Author: Ellen Bell

The warmth of the nights seems to increase the headiness of the perfume emanating from the shrubs and flowers. The elderflower bushes on St David’s Road and the on North Road are particularly pungent. Gorgeous. I love it. I could lose myself in their aroma. Just like the jasmine in Spain. Stunning. I drink it in. I plan my walking route around it when I’m there. The tree at the end of the road, then the one in Capistrano and then later, nearer town the one on the corner by the Asian restaurant. The smell roots me, lifts me, lessens the fear. A comfort. Smells have always been a comfort.

I remembered a little of my dream yesterday. She was in it. I wanted to feed her. She was tired and wanted to get back to the baby. Eat, I said, wanting her to make herself strong. She relented in the end and began eating the rolls of unbuttered brown bread I’d put out for her. Is the bread a symbolic detail, seeing as I don’t eat it? Then she’d talked about a stall at the weekend. She was showing some of her work, jewellery I think. My sister, she said, wouldn’t be able to make it.

I walked with a stick this morning. It was to give me confidence. I can walk, but my foot is sore. I’ve pulled something, my gait has gone awry. I feel every step. Not a bad thing. I fastened a bag of ice to it when I came home. Attached with a rubber band. It soothed it.

A cat miaows below. A moaning sound. Well, a kind of moaning wail, with its mouth open. I can’t see it. The rooks of the roof sound agitated. Can they see it? Are they warning each other?

I’m lost again. London is over. I’ve written the piece. What now? Do I finish the tapestries? Then what? I don’t know what I would’ve done with myself if my life had been different. I’m an artist and writer, it is natural to me to make, to respond to my ideas, to produce. But I have other qualities too. I like order, I like to solve problems. And I like to earn my keep. What else can I do but accept what is? This is what I am, I must make the best of it. And cherish the details.

I’ve finished the two commissions and got low over it. I couldn’t give them all they asked for and now I wait for his yea or nay. A pot-boiler. They are pot-boilers but I still want to do the best I can.

The rooks have gone silent.

A man was playing a guitar and singing by the shelter on the Prom this morning. He didn’t stop when I walked past. A few people wandered about. A tall boy with extremely long legs was sitting on a bench just up from Pier Pressure eating fried chicken from a box. He raised his head to look at me but continued eating.

Another lovely morning. What a boon. A gentle day today. All I can do is wait to see if he is happy. Work offers sessions only to cancel them again. So be it. Can I accept it? Can I just yield to the see-saw of it all. And trust?

A dear friend sent me some blackcurrants from her garden. She’d wrapped them with such care. First they were enfolded layers of kitchen roll, then enclosed in a Tupperware box, sealed with gaffer tape and then finally in brown paper. They got here in one piece. Nothing squashed, just a little warm. What a lovely thing. A gift from her garden, smelling of summer. I love that taste, the tartness and they way they coat the tongue.

I keep asking that I remember my dreams. It hasn’t worked so well recently. I get glimmers, I know that so and so has featured, and I have a sense of place, but the details, the meanings are lost. I have a recurring one. A dream that I seem to revisit, or at least I believe I have most nights. Its about me trying to find a restaurant. I’ve been there in the past and they gave me what I wanted but each time I look for it (and it is in this kind of open-air market/mall with white painted floors) it is either gone, closed or I can’t find it. It is foreign, unfamiliar yet familiar. Small and intimate. Its also on an upper floor. I have to climb to find it.

Two large groups of gulls gathered on the shore line. Evenly spaced, all of them had their heads turned to the North.

On South Beach a man was bending down over the embers of a fire blowing them into life. His dog was tethered to a rock, sitting waiting on the sand to be called for.

Most of the students from the Alexandra Hall have gone home for the holidays. One window was alight as I walked past. It was shimmering, alive with brightly coloured spots spinning around inside the room. A mirror-ball effect, a rainbow of colour. It lifted me.

My foot is kaput. I still walk but I have to consider every step. Something is misaligned. I think of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid and how she felt she was walking on knives after exchanging her tail for legs. Pain is a great leveller. It is wisdom-bringing. I need to harness it. I think of my gait, my posture, each step is felt. I will improve.

A beautiful morning, the sea was a millpond. The stink of fish hung around the harbour. Work now. Sit, then tea, then work. Bonjour.

I’ve told you of his habit of quizzing me on birthdays over breakfast, haven’t I? He reads the names from The Times and I have to guess their ages. It’s mostly celebrities and authors, some politicians and some sportsmen, though with the latter he usually says, you may not know him or her. When did they play? I ask, then I can give a rough guess based on how old I was at time. How about some beetroot? he said this morning. Beetroot? he said to himself, before I had a chance to question him. Beetroot? he said again, I meant birthdays. Sometimes I get them spot on. But I was way out with Olivia de Havilland. Over a hundred I think he said. And I was right out with Carl Lewis. I like it. He is usually impressed, and I bask in it. A little thing. A cosy thing.

I’ve cleaned the house before it got too hot. Three hours from 6.30 to 9.30 am. And we went shopping first. And I did some of the windows. I do find cleaning windows a challenge. It’s so unsatisfactory. I don’t have the skill to make them mark free and in the sun the blemishes stand out a mile. I remember doing the windows as an au pair for the first time. The family had windows everywhere, from floor to ceiling. I was given vinegar and newspaper to clean them with. It was messy and frustrating. And then she’d come home and point out the marks and I’d have to do them all over again. I didn’t mind. I understood and shared her wish for perfection. It isn’t so now. She has relaxed into a more smeary kind of living. She is old now, though still energetic, and perhaps doesn’t see or care as she did. Other things have taken over. He hasn’t long, she tells me on the phone. I want to go and see them. It is so far away, and so expensive. But it is in my heart to do so and I will make it happen. By hook or by crook. What does that mean?

Small gangs of boys haunted the town this morning. Feral lads on the prowl. My back stiffens. Two on the Prom, stopping every two minutes to check their phones. Another group running along South Road. Another three in the Castle Playground. The Perygyl was mine though.

Why are you so bad-tempered? he asked last night. He lost his temper with me. It is rare. But I was scratchy. I had been all day. I couldn’t articulate it. Then it came, the tears and then the laughing. All that bile, all that disappointment. That’s why your tummy was out, yesterday, he said. Yes. It was. I hadn’t realised it. What a nightmare, he said, when I told him of the day. The stress of being amongst strangers, the discordance of us all, the flies, the ridiculous expressive dancing, the blue shorts, the pants showing under skirts. I made him laugh. It was better. He understood and so did I.

I dreamt that Jennifer in The Archers committed suicide and I was the one who broke the news to Brian. They hadn’t been told. How did I know? Had I seen the script? I felt sorry for them. They would probably be written out of the show. I could see the fear across Brian’s face – he didn’t care about Jennifer. What a bizarre thing to dream about, he said, when I told him. Do you think so? I said.

I love the summer sounds. I can hear rooks, cawing and a peeping sound coming from the Quad down below. Is it someone’s fire alarm in need of a new battery? Generators, lawn mowers, and children’s laughter. The noise collects and hangs in the air like a sound cloud. It makes me happy. I like to be around people. At a distance but part of it. I do care deeply. Really.

He was sitting on a corner of Llanbadarn Road. He recognised him by the crutches. He was in the shade. That’s the lad I spoke to the other day, he said. I remembered, he’d told me he’d wanted to see if there was work in the fishing tackle shop. What can we do? I asked. Shall we ask him in for dinner? No, he said, you don’t know what you are letting yourself in for. I know. I know. Then he told me of the homeless man who killed a mother and daughter. I want to open up. I want to help but the intimacy of it is always a stopper. Always.

Give me the grace to do what I can. x

There were lots of people about this morning, ambling along the Prom, too hot to think of bed. I passed a couple. They were middle-aged and clearly drunk. She reeled about, leaning into her companion as she walked. A man in a white shirt came up to them. Any pizzariolas near? he asked. At least that is what I thought he said. He clearly meant pizzerias. No, she said, with what sounded like an Irish accent and gesturing along the Prom, but there’s Chicken Licken up there. Chicken Licken? her friend said. You mean, Lickin’ Chicken, he said and elbowed her in the arm and laughed. It’s Lip Lickin’, I wanted to say but didn’t. Chicken Licken was a character from a child’s rhyme, I think, something to do with the sky falling down. It distressed me as child. It felt unsafe.

Susan Hampshire was on an archive recording of Sounds Natural this morning as I prepared breakfast. I remember her face from my childhood, hers and Anita Harris’s. They felt safe to me, those women. So perfectly pretty, they had to be kind, I’d told myself. They must have perfect lives too. Butter wouldn’t melt, people used to say, though I’ve no idea what they meant by it. Cool. Not heated. Not volatile. Reliable. Loving. Kind. An illusion of course. She spoke of filming in Africa, of her fear of performing with wild lions. I thought of fear as I walked. The sounds of those lions, the hyenas and the leopards. Primal sounds. They could get your jugular in a moment, she said. And yet, it is so potent too. So absolute. So alive.

I lay on the grass eating my lunch. It was glorious in the garden. The inside bits were stressful. I liked the silence but my body was tense the whole time. I felt so self-conscious. She did her best. She is kindness itself. But I wanted to withdraw. I can’t do the sharing. And I tried to get away. Running away, she said to the group. Was I? I suppose so. No, I was taking care of myself. This opening up is not for me, not publicly, not like that. It was such a surprise when he came. There’d been a noise in the porch, the hallway. She went to investigate. Come in when you’re ready, she said. A disparate group, no gelling, no relationships. And she was off, a little off, I think. He was a mass of dreadlocks, they hung round his face, down to the floor some of them. He came with instrument case, rucksack and various bags. Was he homeless? Is he homeless? At one point he walked across the floor and onto the stage to plug in his mobile phone. He didn’t participate much but sat smoking outside and reading a small book with a very ornate, leather bound cover. A bible? Interesting but disparate. I only knew one face. That is all. The garden was lovely but I don’t think I will go again. My gut is still tight.

A beautiful morning. He complains of the heat. I embrace it. It is joy to me. Such morning, such warmth, such light.

She was on the bus when I called. Her voice was excitable, almost elated. It takes courage to leave the house. For some, it takes immense courage. The heat has been getting to her. It has brought on hay fever. I feel it in my chest, she says. I was cross all week, she says, so I thought I’d get out. I’ve got the bus and will take the same one back, she says. Just to Carmarthen to change some clothes for her daughter. I won’t stay long, she says. It’s enough. A big step. She will be tired, ragged when she gets home.

Knausgaard writes about Flaubert. He thinks that Madame Bovary is the best book ever. He recalls reading it first as a teenager, how he didn’t understand it, it was just about the sensations. They filled him, as they do now. I understand what he means, how books’ meanings often grow on us as we revisit them through our lives. And it’s OK not to get it all, it’s enough to just float across the surface and enjoy the dance of words. I love his forays into sentience. He has courage to, to write what he feels. And to be so confident of his opinions. I spend my life not knowing.

The sun shines but there is more of a breeze. Three youngsters were in the sea as I walked this morning. A girl was screeching with the cold. Their voices echoed across the Prom. An oystercatcher peeped. I walked without gloves or hat. Balmy. Lovely.

Silence soon. I forgot to be silent with him too. Never mind. It is fine. There are no rules, she says. Do what makes you comfortable. Well, can I not participate in the after session, then? I struggle with that, all that group-hugging. Nice, in principle but I want to keep contained. Can I?

I will think of you all in that silence. I promise.

A barefoot girl slips out of a taxi on the hill behind Alexandra Hall. She starts to walk up the hill and then stops to look at her phone, its yellow light lighting up her face in the still dark. Switching off her phone, she turns on her heel and walks back down the hill.

There are a few people about, mostly youngsters, out drinking or unable to sleep. Two Americans, a girl and boy sit on a bench on the Prom, he is looking at his phone. I know where I am now, she says. I do too, he says, now.

Lip Lickin’ is open. A large girl stands in its doorway, I was like…she is saying.

Another silent day tomorrow. My work-head wants to say don’t go. But I know that it will do me good. I want the blankness, it refreshes me. My mind is in overdrive at the moment, remember this, remember that. An endless tranche of lists and to dos.

They called to say that there will be no more paper reviews for the foreseeable future. The papers don’t come early enough. I sink and trawl up all those fears of not having enough. He is irritable with the heat and is less than patient. I don’t blame him. He’s heard it all before. You’ve said all this before, he said. I know, I know. And what good is all that catastrophising? I just can’t see my way clear. So be it. Trust. That is the word, just trust all will work out. And then the phone rings….

I keep thinking about the absolute necessities. Water, food, shelter and warmth. Running out. The fear of running out, of death, I suppose. There is no certainty so why seek it? It is an illusion. We get so bogged down with periphery, with the things we think we need to do to show we exist, are immortal. None of it matters. Just the breathing in and out and the kindness. Simple really. Silence gives me that. If only my mind would allow it.

Tomorrow it will. The sun shines and I am glad.

I saw it through the window. They’re doing the building up. It’s surrounded by scaffolding. There was a light on. The room looked empty, high-ceiled, just white and in the centre was this huge birdcage. Or was it one of those glass-fronted herbariums? I don’t know. It used to be the extra mural building, where the University gave classes to the people from the town. It’s a little faded but still rather grand. A cake-like shape, its faux royal icing is now rather yellowed. What are they turning it into? So much change. Always change. But I liked coming upon the birdcage. It was incongruous, elegant, like the doll’s house in the house down the road. So tall, in unpainted bleached wood. How wonderful to have one. I would make it my own. Completely.

We don’t have a garden. I miss it sometimes though I have no idea what I am doing. No confidence. But we do have three pots with geraniums in just by our front door. The windows let in the sun. It’s a good spot. I watered them this morning, early. It was still dark and a moth flew out as I emptied the liquid into the pot. It flew against me, no doubt thinking my black top was a space, an emptiness it could hide in. They are such fluttery, nervous things. I pick up on their nerviness.

I watched a feather fall from the top of the roof and down the tiles. A moments movement when I was being still.

I’ve been unsettled over the last few days. Things niggle. Mostly about the way I should or shouldn’t behave. I talk to him about it. He irons it out. Its OK to think that, he says. Be at peace. It’s an inner fight between the child and the adult and mostly about fear. Just trust. Be gracious. The grace. Accept, find your grace.

She has cancer of the kidney. I am sorry. I tell her about it and she is too. A good woman, she calls her. And she is. No side to her, no anger. Gentle.

A few kids wandering about this morning. A tall gazelle-like girl with her friend, wrapped in a blanket. A group of friends, one, a lad, says, I’m going to sit down on this bench and have a fag. Aaah, one of the girls says, I’m cold.

I send a message via Facebook. Do I really want to wake that up again? I wonder how he is. It’s gone. There is no flame. Nothing. No one but him. It has always been so, the rest have been nothing. It’s not what I expected. But how could I have known about such love.

You OK?

A car rushing down Penglais Hill. A Fiesta or a Golf, black with red on its wheels. It comes to a sharp halt just as I am about to turn into Llanbadarn Road. A young man leans over to speak through the passenger window.

You OK?

I’m a little thrown. Is he drunk? They usually are when they speak to me. Should he be driving?

I’m fine, I answer and continuing walking.

I know you want to get on, he says, but are you OK?

That’s nice, he said from the shower, when I told him. He was looking out for you, he said. I like that.

Yes. It reminded me of the ‘Angels’ I used to see on the tube in the 80s. They’d copied those in NY. I felt safe when they entered one of the carriages. They wore red bomber jackets and would scan the space and smile.

He replied. You might as well have been peeling potatoes, he wrote.

Well, yes, but I wasn’t. I feel a little put out but at the same time it’s quite funny. They’re all men, the ones I went to for advice. Funny that. We’ll see what comes. And from that too.

Grace. Let them be grace. But for the grace…..x

Hello Earth, sang Kate Bush on Hounds of Love. And so do I, in my head, as I walk out each morning. The smell of moist earth fills my nostrils as I open the hallway door and out into the quad. The ‘building site’ is still there, any hopes of them landscaping it are fast fading. Never mind. To be at peace is to accept what is, or at least those things one cannot change. The birds go there, as do the cats, and sometimes there are butterflies. The earth smells good at 3.45 am. My nose is alert, and alive to all things. The elderflower bush as I turn into North Road, the honeysuckle, still yet to flower, the spreads of lavender, two, no three of them, that I pull through my gloves, stopping to smell the residue. And sounds too. There was a lad in a green sweat top going down the steps to the beach as I walked towards the Bar. I heard the crunch of his pumps on the shingle. A man was by the Bar. I smelt his cup of instant coffee and the tobacco from his little clay pipe. A singular looking bloke, in flip flops, the heavy blue kind, and silky, long baggy shorts. Walking through the harbour I expected to smell the fishy odour of lobster pots, sometimes utterly overwhelming in the heat, but instead there was a strong whiff of antiseptic, like germolene. Do you remember the smell? So distinctive of my childhood.

The sea hardly moved. Heavy as treacle, and inert. I heard that bird again. Was it an oystercatcher or a curlew? Do we get curlews here? It was a strange call, a kind of cur-lee, cur-lee, that echoed across from the cement jetty opposite the Perygyl. Then it stopped. The moon is almost full but it is yellow rather than white and it’s light is minimal.

We talked about my morning tension. I thought of it this morning as I walked. Do I just welcome it in? My back tightens all the way down to my waist. I feel its every muscle and sinew. Rigid. Stiff.

I watched as Elephant’s mother ran out of the house for a run. She avoided eye contact with her neighbour who was cutting the grass, as usual. So it isn’t just us. She and her partner do not engage with the rest of us. He smiled at her the other day as we drove past, she almost smiled back but it was so forced, so uncharacteristic and she dropped it mid-grin and returned to stone. And yet their three children spread themselves about, we hear their laughter and noise often. Yesterday she’d laid out a rug for them and they were playing or picnicking in their back garden. She is clearly an attentive and loving parent. He is less patient, we hear him losing his temper with them. A little irascible, I think.

Let them be, I say to him. It may be a religious thing.

Let it all be.

She replied, with pictures. All is well for now. Thank you.

The morning is bird-time. It is theirs. The sky, the earth and the sea. They dominate. The seagulls have taken over from the students. What a noise this morning. A cacophony. They screech, moan and yell. I watch as they soar over the sea catching light on their underbellies, white planes of grace. One came to rest on the pavement ahead of me, all elegance until it landed then it was limping, hobbling. A stunning morning. The black becoming blue, first over Aberdovey then slowly moving south. An opening up of such hope. I stood on the Perygyl, eyes closed, listening to the lapping water. It looked like oil, heavy, languid. Another oystercatcher peeped in the distance. I couldn’t see it. Later, at Morrison’s we watched as seagull ripped at a large bag of Wagg dog food. They do it all the time, said one of the cleaners, nonplussed by it, they gorge themselves.

I sent her a message via Facebook. It’s not the ideal form of communication for me.  She suggested it. I am kept at arm’s length. No, that sounds too loaded. It is how they do it. It is what they do. A managed form of communication, to be responded to if and when, or never. She rarely replies instantly. She has a full life. It brought me down. I feel clumsy, ham-strung by that little box. Is that all, is that all I can say? Trying to keep it light, easy, non-needy. I have to just accept what is. I cannot change it. Yield to it with grace. It is something, she lets me in. That is something.

She was ahead of me, walking ahead of me. I thought it was her. The baker’s girl. The baker’s counter assistant. She must come by train from somewhere. She arrives just before four am. She has a pony tail, and that day wore cotton cut-off trousers and sandals. It was cold and she hugged her sweat-top to her chest as she walked. She stopped at the door of the bakery to let me pass. Sorry, I said, and walked on waiting for that smell to envelop me as she opened the door. I think of her in there. My doppelganger, my other life. My simple other life where I don’t have to create anything, just lay out the bread and serve. A nice ordered existence. People require bread, it is made and I would sell it. Twisting those paper bags with brown loaves inside. Counting out the rolls, the teacakes, the macaroons. Do they sell macaroons? Would I become immune to the smell? They do coffee too. There’s a little café. How would it be to live her life?

There was a girl standing outside the Halls this morning, at the back, as I walk up the hill. She was in the middle of the road. All in black, she looked like a latter-day Audrey Hepburn but taller. She had one arm wrapped across her chest and curled around her waist and she was staring at the sky.

It is my grief. That is all. I can live with it, have done for well over twenty years now. Neither good nor bad. It just is. But I love. I do love. Both of them. So much.

I was sitting on the wall when I climbed the little hill above Llanbadarn Road. It was a while till I noticed it. A big furry, orange cat with a very wide bridge across its nose. It stared at me and grew alarmed. Sitting up it then bounded off the wall. Then obviously having second thoughts as to the threat I posed it stopped by the end of a driveway, sat down and curled up its tail. We held eye contact for minutes, maybe two or three. Sometimes it leaned its head to one side trying to make me out.

Two men passed me on the Prom clearly returning from a night out. One, in a white shirt and thin, straight black tie, called out to me. G’day, he said. Hi, I replied, temporarily thrown by being spoken to, or even noticed.

Each of the benches along the Prom have a red piece of paper taped to the ground beneath them. Wet paint, they read. And yet, the benches aren’t newly painted or indeed wet. They’ve been there for over a week now, have they forgotten them?

The sea was balmy this morning, just lapping. I close my eyes when I reach the Perygyl and I can imagine the Mediterranean, that same glugging as the water curls under the rock, the screech of gulls and a pipping of an oystercatcher as it flies across the ocean.

That was when I first met her, he told me as we sat in the sun, when I went up to school to see my O’ Level results. He was sixteen, she was fourteen. She was coming out of her house, he said. The house is still there, the one on the right as you come out of the gates. We pass it everyday. Does he think of her still? He seems content not to see her.

Sir Kenneth Allsop was on the radio this morning, I said as he got out of the shower, was he Debs father or Fabian’s? Fabian’s, he said, and he wasn’t a peer. I’m sure they said sir, I said. He killed himself, he said, something to do with a pain in his leg that wouldn’t go away. He changed their names, you know, from something quite ordinary, he said. He was on Sounds Natural, a replay of an old 70s radio show. I like it. A gentle start to a Sunday.

There ought to be night jars here, he said. Yes. Yes, there ought.