisa White said. "But it was my brother who held things together together down there."

I sit in her house now, and listen to her talk.

She says, "I feel scared this morning." She says, "I don’t know what to feel."

She’s ironing her tennis clothes.

"Don't you see," she says, "I can't talk now ?" She looks at the iron. "The life I'm living now," she says. "The life I've been living. I wasn't like this but now I am." And then, suddenly: "They knew there was nowhere else to hide us. We paid them the money. It was two hundred dollars. They took us down, past the cabins and store- cupboards, the engine rooms and medical depositories, right down into the oil tank itself. We had to climb down rungs and sit in an orange rubber boat while someone closed the hatch. The tether snapped on the second day, and we spent a month, perhaps two, in an orange rubber boat, sailing on a sea of crude oil."

She puts the iron down, then picks it up again. "James held us together down there. But he couldn't explain the dreams we had, the things we saw." She stared at me. "Everything that begins with oil is already in it," she said. "James knew that. It tired him out."

"I think you've been defending for a long time now," I say.

"I have," she says, "but I don't know why." She sniffs a tear back. Her daughter looks up instantly from the floor.

What can I tell you about myself ? I got to this city by credit card, and asking, "Do you speak English ?" The day I left London, I had this perception: I could start outside my front door, lock it, and, wearing only the clothes I stood up in and carrying a passport & two credit cards, end up anywhere in the world within 24 hours. No matter how many times you've read that, it's not the same as suddenly understanding it. Now I sit in Lisa White's house, and the sun shines across my eyes, making it impossible to concentrate. She's finished the ironing. She's upstairs dressing. She's putting on her make up. Just before lunch, the au pair's tennis-coach boyfriend will arrive, and follow the au pair about the house talking softly in the local language and making kissing noises; or sit drumming incompetently on the kitchen table with the palms of his hands. Lisa's little girl will come downstairs and ride a scooter round the tiled floor of the lounge. The phone will ring and ring again. The shutters will bang in the wind under a hard blue sky.

All stories, Lisa says, twenty years into the aftermath of her journey, are about oil. All oil stories are about war. "Oil is the wave of the past, the war of the near future. It's a resource. It's a lot of dead trees. It's in the nature of a story, with a specific gravity of 881--just slightly less than that of bulk oyster shell, but three to four times that of unshelled peanuts--& quite hard to get out of the ground."