Author: Ellen Bell

One of this town’s ‘entrepreneurial’ hoteliers has put up his Christmas trees in the front windows of two of his Prom-Front establishments. They are of the slightly tacky variety, that is fake and rather garrishly colourful, but are, nevertheless a comforting sight to come upon as I trudge my way along the Promenade in the early hours. The town has hung its decoration but they stopped turning, or leaving them on, during the night. They hang there, functionless. And how this town needs some light. It is a drear sight in those wee small hours. A gaggle of students hung around outside the Express Tesco shouting and pronouncing loudly what a good time they were having. They seem, as usual oblivious to the cold. One girl was dressed in a boob tube, her arms and shoulders bare.

I made a drawing but my fingers went numb.

I walked this morning thinking about bleakness and how this is communicated (or perhaps felt is a better word) through spaces and environments. I walk in the early hours. The dark then (particular in this approach to winter) is absolute. Leaving the house to walk out into is a dread time, managed through the fuss of getting ready – all those layers to be zipped up, fastened and tied. It is easier when there is no rain and wind to navigate. I want to locate those bleak spaces in this shabby town. Generally they feature a streetlight, throwing shadows and a sharp, cold lemon-yellow light. Corners of streets are typical too, with all that signage that has usually been fixed to a wall, that for some reason fascinates me so. There is a slight sense of unsafety in such spaces. I don’t want to linger long and yet I seek them out. I want to draw them to find my own bleakness within them.

His sister is very funny. She shares his same wit, as does their younger brother. And this is despite her demure exterior. She is unshockable too. Though, as I say, you wouldn’t know it to look at her. As part of his daily phone call he often asks her what she had for lunch, and indeed, what she plans to order for supper. Yesterday lunch was Chicken & Mushroom Pie. What was it like? he asked. She hesitated. Well, it was meant to be a pie but there was no lid. How can it be a pie, then? he asked. Was it a flan? I suggested. Well, she continued, it actually didn’t have any pastry at all. It wasn’t a pie, then, he shouted, was it? She was laughing by then. No. But that’s what they called it. What held it together? I chipped in. Nothing, apparently.

A girl passed me this morning on the other side of the road from the Prom. She was all in black and read her phone while she walked. On her feet were a pair of huge, and I mean huge, platforms. They were shiny and looked like they were constructed out of silver.

I saw that they’d erected another one of those metal welded Christmas Trees at the top of Terrace Road, outside the hairdraessers and the seaside gift shop. This one had a star on top. Did they all? I didn’t notice. The real Christmas tree has also been put, though no decorations as yet.

They were talking together on the phone (that is, after he’d sworn a few times about the mute button on WhatsApp and how he cannot for some reason turn it off). She heard it all, bless her, as she waited for him to resolve it, her tiny little voice chirping out in the background, ‘You’ve got mute on’. I interrupted their conversation, it being the usual ‘bollocks’, and asked him to ask her if she had any childhood Christmas memories. She reponded immediately, telling us how she used to sing carols with another of their brothers when they shared a bedroom. She said she was probably about 7 or 8. He hadn’t heard of it before, and of course, neither had I. I asked what they’d sung. Oh, the usual, she said, Away in a Manger and that sort of thing.

He’d told me at lunch over the weekend that they’d been constructed a kind of modern wire Christmas Tree outside the town’s Library. I came across another one on my early walk this morning. It’s been put up across the road from the newly named pub, The Optimist. I like it. It’s minimal and kind of constructivist in style. I wonder if they will leave it in its puritan state or over-prettify it with baubles.

I snatched a walk in between working at my desk yesterday mid-morning. The weekends are domestic days and I clean early, meaning that my early walks aren’t possible. I noticed how less spooked I was by the rain in the daylight as I can be in the dark. It is more manageable and seemingly less aggressive, less personal (though I am aware how ridiculous that sounds, weather is never personal). I walked briskly, there is always so much to do. I chase my tail these days. Coming back over Edge Hill Road which ends with a curving path that leads down onto Llanbadarn Road, I met a woman who was climbing up it. An elderly grey-haired woman, who was probably not much older that I was. She looked fit and intelligent and walked tall. We greeted each other as our paths crossed. She had a badge on her jacket in the shape of a flag. Was it the Palestinian colours? I smelt patchouli as we passed each other. I love the smell. It made me smile.

Sometimes we ask his sister to read out the Home’s ‘itinerary’. Yesterday she could have gone to the lounge for a screening of a Norman Wisdom film. Did you go? he asked. No, she said.

Sometimes I am full of it. It eats into my bones. It is often unnamed, faceless. But it takes me over nonetheless. I attach this nameless shadow to people who I’ve developed, an, often wholly undeserved, mistrust of. Presently it is certain academics who appear to be acting as gatekeepers blocking my path towards what I both want to do and what feels the right thing to do. Their language becomes harsh and unyielding. And I cannot like them. I know I am behaving as child would but my ambitions are frail, inchoate they need nurturing not cutting down before they have a chance to form.

I want to make everything pristine. I yearn for perfect cleanliness, not just bodily but in the spaces in which I live. My home. Our home. I cannot do it. I’ve never been able to. This flat has too many crevices, too many botched corners and unstable skirtings to get at all the dirt and dust I wish to. I try. And everytime cleaning time comes around I feel the deficit. It has always been the way. All those mean rooms I endeavoured to keep clean. It was my way of sweeping away my shame at my (relative, of course) poverty and lack of ability to provide for myself in the way that my parents had provided for me. I’ve not owned any of the spaces, I had to clean what was and what is. Even when we joint owned the house in Cambridge, there wasn’t the money to do the overhaul that I would’ve chosen. I am reminded of impermance and how all of this will be dust, as will I. Nothing matters. It’s just an exercise in control. An empty gesture. And I know this, even when I am sweeping. I want the whiteness, thinking that then, and only then, I will find peace. I want that whiteness, that white room when I am dying. Can I make it happen?

When he called her last night I asked him to ask her again what their grandfather had called Bread & Butter Pudding. I had forgotten or misheard what she’d said the night before. “Mrs Ducky Sunk,” she said. Lovely. No one knows or remembers why he called it that.

I walked on the Perygyl this morning, this first time in a long, long time. There was no rain and virtually no wind. It was glorious. And my legs worked well. I enjoy it while I can. Disordered clumps of students hung around outside The Angel or ambled their way down Great Darkgate Street. They seem oblivious to the coming cold. Oh, and they’ve hung the lights. “Not that they switch them on,” he said at breakfast after I’d told him. I wish they did, it would temper the bleakness of this drear month. So be it. Dark it is then.

He was on the phone to his sister and she asked him if he remembered what their paternal grandfather used to call bread and butter pudding. He said he didn’t and she told him. I couldn’t hear her voice very distinctly but it sounded like ‘Mrs Somebody’s Dunk’. He lived with them in his latter years. They talked about his wife who had died early, possibly as a result of epilepsy with which she was afflicted. He struggled with depression. Again family folklore has it that he’d been made ‘jumpy’ by the wartime bombing of Swansea. I think it was tricky for them all having him in their small house. He made toys out of wood for the children, including a doll’s house for his sister. He had to go to a daughter in the end when his sister reached puberty and needed a room to herself.

A windy morning but dry. The rain was torrential yesterday. It scares me, particularly driving over the mountains in it. It is elemental, mighty. I am made small.

Those oblongs or squares of yellow light are such a comfort to me as I walk through the early dark of the town. Hopper-esque these lit windows speak of insomnia, disturbed nights and restlessness. I feel a fellow-feeling for these non-sleepers. The rain was heavy when I woke but lightened a little when I left home. And now the wind is coming. They’re calling it Storm Debbie, a rather innocuous name for a storm but there you are. Morning begins through my studio window and a Monday opens up with all her usual busy-ness. Go to it….