Author: Ellen Bell

We both misheard her, smiling at the incongruity of it.

What brought you here? I’d asked, while she scanned our food. A beautiful black man, we thought she’d said. A beautiful black man. How nice, I’d whispered. Where is he now? we’d replied. Oh, he’s still in Kidderminster. He didn’t follow me. We looked at each other, perplexed. Yes, she continued, I came to my parents with a beautiful black eye. The penny dropped. Was he your husband? I asked. Yes, she said. That was twenty years ago.

I am sorry. She is a gentle being with soft hands. Each piece of fruit is tenderly handled, there is no rushing. Other people’s stories. Each life, so rich, so full of import. We are the same age. We talk about playing hockey at school, uniforms. I seek a common ground. There is no difference. You’re late, she sometimes says and laughs. Or comments on the amount we’ve spent. Raising an eyebrow if it is over our self-imposed fifty quid. She has a light, high neighing kind of laugh. I like her. We seek her out. We know her name, it’s on a badge on her chest. She doesn’t know ours, and doesn’t ask. The intimacy is contained. It is enough.

The moon was full. The sea was silver. They say that tomorrow’s moon will be gigantic. I love it’s light in the dark.

Serendipity, it happens all the time. A book I’m reading, then the writer is on Desert Island Discs that very same day. Reading the book and I’m thinking about how I absorb it all, all the nuances, the difficulties, all the emotions. It becomes a tension in me. I am a sponge to fiction, to story, to other people’s lives real or unreal. I’m porous. Porous. Two minutes into her interview with Kirsty Young and she says it, that very same word, the word I’d thought of only a hour before. Porous. We must be porous to books, to story, she says. I liked the sound of her. We’re born in the same year. The book, her book is difficult to read. It is not linear. There is sometimes no punctuation. A stream of consciousness, a reflection of inner chatter. Yet, now and again there is something really beautiful. I see it through, I usually do. I honour their craft. I want to learn, to open myself to other ways of thinking of expressing. But I shall be glad when I’ve finished it. It has created a tension in me.

Books. They are talking about books and reading on the radio. Daily essays. Today it was the founder of Virago. An Australian woman, from Melbourne. Articulate with a flat voice. She believes books will always be here. So there to you nay-sayers. I’ve been buying them again. Usually second-hand, I don’t mind. I always try to give one away to make room for the new one. I do the same with clothes. My fetish about stuff. I don’t want too much. I start to feel claustrophobic and I’m preparing, always preparing for my demise. I don’t want to leave too much behind for others to sort out. Often I am too precipitate. I give away something I find I need later on. I’ve replaced three books recently. I keep it to myself, a little shamed. And yet, the re-visiting is good. The re-ownership is good. Let it be. Let such idiosyncrasies be.  They are minor follies.

Where do I start? Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles to see her, and her. Six hundred miles to escape work. Six hundred miles to encounter my grief, my shame. She came and so did she. One brought flowers, a book and a headiness of expensive perfume. The other left behind a pair of fingerless gloves and a residue of cheap, sticky scent. So much love. For both. I was full to the brim and then another encounter the next day. I wanted more. I ask questions, firing them at her, wanting to know, wanting, wanting….. Her skin is familiar. Familiar to me. This time she left behind a hair. A single strand, golden. I have it. I have it in my purse. I have your book, she said, the one you gave me. I thought you’d been given it years ago. No. Just recently. He’s going to blow up some of the pictures and hang them on the wall. I’m glad she has it. I made it for her. So that she knew. She knew about the early days. She thinks that she hasn’t been there, but she has. She has.

Till March, my love.

The starlings are back, I hear their chatterings as I walk past the pier. And the swirlings have begun again, though yesterday it was the rooks. There’s a rookery up at the University, just by the accommodation block. They sound like monkeys, a kind of squawky clamouring. They do the same here. I love their noise, oblivious as they are, to us. Oblivious to the minutiae of us, of our lives.

Four hours up there. Too long. I feel a little sullied from being in that space. I often do. Muggy air, airless really. Too warm or too cold. I read and think and do for my guests. The books take me over. I yield to their story. Ali Smith at the moment. Hotel World, a whirling, unsettling novel. Speech without punctuation, no breaths, no stops. A teenage voice. Teenage. Teenager, not anymore. She is grown now. Twenty-eight, almost thirty. I don’t know what else to do. I am at a loss.

I will place myself there. Place myself near. I’m here. Here for you. Am I? I try. I have lost it. It has unravelled, a long time ago. Years ago. I cannot catch it up, cannot gain control, manage it.

I want to see her. I do. But need to accept that it may not happen. Last time, was a fluke. Or perhaps not. To see her. I looked at her hands, her skin. The gawkiness of her. A bambi, a colt, long-legged, skittish.

I am unravelled, exposed, I don’t know what to do.

Walking the other morning. Walking fast. Striding home. Wanting to get home. A young man ahead of me. Leaning a little. Not vertical. Drunk, maybe. He stopped ahead of me. Standing in my path. Now that’s a proper walk, he said, proceeding to mimic a lazy, slovenly walk, not a fucking……I laughed, edgy, wanting to get home.

Frost today. Hands in pockets.

The mess of it makes me low. Sometimes there is no clear path, no clear way forward. All I can do is yield, give way and allow it not happen, to not be as I’d like it to be.

Someone has laid six roses on the windscreen of his van. They are not wrapped in cellophane, the stalks are uncut, bare. The van has been moved since the weekend. It is now outside his house, though the gates remain closed. White wrought iron gates, they are rarely shut. A busy family, so much coming and going.

We didn’t know him, not really. He knew his father. A rugby player and a transvestite, though that is by the by. A tall man, good-looking, with greying hair, though he was only 41. You only find out their ages when they die – a newspaper detail. He was out in Malaga at a funeral. Killed by a car. Apparently drink had been taken, he told me yesterday. I was quick to react, hating the idea of the creeping pf insidious gossip, small-town stuff. No, I didn’t mean that, he said. It just may be that he didn’t take care crossing an unfamiliar road. Yes, I see, I said.

We didn’t know him, and yet, I feel grief. He was an electrician. We’d see him in his van. He had two. Must have been a success. Nice house. Nice family. Nice wife. A local man. It will be in the paper tomorrow. Can you stop them printing it? I ask at breakfast. If it had happened to you I wouldn’t want it. No, not really, he says, it’s news. And it will remain so for a little while, till they bring home his body, have the funeral. Then what? A family shattered. How do you recover, repair? What can we do? Acquiesce? Rail against it, fate, God?

I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the pain of it. There is much and yet, at least it is evidence of love. There was love. And it will return. It has to for it never goes, not really.

It stops us, death, stops us in our tracks. We are not above it. We are at its mercy, any time. So be it. Let it make us cherish those we have till we have them no more.

I listen at his door each morning. Still there. Still here. With me. Thank God.

I get to the till before him. He is off somewhere searching for baked beans. She is happy to wait for him, her hands poised over the cornflakes packet, ready to start scanning when he appears. Do you still see you friend? I ask, feeling obliged to make conversation. Would she rather I kept quiet? Would she rather be silent? Does she want to share her life with us? No, she replies, it was over some weeks ago. I express sadness. Oh, it’s OK, she says, I ended it. Her voice still carries a touch of Birmingham. I got to the stage, she continues, when I thought there’s no excitement. I nod. When I told him, she said, all he could say ‘well, that’s your prerogative’.

It was wet and stormy this morning. The rain like pricking needles against my face. I move into it. I accept it, feeling the discomfort but also the warmth within. It is so alive, the wind. I lean into it, like a tree, bending to its will. I cannot resent it. It isn’t personal. It is just weather. Yesterday it was all moon. A super moon, they called it. Big, white, an oversized circle of power. The rocks were lit silver by it. No need for a torch. This morning it was just black. No one about. Last week, the students frolicked. A man in a dress and a blonde wig. Another dressed as a Tequila Bottle. A fantastic costume, with an intricately embroidered label down the front. I saw the red lid on his head first. In the dark it was hard to make out, the realisation came slowly. He was sitting on some steps with his friends. The night was over. He’d forgotten he was dressed in fancy dress. His feet were splayed, I think he was rolling a cigarette.

Later, I saw two magpies, then another.

The sky is a cerulean blue. The wind follows him in.

Yesterday the poet did two sessions, one for Front Row and the other for BBC Scotland. She is gracious. She uses my name. I like your tunic, she says. Her voice is husky. She is full of enthusiasm for the book. The other poet is in London or is it Salford? They greet each other down the line. The other poet has a cold. I listen to her reading a poem by Rose Macaulay, my head up close to the speaker. He is right, it is like the Seamus Heaney poem.

It is always good to get home. I can breathe then. Why do I find the company of people such a challenge when there is so much good will? I am solitary. So be it.

Poetry. Sunday and I am immersed. Chopping sprouts, preparing porridge, soup and fruit listening to a programme about Ezra Pound. A Scots sounding voice and yet he was an American, born in Idaho, I believe. They kept him in a cage with no shelter from the Italian sun. Then he was incarcerated in a mental institution. He has fallen out of favour with the Brits, says the presenter He’d gone to Italy to ‘find him’. The Cantos, impenetrable. I tried to read some once. I found them in the Library. I like his Imagist poems. Small, concise, a tremendous condensing of sensation. I felt a sadness listening to his fate. He returned to Italy. Was it for the sun?

Will we ever return to Italy?

For now I am here and happy to be so. In love. In love with the dark harbour with its cacophony of rattling rigging, made noisome by the stink of landed lobster pots. I walk, eyes closed into the wind, missing the Perygyl. Alas, too wet, too wet today. The black of winter beckons. So be it.

I have talked much about the influence of the radio on my life. It marks out my day – more especially the weekend, where I generally have more time to listen. The Food Programme on a Sunday generally finds me upstairs in the kitchen preparing lunch. Last week Dan Saladino presented an edition about Shackleton’s cook. Green made food in what must be the most extreme of climates. He provided comfort where there was little. Cooking on ice. The endless waiting involved in melting water, defrosting supplies. Working with next to nothing.

The cold scares me. My body cannot deal with it. I literally freeze up, my brain and body ceasing to function. I am in awe of those great explorers, the hardships they endured. I think of them often. The endless trekking through white. And the comfort of food. Not as indulgence but as a warming, nourishing filling-ness. Yet appetite scares me. It feels like it could be out-of-control, that hunger. Yet, I have never known real hunger. How might my idiosyncratic diet fare then? And yet, I know, I know it is not about the food but about the controlling of appetite. So complex and yet so simple. As with so much of life. How about we just let it be? To yield, to succumb, to acquiesce is seen as weakness, a reneging of control. And yet, is there not power in that letting go? To not resist what is.

I am tired. We have journeyed and journeyed. But it has been good. Such warm people. I need to sleep. It overpowers me at times. I stand at the end of the Perygyl and I could fall into sleep, fall into the water and sleep. I have to jerk myself awake. That glorious numbing of cloud, the horizon lost to the sea.

I re-read some of my school reports from when I was 14. Can I get a picture of her? I remember the fearfulness, the shyness, and yet, also a performing – a performer. Never quite good enough. That’s what I bring to such memories. But is it true? Die to the past, he commands. Yes. That might be good. I shall try. I shall try. What is left then? A white space. A white space of possibility. Like ice. Like ice.

A single sunflower has sprung up on the building site outside our flat. Tall, yet spindly, it is a testament to Nature’s indiscriminate pulsing towards life, whatever. I like to look at it.

Walking two days ago in the early morning I saw two hats and a toothbrush in the gutter. Not together, I came upon them separately. The toothbrush and the black straw sun hat were on  North Road, the purple satin witch’s hat was further down the hill.

This morning there was the moon, shining through a cloudless sky. I didn’t need my torch. The sea made silver.

A birthday tantrum, or so it felt. What was that about? I didn’t want a fuss. No cards, no presents, thank you. And yet, I wanted to be made to feel special, to be singled-out, as I had been as a child. It is no longer relevant, no longer important. There was a scratchy-ness in my not quite reconciled self. Let it go. Let it all go. The past is no longer relevant. A year has passed. Either way a construct. So be it. Live what you ask. Be what you are destined to be. Let it go. Let it all fall away. Fall away.

We often see her, but not at that time. 3.30 am and she is walking down Terrace Road, her red hat perched on top of her head, handbag held against her chest. She wears her keys on a string around her neck. I am making my way home after my morning walk. I smile at her. Good morning, I breathe, quietly. She doesn’t respond, her mouth set grim. Will she be alright? Her winter coat is thick against the unseasonable warmth, her socks gather around her ankles. Old woman, young girl. There is no difference.

The sound of a gun shot. I heard it through the darkness of the Castle Park. Three teenagers huddled over lit cigarettes. I wouldn’t go down there, they say, that sounded like a gun shot. It’ll be alright, I say. It’s Aberystwyth  not New York I want to say, but don’t. There is smoke and a few lads scattering. Then nothing. All is as usual. Safe.

4.15 am. There’s fucking clouds in the sky. A man’s voice shouting. We won’t be able to see the stars. He is remonstrating with his friends who want to sit in the Castle. Why are we going to the Castle? he wails. I want tea, says another. They are just dark shapes. I see no faces. Usually voices are hushed, conspiratorial in the dark. I walk through the fug of it. Detached.

Voices, snatched conversations. Snippets. A snap shot of another life.

You know what? A tall blonde girl links arms with a diminutive man as they walk the Promenade. It is not yet 4.00 am. You know what I like? she continues. I like that we are mates now, innit? The man is silent. He takes a bite out a huge French stick. (I thought he was sniffing flowers.)

A couple sit in silence outside The Glengower Hotel, they are both in pyjamas.

The baker is standing outside the Pelican Bakery, one foot propped-up against the wall. He smokes while reading his mobile phone. Morning, I say. Morning.

The smell of bread had wafted right up to the Castle.

Selma and When the Wind Blows. I love watching our films. They move me. They enter my dreams. Full of compassion, humanity. A winding-down, entering others’ narratives. It is good to be such a sponge. A sponge to the struggle of others, stepping-out, albeit briefly from one’s own blessedness. To walk in another’s shoes. That image of them walking across the bridge. Such courage, potent in their vulnerability. Dignity. The dignity of quiet, peaceful certainty. Amen.

He handed me the bag, a broad smile on his face. Damsons. You got me damsons. A hankering. A hankering for that rich, purple bitterness. Satisfied.

I’m busy. There is much to do. Not much time to write this. I miss it. It is playful. A gentle inward-looking playfulness, as well as an archive of things, of things I’ve seen, heard and thought of. I will read it back but for the moment I just need to get it down, captured, preserved.

Voices on the promenade as I sit there, eyes closed against the sun. A sound piece. The warm fug of others’ voices, not understanding, just basking in the murmuring.

I bought stocks and sunflowers. The stocks lasted four days, it was enough. The warm, sticky, headiness of their perfume filling our home. I drink it in.

An upright piano on the beach.

The boy baker standing outside the shop in the dark, texting.

Down by the harbour, a car drives off as I approach.

Two boys, one shirtless, throwing down their spliffs and tumbling into the B&B, noisy at 3 am. The acrid smell stinging my nostrils.

A girl pushing a pushchair on Great Darkgate St.. The pram is veering all over the pavement, her other hand holds a mobile. She is shouting. What I need is a really good fuck, she shouts. I’ll be home soon. Love you. She puts the phone in her pocket, turning her attention to the pushchair. It is empty save for a large shopping back. Come on, Baba, she says, steering it forward towards Penglais Hill.

Last week. A memory. Walking towards the Castle. 3.50 am. A line of people, of bodies, semi-visible in the lamp lit gloom. A curve of bodies, walking as one. A family. Different heights. A family. Young children in high vis jackets, white ankle socks and trainers. An Orthodox Jewish family. Five children and two parents. Walking. Walking the Prom at 3.50 am in the morning. I incline my head. A brief nod to the father. He repeats the gesture.

It is a magical time. Today, the wind, blowing through my tiredness. I fall into it, against it, submitting to its will. So tired. A long journey North, to sit with a friend. Good, it was good. Worth the non-sleeping night, driving, driving.

I dust on Tuesdays. A creature of habit, I have my routine. This morning I found a grasshopper. It was dead and lying on the floor of the bedroom. Bright green. Too green to be dead. How had it got there? Jumped through the window perhaps or been carried by the wind?

In later days, she’d say that I looked like her. A tiny woman, an Edith Piaf in furs. Pinched mouth. Like mother like daughter, bitter brides.

It’s been ages since I wrote properly. So many other things taking up my time. So it will have to be a list again – else the notes bulge from my Filofax. So what do I have here, yes, Harvest Moon. A yellow-orange one for days. It felt strange to see it, not the usual silvery-white but a sun-like custardy yellow. Summer berries is next. Yes, I remember being sad all day and then standing in the kitchen preparing the summer fruits to stew. The feel of the redcurrants and gooseberries, hard-skinned and perfect, and the smell of the blackcurrants and the memories of childhood summers that flooded in. I was made still. Exquisite sensuality. A solace. A solace to feel this way.

Then I have a note about a girl that I saw asleep through a window of a ground floor flat on South Marine Terrace. Outside was black as pitch, she lay on the sofa fully lit, exposed by the glare of an overhead light. Hopper-esque in it’s starkness. She a tumble of duvets. Then there are Witches Bottles, Carnival Bunting and Kit Williams’ book Masquerade. Things I’ve heard of on the radio. The bunting was around Llanbadarn for its Carnival. It was on and gone without us even noticing. The bunting is still up. They live in a world of light. A quote from a poem I heard on an edition of Homefront. I liked it.

I bought him a copy of Gilbert White’s studies of Selbourne. He seemed to know of it. Isn’t it often the case we buy books for others that we wish to read ourselves? I listened to Paul Theroux on In The Psychiatrist’s Chair. He was spiky. A porcupine. But I want to read him. Again.

Then voices on the Prom. Perhaps I’ve already told you. A slight blonde girl sitting on a bench with a large man in a paisley short-sleeved shirt. He smokes. An’ it got to Monday, she is saying, an’ I panicked. The man in the floral shirt laughs.

More radio stuff. An adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor by Rachel Joyce. My story is not marvellous, he says. And then I heard Christopher Hitchens’ essays Arguably. Lovely prose on such difficult subjects – water-boarding, Agent Orange and Isaac Newton. Someone accused Newton of ‘unweaving a rainbow’.

Outside The Angel at 4.30 am a girl is delving into her handbag for her keys. A tall man walks under a streetlight. He wears a heavy tweed overcoat and there is a gash on his face. He stares at me.

I think about a collaborative piece. Somewhere out on the Yorkshire Moors, perhaps. A trace on the grass of something said, something remembered, something enacted. Long ago. Still left, still impressed onto the landscape.