Author: Ellen Bell

We were late. I’m never late. At least, I do all I can to not be. I wept at the thought of missing it, of not being there. And yet he’s gone. He went a long time ago. Weeks ago. His body kept in cold storage for almost three weeks. And yet I needed to be there. To stand next to her, to hold her and be held in return. Loss brings back other such losses. All those connections. We wouldn’t have known him if not for her. Twenty years they were together, more. Not happy, either of them but there were the honeymoon years before the reality of each other set in.

We got there in the end, walking in halfway through the eulogy. Are you the woman who was lost? A uniformed lady at the Crematorium asked, before hurrying me in. We got there. I was there. The eulogy was pragmatic, honest as it could be. The pictures of him were unfamiliar. They played Mull of Kintyre at the end. A tenuous choice. I don’t think I ever heard him putting on music, the radio even. A big man, a vital man. Gone. So much space. The space in between. Breathe into the space. An awkward huddle outside. Sibling not talking to sibling. Fighting over money. I met his wife, the one he left for her. I liked her. A twinkle, a spark. I liked her. Paying my respects to the daughter. A cold fish. Poor love. So tight, so stiff. We’re the same age. No connection. She is closed-off, protected. So be it. For her it is clearly necessary. We just need to survive, any which way. He was a good age, she said. The burden gone. Released.

A memory of Aberdovey. The jigsaw in the adult’s lounge, almost finished. A woman doing a bit before she joins her husband on the terrace. A group effort. A shared satisfaction. Do you finish your crosswords? the husband asks him. Yes, he says. We don’t, not always.

Morning comes now. The cloud breaks up. Blue coming through.

Walking back from the Prom and a woman calling out to me. I’d passed her earlier. Where you walking to? she shouted. Home, I replied. Home.

Wood pigeon song dominates the mornings and afternoons. I remember it from boarding school. I’ve always found it comforting, upbeat, safe. Coo, coo. We hear it in Spain too, from the terrace. Woodrow we call him, it, them. Woodrow Wilson. There are two on the tree outside my bedroom window. A pair. A couple. Woodrow and Wilhelmina. Silly, I know, but what the hell it holds us together. A restricted code. A kind of belonging.

Inevitably, we talked of feet. I had broken my toe. It will heal, she said, but it may remain a little bent. That’s OK, so long as I can walk, stride, move unhampered, un-slowed. Then she began to tell me of a client she used to treat at the hospital. Do you remember Oliver’s Shoe Shop? she asked. Nope. I’ve only been her five years. Five years, fancy that. He was the owner, she said. You’ll be shocked, he’d told her, prior to taking of his shoes. He’d been a POW in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp. His feet were in a terrible state, she said. They’d made them march and march. He’d cried, she said. The officers wouldn’t let them help those who fell, who stumbled. They were left there, to starve, to die. He’d cried, then, she said.

It’s a liminal time my walking time. That blue light between night and day. Nearing home I catch sight of man from the corner of my eye. He falls off the pavement. His arms jerk upwards. His head is looking downwards, concentrating. Fuck it! he says. A girl in a red dress walks up Penglais Hill, her heels clicking. Back in town, outside The Angel all is chaos. I walk from silence to mayhem. A jumble of platform soles, fleshy thighs squeezed into shorts, torn fish net tights, broken glass, smeared mascara, the smell of beer and perfume and shouting. They lurch and leer, ugly exaggerations of themselves.

On North Road the smell of their honeysuckle is divine.

Later, a woman is on the walkway potting some lobelias. I’m making such a mess, she says, as I step past her. It does, she says, instead of a garden.

What a dilemma, what a problem? I was moved. Moved, listening to it while making breakfast. A twelve-year-old girl, who, as a result of her father taking a paternity test, is told that neither of her parents are hers. Not biologically. Who is she? she asks. Everything turned upside down. It ends OK. She gains another family, a sister. And two names. She can switch and change. A story, a true story, about perceptions. About identity. The Other One.

And in the studio. A transgender boy with his father. A lissome, beautiful boy turning girl. Happy to be there. Happy to have it all out, out in the open. And his father, gentle, a little shy in his fleecy jerkin and big boots. The gentle being brave. Amen to that.

It is 3.30 am and two girls are running towards me on the Prom. Excuse me, excuse me, one of them says, breathless. Excuse me, have you seen a boy in glasses, a green jumper and dark jeans? No. Thank you, they say in unison and run off. One of them is barefooted and in shorts. Earnest entreaties. Of absolute importance. To them. The blonde, long-haired one with glasses, carries a KFC takeaway carton. On the ground, there is a black bow tie. A formal one with a clip and ribbon.

I always feel a little shaken when someone talks to me during my walking. I’m in another realm. A realm of inner thoughts and silence. I struggle to find my voice. Where is it? When I eventually find it, it sounds foreign to me and as if it’s a long, long way away. From down a tunnel, or a cave. Hello. Yes. No.

I have a pile of post-it notes, written in a scribble when I got home. A pile. All stuck together. I shall just have to list them. Things, sightings that I didn’t want to forget. Things I haven’t had time to write. I’ve been writing, you see. Reviews. Three this week. It took it out of me. The intense looking, the note-taking and then the creating from nothing. He wants to go through it with me. What does that mean? I remember the PR editing process. Heart-ripping stuff, but worth it. It was better for it. Tighter. I need to learn. I need these processes. But my heart falls at the prospect. Prick me, do I not bleed? So be it. So back to the notes. A list. A list for the details – those gorgeous clouds of sensation have almost gone. I forget names. Do you? All through my walk this morning, trying to remember the name of the actress who plays Sister Julienne in the Midwife. I had to ask him at breakfast in the end. He knew – he’d remembered. It begins with a J.

Notes:

A girl in pink knee-high socks. Waiting on a pavement-edge. Another girl on a corner, asking me, Do you know a number for a taxi? A strong south Walian accent. Wearing an Hawaiian shirt. I don’t know where I am. Earlier a boy dancing in the road. In the middle of the road at 3.15 am. Dancing to his ipod. I could hear it. Elton John’s Rocket Man. A man walking his Labrador on the Prom. Silence. A vigil. Suspended animation. A pink plastic Stetson in the road, shiny with sequins. A boy in a jockey’s silks, his friend in a policeman’s outfit with a fat, curly wig. A fancy dress at the WHY NOT? club? Why not? The Beast at his window when I got home. Was that your bacon, I smelt earlier? I asked. No, he said, it’s the chicken curry I’ve been making for tomorrow. Then the word Annie. I don’t know what this refers to. Perhaps it will come back to me. Annie. Who’s Annie?

I dreamt a lot this week. Dreaming a lot is a sign of intelligence, so says Steve Wright on his afternoon big show. A dream where I was naked in public. It happens often. I am embarrassed but make the best of it. I have long hair this time to cover some of it. Act natural and perhaps they won’t notice. As a child I’d dream I had forgotten to put on my knickers for school. In this dream I was looking up at a toilet at the top of a tall flight of stairs. Everything is open to the elements. It was not dirty but dusty, like a new model that’s been left in the showroom. And there was a bath, half-filled with grimy water. Then our neighbours had gutted someone else’s van. I was shocked, they seem so trustworthy. Everything removed. It was empty but pristine but they still drove it. It still worked. A sham van.

Then, weeks back. Notes about students on the Prom in the dark carrying pallets. Large industrial pallets to put on a fire they’d lit on the beach. One in a dark great coat. All done in silence. Then a girl in the road in front of South Marine Terrace. Two police officers, one with her hands on the girl’s shoulders. All are silence. Holding her. Then up by the castle, three seagulls soaring in the sky, flashing white above the street lamps. Mesmerising. Then walking into the chaos of noise outside The Angel. Bodies jostling me. Side-stepping and seeing a business card on the ground. STITCH it said. STITCH it ordered. Later, down by the corner of Great Darkgate Street a lad in rugby gear and no shoes, a tip-toeing run, shouting, O to his friend. O, where’s the boys? Then further up the road I follow three boys, one also in a rugby strip. A number 33 on his back. Two leave him and cut up a side road. He walks on ahead. Then stops to let me pass. It’s still dark. He starts to talk. How are you? he asks, his voice slurring. He is young with a gentle face. Very drunk, swaying. I try to fob him off, wanting to keep striding, to go home, in silence. No, he says, I’d rather walk home with you. I don’t want him. I don’t want him. I try to suggest that I walk on ahead. No, he keeps saying, no I’d rather. We come to the corner of St David’s Road and he lets me go without a fuss. Good night, I say, take care.

An eerie morning walk fall of remarkable sights. Well, remarkable in their sensationalism. First, coming down the hill past the Alexandra Hall there was a policeman, his car headlights trained on Constitution Hill. A sharp, cold yellow in the blackness. He was standing, in his shirt sleeves aiming a strong torch across the slope. Up and down, searching, searching for something or someone. Giggling students walked along the Prom, oblivious.

Then a girl separating herself, then running from a pair of other girls along the pavement, across the road from the Prom her dress alive with sequins, afire, white and scintillating. It was beautiful. A beautiful sight. A shimmering, an animated shimmering in the night. Starry. Like the sky, though that was still. Caught.

Then the moon. Half. A half shape in the same black.

Then the hum of the fishing boat, getting ready. Getting ready to sail. Gorgeous. Remarkable. Yes.

I saw his truck the other morning, early. It’s an open truck that tinkles with bottles when it turns a corner. He drives it fast. A small man, a younger version of Bruce Springsteen. We see him sometimes at Morrison’s. A trolley full, he must have lots of kids. I remember my Nanny’s milkman. He had a horse and cart. Dobbin, I think the horse was called. When we stayed with her, I’d hear it in the early morning, the clip clop of hooves and that jingle jangle of bottles in crates. A comforting sound. Familiar, regular. Always on time. One pint. A silver top. The cream risen to the top. Can I have it? On my cereal. Thick and sweet. I loved her. I loved her cool hands. Her moustache. Her big bloomers. The photographs under glass on her dressing table. Her souvenir of a miniature Swiss Chalet that carried matches. She was safe. Until she went dolally. Rest in peace my love.

Another passing. What can I say of him? We became close. Not a father but known and loved. A difficult man, but near the end gentler. Full of fun. A child man. I loved him in his vulnerability. Yet, such a big man. Pompous at times. Needy at the end. Our last meeting was sadness itself. Him singing, strident, staring, not knowing. And me, sitting, touching, holding his hand, his knee not knowing what to do. He clutched a piece of toast and a knife, both wrapped up in napkin. Why? I asked. He did not know but kept singing. Will you marry me? he asked. Larger than life. I miss them both and yet am glad that they are at rest. Let it be so. Amen.

I saw him just before he saw me. And I knew, as animals know, that I was in danger. He saw it, he saw me flinch, make to run and then he was upon me. Darkness. The smell of him. Sweat, damp, fear. Give me money. I have none. And I didn’t. I never walk out in the morning with money in my pocket. I walk empty-handed. I waited for the feel of the blade. Would it hurt? Would I die? Then nothing. The darkness lifted and I was talking to him. Inside. Inside the University. He needed help with his project, a Graphics brief. I sat with him, talked it through, made suggestions. Good ones. He was calm then. The project subsumed us. Then we were in a student canteen. Other people. Should I get out some cash for him? I thought. He has a young family to support. No, said a woman sitting to my left. Don’t give him any money. I woke up.

A symbolic dream. I can read it, understand it. There is comfort there, I think.

I wanted to be alone this morning as I walked but no. First, there was a man sitting in one of the Promenade shelters. He was cross-legged on the bench, a woolly hat with hanging toggles on his head reading a magazine, his sleeping-bag and bagged-up belongings beside him. Then, just beyond Pier Pressure there was a woman sitting on the ground by a bin, her legs outstretched. She seemed to be building a kind of tower with several plastic food cartons. Then she opened one and began eating fast. Her back was to me, her parka hood up against the wind. Further along the Prom a woman walked ahead of me, smoking, a half-empty Morrison’s bag-for-life in her left hand. Later, a cat strode across the road.

The most ordinary, the most prosaic often seems surreal in that early morning light. Liminal time. People catch me unawares, I am too open. The other morning there were three lads, early twenties, possibly younger dancing in the road. Llanbadarn Road. A wild kind of dancing, legs kicking, arms revolving, bounding. In the middle of the road. Noiseless. They made no sound as they jigged about. The world felt slowed down, strange.

See, he said, emerging from his room at 1.30 am to go for a pee, not dead yet.

As I walked down the hill of North Road at 3.15 am a young woman came out of a doorway and crossed the road. She was barelegged and bare armed, wearing black shorts and high patent leather court shoes. A minute later a young man came out of the same doorway, shoeless and followed her. Coming back along the Prom I saw him again, in his socks, walking back to his flat alone.

The man in the basement flat below has bought a wind breaker. You know, one of those strips of striped canvas with wooden poles that you jam into the sand. He is using it in the little strip of garden in front of his flat. He sets it up, puts his reclining deck chair behind it and lies out, fully clothed, drinking from a glass tankard of beer. We saw him on the Prom the other afternoon. Watch out, he said, its the Welshie. You don’t have to say hello. I did. Or at least I nodded. He nodded back.

We sat in our cwtch watching the sea and I gave my usual Archers rundown. I told him about all the programmes I’d listened to that morning. The tears that came took me by surprise. The Reunion hosted by Sue Macgregor was about the ill-fated Challenger mission. One of her guests was the astronaut Dick Scobee’s widow June. Her testimony was so moving. I started to weep when I recounted her telling of the missing man flight pass. How I love the radio. It moves me like TV never can. It is the voice. It is all in the voice. All those stories. Some fiction, like Ann Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage and others life, like Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography, telling of his childhood poverty and his mother pawning the same theatrical costume over and over again. It was all she had.

Learning to pay attention. I am learning to pay attention. Close attention. There is wisdom in it. It hold’s one in the present. You see the whole then. And the chatter, if only for a moment, stops.

I write these notes, trying to capture it all, all that knowing. A great shedding, I’ve written. A great shedding. What was that about? And now I remember, the maudlin thoughts of his passing. Not yet. I don’t want to go yet, he says, I’m having too good a time. That is good. That IS good. Amen to that.

He talked at me the whole time she was in the studio. Was he nervous? Possibly. Or just passionate about his work? Hobby turned work. Vernacular furniture his business card said. Welsh vernacular furniture. I was seduced. Seduced by his enthusiasm. I kept picturing the chairs, a dark rich patina, smoothed by use. She, shyer, more hesitant, red-lipsticked. I’m not chasing the money, he said. We have enough. Enough.

I walked home afterwards. He had the car. It was having two tyres changed. A lovely walk down Penglais Hill. Fast walking. Then cut through below the National Library and down the steps passed the Nurses’ Home. Steep, steep hill then down into St David’s Road. I saw chaffinches and gold finches bobbing and darting through the hedges.

A host of birds sing to me at night. My night. Not your night. In bed by 7.30 sometimes 8. It is still light and they sing. Chiff chaff. The sound echoes across the empty land beneath my window. Land that is a building site but surrounded by trees. It is left to its own devices. Up for sale, he tells me. Meanwhile, the birds have it. I fall asleep to their song, happily.

He was there at his window when I got home. Have you had lunch? I asked. In the middle of it, he said, lighting up a cigarette, lamb stew followed by rhubarb pie. The smell, sweet and heavy, filled our hallway. I opened a window wide.

More Diski and her thoughts on smoking. Mum smoked all through her pregnancies. Didn’t do you any harm, she’d say. My sister took up smoking briefly when she died, menthol ones just like her. It gives you something to do. Always, Diski wrote. Most of my lovers have been smokers, and yet, now, I cannot bear the smell. Suffocating the air. I grow less tolerant. Is it just age?

Do you remember the wasps? she asked me. We were talking about the last time we were all together before he died. I do. They were all over your face, she said. I don’t know how you could stand it. I remember. I remember making myself still. I remember the peace of it, the peace in between the fear. And my sister blowing them away.

I want to write about it. I think about it. How to say it. How to tell the story of it, as I walk. It will come. Now, I must go, again. Out into the milky grey.

Soon.

The artist Simon Lewty makes art from his dreams. He writes them out in beautiful copperplate script. Gorgeous lines of ink. The writing out of them makes them memorable, encourages, stimulates a memory that would not have been, perhaps. My dreams over the last few days have been so lucid. Is it because I have started writing again? Both my parents have featured. We have spoken normally, always knocking me for six when I wake up and the realisation of their death hits home. Yesterday afternoon I dreamt of being with my father. We were abroad, in Italy, the light was right but the B&B was different, too twee, too frou-frou to be Italian. He needed to buy a ticket and the office, part of a coach firm called Fares was outside of the city. I remember walking upstairs in the B&B and watching the light coming in from a skylight. A hot, yellow light. And I thought with pleasure of my walk in the morning. I found him outside the ticket office sitting in the sun on the ground. I’d asked him the time and looked at my watch at the same time. Seven o’clock, he said. I looked at my watch and the hands were spinning wildly, madly backwards. The dream last night was of me needing to buy perfume and of being in a huge department store, the size of Harrods. I was accompanied by a lover (an amalgam of past and present loves) whom I lost. I unrolled a felt container full of phials and bottles of perfume, smelling  each one. I can recall the odours of them. And then, all of sudden I didn’t have perfume but jewellery, with two rings on my fingers. They were wrong. The hands were wrong, the rings way too ornate for my taste.

Often in dreams I have looked in mirrors and not seen my face but that of a stranger’s. The ancient Greeks thought that dreams were visitations from the Gods. For me they seem to be a working through the concerns of the day. I can see all the connections. And yet, the complexity of the narrative is fascinating.

I’ve begun writing again. It is turgid, gloopy stuff. I need to get back into my stride. I talk it through with him. He is patient, happy to listen and offer up encouragement. Talking stops it festering. Festering that fear of not being good enough, of being foolish for trying. But surely if one writes everyday, keeps going, something worthy will come through.

I go to bed in the light and rise in the dark. Topsy-turvy. I could hear children’s voices in play last night as I lay in bed. The light on the tree was golden. The sky was azure. This morning is cold, nipping at fingers. My puffa gilet under my coat for extra layers. The town has emptied since the weekend. Day-trippers and holidaymakers for now subsided. He is happy. He hates such an invasion of his home-town. Work soon. I shall do what I can before. Drip, drip.

She came through the door heavy with grief. Grey around the eyes. Her country lost. A dictatorship. It is a dictatorship, she said. What could I say? What can I say? We spoke in clichés, I offered up hope, vague but sincere. She took it briefly. All I can do is write about it, she said. Yes, I said, write it out.

They were standing outside one of the student houses along Llanbadarn Road, snogging. I’ve never really liked the word, but it is appropriate I suppose. Kissing strangers. Snogging. They used to call it spooning. What was that line in Joni Mitchell’s song Edith and the Kingpin? He lifts their faces to the spoon. Or he takes their faces to the spoon? About cocaine, possibly. Spooning. Ted tries to describe spooning to the boy in L P Hartley’s The Go Between. He gets flustered, saying that the horses have been doing a bit of spooning. It sounds rude but also evocative. Snogging sounds immature, fumbling. I remember it. Just like those two. There was warmth, an encountering of warm strangeness. I remember being liquefied, turned molten. My body, older now, is slower to react, more hesitant, wary.

The noise was a shock. After the silence. They spilled out of the club onto the pavements, the road. Seemed like hundreds, shouting, some lurching, all in various states of undress. No coats. The Angel, Pier Pressure and the Why Not were all open. Not students, these were young and rowdy. Some leant against walls, others were on mobile phones calling taxis. I expected an Easter lull. A hushed reverence. The harbour was quiet, except for wind and rush of waves.

By the castle a dog was barking. I thought it was in a car. Some people had perched themselves in the castle turret. 1987 one was shouting. I couldn’t catch the rest. Then he spat, missing me.

Sleepy. Killing time till work. So much I want to be doing.

So you work for the BBC, says the woman over the phone. Can I ask? she says. Are you an undercover reporter?

I watch her from my window. She is one of three. The youngest. She is lumpen, where the other two are slim and lean. They ride around their drive on bikes. She is always bringing up the rear, not riding as such but propelling her bike along with her feet. She wears heavy-rimmed glasses. I’d heard her mother calling her by her pet name. Elephant. Elephant, she called. Elephant.

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the Circus, they used to sing at me. Nellie. At primary school. Nellie the Elephant, they’d say. Trunk, trunk, trunk.