I’ve got these slippers, well they’re more like boots really. He calls them UG boots but they’re not. They have no hard soles. Anyway, they are suede, sheepskin I suppose with lovely furry interiors. And they need cleaning. But no drycleaners seem to do suede anymore. Can’t you buy some of that suede cleaning spray? one of the girls in the local drycleaners asked him. No, he said, we want them properly cleaned. When he got home he started to ring round. He’s lovely like that, and when he gets the bit between his teeth there’s no stopping him. He called up a Johnson’s in Swansea. I can’t help you at the moment, a girl said over the phone, you’ll have to ring back. I didn’t catch your name? he said. Kim, she said, or is it Kylie? Well, he said, what is it? I dunno, she said, I haven’t had my coffee yet.
Town was busy this morning, with young revellers still filing out of the clubs. Girls with big glumpy thighs in tiny mini skirts, with no tights or leggings to guard their flesh from the cold. There was vomit and empty food cartons strewn across pavements. Two girls walked arm in arm along the Prom. A fire was still burning on the beach.
It was a turgid writing day yesterday. It makes me feel sick sometimes. I have an hour before work and will begin to shape it. Still very very tired.
Someone has put more pink bows out. Now they follow the line of lamp posts all the way down to South Marine. The east wind this morning was catching at the ribbon tendrils and making them, flitter like jellyfish, in its gusts. The wind was chill. My fingers nipped at their extremities. I am tired. But I am ready to work. I need to make a start, it is the only way to deal with the fear. It’s a beautiful morning. The clouds, what there is of them, are almost stationery, hanging but building up their mountainous whiteness. A few people milled about. I watched as a group of four party-goers tried to get a key into the door of the Richmond Hotel. The big window of The Castle pub was still lit up at three am when I walked by. It’s a stunning window, like the one in that pub on St Martin’s Lane. Etched white with swirling post-Art Nouveau curlicues. It, both windows, speak of a yesteryear grandness when light was courtesy of candles and they flickered flames of yellow against walls of mirrors. Hang the washing, make coffee and work. Chop, chop.
‘With adulthood there had come a quietening of the soul.’
I often listen to the BBC Sounds playback of plays and short stories on my computer when I work. I usually begin with something I’ve either missed or want to hear again and then let it run of its own accord. More often then not something intriguing will come on that I wouldn’t have chosen to listen to. Yesterday it was a short story by Matt Coward called ‘Clean and Bright’ about a young man’s granny who was so fastidious about her housekeeping that she washed air. A thoroughly contented woman, by all accounts. The young man inherits her house on her death but begins to notice a dimming of the light. Full of metaphors and sentences like the one above, it was a beautiful, rather melancholic (the best kind – a November-day-kicking-the leaves-as-you-walk-in-a-park kind of melancholy) tale. I’m glad it found me.
The sun is out already and the housework, such an effort these days (is it my tiredness or just a general malaise?) is done. I’m ready to work now. I was going to crack on with his quilt but the next article is concerning me and I want to make some inroads. Anything to feel lighter. And next week is looking a busy one. Nice, but busy.
She wasn’t what I expected. Though how I could hope to build up a picture from just a name, who knows? But we do don’t we? She had an energy that I also wasn’t expecting. It charged me up – I hope I can bottle some of it for my writing. I’ve never written about something yet to happen before. May the resources I need come to me. Let it not be turgid.
My body grew full of water yesterday. I felt it was drowning me and my legs like lead. It’s my heart. Heart failure, the surgeon called it all those years ago. A throw-away line that for him did not have the import I attributed to it. The discomfort made me cross and irritable and he, in turn, became resentful. It’s like we were strangers, he said later, recounting how it was over lunch. I was, am, sorry for his disappointment. Sometimes it is impossible to pull such things back. They just have to be lived out excruciating as they are.
I didn’t know what to buy her. I don’t know her, not really. It hurts me. I want to please her, make her smile, genuinely. Even surprise her. It is not in my gift. So be it. I will do my best. Something practical. That smells good. Eh?
I have a drawer in my plan chest containing my sewing work. I am not always at ease with this. Not for the fact that it contains tapestries, or that they are still very much in progress and unfinished, but for the fact that I’m not sure why I’m doing them. One is of a book cover, the other is of a section of an old family photograph. I convince myself that they are experiments. But are they really that? I see things and ‘borrow’ them magpie-like, stowing them away in my mind until I can try them out. For the moment such ‘tryings’ are sewn. There are other motives but they are harder to clarify. I came to sewing for so many reasons, one of which is the stillness thing. And the emptying of my head thing. I need to do both these things. I often struggle with the end result. Is that all there is? I ask. It’s not about decoration or even skill but some kind of continuum, a doing, a simple process of using my hands and doing. Time passers. They help pass the time and my mind is at its most creative when I do them. What is that about? I want to see them through, those two pieces and the several text pieces that lie, in see-through bags, next to them. One cannot judge the success or otherwise of a project unless one does. Do they need to be a success? This conversation raises the issue of what to do with the sunflower pieces. They were props ostensibly. What are they now, now that the project is over? What shall I do with them? Complete them, then frame and hang them or make them into cushion covers? What does that make them? I have no prowess in tapestry. I make no claims for my skill. And I never wanted to create stuff – that was another ambition behind the performance piece – to leave no trace, no stuff. I’m blurting.
A mild morning, almost still. I could hear the waves though. A few bodies, like me, wandering.
I’m tired. My body aches a little. Coffee then work. Wake up.
We were talking in the car on the way to have some lunch in our favourite hotel lounge. He was telling me about an article he’d read by a Brazilian sociologist who’d quoted Karl Hopper and his notion that life has two distinct approaches – the clock and the cloud. One is seeing it in a practical, problem-solving way – all is clockwork. The other is regarding it as a cloud, dense, oftentimes obscure and inexplicable. He’d been pleased with the metaphor and the explanation. I’d been talking about my relationship with her. She’s the clock and I’m the cloud (though I can do the clockworks stuff too.) He used the ‘lighten up’ phrase. No, I said, I need to detach, to let it go. And I do. I’m sorry if my presence can be nemesis-like, it isn’t my intention but I can impose it, unconsciously on others. I did to them, I think.
Tea and lunch was lovely. I felt the tension fall away, muscle by muscle. There were few people there. A couple shared our lounge (the adult lounge (how I love that) and then another. One of the women wandered about the room waiting for her husband picking up magazines or adding pieces to the puzzle on the puzzle table to the right of us. He had cod goujons while I had a salad. His food smelt gorgeous. What is it about fried food? It was glorious doing nothing in that warm, innocuous place. We talk about staying there for a couple of nights – to read, walk, stretch on sofas and be the youngest people there.
Two plays, one about policemen trying to talk two female suicide bombers out of blowing themselves and all the participants at a wedding up and the other about a group of women poisoning people so as to collect on their life insurance. Both about trying to see another’s point of view no matter the horror of their actions and divine forgiveness. The poisoners were hung. The priest walked with them to the gallows sincerely promising them God’s leniency and love. I was moved and thought how poverty and hunger pushes people to extremis and about forgiveness. And when I locked the door in readiness to go and meet him the geranium on the windowsill was a vibrant red.
There is a distinct aura of Mervyn Peake to my drawings. I’m not flattering myself – he was a natural and my drawing is mostly hit and miss. But I can see something there, perhaps it is what happens when I scan them, they become separate from the page and from me.
There are pink bows tied to the lampposts along the Prom, at least part of the way. They are heralding the approach of Race for Life in a week on Sunday. We used to see them running past our window in our last flat. Mostly (or are they all women?) middle-aged they huff and puff their way round. It’s nice. And the town is made noisy with shoutings of congratulations from loud hailers. Not my thing, but I celebrate their participation.
I struggled to write yesterday. It was like wading through porridge but I persevered and something was put down. You’ve broken the back of it, he said later. And now, just now, we edited it a little. I still want to tweak it but it’s almost there. I hope he will be happy with it. I asked and it came. My abundance, or at least the start of it. Two new reviews in prospect. It’s not a king’s ransom, he said. No, it isn’t. And apparently writers are earning less and less. And yet it is such hard work. Nothing like it. I wrestle to get my meaning out. And then I go upstairs and put on the radio and there is this Turkish authoress speaking so eloquently, so articulately and I am floored. I have still so far to go. Sometimes I think I know nothing at all.
Bold girls were hollering in town. Bold girls in sleeveless tops and mini skirts. In the rain. Shouting. I walk through the membrane of their clamour, waterproofed and separate. Lone boys with headphones clamped to ears strolled along the Prom. Who are they all? Are they students? They seemed different. I think about the Turkish writer’s claim that the mind lives after the heart stops. For 10 minutes thirty seconds, I think she said. I am still reeling with the thought. She might have been aware of me as I climbed on that hospital bed to lie beside her cadaver. She might have known my nearness and be unable to respond. Would it have made her sad?
We’re off out for tea and lunch later. A rare thing these days. To just sit and not plan. The next few weeks are busy – take the stillness when you can.
He bought me a tea cosy. I’d thought I’d wanted an old-fashioned one. You know the kind, knitted in a complex pattern, multi-coloured though rather drab looking, the epitome of 1950s cosiness. He called me from The Mecca, sellers of coffee and tea. They’ve only got modern ones, he said. It’s a kind of half-moon and large. Which one do you want, red or black? It’s fine. Clean, fresh and simple. We don’t live in a cosy way, he and I. We don’t have enough stuff and I lean toward the austere, if truth be told. Well, spartan at least. Cosy is for other people’s houses where I don’t need to feel responsible for the dust. Now I need the confidence to try it out. I get used to do things the same way. I’ve got used to my thermos cup (which leaks) and breaking those habits can be uncomfortable. Give it a go, Ellen. Small things, eh?
My back is all tightness again. A tightness of fear. It’s the writing. Julia Cameron used to have to drink to write, I understand that totally. I see his face, his expectations, and yet it is a mirage. He asked me to do it. Not somebody else. So I shall write as me.
‘There is no true life. Your true life is what you end up with.’ I re-listened to Anne Tyler’s Back When We Were Grown-ups and wrote down this quote as I worked. The character who says it is Poppy, a hundred-year-old man who lives with Rebecca the main protagonist. I love it. It follows the same lines of that song by John Lennon. Was it something like Watching the Wheels?
On Mondays he rings up the health food shop with our weekly order. Now that is cosy and brings it home all bagged-up. They give us herbs, seeds and spices in little brown paper bags for me to decant into jars. The smells are gorgeous – cinnamon, fennel seeds, cracked pepper and turmeric.
No one about this morning. All was still. He has a funeral today. The deceased requested that colours were worn. No black. All the great and good of the town will be there. The wake is at the golf course. I watch from the outside looking in.
It intrigues me the things that the unconscious fixes on to dream about. Last night, for some reason, perhaps it is that I watch him sometimes from our window, I dreamt of one of our neighbours. He works for the Welsh Books Council, sometimes babysits a white Highland Terrier, puts his washing out on an airer in the Quad below us and keeps himself to himself. In my dream he kept bringing me food and putting it in my fridge. I’m not sure whether it was a gift or he was just taking space in the fridge. They were mainly vegetables and mostly cabbages. Great big footballs of cabbages, some rather raggedy. He complimented me on what was already in there. Nothing really happened. There were journeys and ones ahead that I was preparing for. I just remember irritation and stress that the food might go off.
I sewed yesterday. I wanted the nothingness of it. I sewed an off-white nothing, lines and lines, rows and rows of magnolia. The peace of nothing, no thought, no plan, so problem-solving. Just colouring-in. And I listened to 1962 adaptations of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories followed by the Archers. It was an emptying out, of sorts. Tony Archer was telling Natasha about his son, Tom and how he had lots of ideas but got waylaid, distracted and lacked the vision to see them through. Am I like that? Sometimes I wonder. I just want to finish things, how can you judge their success or otherwise if you don’t?
‘I was reduced to being an artist.’ A quote that I read somewhere, I can’t remember where. I like it. Is it tongue and cheek? I was reduced by being an artist. I was reduced as an artist. Lots of connotations. I think it was a man. And that he felt he had nothing else to offer.
It rained as I walked, pitter pat on my umbrella. I spent the first ten minutes trying to remember Leonard Cohen’s name. I go through the alphabet like he does now. I could’ve sworn there was a G in there somewhere. All I had was ‘Suzanne’ and the gravelly, spoken-ness of his deep voice. I turned the corner, walked down to the sea and it came.
She hasn’t replied. She is not alone. Let it go. I did what felt right. There is nothing else to do. Let it go.
I saw a clump of what looked like bodies on the Prom by Pier Pressure. Where they dead? Oh, no they are moving? I can’t quite make it out. Oh, please don’t let them be having sex. The rain was heavier by then. There were three of them. A lad was on the floor and a girl was trying to drag him up, wrench him up. Another girl in what looked like a cross between a swimming costume and a child’s romper suit was standing up looking at them, her handbag discarded on the ground. Should I have done something? I asked him at breakfast. Oh, God no, he said, leave them to it.
The wind was still strong when I walked this morning. I was buffeted this way and that. Boats rigging jangled and rattled down by the harbour and the waves roared their approach. I didn’t chance it on the Perygyl, too wet and too exposed. I wanted to feel safe, and out of the gust so I walked through town, protected by houses and high walls. We did go out yesterday afternoon once Storm Hannah had eased. I walked the length of the Prom and met him at the harbour. Again the wind was a force, sometimes it was as if I wasn’t moving at all. But I needed it. I need to move, I need to stride, else my body, my heart, my circulation just grinds to a halt, my legs go thick with liquid and my breathing is slowed. The colours of the town look different in the day light, sharper and more vibrant. And I noticed that the college students who did the mural under the castle have extended their reach to an area beneath the monument.
I think about her often. She is an enigma to me. I remember when I cried, she clearly didn’t know what to do and just continued giving directions, keeping it practical, immediate. Does she cry? I can’t remember the last time, I…..yes, yes I can. It was that occasion that cemented something for me. She’d revealed her vulnerability. He had meant so much to her. Symbolically, I think. I feel better about her when I am with her, it was the same with her. Just to keep them in my sight. I know what I am dealing with then. She doesn’t reply to my messages like she used to, she is busy and wrapped up in the negotiations of her life. Is there empathy between us? I don’t know. I feel like I have to prostrate myself before her and ask forgiveness for every past demeanour before we can be at peace. She has a sharp kind of beauty, like her. Hard at times. Hard-edged at least. There is no falling into her, cushion-like. Perhaps men feel differently. I want her to be happy. For her sake and mine. We are so unalike. We didn’t chose each other. We are found together in this life. We must make the best of it. She doesn’t see what I feel, what I do. Though it is not altruism, merely survival. It was the same with her, though more difficult.
Drawers are neater now. And the semblance of order, for it is but a semblance, does quieten me. Now I will sew, listen to The Archers and dream.
I worked intensely yesterday. It is exhausting. Not so much for the act of writing but the taking on of my fears. And yet it was such a good process to go through. Both of them were. Nothing may come of them. It doesn’t really matter, though I’d love to be selected for the last one. But I don’t know if I got myself across well enough. Was I clear, non-wanky and lucid? Did I put across a good idea? Aagh, there is nothing more I can do. But there is no doubt that I feel better about myself for having worked well, and given my best. And then I go upstairs to make lunch and do some yoga and there’s a woman talking on the radio about the same thing I wrote about. And she was discussing it with the same uncertainties I have. Serendipity, beautiful, powerful happenchance. I felt held. The afternoon brought a long sleep and dreams of the picture hanging in his bedroom. I was looking down on it from a balcony in a photographer’s studio. I’d been out for a walk but there had been two wild cats I’d seen chasing a herd of what? Wildebeest? And yet, I was sure I was in Scandinavia. I wanted to report it but didn’t know how. Then I couldn’t find my way home and returned to the photographer. I got vertigo on the balcony this time. And he, who was now in my dream, was convinced the photographer wanted to buy my picture and was mouthing a price to me. I felt excited. V. came through the door with several people, I thought I’d ask her about the lions, (or were they pumas?) but she was drunk. M. from work was there too and was disdainful about my desire to take action. Just leave them, she said. But people were screaming, I said.
A sorting day. A cupboard and set of shelving done. It feels better but the satisfaction only lasts for a short while. I re-arranged some of his drawers too. He hates change. Will he be cross?
I didn’t walk. It has thrown me. The wind and rain were too much. He says he’ll take me to the Prom this afternoon for a blow.
She answered. I’d woken her up. We talked of nurseries, carrots with worms and the weather. Her runner beans are doing well. She lets me in. For those 15 minutes I give her my attention. And it all matters, every last thing. Bless her for her sweetness.
