Author: Ellen Bell

I woke for a pee at 11.30 pm from a richly-layered dream. I knew this. The landscape stayed with me but the details were lost on waking. Let me remember the next one, I asked as I climbed back into bed. And I did. My now deceased Norwegian aunt was there. We were in some kind of hotel, but as is often the case with my dreamscapes the rooms are not closed in, or defined, they lead into each other. She was staying there and had her own special room. Even in my dream I remembered her sojourns as a young woman to London to sing and how she’d stayed at the Holland Park YHA. A little different then. We’d visited it together, she and I, years later. How delighted she’d been. Perhaps it is listening to the production of Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark on the radio that brought forth this image into my reverie. Who knows. I was to sleep there too but I was shown a downstairs room that appeared to have no ceiling, or indeed, walls. I thought of rain and how I would shelter and then I noticed that there was a semi roof running along the edge of the non-ceiling. All would be well. There was also some kind of performance or critique going on, for at the end of the dream a man put his head round the door and said, She’s marked you down. It stayed with me, that phrase, she’s marked you down. I knew to whom he was referring. But she always loves your new work, he said by way of consolation. I knew this too. This was a blip as far as she was concerned. She was confident in my ability. Need I be downhearted? I’d asked to remember it and so be it. I take the consequences. Perhaps it had been his somewhat throw away comment, well what will you do now? Perhaps I read a criticism, or at least as requirement to always have the next new idea. But he too qualified his statement, you’ve got to have something to worry about, haven’t you? he said. I tell him the dream and he laughs. It had to be an older woman, didn’t it? he said. Yes, I said, though funnily enough all my art tutors have been male. Perhaps this is not about my work after all.

The wind was less strong this morning, though the rain struck like splinters of glass on my face.

He bought us some daffodils. To remind us that Spring is coming, he said. And their British. I was less than grateful. Too tired to want another thing to do. I tried to pull back. Thank you, I said cutting the ends and immersing them in water. Thank you. Sometimes I am cross and I am sorry for it.

There was a tube of Fixodent on the path down to Llanbadarn Road. It seemed out of place, inappropriate, considering the demographic. Where had it come from? Someone’s pocket or had it fallen out of the recycling bag that the wind has clearly blown onto the path?

I need to write this morning, though I long to sew and hear the end of Stone. I need to write about what I want from next week. I am concerned about the residency. I want to be able to maintain a low profile but am not sure that she will let me. And the interview. Did I tell you she said yes? I saw her again this morning pushing a trolley with ten bottles of water inside. We’re not on the mains, she said. It’s spring water, perfectly fine but I’d rather not drink it. She looks different without her glasses. What do I want from her? Is it enough to say, see what happens? I’ve been thinking about detachment today. How to be more detached. Guide me. It doesn’t mean not caring, it is just more peaceful, somehow. Sometimes, I believe that is all I have to offer. Peacefulness. Let is be so. It is enough.

He fell. Just now, just as he was getting up from the breakfast table. It happens in a blur, too fast and yet slow too. I wanted to catch him. I was at the sink washing up and saw him slide and then tumble over onto his back. I wanted to catch him. Are you alright? Such an inane thing to say but we all say it. Are you alright? He is shaky, breaking into a sweat once he gets up. He sits down again. A turn. He’s had a turn. How terribly strange to be seventy, sang Simon and Garfunkel. Yes. His arm is sore. I pull back his dressing gown and there is a mighty bruise. I fetch Arnica cream and put a squirt of Rescue Remedy spray on his tongue. He acquiesces without demur. I felt the soreness for him, with him, my stomach aching. I make him a hot water bottle and he goes back to bed.

The wind is creating chaos. I remember our horses used to go wild, cantering around the perimeters of their field madly, manes flying and whinnying as they galloped. Something in the wind got to them. They wanted to push at the boundaries. The students, it appeared this morning, were the same. The wind fired them up. The clubs were still open when I walked. A security guard was tying up the last of the heaving metal railings they use to marshal the queues. Music still throbbed through the upstairs windows of Pier Pressure as the final leavers pushed their way through the gusts up Pier Street in search of pizza and KFC. Walking along North Prom I watched a figure run down to beach towards the sea. It was a girl with bare legs. A man was running after her. He grabbed her pulling her from the water. She seemed to crumple, falling like an unstringed marionette onto the sand. It was like a dance. A modern dance. A wordless dance.

They’re promising 40 mile winds, he said last night. I thought I’d have to forgo the Prom but I managed as far as the Castle, till it got too much. I turned into the Castle keep only to see a lad running behind me clutching what looked like some kind of food carton into the wind. Does running into it make it easier, is that the trick? I get lost in the Castle ruins. Always. Me too, he said at breakfast when I told him how I’d shouted ‘Where am I supposed to go NOW!?’. I’ve lived here all my life, he said, and I still don’t know where the paths will take me. Up and down, and then out into the full force of the wind. Hopeless. I turned one corner, thinking whether I’d try the running trick, when I saw a young man lying face down in the grass and sobbing. What do I do? Do I ask if he is alright? Knowing full well that he clearly isn’t? Or do I let him be? I had no choice in the end as the wind pushed and buffeted me down the hill. Best leave it, he said. Best not get involved. I remember standing next to a girl on a corner of The Strand, years ago, and she was weeping profusely. I touched her arm, is there anything I can do? She shook her head and offered a weak smile. The difficulty was, no is, mine. I wanted to make it alright. I wanted there to be peace, no grief, no pain. Just stand with them. Just be with them, in silence.

They wear so little clothes. The girls especially. All décolletage. Cleavage burgeoning. I glimpsed a tattoo on a thigh, a huge dragon encircling the flesh. Another girl walked ahead of me with a male friend, red-leather mini-skirted she wore tights that mimicked stockings. She was chattering away in Polish.

Its being re-decorated. We close for January to give us time to decorate and make repairs, she said. I followed her through the tiny, hallowed rooms, where all the furniture was draped in white conservation tissue, down some flagged steps into a basement room. It went well. I forgot some words, crinoline and link, and didn’t boost some pieces up the way I’d planned but it went well. She understood. She got it. Wait and see. Something will come. Something will come. I did it. I made it happen. That is enough.

I’m having the living room redecorated, she said. Everything is under dust sheets, we will have to sit in the kitchen. And it was fine. I like the emptiness of rooms that are being re-painted. An opportunity for some sloughing-off.

I’d been so agitated. Too much to put in place. And that water. We’d heard the gushing and it was still gushing when we return from the supermarket. It has stopped now though the outside lights aren’t working. A reminder that all, really, is chaos. Order is an illusion. Why seek it?

You write to create order. To put things in place. To understand.

I am dog-tired. Pushing into the wind was hard-going. It rattles the windows now, and rain lashes. Ah, winter. They say that catkins are coming out now, he says, reading from The Times’s Nature’s Diary. They’re also called Lambkins. Or was it Lamb’s Tails?

It’s fifteen minutes before The Archers. I have to write this in fifteen minutes. A nice problem. A quickie. A quick shuftie. Is that the word? What will I talk about? I’ve been reading about writing poetry and had two cups of tea. Both have made me a little high, separate, watching and alert. I had to go into work for a guest who was doing a paper review. A big bear of man. It’s cold out there, he said, rolling through the door in t-shirt and jerkin. He didn’t smell of the usual after shave. I asked what time he would finish. 9.15 I hope, he said, as I’ve got to go and play the organ. Where? I asked. St Mikes, he said. I need time to shower, he said. Ah, I thought, that’s why there’s no aftershave. Three cups of coffee and he only needed one pee. I had three pees and only two cups of tea. He’d bought all the papers, even the horrid ones, like the Sunday People. He pushes all of them under his arm as he leaves. For the guinea pigs, he explains. It’s the detail. Poetry is the detail. Show not tell, Sansom quotes. A picture springs up, young kids, guinea pigs in a hutch in the garden. That musty smell of hay and guinea pig poo. Parents bemoaning the fact that, they’re your pets, you wanted them, but we always have to feed them. A good way of teaching kids about death, about responsibility. How hateful it seems now to keep those blessed little creatures in a cage. I remember my rabbit. What am supposed to do with it? I thought, even then. And then she began to eat her children. Why Mummy?

She called me. A warm thing. An ordinary love made extraordinary. We talk of prosaic things. What a gift that baby has been. We connect. We touch across the phone line. She is in pain. She is so grown. So grown-up. My baby girl. Can I own her now? Can she own me?

Smells. I am alive to them. The group of students ahead of me on Llanbadarn Road leaving a stink of nightclubs in their wake. I can smell it for yards and yards behind them. Stale beer, perfume, aftershave, sweat and take-away pizza. Hot, sticky and clammy. It doesn’t fit in the cold air, it won’t mix.

I took her advice and watched a snippet of it. Hands sewing. It amazed me how much they moved me. Those hands. No nail varnish, old hands like mine. Knowing hands, sewing. Nails cut to the quick, sensible. Sewing. I have become obsessed. Not by the craft of it but by the doing of it.

I shall be away two days. No writing. I will have to handwrite. Won’t I?

He was so derisory about painting by numbers. I felt a hurt.

I watched her. Our neighbour. I’m ninety-nine, she told him. I heard her door open, though I smelt the reek of all that closed-up, un-aired cooking first (onions, curry, boiled potatoes and the inevitable cabbage, it comes through our bathroom tiles sometimes). I’d just come in and was opening up our giant umbrella to leave it in the hallway. I watched her go to the door. She is deaf. Deaf as a post, he says. Her TV booms through our floorboards. Quiz shows mainly. A sharp woman. The same birthday as my mother. That explains it. She won’t be helped. I stand watching as she goes to the door and is surprised by the rain. Wet rain. Big drops. Should I offer her my umbrella? No, I don’t. I am unkind. Not wanting to break the membrane of her silence. Preferring to observe. Or is it that I fear her no? So closed in. Just like her. She is going to church. The wife of a missionary who is long dead. The mother of sons, five in all. And an illustrator, self-taught at the age of fifty. A sharp one. A tough one. She uses a stick but walks every day into town. Won’t be helped. Would you like my umbrella? I test the question on my tongue. No thank you. I’ll manage. I’ll manage, she’ll say. But she didn’t. Did you?

What is it about talking to her? Sometimes I don’t want to do it at all. Friday comes around and I am not resenting it exactly but less than eager to do it. It is just me and phones? Possibly. No, I think it is more the heaviness of another. Or at least, what I perceive as heaviness. In truth, the only person I have to ‘carry’ is myself. Sometimes she isn’t there. I always leave a message on her answering machine so that she knows that I haven’t forgotten. I’ve been calling her for years now. Age Cymru have long since stopped doing telephone befriending but I keep doing it. I tried to explain that the service had ended, giving her the option to drop out, to end her connection with me. But she didn’t respond. So I keep on calling. It has become part of my week. We talk for fifteen minutes or so. Sometimes, like yesterday, I can barely hear her. She has a soft voice at the best of times, and often I think she is translating from Welsh. Her words are laboured, slow (what I mean to say is). And then she is frequently out with the sheepdog, Bonnie, a refugee from the next-door farm. She arived and stayed. They provide the food. While she has moved in permanently. Taken refuge after the loss of her dog-companion. Bonnie herself hasn’t been well, suffering a stroke, was it last year? She cried then. I held her across the phone wires. We’ve shared much. She doesn’t talk of her inner life. It is mostly about her ailments, her daughter and Bonnie. Yesterday she told me of an elderly relative, a farmer, who’d been visited by thieves. He shouted at them and they left, she said. I think they were Irish. He was very shaken and it was only five in the afternoon, she said. It has shaken her too, clearly. I tell her (her daughter) that if we hear anything to just let them take it. Leave them to it, I say. She hasn’t been well, beset with a kidney infection. What with her being unwell over Christmas I’ve had to do more than usual, she said. I got a chill down my back. How old is she? With a daughter in her twenties she can’t be more than sixties, surely? So tender. And the daughter too. She gets uneasy, unsettled when I’m unwell, she says. I can see that. I’m sure she does, watching like he used to do with his mother for every symptom, every sign that they might go. Clinging too tight. I ask if she is warm. It’s an old house, we don’t have central heating, she says. We’ve got electric heaters and a coal fire. The antibiotics are kicking in now, she says. You’ll take it easy, I say. Yes, she says, I’m exhausted. I like to do puzzles, she says. Her voice always a little quavery when she introduces a new topic. Do you? I reply. Yes, crosswords, though not the hard ones, and the ones where you have to put in a missing word. Are they in Welsh? I want to ask. Though I don’t. Does she sound different, seem different when speaking her mother tongue? I didn’t used to know my mother when she spoke Norwegian. It frightened me sometimes. She became a stranger. I think of her with her puzzles, her Take a Break magazines, tending her garden with her carrots and runner beans. I tell her of the snowdrops I saw and she tells me of the daffodils in the next village that have been in bloom since Christmas. Her daughter drove her to see them. Just so that you can see that Spring is coming, Mam, she said.

I do it for myself as much as I do it for her. The first time I called she had to put the phone down after a minute she was so anxious. Now, she chatters away. Thank you, she always says at the end. Perhaps I shouldn’t try to make sense of what I do for her. Perhaps it is nothing. For me it is about engagement with another being’s life. I fall into it like a pillow, a feather bed. I see it. It is an intimacy. A lovingness. And I do. I do love her. I love the rise and fall of her voice, her tenderness, her uncertainty, her shyness. I think of her up there, exposed to the wind (I thought the roof was going to blow in), the snow and rain. A hilltop girl, born and bred. She doesn’t want to go or be anywhere else. A part of me. The inward, homed part of me. Soft. It is enough. There is a world there, in her voice. A world of experience. Of loving. Raising a child on her own, divorcing a husband who wasn’t kind. And then her accident. (I haven’t been right since.) And their various forays into alternative medicine. Her puttering as she calls it. Pottering, puttering. She takes time. She knows the landscape, the animals, her garden. Not small but big. True.

Poems are true, writes Peter Sansom.

She helps me pay attention beyond my self-serving, running-along mind. For that I am truly grateful. Keep safe and well. Till next week. x

It gave me a shock. For a start I thought I was alone. He’d come out of the shadows, probably having slipped through one of the side roads off the Prom. The sound was huge. A hard, echoing sound as if it were resonating from a deep cavern. I felt the hackles rise up my back. What is that? And then I saw him. A thin, rake of lad, stuffing his face with something from a KFC carton. He’d let out a belch and then resumed eating. No pardon, or acknowledgement of my presence. He just walked on by. Disgusting, isn’t it? he said when I recounted the experience at breakfast. I don’t know. Is it? I just couldn’t get over the magnitude of the sound and my reaction to it. She wrote about being scared of the dark. Was she, is she? I hadn’t known that. I am, was. I try to walk into it now but it clearly makes me super-sensitive, alert. And such shocks shatter something. Is it good to go through life so skinless?

There were lots of bodies about this morning. More than usual. I suppose it was something to do with the easing of the wind. I could walk the Prom this morning. I was glad to. I went without my ipod. In silence. I wanted to be open. A couple, arm in arm walked towards me along the Prom. Another were just clambering out of a car when I came down South Marine. And then there were the two boys in the doorway along Darkgate Terrace. I thought they were struggling to get the key in. I saw a flash of light, a mobile phone? No, it was a lighter. It worked. They both dragged on their cigarettes and walked on. There was an ambulance parked in the middle of Terrace Road. I watched as a boy stumbled and then dropped something. His legs almost gave way. A lad and girl were standing outside the Why Not? club. Nothing is going on. January’s torpor. Everyone tries to behave as normally as possibly, but there is just this gloom.

Daylight now. I’ve done my chores. She called them ‘chores’. I liked that. The sky is a baby-blue, its clouds yellowy. From our upstairs window I can see Elephant’s mother waving off her other two children. Elephant is resting on her hip, clinging. A zygote child, she has none of her parents extreme slimness. And she is bespectacled. Indulged though. I hear her shouting, crying, demanding. She often goes to Nursery School dressed as a princess, her pink Disney-like confection of a dress dragging along the ground. They’re not very friendly, are they? he says of them. He’s right, both parents avoid eye contact. Perhaps they just want to keep themselves to themselves, I say.

They haven’t collected the recycling. The bags still lie along pavements and in people’s front gardens. It’s unsettling such forgetting. It feels like the world is awry. Silly really considering the terror of so many beings’ lives. I hear of them through the radio, snapshots of war zones as I do my yoga. How do we live with such discrepancies? I think of what I don’t have and then of what I do. So much. It all boils down to love and being loved. I know this. Sugary or not. True. I am held. He catches me whenever I slip. There, always. Loving me. All that having is nought to that. Nought.

I haven’t long. There’s been too much to do this morning. Or at least I have set myself too much to do. Two loads of washing, ironing, washing the floors, vacuuming, shopping, changing the sheets and the dentist. We did fit in a coffee at Nero but even then I couldn’t wind down. And he was irritated by the crossword. They’re being too clever, he said. And that too gave me edginess. I’d chosen that crossword after all. Some days are like this. Do I just succumb to it? Let my heart race over nothing.

There are a group of Chinese students in the downstairs flat round the corner from ours and they’ve stuck various kinds of wrapping paper in the windows. Do they use curtains in China? The paper is shiny, metallic some of it, other pieces are floral. They have been stuck haphazardly. They are not Japanese, there is none of their finesse. They are smiley people though and friends with another Chinese family who live further along in a garden flat. They have a little boy who we saw crouching, his face concentrated. He was clearly having a poo and his mother whipped him away

I keep dreaming of eating out. Night after night. I am with different friends and acquaintances. I book tables, select restaurants. Sometimes I am late like last night. I speak to maître d’ hotels, waiters. I rarely actually eat, it is the meeting that is important and the selection of the place.

The wind was still furious this morning. I walked through the Buarth and then back through Llanbadarn. Rubbish dusted along the road. Bin bags lay in ditches, apocalypse-like.

Now rest.

Sometimes I walk with music in my ears. I don’t really approve of it, preferring to be open. Open to the sounds of sea, the birdsong, the chatter of voices, the occasional snatched conversation. But sometimes, like the last few days when the wind has roared I’ve wanted comfort. The sounds of familiar music. I always put it on shuffle liking the serendipity of it. Today it was Tracy Chapman, Neil Young, extracts from Proust’s Swann Way and Clarissa Pinkola Estes performing her version of the Sleeping Beauty. I’ve been waiting so long, says the Princess on awakening. For him, the Prince asks himself, or to be awakened. He will never know. I walked through Llanbadarn village while I listened. Sometimes I find her embellishments a little too much, preferring the Grimm’s early Puritan style, but today I liked it. It worked. It was apt. What with the wind and ‘all. But the other problem is when people speak to you. My headphones are hidden under hats and countless hoods and can’t be seen.

I’ve noticed him lots of times as I walk down Great Darkgate Street. Watched as he pressed the buzzer that lowered the platform on the back of his truck. I heard the rattle of his cages of bread and sandwiches as he rolled them across the road to Gregg’s shop. He spoke to me today. I couldn’t quite hear so I stopped walking and edged closer. Excuse me? The assault, he said. I read about the assault. Yes, I said, but it was at the weekend. Yes, he replied, Sunday morning. I come from Birmingham, that kind of thing happens every day of the week, but Aber? I know, I said. But it’s still a safe town. They arrested them then, he said, clearly wanting to talk. It must be a lonely job, no one awaiting his arrival. A thin man, very tall with a large bulbous nose. He’s on the mend now, I said pulling away. You work on the doors, don’t you? he asked. The doors? I asked. Yes, in one of the pubs, you’re on the doors? No, I said, no I don’t do that. Oh, he said. Bye, I said, and take care. Will do.

Clusters of snowdrops are beginning to appear in the front garden of one of the semi-detached houses on Llanbadarn Road. I moved in close and touched a hanging bloom. I planted some in Cambridge and in Truro. Do they still appear? Such a joy. I tell him of my discovery at breakfast. Marvellous, he said. The wind has blown all the recycling bags into the road. Well, virtually all. All so neatly tied up. Citizen-like we do as we are told. Like in my dream where I try to find a chair in a hotel and people have left their belongings on them, bagsy-ing them. Bagsy? he asked when I told him of it. Yes, we used to say it at all, I don’t know where it comes from. We used to say it too, he said. Bagsy, bagsy.

There was another rogue Christmas tree in the front parlour of a house in Llanbadarn, fully lit and sparkling.

I touch the outer wall of the church and turn back.

He gets an email from him asking to borrow some money. He’s lost his cards out there and needs to pay his hotel and get himself home. I worry about it. He is so chaotic. He’s getting quite doddery now, he says, he’s always losing things. He will help him. I have no choice, he says, and he is right. Help and trust. He’s in Malaysia, working, existing and seeing his love. He loves the exotic, the louche. And in between it all he writes, somehow, I don’t know how. He is not precious about it. He just gets on. Getting getting on.

I sent the application and then felt shit about myself because I go the email address wrong. Why can’t it all be smooth and perfect? Because this is not heaven. I do the best I can, always. There is nothing more you can do, he says. Nothing. Nada. Nil.

No going on the Prom, he said last night. You promise? The wind is too strong. Forty miles an hour they predicted, though since I’ve been out in it I’d say it isn’t that much. I miss it when I can’t walk by the sea. I miss that sensation of being blown through. I tried to go and look at it, creeping gingerly along the path from Laura Place to sneak a peek over the wall. But it was too strong. Just there. I was blown back and had to clutch at the Old College wall for ballast. So I wandered around town. Up hill and down dale. Up past the Old Library, past G.B. Fishing Supplies, then up past the Tan Shop, The Treehouse health food shop and the rows of solicitors, rental agencies and then Vaughan’s the electrical shop on the corner. I wound round Laura Place then up to the top of High Street to see if they’d taken down the police tape.

I’ve found out what it was, he told me at breakfast yesterday. A second year student from Cardiff was found unconscious on the ground. Three men aged twenty have been arrested. They were all talking about it at work too. One colleague said that she knew his mother. I heard the helicopter at five am, she said, they were obviously taking him to the Heath. His mother says he’ll pull through. But they had to relieve the pressure from his brain. They were all talking about it in the canteen too. One of them had a picture of him on her mobile phone. Apparently, he’s a second cousin or something, he said. That’s how gossip works, he said.

You alright? she asks as she brings us our coffees. She doesn’t run on so as she used to. She’s more relaxed with us and doesn’t need all that nervous chatter to fill the gaps. Cold ain’t it? she says. Windy, he says. Yeh, she says, I had my washing out yesterday, it was blowing lovely. Have I told you how much I like her? I cleave to her and to her and to her. It’s the big upper arms. She’s unflappable, capable. Got it all shipshape, she says. I never stop. She and her Gareth.

I finished it. I finished it in two sittings. All day at work. I was exhausted. Shot through. I need to tell her.

I walked up through The Buarth again this morning. I wanted to see if the yellow room was still lit. I saw it on Sunday morning. A stark room, lit from a naked bulb hanging from it’s corniced ceiling. There were two immense paintings hanging on opposite walls. A grand room, a front room without curtains. A gallery of art. A house of art. Restrained, puritan, sparse. But no, it was dark. There are lots of house lights on as I walk on the early hours. Mostly with drawn curtains. Are they students still cramming for exams?

I will finish my application to the Open today. Just the statement to do then let go. Pay and let go. I’ve tried. That’s all.

The wind scatters rubbish bags across the road. Should I pick them up? I like to walk without engaging with what is around me. To just observe. Bits of paper, plastic bags flutter. A foiled-up johnny. I saw a still-lit Christmas tree in one of the windows, will it be there all year? I understand.

A girl skittering along on heels, suddenly buckles at the knee, tumbling, crumbling into the gutter. She falls back in slow motion, raising her legs to the sky. Her face is bemused but no untroubled. For fuck’s sake, Alex, shouts a man running towards her. She lets herself be helped to her feet.

I got drenched yesterday. His coat was sopping. I remembered another walk years ago in Cambridge. After a row I walked in the afternoon. A summer downpour. Rain in my shoes. Squelching.

All these resolutions to learn, to get better, to understand more, to gain talent, knowing, skill, aptitude. To know. A poem a day. That’s what I intended. Where to fit it in? You want to achieve more in your one life than most people achieve in six, he said. All those years ago as his Siamese purred and miaowed in the background.

Where’ve you come from? the police woman asked me, did you go under the tape? Yes, I said, I thought it was only for cars. This wasn’t strictly true. I knew I was misbehaving but I thought I could just slip through without being noticed. What harm could it do? Where do you want to get to? she asked. She looked a little stressed. A small woman, petite even. The station, I answered. Well you’ll just have to go back the way you came, she said, I need to keep this contained. Has something happened? I asked. She didn’t reply and I turned round to go back under the tape, before taking the steps down under the bridge. A little bit of nothing in our small town. What had happened? An incident of some kind, clearly. A stabbing, the discovery of an unexploded WWII bomb, an escaped criminal, a heist, a hide-out? It intrigued me for a moment, then it was gone. I’ll tell him when I get home then let it go. Forget it. You naughty thing, going under the tape, he said. Yes, I said, aren’t I?

In the end it was nice.

I didn’t want to do it. I was dog-tired. It’s the carrying of all this tension. It shatters me. And when the tightness finally leaves, my body feels bruised and battered. I didn’t want to do it. All that way. All that way to sew on some beads. Why had I signed up for it? Because I had been beguiled by her sweetness, her openness and her simplicity. I wanted to continue to be a little in her light. I get like that with people. I am sponge to what I see as their loveliness. I want to be in their umbra. So I’d put my name down on a whim. Twenty-five quid, certainly. I’d love to. Two and half hours it took. Dog-tired both of us. A pot of tea helped. A pot of tea with a brown and orange pom pom tea cosy. We ordered another pot. Do you want the same cosy or another one? asked the hyper-camp man from behind the counter. No, let’s stick with this one, I said. I love your dress, said the girl making lunches in the back room. And I love yours, I replied. Which was true. I’d admired it. A lovely, fresh dress, a full-scale print of a summer’s day, blue sky and everything. And I haven’t got a dress on at all, said the camp man. Next time, I said. I like him. I remembered him from my last visit. I like to hear him talk with his high, melodic voice. And watch his walk, a rolling, hip-swinging one, with his pinny tied high up his waist. I love it that he can be this way without restraint. Marvellous.

It was nice to sit there sewing. There were eleven of us in all. All women. Wouldn’t it be great if a man turned up, I said to the woman on my right. I don’t think she understood what I meant for she made no answer. I should’ve explained. You know, anything to break the gender stereotyping, but I left it. I didn’t want to make an exhibition of myself that day. Just be quiet. She was lovely, lots of hugs. I hope she likes the article. I want to be kind. It was nice. Companionable, just to hear them chatter. The woman with her wheezing breath breaking the sometime silence. Oh, God, I sewn it to my skirt, exclaimed one woman and her friends laughed. Then half and hour later, the same woman to her companion, are your hens laying? I learnt a little but it wasn’t really about that. It was just something different. Three hours of gentle, orderly distraction and using my hands.

I’ve begun her book. We talked about it in the car. The listening to Chopin mostly. He struggles with her. He sees through what he thinks is a pose. I am not sure. I think she is genuine, earnest, true. I feel such compassion for her. I think she is at odds with the world sometimes. I want to hold her. I always have. There is something like vulnerability in her that is hard to witness.

Oh, the fear, it continues to assail me. Will it help? Can I help myself? So much fear. Fear of every step. Just do it. That’s all you have to do is do without fear of failure. The black bag. Love that failing part. As you love the failing light, the failing moon, the failing breath. Ring those golden bells soon, eh? Soon. And let there be rest.

I only have a moment. This will have to be a quickie. I’m always chasing my tail. It’s become a little out of control. Even on holiday I’m doing it.

I chanted them all the way home from my walk this morning. I wanted to remember every nuance, every breath, every rest. The first was heard outside the Pier Pressure nightclub. A man with no coat on making large gestures with his hands as he spoke. What he said was lost to the wind. The woman he was speaking to was another matter. A broad woman wearing a large, outsize navy blue parka. Shut up! she was shouting. Shut up, no one is speaking to you. She too made big expressive gestures with her arms. Be gone! she shouted. Be gone. Past it. Gone. The second was outside The Angel pub. I didn’t see her. I just heard her voice, soft, feminine, imploring and ending her sentences on an up, questioning. I know it’s not my fault, she was saying, but I can’t help blaming myself. The final part of the sentence was more like an enquiry than a statement. I didn’t hear his reply.

They are back in force. The students. They were everywhere this morning. Was it the wind? I’ve seen horses go wild in the wind. A girl was standing outside the telephone box opposite Slater’s Bakery. She was reaching down into a voluminous handbag. A trickle of water was running from the under the phone box. Had she, or someone else peed there? It doesn’t bear thinking about. She looked at me rather sheepishly. So perhaps it was her. Desperate measures.

Off. I must be off. Work then Cwmbran. A bientot. What is the French for or?