ellen bell

With the first truly cold night, a part of me begins to shrivel. The dark, the zero temperatures, and I don’t thrive. It must be borne, as others in direr circumstances must bear hunger, homelessness and war. I know this. But I shrink nevertheless.

It was a dream, and I knew it was. The Prime Minister telephoned me. She’d handed me the phone. Had I been in her house? She was wearing a long, white cotton nightdress. Before I answered, I remember trying to work out what I could make his voice sound like. He wanted me to make a wedding cake, not for him but for a non-celebrity couple, a kind of everyman pair. I told him that I’d never made one before and it didn’t seem to matter. Can I make the crudities as well? I asked. (I also remember trying to find that word, mid-dream.) Then I had another dream in which I told P. all about the dream before, describing her nightie in detail and how Burnham’s voice kept fading.

Is there moon stuff going on?

And where is that smell of pine disinfectant coming from?

It smells of autumn these mornings. Leaves cover the pavement, becoming sludgy and slimy in the rain. Winter beckons. Is there joy in that?

No house that I’ve ever lived in has been without some issue or other, the one we owned in Cambridge used to get under my skin with its flat roof and other concerns. This one has mould on the sills, and now this Copydex smells, which, despite my efforts with sage, persists. But we can leave, and we will, though I will miss its space, this studio, the view and the light. Change will happen anyway. We are in flux, always. Even when we think we are still.

The smell of Copydex seems to be lessening. I pulled out my desk and chest of drawers in the studio a little to see if I could locate its source but just found dust and a mass of cobwebs (ugh, how I struggle with such evidence of squalor, that, at the moment, I cannot seem to keep back). Nevertheless, I have been burning sage. The aroma comforts me as well as seducing me into believing that whatever ‘badness’ is or was causing the stink will be cleansed away. I hope it isn’t that possibly mythic baby bird, in the wall, decomposing. Would that smell like Copydex?

The studio smells of copydex. It’s a smell of childhood. I never liked the stuff, and its stink repelled me. Though it was mostly the way its rubbery texture clung to everything, paper, clothes, hair and fingers. Why this particular smell has commandeered my working space, I don’t know. Is it the wind bringing it in through the gaps in the wall and sill? Or is it emanating through the floor, from the new owner downstairs or perhaps from the flat opposite? Who knows. I hope it passes soon.

It was a bleak news day. Trump makes a deal with Putin, people are killed in Saudi Arabia and then, in retaliation, in Yemen and a man climbs into a tiger enclosure. Then reading Emma Brockes, we learn of a woman dying from pneumonic plague. So much threat. Has it always been so? Where is the light, the good, the hope?

My dreams are packed-full and busy. A mish-mash of things said, thought and seen during my waking hours, my subconscious is evidently working hard at making sense of it. He’d told me he’d put a downpayment on a houseboat. I stood in it. I remember the carpet and how it was like the one in Amsterdam that I used to clean. Then I was walking around the car park of the Telstar Hotel in Exeter, in the dark, wondering whether, not being a guest, I’d be told off for doing so. And then there was the fridge. Whose was it? I don’t know, but it had no door. How did it keep cold, I think I asked. You see, no sense at all.

She’d cooked me a piece of veal and I ate it. I remember its taste, sweet, cloying and how I regretted it. It was a dream, and even in the dream I’d thought that I don’t have to do this. It had been a practice-run for a big work’s party, where we’d been informed that they wouldn’t cater for non-meat eaters. I had, or felt I should fit in, but the meat repelled me. I woke from it unsettled, uncertain as to why I didn’t stand my ground and refuse.

I feel a pang for it, as if I know it and have lived in it. I haven’t. It is a film set. And yet, I do know it and last night I wanted it.