Author: Ellen Bell

A perfect circle. A perfect O. Moon walking. This morning, no rain. Just the moon. Walking in the light of the moon. It’s a special kind of light. A warm white. Apparently the lunar eclipse will turn it red. A blood moon. Later this morning two rainbows. Two. Two crocks of gold. Where is the crock? he asked, which end? What does a crock look like? Twice the luck? Perhaps.

A 100 Miles yesterday. Sweeping roads through hills and towns. It was nice. We talked, the three of us. Sometimes we sat in silence. We lunched in a hotel on a hill overlooking the sea. A sleepy lounge softened by the warmth of a still hot sun. Gatherings of sofas. Elderly women sprawled out on the chintz, positively lolling in the through-glass sunshine. Like cats. Sitting up only for the arrival of triangular cut sandwiches and heavy metal pots of tea. No Lapsang Souchong, madam. Sorry. Well, Darjeeling will have to do. Two or three push walking cages past the window outside. They’re going for a fag. They sit huddled on garden chairs. In the lounge lunch is over and they are doing crosswords and Sudoku, heavy-eyed after food. Going to the loo I spot another lounge, empty, its glass door shut. The Adult Lounge.

No more Chris Evans in the morning. I promised. In return I don’t have to collect his papers. Bliss. I don’t have to do to the SPAR and talk to people. It’s not that I really mind I just prefer the silence, the closed-in-ness. I wonder if Jamie ever got Wendy back. No more Chris Evans. We listen to Radio 3 instead. The dulcet voice of Petroc Trelawney. A small change. A small shift towards something new. Yes. I like it. Children talking about the ten pieces project. It’s better than real music, one said.

You seem happy, she said. Yes, I said, I think I am.

I walk every morning. Every morning, early, whatever the weather. The last few days it has been wet. Yesterday it was windy. Today not so. I opened my umbrella. There must be something, some pleasure even in the rain. The patter of raindrops on the fabric of my umbrella, the smell of wet, rotting leaves. The stillness, the still warmness of the new autumn. There is always something, isn’t there? If you just look, if you are prepared to look beyond the disappointment of it not being what you hoped for or expected. Always something. A young woman walking through the rain towards me. No proper coat, sucking a lolly in the dark. Her wide hips, so beautifully womanly. What else? Little things. Adapting, managing the disappointment of a grey sky. A forgotten grapefruit replaced by a Satsuma. Different but not necessarily bad. I missed the sharp bitterness of the grapefruit but the Satsuma’s sweetness was nice. Sometimes when I walk I take my ipod. Not today. Today I heard the squeaking whistles of the oystercatchers. When I take it I put the ipod on shuffle. I walk to a mix of music, poetry, readings and Norwegian lessons. I like the randomness of it. Whatever comes up seems to be right. I walk accepting, not expecting or forming an opinion.

You’re free, she said. Yes, I am. What shall I do with the freedom? I want to live well. To love well. One and the same. To live without expectation. Now there is a thing.

Little delights. Coming upon a friend’s novel being read by Dan Stephens on Radio 4 Extra. Earlier listening to Ann Bronte’s Agnes Grey. Unexpected. Unlooked-for pleasures. She was the quiet one. I think. None of them wanting to leave home, except perhaps for Charlotte, though that was much later when they had all gone. Sharp, intense lives – no matter that they were living seemingly small outer lives. What inner ones. What inner ones.

A taxi driver. A good man it seems. Gone. Brutally killed. I don’t know what to do with such knowing. Such knowledge. The bells will ring in Eccles. Rest in peace.

A kite is caught, wrapt in the wires of the lights that hang between the lamp posts on the promenade. A cheap kite. Plastic. No wind. It was still as I walked past in the dark. Dark. Still wary. I was brave on Thursday as I walked into it. For the birds. I walked into it for the birds. In the end it was for me. What a joy. What a treasure. Art at its best. Life-changing. Transforming. That undulating lake of blue light, the cuckoo bellows, the white dot-to-dot bird, the streak of the kingfisher. Magical. What can I say?

I am stilled by the joy and the grief of it all. This life. His life. I don’t know what to say. Other than thank you. For this. This experience, however fragile, however uncertain. Even the dark can bring a transforming. Yes.

Red ribbons for her hair. A song. A song from childhood. A folk song. Sinead O’Connor sings it with breathy weightiness. The red ribbons are still tied to the prom railing down near the Pier. The wind has bunched them together. A straggly glut of red made ragged by the weather. Last year they were pink. Pink for a little girl that was taken. This year they are red for the other girls, stolen from school. Where are they? No longer in the news. Have they been forgotten? Their eyes in newspaper photographs hollowed out by fear, by the why of it all. Like that journalist and the taxi driver. Innocents, taken, caught up in something they are not responsible for. A wife makes a desperate appeal, one human being to another. Will she be heard? Listened to? Let it be so.

I wanted to find a winking Jesus. A hologram. I’ve seen them. He smiles benignly and then winks as you twist the card back and forth. Tricks. Cheap tricks – even better in the name of religion. An icon made accessible, tacky. And yet, miraculous to my still childlike eye. Still the child. Still charmed by gaudy flamenco dresses. Spanish dolls and cards with sewn bits. It will always be so. Just like the small, the miniature, the dolls’ houses. I am captivated by what I can hold in my palm.

Watch the 4 Lions, he told us from the front seat of his people carrier. David, a Spanish taxi driver from Catalonia, who spoke English with a German accent. He told us he sometimes goes to the cinema in the afternoons. Sometimes I have a long wait at the airport for a client, he said. I didn’t feel like talking but felt obliged. We talked of films, of Pedro Almodovar and 4 Lions. I rented it when we got home. He was right. A marvellous film. Marvellous. Full of marvels. The actor playing Omar. The crow fitted up as a suicide bomber being directed by Faisal to fly over and blow up a plastic toy house he’d placed on a bird table. Pretend it’s a sex shop, says Faisal. Faisal is the first to be blown up, tripping over a sheep. They all go like that. A shock. I wanted it to be just play, silly and for them to go home safe. Not so. Not even in fantasy land. Tell me what to do, begs Waj down the phone to Omar. I don’t know what to do. The police are as clueless as the terrorists. They are told to shoot a ‘bear’ during the London Marathon. You just shot a Wookie, says a voice from the remote control. No I didn’t, the police marksman replied, I shot a bear. Is a Wookie a bear? asks his companion. And Omar commanding his colleague to tell them he was smiling, before walking into a chemist’s shop to detonate his bomb. The end. And what was it for? I am still reeling. No questions answered.

The Turner Prize. I scan the reviews. Jonathon Jones in The Guardian. He is charmed by Tris Vonna Michell. His voice. He calls him a performer, a poet. I watch a clip. Words repeated, fast, urgently. There is something, certainly. The aesthetic is tired. A space with a trestle table. Unfinished. A screen behind showing slides. But the voice. Yes, there is something. ‘He seems to have found a highly imaginative way of being in the world’, writes Jones. ‘You feel he is an artist when he’s on the loo, as much as he is when he gets up to perform……he even thanks the audience for listening – what a charmer’, he writes.

An imaginative way of being in the world. Yes. I like that. A rare thing. A rare thing.

I’m bored, she says, there is nothing for me to do here. They keep us inside, she says. I walk the corridors, just to keep moving, she says. I ask about her room. It isn’t nice, she says, too plain. I ask if she has some of her things there, photographs and pictures. No, she says, its my fault. What she means is that she hasn’t the energy, the desire to make the effort, or perhaps it is just that her things, her beautiful things don’t belong there. They can hear us, she tells me down the telephone. Surely they can’t understand English, I say. Yes, yes, they can. There is a garden but she can only visit it if there is someone reliable with her. They think we will run off, she says.  And one night she watched a film, Out of Africa, I think. There is a gentleman, she says. He is good company, she says. I am glad. She was always one for the men. Somehow they lit her up in a way that I or other women could not. And it is always so good to see her smile. She shines from the inside out. A beaming smile. White. White light. She sounds cranky. She is grateful. Grateful to be safe, to be looked after, to not be alone. But it is a heavy price to pay. A loss of her independence, room to be awkward, unconventional, her specialness acknowledged, known. I am weighed down by the sadness of it. Of her. Must ageing, dying be such a shutting down? A shutting in? Dylan Thomas urged his father to rage. That, I fear is only true for those who still hope for something better to come, here, in this reality. What more for her? There is no getting better. Nothing better, than sleep and the coming oblivion. But must it be so slow? The tick tick of the hours. I remember my father. The restless agony, the endlessness of waiting, waiting to go. And what was left of him. He says, much was, that he still recognised him, even at the end. I did not. The light, the spirit was gone. And such a spirit. Like hers. Singular. Spiky. Difficult and yet so amiable when all was well, when their will was granted. Delicious singularity. Shining spirits. Glorious.

Let it be. It must be. Shining.

We’re in Morrisons. Mags is behind the till. She calls us both ‘Cariad’. Nice. I like it. Cosy as toast. We talk about the weather. Mags says its going to rain soon. I hope it won’t thunder, she says. I’m scared of thunderstorms, she says. Why, we ask. She tells us how as a child she was out on the farm with her mother. I must have been about six, she says. There was a storm, she says. With lightning, she says. One cow dead, the other one fell down, she says. I was terrified, she says. My mother, she says, was white inside a month.

Gloomy. Gloomy since our return. I miss the light. That clean white light of sun on white-washed walls. Our skin is still olive-coloured. It lingers. He still shines with it. A good time. The best ever, I think. Peace. Rest. Morning talks and bedroom talks. Coffee in the Portofino. Dos café con leche, una descafeinado, uno normal y agua con gas, por favour, I say. By the end she smiled. The view of the beach and the Papagayo café. In the evening watching the promenading. Irish wedding guests hugging their plastic pint glasses of lager, Spanish children hovering around the sweet stall fingering the pink plastic tat, waiters back and forth, with their trays held at shoulder-height, stopping to lean against the door frame for a cigarette. I miss the light. Gloomy. Gloomy with what now. What now?

Early this morning I saw dancing lights at the end of the harbour. Car lights? Not sure. I walk nearer. They are at the end of the jetty. Three men in high visible jackets shining torches onto the water, the waves. Circling beams catching the moving white and dark. Is someone lost? The coastguard’s office is lit up. I can see a circle of people on chairs. A pony-tailed young woman at a lectern. No sense of panic or alarm. Three of the RNLI boys are eating chips. Night-time strangeness. Like a dream. Like dreams, moving from dark into light.

Feast on your life, says Derek Walcott.

Myself it speaks and spells, What I do is me: for that I came, writes Gerald Manley Hopkins.

What I do is me.

What I do is me.

For that I came. Yes.

Someone has written ‘Leave only footprints’ on a large stone by South Beach. Yes. I agree. Too much stuff. I begin the process of passing on. Passing on things. My mind fills with ideas for new work. Make this, make that. Yes. Yes. But not now. Let’s stay with the emptying process. Make space. And wait. Wait and see what comes in.

I walk. I walk morning and afternoon. In the sun. Two men are walking ahead of me. They called it a ‘Sky Burial’ one of them is saying. Horrific, he says, to be eaten by birds. Just put me in a cardboard box, he says, I don’t need a coffin. I want one of them Thai farm burials, the other man replies. My bones crushed and scattered over the paddy fields of Phuket, he says, then I can return to Aber in a bag of Morrisons rice. They laugh.

I sit on a park bench and wait for him. The sun warms my skin. For a moment. Just for a moment, I am empty. Nice.

This morning, before light, a mass of gulls on the rocks.

The artist Michael Landy famously burnt all his possessions. A funeral pyre. A burning made into art. Everything the artist does becomes art. Everything gone. How did it feel? Throwing it all away. Everything gone. Clearing a space. Empty. Ready to fill. To fill with what?

It takes courage to let it all go. Delivering it up to the fire. Embers into dust. Energetic destruction. Death to life. Yes. Mark Doty writes about the Buddhist ‘Sky Burial’. Stripped bare by vultures. Then the bones crushed to powder and mixed with flour. The birds take that too. All gone. No trace. Returned to the source. Emptied.

I wake from a dream. 3.10 am. I go for a pee still disturbed by the vision of it. My mother is alive. I am staring at her skin and the tracery of red wheals that has begun to show on her arms and back. As I continue to stare the wheals become hennaed – gorgeous patterns. She seems oblivious of this tattooing. The pattern closes up and metamorphoses into a mass of swirling worms and eels. I am horrified. Mum is unconcerned merely pushing them off. I watch as they fall to the ground. Underneath her skin is perfect, white, young and shining. Dad is there too – we talk about it, wondering what it means.

I cry. Let it go, he says. It is only a dream. Yes.

She gave it to us when we were crossing the road. Here, she said, I thought you might like it. A bleak cover. A range of greys. Stark. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family. A big book with small type. I find it familiar. It is in the blood. The snow, the bleakness, the taciturn parent, the names. He is writer. A writer juggling a domestic life with a deep ambition to do something good. To do something well. Yes. Keep reading. We’ll see.

They bring their raspberry-coloured camper van to the promenade every summer. Parked halfway along the South Marine end, just beyond the war memorial, they have a great view. Just sea. Late August their little van is sandwiched between much larger ones. Theirs is tiny in comparison. Just one room really. A room that must be kitchen, bedroom, lounge and bathroom. Where do they pee? One morning I saw her open the side door and fling out a bucketful of soapy water onto the pavement. An arc of Flash suds. Lemony.

There are two of them in that van. A man and wife, I suppose. He is a large man with a white walrus moustache. She is smaller in frame. A busy little woman. She keeps the van tidy. When it rains they sit inside with the door ajar. When it is sunny they stretch out on fold away chairs or chat on the nearest prom bench. There never seems to be any rancour between them. They occupy the tiny space happily, it seems. They both choose to be there. What do they leave behind? Is there a house, or a flat? They are clearly both retired or out of work. He reminds me of a old country and western singer. It must be the moustache. He keeps it just so.

He takes up a lot of room. When he sits on the sofa-cum-bed there is barely room for her. His legs bow outwards, his large thighs spreading fatly on the upholstery. Sometimes she just stands leaning against the sink-cum-kitchen surface.

Once it is parked the van stays still, driven, as they so often are, onto those little yellow tyre levellers. How do they do that? They all use them, they have to, the road leans towards the sea. It would be like being at sea, always leaning.

There is something so neat about these vans. Boxes on wheels. Homes on wheels. They make him seethe. They block the view, he says. So selfish, he says. So selfish. I like them. I like the neatness. That beige sort of orderliness. The man are usually handy. They have tool belts. Though not the walrus-man, I suspect. She is the busy one. Can’t sit still. Neither of them read. They accost people, he says. See, he says, jogging my arm, see they’ve accosted another local. I think there is a little dog too. How do they do it? Don’t they long to stretch out? It pleases me that there is a certain peace between them. They appear content. No envy towards the flashier campers that flank them. They are happy in their raspberry home. Happy to be here. Happy to be them.

Driving home through Abergavenny we stop to fill up. I watch as a young man fills a bucket from a tap. He waits by the tap and unfolds his arms. Looking up he sees a crow on the roof of the Co-op across the road. He raises his arms to emulate a shotgun, aiming it with partly-closed-eyed concentration at the bird. Pow, pow, he shouts. He does this three times. And then grins.

Love and art – writes Mark Doty – those two towers can’t be knocked down, can they? Though you can, for a stretch of time, lose sight of them.