The mornings are getting noticeably darker. I walk in the murk now. It is especially dark down by the harbour. No walk on the Perygyl though as it was too wet. I walked around the turning circle now flanked on either side by mobile homes and SUVs. Out of nowhere the sound of a barking dog. I couldn’t see it. It seemed to be coming from a van, parked at the end of the line of vehicles. I shushed it as best I could before another dog began to join in, a smaller dog, clearly from the yappy quality of its bark. Then a man’s voice telling them both to be quiet. The van’s side door must’ve been open and he and he dogs must’ve have been sleeping there open to the wind, stars and rain. And why not? I would have loved to do the same. I am sorry if I disturbed them. The town echoes with the plaintive cries of young gulls. They have been ousted out of nests and have to fend for themselves but they are clearly disorientated and thrown by the rejection. They promised rain but so far it is holding off. Fingers crossed he will be dry.
I think about my writing as I walk. It’s been difficult the last few days. I have got stuck with it. I still write, still try to make my quota but the results have not lifted me. Is that really what it is about? Being good at it. Or is it about being good enough and concentrating on just doing it. As Julia Cameron says, ‘showing up at the page’. I don’t know where I am going with it, what it will become. Again, what does this matter? The important thing is to do it, just do it. Get it all down and then begin to edit afterwards. ‘The right to write’, JC calls it.
We lay on the grass and got covered in its dry strands. The smell was so evocative, and it was so pleasing to feel my belly about the earth. I watched the life teeming beneath me, the ants and beetles. The sports field groundsmen waved a greeting, happy in their jobs.
I thought it was a bank holiday today. I can’t think why I thought that. Perhaps I’d seen it in my diary (I believe, or so one of the women in Tesco’s said, that it is one in Scotland), or perhaps I was confusing it with May where there are two, one each end of the month. He is taking the piss unremittingly. And why not? It is his way. I must bear it, nobly. Fair game, eh?
I asked her if the tattoo on her inner, lower arm was a quote. No, she said, showing it to me, I got it done when we got married. They are separating now. I’m going to cover it with an image of feather, she said. I’ve already booked it in for November. Did your partner have one done too? I asked. Yes, she said, she did, exactly the same.
A girl walking towards me in the semi-light. Her t-shirt reads ‘Babygirl’. He calls me that sometimes.
I catch the tale end of a play about a home care-worker called ‘Flying visits’. She attends a council meeting to complain about the impossibility of managing each visit within the allotted 15 minutes time-frame. She gives a moving speech, describing how her clients ‘can’t be rushed’ and the time it takes to prepare them for a shower and what a ‘privilege’ it is to bathe someone. Beautiful. It stood me still.
And it is the end of Academy Street on the radio. I shall miss it. I shall miss Tess. So much so that I have got the book from the library. I think I have read it before. It is so familiar. A part of me already. ‘I shall never lie with a man again, Tess, now in her fifties says to herself. But she relishes all the books she has yet to read. Amen to that.
Then there is a clip of Stephen Fry’s upcoming programme of Fry’s English Delights with his guest David Sedaris, with Sedaris admitting that if he doesn’t do his ‘laundry’ at 7.00 am on a Sunday morning he is utterly thrown. I know this all too well, and it sometimes hurts. He tries to soften my self-criticism. You just like order, he says. And I do. It calms me. There is so much chaos.
Those poor people in the US. So much needless killing and pain. How can you protect yourself against that?
Sometimes, says Brian Aldridge in The Archers to Ed Grundy, all you can do is endure it.
A trivial thing, and I know it, but I long for a cup of coffee. And maybe, just maybe, she will tell me tomorrow that it is a no go, for ever. And even, grapefruit, possibly. Do I want to know this?
Rest in peace all of you. I am so sorry. And then there was the ‘seed saviour’ on the Food Programme with the glorious Dan Saladino. What a warm glow that programme gives me. Sunday’s are a roller-coaster of listening. And DID with Sir Tim Waterstone – not sure what to make of him. I was wobbled a little. I look for a gem of something. And it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there.
My belief deepens while my certainty lessens. It feels like I’m standing on ground that is being rocked by an earthquake, splitting and I have a leg either side. Acceptance. That is it. That is all I, we can do. Not in a passive way but an open energetic way. They cancelled one then all of them. I have to let it be and hope that abundance will come from elsewhere. That is all. That is all.
I remember the phrase from childhood. There was a clothes shop with the same title in the small town where I was living at the time. It sounded impossibly exotic. San souci, without care. And walking home with my headphones on Rufus Wainwright’s song with the same name, about a night club in Germany, came on. A happy song, it reminds me of our times in Spoleto. One cannot separate place from sound. A song listened to in a certain place will always bring it back. And I remembered the answer to the crossword clue about a decorative embroidery loop. Well, to be fair I didn’t remember it just came forward, like that, picot. It is picot. Will I recall it next time?
They were all out this morning, looking slightly the worse for wear as the clubs began to close. Three to a bench, girls without coats or cardigans, obviously, bare skin exposed to the night-cum-morning air. Legs akimbo, modesty gone. Bare arms, bare legs and full, in your face, décolletage. Some wore sequinned tops. And it brought back a memory of one that she had had in her wardrobe. It was all zipped up in a plastic dress bag. I opened it once. The sequins were like mermaid skin, all luminescent blues and greens and pinks. It was beautiful. I would go and peek at it now and then when she was out. Another girl on one of the benches had glittered platforms. They were like bambis, all legs, so vulnerable. I hope they get home safe, for all their giggling bravery.
They were standing on a street corner halfway down Pier Street. The woman who was talking had a pair of suede fuchsia high-heeled espadrilles hanging down from her right hand. She was talking to a man and a woman. Her high heels had been replaced by a pair of salmon pink ballet pumps. She was middle-aged and her voice slurred a little. It was 3.00 am. She reached over and embraced the couple beside her. You are my soulmates, she said, you GENUINELY are.
I saw something whirl on the pavement ahead of me. I was striding down Northgate Street. I thought it was a feather or a piece of litter. It was a moth, on its back whirring.
We sat on the ‘Coll field’ in the sometime sunshine and he talked about cricket. I love to hear him ‘witter on’ (Dinnerladies, Victoria Wood, may she rest in peace) like that. He sounds happy, or if not happy, content. We watched as groups of Muslim men kept appearing and heading to what must’ve been a prayer meeting in the little hut behind the Pavilion. Some sat outside on the wall or talked by their cars. It was an amiable atmosphere, calm, masculine. White lines had been drawn on the playing field. A crocodile of nursery school children walked past, on the path below us.
All my work is done. And there is a chance of something unexpected coming. We shall see. So often they come to nothing. But it is nice to be considered. Perhaps she will be put off by having to deal directly with me. Who knows? I like to think it might have pleased him though. That will do me.
No sun. A grey heaviness. I watch a rook on the roof preening. It threw me yesterday. It’s because I don’t understand it. I will try. With calmness. There is nothing to be afraid of. Ever.
I walked thinking, I want to know my death, to carry that knowing with me, to let it help me to see that nothing really matters. Whatever I do here will pass, become nothing. And that is good. That is as it should be. My trace will be as if it never happened. Passing through. I am just passing through. Let it be so. Home soon. Let me come home soon.
There is a sort of wilderness outside and beneath our flat. It is a building site really, and we often hear a JCB winding its slow, heavy way down the slight hill and then round and through its undergrowth. I hated it at first. It was so ugly, so unkempt, but I’ve grown used to it and almost enjoy its wildness now. For it is wild. Ragworts and buddleia have grown in a profusion and there are some marvellous trees. The estates cats roam it pretending it is a forest. One of the Kray twins was out yesterday afternoon, I saw it from my bedroom window just about to creep into a clump of long grass. It was on high alert, its tail and sleek, spotted body razor-sharp with intense concentration. It looked like a leopard, or the tiger in Rousseau’s jungle painting. They’re worth a lot of money, he said of her two cats, she has them tagged. We pass this wilderness along the path to the car and yesterday the buddleia (he always struggles to remember the name, the butterfly bush, he called it yesterday) had a sprinkling of butterflies on it. I saw a Red Admiral and several Painted Ladies. There must’ve been about twenty in all, not that many, I own but an improvement on the few Cabbage Whites we usually see. Butterflies make me feel well. Soulful creatures – they fill the air with their grace.
Still not allowed coffee, how I want one. I miss the smell, the routine of preparing it. I roasted some flaked almonds last night to go on top of a salad. The smell, though subtle is divine. It lingers, like the mist this morning hanging high over the town. It will have to do. I catch it each time I go upstairs.
He was outraged. They’ve clearly never had anxiety, he said. It was a crossword answer. The clue was something like ‘serious anxiety’. Collywobbles. Well, I take it to mean ‘butterflies’ or a slight nervousness over an event or doing something in public. However, I do love that about language, it is so stretchy, so versatile and can mean so many different things to different people. We talked about ‘stool pigeon’ in length too. Apparently, in the 16th century it meant a decoy. A pigeon was literally tied of fixed to a ‘stool’ or in those days a ‘stoal’ or tree stump to act as bait for a hawk. Poor thing. The crossword clue was police informer. (I can’t help singing that Kid Creole and the Coconuts song in my head.) I get a bit cross when they don’t come, the crossword answers, that is. And this morning I was all over the shop with my Sudoku. Sometimes my brain is mush. As is my body. Poor love. She grows old. Battered. We all do I suppose. My legs have returned to feeling heavy after changing my medication back. At least I no longer have the headaches, though apparently the cardiac consultant will want to see me. Shouldn’t they concentrate on those with real need? I just need to live gracefully with it. So many people are in real pain. Like the woman in Tesco’s. We saw her at the doctors. He recognised her before I did. (I wander around this town in a constant state of anonymity, never assuming that I will be known or that I will know anybody. Don’t get me wrong, I like i.) We asked her about it when we saw her this morning. She winces with it. It’s her back. It is crumbling at the base of her spine. The pain killers have little impact. She takes morphine-based ones and her whole paracetamol allowance daily. It only really starts kicking in in the afternoon, she says. She leans to one side, and hobbles as she walks. The other woman, the one with what we suspect to be Parkinson’s, also hobbles. The halt and the lame. Such nice people. I do not regret the change. And the lovely MA student on the till. So elegant and gently-spoken.
They promised wall-to-wall sun and now there is cloud. Heigh-ho. So be it.
A programme this morning on the radio about the Saharan people living in refugee camps. Some were born there. Such strength. They were working on their music as a way of expressing their plight. That longing for a homeland. I cannot know what that is. I do not belong here. Or there. I am moved by such stories, both real and fiction. A thin veil divides them. The mother in Costello’s novel who gave her boy-child all she could and then suffers the grief of his rejection and longing for a father that he has never known. After all that she gave him. Can we blame him? Did she feel the same when her daughter went on a similar search? She came back disappointed, but even so, the implication was that what she had wasn’t enough.
We will soon slough these bodies off, but until we do there is the pain to manage. The pain of living, of being alive. It is a manifestation. How does one live well with it? You’ve just got to get on with it, said the woman in Tesco’s.
It was still there when I walked past this morning on my way home. He’d picked it up off the pavement as we’d walked by on Monday afternoon and placed it on the low wall outside one of the terraced houses. Some little girl will be very sorry to have lost it. A piece of gimcrack, fake silver with paste diamonds. I would’ve loved it, worn it in the privacy of my own room, fantasising about princes and marriage and being saved as I did all those years ago.
I passed it again this morning up the path to work. Still there, like the tiara, though made sodden by the rain. Poor love. Is it a shrew or a mouse? He couldn’t say when I showed him the picture. Has she or he (who can tell) left behind a family, a nest of them waiting to be fed? It is all so chaotic. So beyond our control. And now he must lie there till he decomposes or until whatever it was that killed him decides to return. Raptors won’t take him now.
He was at his window when I returned from my walk. My heart always sinks when I see him there, the light behind him, putting him in shadow. Does he feel the same when he sees me climb the steps? We have to converse, it is expected. The rain held off, I see, he says. Yes, I reply, but it’s a bit breezy out there. Good for blowing off the cobwebs, eh? he replies. Yes, I say, definitely. Definitely. What else can I say? I cannot think. See you then. Cheers now, he replies. Is that enough? Was it sufficient? Did I offend? Och, it is so tricky. And I so want to remain in my bubble of silence and inner thoughts. It’s the same when I am out walking. I am rarely interrupted but sometimes it is inevitable. Like today. I saw them at a distance. Two figures looking lost. He looked like he was carrying a bag. They both swayed a little. I kept my distance. Excuse me, the woman called out, a generously built woman with a head of thick peroxided hair. Yes, I said. Where’s the back of The Glengower? she asked. Oh, I said trying to think, to picture it in my mind, it’s one of these. She sounded disappointed, Oh, OK, and returned her gaze to her phone. They were both standing in the middle of the road. It was not yet 3 am. Continuing my walk up the hill I came upon the sign and called out to them. It’s here. Hello, it’s here. Though how they intended to get in, who knows, the back door looked very firmly closed.
The best thing about having to go into work is the reading I do. I love this book. I lap it up, like cream. (I’ve used that metaphor before for books and reading but still.) She is such a well-observed character and I feel such an affinity for her. Do others feel the same when they read it? (I hope if they make a film of it, which they inevitably will, they will use an ordinary looking actress to play the part. None of those impossibly beautiful American stars made to look dull by simply wearing a pair of glasses and so-called ‘natural make-up’, please). And relationship with ‘Mummy’ is harrowing.
I wrote it on the form. He saw me and was pleased. I usually write both. But for the meantime the one word is sufficient. Is it true? Is that what I am? Will I do the other again? I just want to get this written. It feels right to do so. Even though throughout each day I do sink with it. Negative thoughts play around inside my head – is it good, is it worthy of my time, should I be doing something more useful, less indulgent? I just don’t know. I just do what I think I need to do. To purge myself of her, but also to come to know her, to forgive and feel compassion. It is necessary. A therapy of sorts, clearly, though I cringe at it, at it’s hackneyed-ness. I want to be wiped clean. To order it. To sort it. And interesting things are coming up, things I have long forgotten. I want to be free of her. And not just of her but of the her I created, gave credence to. And in turn her too. All of them. I might be nothing at the end of it, have nothing more to say, for it has all been about her, really. If so, so be it. I will be lighter, smaller, ready to be peaceful. At rest. And he is so supportive, so continually kind and loving. How can anyone be so blessed as me? And I am not always as kind as I can be. Help me to be so. Please.
We got there a little early. I was nervous and wanted it done. Done and dusted. What a day of it. Both ends of the spectrum – from traditional Western to herbal Chinese medicine. Both opaque, at least to me. She gave me a form to fill it. Call me when you’re done, she said, slipping back through the curtains. Oh, dear, I hadn’t realised she was with a patient. It wasn’t what I’d expected. A small shop right on the main street. Two doors, the one on the right with a little label saying her name. Inside a counter flanked behind and to the side and beneath with shelf after shelf of plastic bottles full of stuff. I peered at them trying to work out what they were. Some looked like dried mushrooms. There were powders, dried flower heads, seeds, twigs, roots. Everything, naturally, was in Chinese. To the right of the counter, beside the white curtain was an Acupuncture chart. Her voice had been a little brusque on the phone. But seeing her was different. A small woman with a broad face and smile. She had on silver pumps beneath her white coat. She asked me questions about the form, scribbling down my responses in Chinese script. Your condition is not serious, she said, that sharpness returning, or was I just imagining it? Take these, she said handing me two bottles of pills, and come back and see me in ten days. No spicy foods, coffee or chocolate. Tea was alright, apparently. But not chocolate, she reiterated.
I told him later what a lad I’d met as a teenager had said to me. He’d been a son of a friend of family, I think, and he’d come to our house. We were ‘playing’, as kids are always told to do. He’d offered me some chocolate and I’d refused. You look like someone who likes chocolate, he said. I was mortified.
I’d been conscious of my resistance, no my mistrust, of the smiling woman all along. And how I grieved over it. And yet compared to the English doctor I’d seen in the morning, her consultation had been in-depth and knowing. I felt her kindness. No acupuncture? he asked her. Not necessary, she said. I felt a little fraudulent, especially when her patient hobbled out from behind the curtain on two crutches. The doctor was kind too but distracted, she hadn’t done her homework and couldn’t answer my questions. (Her surgery had smelt of coconut when we’d walked in.) How I hate giving myself over to traditional practitioners. I do not like what they offer and I’ve felt unwell on these last drugs. Enough. What a cul-de-sac. And she’d forgotten why I come originally. We shall see what these tiny black pills do. Twice a day. One bottle tastes of aniseed and the other of licorice.
He called the hospital on my behalf. They want another blood test. Bummer. He frets that I won’t do what I am told. They’re ACE inhibitors, the doctor said, but I’ve forgotten what that stands for. The consultant, she tells me is thorough. Aren’t I just wasting their time? Can’t I go to that little shop on the high street for everything?
There was dead field mouse on the path as I walked up to work. No murders beneath my bedroom window last night.
The rain is holding off. He went out with an umbrella nevertheless.
Mary Costello’s writing is so tender. ‘Never in my whole life did I have one iota of courage’, the main protagonist of Academy Street, Tess, says to herself. Then, describing her neighbour’s, a black woman called Willa, flat: ‘warm, a glorious place, a hum of heaven’. I’ve ordered it from the library, I couldn’t help it even though I’ve two more to finish. And I’ve bought a second-hand copy of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. Got to strike while the iron is hot, eh?
The TED talk yesterday was on altruism. The Gold Coats in the San Francisco prison, inmates who voluntarily help other inmates with dementia and the philosopher from Princeton who talked about effective altruism. That is, giving intelligently. I never thought my life would have reach. I am a small person, not here to do grand things. I can maybe help one or two lives but no more, no I haven’t the confidence or the courage. Is it enough? Is it ever enough to just be? I sat on the bench in the sun and thought about being empty, empty of everything. Clean, shiny and clean. This is why I am writing this to make myself white, fresh, a clean slate. And then, then perhaps I will have something to give.
But I will think about world poverty, the eradication of disease and make my small contribution, I promise.
It was a crossword clue. We do the Saturday Telegraph one on a Sunday night. Regular as clockwork. We are both so routinous. It holds us in place. Sometimes I want to fight against it, run a mile, but other times I know what it does, how it keeps us feeling safe. So, yes, we do this particular crossword on a Sunday. The compiler writes long-winded clues that often drive him, as crossword-reader-out-er, quite mad. But they are also lyrical and so suggestive of a certain class. They’d know that one in Beswick, wouldn’t they? he says, when for instance she’s included a clue about some obscure herb to used in French cuisine. It was a lovely image, though it took me several goes to come up with the answer. The collective noun was ‘a trembling’. A trembling of greenfinches. Isn’t that beautiful?
It woke me. Only half an hour before my alarm was to go off. It was pitch black, thick night. And just below my window. I couldn’t work out what it was. It wasn’t a bird. It sounded like a screeching, a screaming, a howling. It was primeval, desperate, a sound of such fear. It was fighting for its life, this creature and letting out a final death yell. My heart went out to it. Was it a shrew? I remember our farm cats catching them when I was a child. The screaming they made defied the tininess of their bodies. Or was it a mouse being caught by an owl? It sounded mammalian. Poor love. And then there was a flurrying sound, of bushes and leaves being shaken. I hope it was swift, that its heart took it before the real pain of slaughter did. We can do nothing in those circumstances – it’s like Hartley’s story of the Shrimp and the Anemone, to interfere might do more damage. It shook me, I was unsettled as I walked, life is so fragile. All.
I keep walking past her door. I am to see her today. Can I trust? Or is it all bunkum?
I heard a crash upstairs in the kitchen. He’d been doing the drying-up, I’d come down to get ready for bed. What’s happened? I called up. I’ve broken a bowl, he said. Not my bowl? I asked, going into an immediate panic as to what I was going to use for breakfast.
You see, we don’t have a lot of crockery. My fault, I like to keep things small, contained, and not crowded. So there is mostly one or at the most two of each necessity. Which makes the breaking of one a problem. But I’d calmed down by the time I got upstairs. It needed to be cleared up for a start. Nothing like practical measures to calm the nerves. Then I mourned it. My white bowl, that was becoming a little grey in its dip from all the washing and scouring. But I used it for everything, salad, soup, yoghurt and fruit. I have a favourite cup too and plate. I’m a puritan, always have been. But, I thought this morning as I made shift with something else, change is good. It makes one see the world with fresh eyes. And he didn’t mean to do it. And he gets so cross with himself when he is clumsy or ham-fisted. I don’t want to exacerbate that habit. It is easily done, things just slip from your fingers. Besides something new will come in its place.
I sorted through my drawers yesterday. All is tidy. Most calming for some one of my disposition.
And look the sun has come out. What could be nicer?
