I thought at first it was a collection of plastic bags of food from a barbecue. It was in a jumble on South Beach near the kiosk that sells coffee and ice cream. Then I noticed the silver foil. It was a silver foil wrap the kind they put around the runners at the end of a marathon. It was draped over something, though one side had come lose and was waving in the breeze. I didn’t want to stare. I keep to myself when I walk in the early mornings and I respect others’ privacy in equal measure. I guessed it was a man sleeping and the bags were his belongings. There was room in the shelter on the Prom but perhaps he wanted to sleep alone, even if the beach is pebbled and far from comfortable to lie on, I know I would. I saw two groups of kids huddled around bonfires on the North and South beach. It looks so evocative. A lovely way to see in the morning. Which, this morning, is rather overcast.
I am sleepy. Sometimes I shut my eyes even as I am writing.
A gentle day today to prepare myself mentally for the journey. I shall read through it and hunker down as best I can. It will be good to be on the move. And to see her. Quiet and talk. Quiet talk in the garden. And tea. Lots of tea.
He is there in the background whenever I call her these days, crowing. Though it isn’t really crowing, more of a cawing, carolling sound. I understand why children are told it’s a cock-a-doodle noise but that isn’t it either. I can picture him in my mind’s eye with his head and throat extended to the sky calling out for all his might. I don’t think she hears him anymore. Apparently, he runs to greet her daughter’s car when she returns from work. The idea of their relationship (hers and her daughters that is) warms me, though I can see that it might have it’s issues. They are so intertwined, so scared for each other. Scared of their separate fragilities. It reminds me of L. P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone, though the protagonists were a brother and sister not a mother and daughter. In the end there is much love and that has to be a good thing, a warm thing. She’d broken her rib. Gosh, you are in the wars, I say. She is sanguine about it but admits to being in pain. She fell walking, luckily she wasn’t alone. She has to go, she’d got a doctor’s appointment.
The scent of a woman’s perfume hung in the air as I walked along South Marine Terrace. It was 3 am. A cluster of students were sitting on the beach warming themselves before a bonfire. They had some music on but it was low. The all stared at the sea.
I saw them twice during my walk. He was tall and thin with a long white beard. He had on heavy walking boots and strode ahead. He looked distracted, a little lost. Behind him trailed a youngish woman wrapped in a rug or blanket. She was waif-like thin.
Housework done for the moment, ironing later. And my admin. A beautiful morning shines through my studio window. Another cup of tea then work.
It had been placed directly outside the Elim Christian Fellowship Church. A kind of make-shift barrier made up of a plank of wood laid across two chairs. The plank looked like a painted floorboard, its layers of paint long since peeled. Several A4 sheets of paper printed with the words RESERVED FOR WEDDING CAR had been sellotaped to the board. Some had come away from their tape and one was trapped under a wheel of a car further up the road. The chairs were plastic, austere. There was no hint of any extravagance, pomp or flurry to come. What would the wedding car look like? Would there be confetti thrown? The Elim Church was the congregation that Jeanette Winterson’s adopted family belonged to with the now infamous exorcism and full-body baptismal insertions. It makes me shiver a bit. When I walk past. But that was then and perhaps now they are a little less fundamentalist. Even so, the prospect of a wedding car arriving there bedecked in ribbons and bows seems an anathema. We wonder if Elephant’s parents are members, it is the only way to explain their utter lack of sociability.
He started speaking to us as if he knew us, or at least him. He’d been doing up a mobile van, a bright red thing. It’s going to New Zealand tomorrow, he said, pointing at it. It had to be cleared of all cobwebs before it went, he said, proudly. It gleamed. We admired it noisily and walked on. The mobile van parked outside Alexandra Hall is a little shabbier. The raised, glue-d on lettering on its bonnet looked like Japanese script, illegible to me. But as I walked past I suddenly saw it. It wasn’t oriental at all but English. The word was MABEL.
Two girls were sitting hunched on a bench near Pier Pressure. A jacket and two phones lay on the ground ahead of them just beneath the railings, looking like they’d been thrown there. One of the girls was crying, the other was comforting her.
I see the slug trails as I walk along North Road. The glisten and shine in the lamplight. There are shiny things on the ground everywhere. My eyes search for them: silver paper from a chewing gum packet, bits of cellophane, an odd coin, a button embed into the paving.
No writing today. There are my accounts to do and I must do a few hours on his quilt, then to work.
She was a healer, undoubtedly. Her hands were hot with it. But things were a little haphazard. I don’t find even a small amount of chaos relaxing. I want it all to go smoothly. She asked questions of me, I didn’t want to talk and was mono-syllabic. Did she think me rude? She was good. I felt floaty and out of synch afterwards.
We sat on a bench in the sun. He was loquacious, happy. Let me show you Prospect Street, he said.
They called him to say that they’d got some in. And there they were when he picked me up, a cardboard punnet of them covered over with a brown paper bag. How I love them. They are so evocative of summer, of orchards, of skin prickly with sun and from thorns while delving for currants, fingers stained blue from currants. I lump them all in together. Soft fruits. The tartness of them. I don’t use sugar. Too sweet, to dangerous. The next quest is blackcurrants then damsons. A concentration from childhood. A punnet of joy, zinging on the tongue.
The prospect of writing spasms my back. Let it happen. For when I am in it, when I am writing, it is peaceful. I accept what comes out, letting it do so, without judgement. I need to get somewhere. And it, this outpouring flow, is taking me there. What a learning curve. I’m trying to find my voice, authentic, unforced, mine. The sewing I’m working on echoes it. Just doing it. Just working it. More books arrive. Two from the library. I go there for them when I can. They excite me. Thrill me at times. Two are from Amanda Vickery. The interior lives of eighteenth century women. Fascinating. I merely dip my fingers. I want to find a something, a hint of a path I might follow. This is why I am doing what I am doing. Perhaps it won’t come like that. Who knows?
I am nervous about later. A new practitioner. A new space. I hand myself over. You have to trust in the end don’t you?
Sometimes it feels like I am writing her alive again.
I set my alarm for an hour later. I was nervous about doing so. I hold tight, too tight I know, to my regime. It keeps me in place, like a corset, held in, taut. But I’d had a late session the night before and knew that I’d be too tired to function well if I didn’t snatch an extra hour. But everything is shifted forward. I missed several of the radio programmes I like to listen to while I make breakfast. Though I did catch the end of one of Julia Darling’s series of short stories about the Post Office, which was nice. I must listen to the rest. And I did try to see the positive side of being later. Such as the oncoming daylight as I walked. A blue really. A lifting of night. Different people were out. I’d missed the woman with the Tesco Bag for Life who seems to do all her shopping in the 24 hr petrol station on Mill Road. A woman with a shock of white blonde hair passed me but kept her head down. A few lights were on in the houses along South Marine and someone had neglected to switch off the fairy lights in the breakfast room of the Shoreline guest house. They were flickering their candy-like colours wildly when I passed. I love looking in on breakfast rooms in B&Bs. I love the tables all laid out ready. The cups upended in saucers, the ironed napkins, the posy of flowers, the butter pats. It’s the order, the pre-planning, I think. It calms me. The walls are full of paintings of ships and ships in bottles grace the mantlepiece and window sills. The lights of Aberaeron glimmered across the water. I couldn’t see Aberdovey, the mist hid it from view. We were supposed to go there today but worked called. No matter. The earth smelt sweet, damp, cloying as I walked along North Road. Still wet with rain.
I saw it on the pavement on one of the back streets that lead up to the little hill. A bright azure blue. A fiver. Thank you, I said. I told him of it at breakfast. Shall I take it to the police station later? he asked smiling. He knows me so well. I am sorry for the person who lost it. But I am also grateful for the abundance, the gift, the sign of something unexpected.
I wrote. A wrote a thousand words, well almost. I like having written, said Andy Robbins on the radio, the stress being on the ‘having’. Be patient, you have to find what is lost, said the spirit guide in Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time. That is what I am doing. Writing to find it.
The comfort of smells. Old Spice. He wears its, always has. I come downstairs and its aroma permeates the fuggy air. It makes me feel safe. It is him. The comfort of him.
In the middle of my life I am walking through a dark wood. So said Dante while writing the Divine Comedy, according to David Whyte the poet, who I listened to as I walked this morning. I don’t walk the dark woods but the dark streets and the dark Prom. Though in June, now, in the blueness of now, it grows lighter faster. I woke from a dream in which I was working for the royal family and living in the Palace. I wasn’t doing to well, there was still so much I didn’t know. I forgot to change Prince Harry’s lunchtime menu. He was going to end up with Roast Beef two days running and there was nothing I could do about it, save make up for it with an irresistible sweet dish. Then I was working in a shop in the palace, a canteen with a shop. Someone was teaching me the ropes. There was so much to learn and I couldn’t remember it all. There was something to do with a bonus payment but the procedure was so complicated. And yet I was left to my own devices, trusted with it all. I was scared but not scared. But I do remember looking at my watch and realising I had a whole day ahead of me to get through in this state of not knowing.
I caught the tail end of the TED talks and heard an author and ex-Olympiad swimmer talking about failure and how the fairy-tale myth perpetuated by story and mass media is that failure is also followed by some meteoric success. There is not always a rise, she said, not everyone rises. Sometimes this (this ‘failure’ for want of a better word) is your life. I found her words profoundly restful. I fell into them like an eiderdown. The pursuit of success if so tiring. I’m not sure I want it. Not anymore.
I’ve decided to begin writing. A curtain, thick and black comes down before my eyes at the thought of it. It is timely. I need to reduce my fear of it.
I’ve always been afraid, I thought as I walked, for as long as I can remember. Mostly unnamed, unimagined fears – sometimes it was her, or school, or just being alive. And yet, physically I had enough, was fed, watered, kept warm. It was just in me. Was it hers, a hand-me-down dread? Or was it of my own making? I will live with it. Working with it even if fear is a counterpoint to creativity able to sabotage, strangle the joy and courage out of it.
I looked up list poets but none were listed. But there is such a thing as a list poem. I wanted to write a happy list. Not as a poem but as a reference point that I could return to when bleak. Things I could do. I always like to have things I can do. Small things. Sometimes miniscule things. Like walking near the bakery so that I can catch the smell of freshly baking bread so as to alleviate the dreariness of walking in the dark and the pissing rain. Or the breathing in the scent of the dog roses, sharpened in the wet, just beyond the Castle. So often happiness, or is it bliss, or merely pleasure comes to me via my sense of smell, such as the perfume of night-scented stocks on a warm evening, or the warm sweet-buttery-ness of a Danish pastry straight from the oven or that of ground coffee beans in Covent Garden’s Monmouth Street’s Coffee House. One has to be specific. That specific. Smells can disappoint. For the moment I think of sun. Of sitting in the sun. Of sitting in the sun on a balcony. Just sitting. Doing nothing but sitting. Warming my bones in the sun. The sun empties me out. It roots out the mouldy darkness, the dread, those corners of impossible-to-articulate dread and washes it white. A white-out. How I want that. A white-out. Clean white sheets. Never patterned. Have I ever said how much I prefer not to sleep in patterned sheets? Sleep, bed has taken on a holy state. I need its warm, then cool white emptiness. So that I can empty out. But not before sending out love, good thoughts, healing whatever you want to call it. To her in that prison. They call it languishing. The word seems wrong, inappropriate like Lydia Languish of The Rivals. Languishing implies a prone body, stretched out bored on a chaise longue. Not so in the case. I thought of her today, this morning. I thought of her as walked in the relentless rain, shopped in the supermarket and as I put away the food. Don’t let her be forgotten. Somebody do something now, soon, please. I want to feel for others. Sometimes it is all I can do. To stand beside. To sit beside. To be in their story. To listen. It seems such a small thing. What am I for? Perhaps it is not about happiness, a sometime scary thing, a wildness, but more about peace. Is that it? Is that what I have to offer? My peace? A lifetime’s work. To be at peace with oneself as a gift to the world. Here. When I have it it is yours.
Maybe I just don’t know how to be happy. How to be happy. I think it is an art. Perhaps we have it as babies, newborns, who knows. And perhaps some of us un-learn it. Or just cannot allow it. I think about dark things more than light. That is for certain. I thought of her and her last night. One in a prison refusing food and another still ill, not herself. Does this happiness thing really matter? Is that our only reason to be here, to get happy? He advocates medication, believes in it, swears by it. I am sceptical, scared of handing myself, my mind and my body over. I want to find my own way to the other side, if there is one.
The dead blackbird was still there on the side of the road on the approach to the little hill. It is still in one piece. A perfect form but lifeless.
The moon was almost full as I walked. And the morning just breaking. Two girls were wrestling in the sand pit, another sat on the giant deckchair egging them on. Pier Pressure was busy. A line of white taxi-cabs waited outside. The salty stink of fried chicken hung in the air. There was no wind.
I brought him down, I could see that. He wants to help, to make it better.
He didn’t give her the job. He said it was because she wore too much green eyeshadow. Times have changed. Might she have lived now? I understand his obsession, I am somewhat the same. I think about them all, all my grandparents, parents and ever further back. They’ve all had their part to play in this life of mine. She came down so low from all those prospects. And she did, and she. One can only feel sorry. Always.
She was out walking when I phoned her. Her voice was a little breathless and I could hear the wind. Is the dog with you? I asked. Yes, she said. She’d woken late she told me. And I had to get out, she said, to shake off my stupid dreams. I wondered why they were stupid. I didn’t ask. She was chatty. It is nice to hear. She is so different, so much more open. I like out chats, she says. I do too. I do too.
More on-waking chattering in my head. This morning it was someone saying, ‘You could quickly get into the psychiatrist’s chair.’ And just before going to sleep I saw an image of glass that had just been shattered on a tarmac path. The glass was like little tiny cubes of ice. It had smashed right in front of me. Had I thrown it? I read somewhere that Thomas Edison was so fascinated by human subconscious activity just before waking that he rigged up a systems of alarms so that he would wake sharply in time to note down his visions and hearings.
I heard the crunch under my walking boot. Oh, no, I’ve stepped on a snail. I recoil from that tender destruction, feeling the fragility of the shell. They spend the night making their way across paths and roads and cannot be seen in the dark. I didn’t meant to. I am so sorry. The glare of headlights makes me avert my eyes. I take the shortcut towards the station and the same car is coming round the corner. It’s a police car and the officer inside cranes his neck to stare at me. Am I suspicious-looking in my waterproofs, hoodie and boots? The scent of the dog roses in the Castle park are gorgeous. The night time seems to heighten their sweetness. Three lads in Hawaiian shirts loiter outside The Angel, playfighting. There is another next-door in Pizza Lush ordering from the counter. Three girls sit on the steps of The Academy smoking. I sniff the air just beyond the Pelican Bakery. Any smell of bread? A hint. Buttery notes, a trace of salt and a warm blast of yeast. A few days ago the odour of baking bread filled the town from the station to the top of Llanbadarn Road. It must’ve been the direction of the wind. The two bakers from Slater’s used to hang around outside the shop smoking, their floury footsteps marking a route from the Barclay’s’ ATM to the 24 hour SPAR. I don’t see them anymore.
A man is ahead of me. A large man, shaven head broad shoulders. Should I cut off down the next road? He has the word SECURITY emblazoned on the back of his bomber jacket. I join Llanbadarn Road from down the little hill. He is across the road on the other pavement. He looks up at me but continues walking. An owl whoo woos in the distance. I am safe. I always have been.
A new word came to me. A derivation of ‘twatting’ or ‘twatting-around’. He does a lot of that. ‘Twattling’. Don’t do too much twattling, I said getting out of the car.
I was going to work on his quilt but my legs are heavy and tired, I need to sit with them up. So I will put it off till Monday. I yielded to her advice. More blood tests and new medication. How have I got to this place?
A note to myself. Read Harriet Martineau’s letters and those of Vanessa Bell and her part in the Omega workshops and the aesthetic indivisibility between home space and workspace.
I woke with a sentence in my head. Things make sense in dreams that don’t when one tries to bring them into this reality. They don’t translate. I knew what it meant then but now I’m not so sure. ‘Very up to talk.’ That’s what it said. Was it about a particular person? Who knows. Leave it be. Let it float around as sound, sound heard but not verbalised.
He reads the obituaries just before he leaves the breakfast table to go downstairs to dress. He wasn’t a notable personage. An actor with an unusual name. He never knew his father. He’d left and the actor had never sought him out. His most famous role was as a Darlek. ‘I needed the money,’ he said, ‘and nobody cared.’
The rain was relentless when I walked. But it is always better than one expects. And there is pleasure in it. The patter of drops on the umbrella. The smell of the damp earth, the lack of people, and looking in on lit drawing rooms.
It gave me a fillip. I remembered her name and ordered two of her books. Both are about the eighteenth-century. And it’s interiors. I want to read about women sewing, why they did it and what they thought of while they did it. She writes from the standpoint of the individual. She goes inside their homes, reads their letters and diaries. I want to discover what they say about needlework marking time, filling time, taking time.
I keep falling asleep at my keyboard. Just a second, a moment. And the voices continue, chattery chattery. Time for coffee, then work. Then the Surgery. She’s doing her best, he said before he left. I know. And I will be polite. I will keep open, I promise him.
