It rattled my window all night and I turned about, over and over, barely going under. It is a potent force. And I still make myself walk into it, legs stiff and rigid, hips as metal. It is better that way. I face my fear of it. And I love the smell it conjures up. Everything is stirred, all is revealed. The wet stink of earth, the flurried confetti of cherry and magnolia blossom, the dying slippered cases of daffodil heads, and salt, carried from the sea. I walk into it, seeking streets where it is not so strong and am unable to find them. It is funnelled down them, catching me unawares and I reach out to cars, to railings, to walls for support. And then I am home, aching from the holding in of breath and muscle.
He was waiting by the door when we arrived. I tried engage him in conversation (a way of alleviating my my awkwardness, not his). I don’t know that he feels obliged to respond any niceties of behaviour, why should he, he lives on the street, after all. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen him sleeping in the doorway of the ex-barber shop. No, he said, I’ve got a house near the castle. Yes, I said, I suspect it has been too cold to sleep out. (I saw him this morning though, back on the street clearly, but this time lying under his blanket in the doorway of the Barnado’s shop. Perhaps he prefers to be out. He had his violin in pride of place, standing up in it’s case with a single tulip resting against it.) The chat (one-sided though it was) soon tailed off, that is after he offered to buy him some food from SPAR. No, he said, I’ll get something in here. There is no thanks, again why should there be. He is graceless, not rude but empty of the need or the desire to please. Again, why should he wish to? He is freer than me. Then she arrived.
Her movements were jerky. They were the first intimation that something was awry. Then there was her voice. She shouted, but it was if she couldn’t manage the controls, as if she made a noise without being able to perceive it’s possible effect prior to making it. She asked the time, of the homeless man first. He ignored her, no doubt sensing that she was off the rails before I did, and turned his face away. I answered the question and told her that the coffee shop would open in about 5 minutes. That’s good, she said, stamping her feet, I’m dying for a drink. Her clothes were a cacophony of pattern, her leggings, with their psychedelic swirlings were particularly so. She had a huge rucksack on her back and another holdall in her hand, and draped around her neck hung a cloth bag. She’d clearly spent the night on the street. I watched as she opened her little bag and pulled out a half bottle of brandy, took a swig and then another. Did he see? I felt him he stiffened.
Once inside she marched over to where we usually sit and I tensed. Not our table? NO. And then ashamed of my smallness, I saw that she’d thrown her bags by the one next to it. Everything was wrong about her. She jerked and writhed and then grew sad. I heard her phone conversation with a man called M. And how he put the phone down on her when she told him that she was there, her voice unnaturally high. She sank then. I smiled at her when she looked back but she did not respond. Her eyes were sad, lost, scared. Unlike his, azure-blue though they are, they are dead behind the light. Gone.
With the promise of minus temperatures I went out in my big, impossibly expensive coat. It is tricky to walk in, it is so long but I love the comfort of it. It encloses me, it cocoons me, especially when I have the hood up. There was no one about, excepting the occasionally body off for an early morning shift. A group of students were having a sort of party in a house at the bottom of the hill and the baker and his assistant were baking and setting out the bread in The Pelican Bakery. I couldn’t see the sea it was too black. It’s a waning crescent moon today and a new one tomorrow. What will that bring I wonder?
It’s done. It’s been sent. The relief is an odd one, I am pleased and I try to let that sensation take hold but the vacancy, the gap is also a little alarming. I will try not to fill it all. Other than with drawing, naturally. The sky is clear outside. A beautiful morning.
He’s taken up residence in the ex-barber shop just beyond Smiths. All his stuff, what there is of it in squashed into the doorway. He sleeps and sits there, day in day out, mostly perched on his beanbag. His face is cadaverous and mostly covered in a long, wiry beard. His eyes look wary and lost. He is still young. We offered to get him a drink the other day. He didn’t refuse exactly but said that he had some money and began searching around for it. His pockets jingled with change. No, he said, I’ve got 40 quid somewhere. He found it for him. It was in a paper takeaway coffee cup.
I was waiting for him while he went into the post office to send back yet more coats and sat on the bench outside the coffee shop directly in front of his ‘residence’. I wanted to snatch some drawing time. It never works but enables me to tell myself that at least I’ve made a drawing each day. I started to draw him but my discomfort made it clunky and unseen. I watched him but didn’t want to in case he saw what I was doing. He didn’t. His head kept lolling forward. Was he sleeping or out on something? Why not? he would say. I ended up focussing my attention of a woman talking to a man in sagging jeans outside the Health Food Shop. She was a little thing in a bright white raincoat and black, knife-edged creased, crimplene trousers, with, and I noticed this as my drawing reached it’s end, very very dapper shoes, a kind of tri-coloured leather loafer with brass buckle. Were they Italian?
And inexplicably there was a violin. Was it his? Does he play? It was in a case and was shiny new.
Not all of us, God willing, will be called on to demonstrate the huge acts of bravery that the Ukrainian people are currently having to display. Most of us live quietly, doing our best to not harm or hinder others in their wish to live as they do. Perhaps it is age, or perhaps in my recent slowing down I’ve begun to pay more attention, but I notice the small acts of bravery that are playing out around me. The ones I speak of are shown by women, predominantly aged and ill women. One in particular has lost so much. Yes, she has financial security and the retirement (or should I say care) home she now lives in is a good one, at least it is clean and they seem kind, but she has still lost her husband, her home, her independence and her mobility. And yet, she never complains, she jokes and laughs and makes the most of what she can still do – such as sit in the sun, read Jane Austen and watch Escape to the Country on TV. Her fortitude is breath-taking, God grant me the same grace to bear what life has in store for me, not least the loss of him. And there is another, though in a very different situation. She is still in hospital (I believe as she has not answered her phone for a while) with Covid-19 and has been since before Christmas. What sense does she make of her life now? It is all on hold, small though it is. She has a daughter, a granddaughter, a cat with umpteen kittens (she is always having them being semi-feral), a neighbour’s dog she used to walk, and a place in a tiny hamlet where she is known and has been most of her life. Does she remember the fields, the smell of the nearby farm, her vegetable garden, her chickens, her cockerel who runs to greet her daughter when she returns from work? What does she dream of in that ward? Hers is less a case of fortitude and more one of endurance. She is enduring. And I wish her strength and support when she is finally set free for it will be frightening.
And me? I am stiff and hip-sore. And tired. Can one ever sleep it away?
I heard their voices coming through the dark but couldn’t work out the direction. Climbing up the little hill I caught the nearness of them. There were two of them, students I presume, sitting on the wee bench on the corner of the bend. One was doing most of the talking and the other was listening, head bent. You don’t have to take on other people’s shit, the talker was saying, it’s their shit not yours, man. I know, said the other, his head still bent. They didn’t stop talking as a I walked by. They were enclosed in their, evidently a trifle inebriated cocoon, and my presence or overhearing of their conversation had no importance. I saw them again on my return. They were ahead of me, still talking earnestly but this time it was the counselee rattling on, in a rather drawled, slurring way. You see, he said, I don’t want to be too clever. No, said his friend, you’re too friendly for that, you like to get on with people. You like to talk.
I’m a little in awe of her. At least I think it is awe. What is she now, 103 or 104? Profoundly deaf and virtually blind she must be cocooned against much of this present world. What does she think about? I asked him yesterday after we’d met her by the car park. She’d been out on her daily tour of the estate. She knows him, though he has to tell her his name and very loudly, but not me. He told her I was his wife. Oh, yes, she said. And then she asked if the little girl she’d seen was his. What little girl? he asked.
I think she meant me, I told him afterwards. Yes, I think so, he said. I don’t know why I thought that. It was a hunch. I sometimes see things that aren’t there, she’d told us, and sometimes I don’t see what is. She is untroubled by this. Or that is how it appears to me. Her looks and her voice have become mannish. When he told her we’d been to Yorkshire she said that she’d been married in Leeds and honeymooned in York. I cannot square the notion of a honeymoon with the being that she is now, and yet she has, or had, five children, so why not? Because she has gone beyond it? And the little girl? I sense it was me. She saw me but she didn’t.
And the little girl? She is ever present and just as scared.
We bumped into one of our neighbours when we walked into town yesterday afternoon and asked him about the building work that he is having done. My guess had been either for a conservatory or a possibly even a swimming pool. But no, it’s a kitchen extension. I commiserated with him over the mess. And that’s when he called me by that name. Mine’s a simple name, I think. Not much room for error one would imagine. Nevertheless I’ve been called by various other monikers. Sometimes the e is replaced by an i or an a or an e is added to the end or there’s an h put at the front. Is it that people don’t listen or perhaps they have never heard of Ms Terry, or Ms Barkin or Ms DeGeneres? I thought about this new version after he left us. And actually it felt OK. A new identity. Why not?
I’d come across David Hockney’s sketchbooks and sank. Other people’s brilliance always has that effect on me. No? he said. Then I picked up. I rooted through mine trying to find ones for the photographer to work with. And they were OK. Not brilliant but they show promise. I think. Then the sun shone and we went to the library on the hill and he was nice and then we had some tea and I drew and then I walked home in the sun. And then we went out again and the sun still shone and I closed an account that I’ve always had trouble with and we walked back in the same sun.
Elsewhere though, people are dying, needlessly. Where is acceptance in that? Show me.
We’ve three long ones. It’s our only garden really, other than the cloth container on our neighbours balcony with our now dying crocus in (the container wasn’t a success really, it sags and bulges – I just didn’t want to buy plastic). But the hyacinths have gone (I’m just waiting for the foliage to dry out so I can recycle the bulbs if Monty Don is to be believed) and I’m at a loss for the moment what to replace them with. However, they are currently encouraging a blossoming of flies. Are they fruit flies or just little gnats. I had asked them to disappear by our return but they didn’t so I had to (well, I didn’t have to but the mass of them gets under my skin) exterminate them with bathroom spray and loo paper. I’m sorry, I kept saying, I’m sorry.
I walked again this morning, early. How I’ve missed it. And the birds did not disappoint. Thank you for the joy of you.
Returning from a holiday always makes me feel like the contents of a snow scene – shaken up and discombobulated. There is to much to put back in place and sometimes it won’t go. And last night I couldn’t sleep. I was still in the car being rolled about. And our neighbours TV was so loud. Waking to bird song and walking in it (well that’s how it feels) helps but the news of what awaits Ukraine doesn’t. Or indeed the news that another family member (though not mine) has been diagnosed with something beastly. Poor love. Poor loves. And yet the sun still shines. Why?
