Artist and writer currently living in Aberystwyth.
Town was wild as I walked in. Noise, hilarity, and shouting ricocheting off the terraced streets. Students. Winding down. A man falls to the ground. A soft falling. Intoxicated, there is no hard thud. He rolls to his knees and raises himself. I walk on. Watching to see if he needed help but not wanting to go too close. Christmas trees in shop windows abound. It helps cut through the darkness. So thick, so black.
I try to secure what I see as I walk the streets of this town in mind. It’s almost a memory game. A listing of things, of sights, of overheard conversations that I make in my head as I return home. This morning it was sausages. A cling-film-wrapped try of raw sausages that lay on the pavement along Llanbadarn Road, priced £1.79. Clearly they had fallen out of someone’s shopping bag. Had they got home, anticipating their cooked breakfast and scratched their head at the absence of them? An incongruous sight. Seemingly, more akin to fiction than fact.
One of the trees on the estate has fallen across the road out. A huge branch. Wrenched from its trunk, tt snapped in the storm. It looked so melancholy in the early morning dark, throwing strange, unearthly shadows. It forms an arch.
I was frightened. I think it was the howling and the whistling and the bowing-in of the windows. I was unrelenting. All day and all night. The power on and off. I was frightened. He wasn’t. I don’t think he understood. Do tiny animals also sense fear during storms?
I had a phone call from an unknown number. It was the town’s hospital’s admissions offering me a hip operation this month. It threw me. I thought it has all been forgotten. Not so, it seems. I declined it. She seemed a little irritated. I am doing OK. So far. And isn’t it better to offer it to someone in pain and incapacity? I have to come off the list, apparently. So who knows? I don’t want the surgeon’s knife. Not now, not ever.
Sebald’s book is becoming harder and harder to read. R. N. D. was stamped on the files of those sent away from the ghetto and onwards to the camps, he writes. R. N. D.? Return not desired.
He writes a note for me each night, leaving it on the stairs for me to find in the morning. There are ostensibly weather forecasts but he often adds a comment about how he feels about me with a crossed heart. I love them. Yesterday he wrote (that is, after the usual gloomy forecast of rain and more rain) that “you are more than you think you are.”
I suspect it hasn’t been the reign he’d expected. A small feature in the news a few days ago said how the give-away portraits of him from his coronation had only been taken up by 3 per cent of the hospitals to which they were offered. I remember how ubiquitous images of the Queen were during my childhood. They were everywhere – in doctors’ surgeries, libraries, schools and church halls. She had her tricky national moments too, but towards the end she was well and truly embraced by the royalists of this nation. It doesn’t appear to be the case with him. Is he too reserved, too removed? His ill health can’t have helped, nor that of his wife. I am sorry for him. Having spent a lifetime in expectation, he must have hoped for more. I hope he finds some joy in what is. I try to.
It’s a word that I associate with Shakespeare’s King Lear. A violent word, one that threatens destruction. She talked about it terms of clouds coming over the eye. Yes. It makes sense now but it was a shock to see how little of those lines of letters that I could decipher. Take your time, she said. But time, it seems, is something I don’t have.
We talked of a neighbour who looks after his daughter’s dog. It’s a sweet little thing. White, fluffy and mild. He said how different the dog had appeared when the daughter visited. Unrecognisable. Neither the father or the dog want to be together. They accept it. It is their fate – he walking ahead, the dog on a lead, behind. They cohabit, appreciating, even respecting, the gesture. But it is joyless. A joyless marriage.
One of the DJs I sometimes listen to always ends his programme with a quote from some star or other. Yesterday he used one from Ridley Scott. Something to do with trying regardless of failure and that failures are all good learning curves. I paraphrase him, of course, I was only half listening. Failure. Failing. What is it? The doctor insists that I have heart failure. Have I? I don’t know. I live with it. As I live with my other failures. They are everywhere in every drawing and piece of writing that I make. It is inevitable. And it is what I see. Distance sometimes makes them more bearable but not always. Yes, I am fearful of doing more. Always. And yet I get up each day set on repeating them in the hope that I won’t.
He suggested that I might not be reading enough. He is right. But. And the but is significant. I’m not doing anything enough. I am reading but there is always more I can do. And, when I do read, it takes so so long to assimilate it that it feels like a single breath in a mountain of sighs. I am drowning in the work that needs to be done. Drowning. I am mole, drowning. A mole because I am in the dark, unsure of which underground trail to follow, scrabbling about taking wrong-turns, coming up against hard rock. And the water is coming. I can hear it. Help me.