I sat in the sun and watched her. She was alone and drank a glass of ginger beer while she waited for her food to be delivered. She reminded me of someone else, someone that I know quite well. She had that same kind of outward peace about her. She wore a simple cotton shirt with a a delicate tracery of embroidery on the collar. She raised her face to the sun and closed her eyes. I drew her and continued to watch. Her hands were under the table and in my process of observing I notice that on her left arm there was a large square of bruise turning brown and yellow.
Later I sat in the sun and closing my eyes I listened to the rustle of leaves and the distant clamour of children playing in the playground.
I heard a flapping on the ground as I walked along Llanbadarn Road. It was a blackbird and it was clearly injured, with one of its legs bent and lifeless. I kept my distance from it not wanted to distress it further. Poor lamb, I heard myself saying, while its yellow eye stared at me. What could I do? How could I help it? The RSPCA would help, he said at breakfast. What a blackbird? Yes, he said, they’d come out for anything. I hope that is the case and if it is still there when we walk out later we can call them. If a cat doesn’t get it before then, I said. That’s Nature, he said.
The town was a cacophony of seagull squawks as I walked. Near the station a baby gull was calling and two adult birds were bending their heads up and down in front of it and shrieking. Where they it’s parents or where they telling it to be off? I could hear the young screeching across the whole area, either from their nests or from their hiding places on the ground. It is such a lonely, aching sound. They are betwixt and between babyhood and maturity and all at sea.
He doesn’t much like going that way, and to be honest I don’t like it much either. It is depressing walking along the backs of the hotels and guest houses and then behind Alexandra Hall, a gothic monster with its dark, wrought iron fire escapes. It smells of bins, rubbish is invariably scattered on the road and it is bleak. But, and herein lies the point, when you get to the top of the hill you have this ‘take-your-breath-away’ view of the sea and bay that cancels out any of the gloom of the previous vista. It is marvellous, and even more so on a morning like today’s where the sea is lashing and swirling and the sky is a steel blue. I love it. I love its wildness, the cragginess of the headland and the power of the water, eschewing all attempts at scenic twee-ness. Give me wild any day. And the sun, naturally.
He’d been getting at me to take some rest, so I did so. I had work to do, I always have but I sat out instead. We’d walked home from drawing in a café and I just stayed put, out there in the car park, aka our garden. I sat there for half and hour in the sun and watched my breathing, heard the bees, observed butterflies, smelt the rapeseed and listened to them cutting the grass on the College Field. It was lovely. There was a frisson guilt but my breathing stilled and I felt heaps better. Then I heard the news…..
I do a lot of couple watching, particularly in the M&S café that I go and draw in after lunch. There are some rich pickings of interesting faces, bodies and habits. He calls the women 18 short, which was the size of trousers that he used to buy for his mother. I love to watch their concentration as they eat their triangle-cut sandwiches and drink their pots of tea. Most of the couples I observe cease talking when the food arrives (there is still a kind of waitress service, at least for the hot food) and tuck in. It takes them a while to chew, many with their heads down, others with their heads up like tortoises with bits of food poking out of their mouths (like the elderly lady with the other woman who may have been her daughter, who had lettuce jutting from her lips as she munched). They share a packet of crisps or two, hands digging down while their mouths are still full of bread. I try to capture the industry of it, the flurrying of hands and the crunching mouths. It’s a kind of intimacy, I suppose, perhaps all that is left to us once age takes its toll. There is little touching. Alas, I am often very tired once I get there and the drawing is sometimes lack lustre. I’m taking it in, though, I’m taking it in.
It’s not really the right word – a word and indeed a phrase that I always misunderstood as a child thinking that the son being described as prodigal referred to his return not the wildness of his life when he left. Anyway, he has returned. He left the ‘hell hole’, as he described it, after what? six years or was it more, to work for a famous dairy on an industrial site. He kept coming in to the coffee shop aka HH on his days off, saying that ‘he was getting there’ with his new job. And now he is back. My heart went out to him. He has lost weight and the skin condition that ails him has flared up. His face was positively afire. How do we handle it? we asked each other. In the end I raised it, giving him a way out, a chance to save face. I think it helped. It broke something and he drooped a little less as a consequence. He isn’t an easy man, he can be a little arsy, no brusque – I call him an ‘Eeyore’ like the donkey toy in Winnie-the-pooh. I hope he feels safer now that he is back in the fold.
I walked to the Perygyl from over the Buarth, marvelling at the host of seagulls making in circles in the sky, flashing white from the reflection of the street lights below, magical quite magical. And then, joy of joys there was a fishing boat preparing to set sail. I love that warming thrum of the engine and the stark yellow lights in the still darkness. And I am determined to get strong. These hips are mine and I want to keep them, decrepit or no.
Most we only know to say hello to but that doesn’t stop us spinning stories about them. Not unkind ones but just a means of piecing together the bits of information we get from their habits to form a picture of who they really are. There’s ‘the smoker’ across the way who is up at all hours loitering outside his flat smoking and reading his phone. During lockdown he appeared to be holding seminars in the car park so we have him down as a lecturer or possibly a PhD student with teaching duties. There’s the young father whose kids visit at the weekends, he also smokes and sits on the railings, also reading his phone. There was Alfie the dog’s owner (we discovered later that he was a she but the name stuck) – I don’t think we worked out what he did, and he has since gone taking Alfie with him. I miss her barking and sheer thrill whenever he returned home from who knows where. There was the ‘Scottish Guy’ who has also gone, he who never wore a coat, always that same black t-shirt come snow, rain or shine, and whom he would see drinking during the day in The White Horse, just wine, and always on his own. He since found out that he is actually married and that his wife still lives in Scotland and that he lecturers at the University (we thought, Politics or IT or Literature but no he works in the IBERS department something to do with seeds, I think). But the girl who lives in a flat around the corner was a surprise. She lives with her boyfriend or could be her husband and they can be seen (like us) walking the Prom in the early morning (he always strides way ahead of her). She came once to say that the washing machine was waking them and looked so uncomfortable doing so, bless her. Anyway we met her the other day as she got out of her car (they park next to us) and she revealed that she actually works in a café near Borth. I’d have thought she’d have an office job or was a researcher perhaps. So shy, and so reticent, she blushes at a moment’s notice and there she is doing a job that is all about interacting with others. I like her. She blushed when I said that I liked her new hair cut. A gentle being, I think.
But it’s a Paul Smith, he protests and doesn’t need to. I try to keep mum these days. It’s his joy, this buying and bidding on eBay. He says it’s harmless and doesn’t cost much as they are all second-hand. So I leave him be and patiently (mostly) pack up the parcels to return if they don’t suit. I hadn’t seen the coat before he sent it off to the drycleaners to be cleaned. I can’t remember the adjective they used when he called them to check it had arrived (a blousy, cheery woman comes to collect every Thursday). There’s swank, they should’ve said. For it is bright, even garish. Pink. Do you remember when we were going to buy me that pink velvet suit from Paul Smith in Covent Garden? Yes, I do. I remember the umming and ahing and the dithering. It wasn’t cheap. He is happy now. That is what matters. And I have my fetishes too. Sketchbooks for instance?
He wasn’t sure if it was in honour of his death or not, but the National Library of Wales on the hill above us was flying their flag at half mast. How nice, I said, not knowing if the man would’ve appreciated it or not. He went to his funeral yesterday. I was the only one in jeans, he said. He learnt things about him he didn’t know before. Though he didn’t know him very well. He was younger than him and was in school with his younger brother. But they did used to drink together. In his drinking days. I’m glad he went. He wavered. I couldn’t hear my brother’s eulogy, he said, he spoke so quietly, I think his voice cracked a little at the end. The played The Waterboys, twice. Nice.
I saw her again yesterday. I’ve seen her a few times now. We were out walking in the afternoon and went into Ridiculously Rich’s outdoor seating area for a coffee and so that I could draw. She came a little later on and sat at a table just beyond ours. I like to look at her. She isn’t beautiful but she has a strong body, a fresh face and intelligence and openness shines from her. She doesn’t know me, though I did go up and say hello that one time. I don’t mind. I like to preserve my relative anonymity here. I have all I need.
