The road and footpath as I walked looked blown clean, dried clean by the east wind that caught at my face. It is almost an invisible whiteness to the approach of cold. It’s not quite here, but it is coming.
There are three smokers that I know of in the estate. One is our neighbour below. He stands at his bedroom window (ground floor level) and smokes out of the window, sometimes leaning out but mostly standing within the door frame reading his phone. Another is the one we call ‘The Lecturer’ because he appeared to hold regular seminars in the car park during lockdown last year. He smokes outside, at all hours. He can be see loitering or walking up and down beneath his upstairs flat with his hoodie pulled over his head, and like our neighbour reading from his phone. He must be in his thirties or forties for he has a young son who visits him at weekends. He used to put all his fag ends in a drain beneath a downpipe by No. 1 but I haven’t seen them there for months, so perhaps he has found another drain to block up. The final one is a young lad who lives in the block of flats opposite. He is the one who ties his bike to the railings by the stairs that leads down to the road. He irritates him, I think for being young, for being skinny, for hanging around and probably being like he was at his age. He still goes to school for I’ve seen him in his uniform. I think he lives in the flat with his mother. He smokes on the walkway, or by hanging out of his window. Yesterday, I saw him climbing in and out of his window. He takes his shoes off first and then puts one long leg in at a time. He is a bit like an insect, a stick insect. He listens to music as he smokes for his body jerks as he does so.
It was a small gesture but it felt a right thing to do, even though it engendered an intimacy that had not been there previously. She mentioned it when we spoke on the phone, said how much pleasure she continued to get from it. I like to think of her with it, my little transistor that I used to have in my bathroom, tuning into to Radio Cymru in the early hours when she can’t sleep. Her voice sounded a little stronger. She misses walking the dog and being out in the fresh air. Keep her safe.
I was expecting the spectacle of three police vans and a clutch of police men and women blocking the road on South Road just before the Prom. A dog was barking. Whether it was coming from one of the police vans or from one of the houses I wasn’t sure. The police stood in a clutch seemingly waiting for something. They all wore masks. One of the policewomen looked as me as I approached, so I turned down a side road and made my way to the harbour. Was it a raid? There was no shouting or noise. It was eerily quiet. What were they waiting for? They were still there when I walked back from the harbour.
The pair of trainers that I’d seen on the Prom caught up in some seaweed and flotsam were no longer there. Had the sea reclaimed them?
The vividness of my dreams at that moment (is it the moon, did I hear someone call it a ‘wolf moon’?) means that I remember them more clearly when I wake. Last night I was in an art room (belonging to a school or college or university). I was very comfortable in there, I knew my way about and was organising the space, emptying and sorting out the drawers and cupboards but I needed some glasses in order to see more clearly. For some reason I knew that they were in a cupboard high up in the ceiling and I needed to stand on chair to reach it. There was a man there. A handsome presence, young and strong. He wanted to help me and stood on the chair with me, behind me, giving me a ballast as I reached up to open the cupboard (trapdoor) and then I woke.
Our potted hyacinths upstairs are beginning to open and the smell is almost too much. Delicious. Beyond sweet.
It was one of those journeying dreams, you know the kind, or perhaps you don’t, the ones where there is a path and its long and winding and takes you through a variety of different terrain. This path lead me to a flooded road which meant I had to climb up a bank into a woody area (my cousin had said that he would meet me at the end of my journey in his car – how will he find me? I thought as I headed inland off the road). It became dark and I saw a huge hole in the ground, too big for a warren, was it a badger’s holt? I thought I could see an animal crouching in the gloom at the mouth of the hole. I was scared. It looked like the skeleton of a badger (not unlike that skull I’d seen on the Prom a few weeks ago) but it was hairless. I grew more scared. Would it attack me? But then suddenly, as it is in dreams I was out in the sunlight again and in a green, open meadow, all threat dissipated, for now. As I lay in semi-sleep another one of those sentences came forward. Last week one of them had been: ‘Welcome Mr Frankenstein and his monster.’ And another voice had replied: ‘Thank you.’ This morning the voice had said: ‘I want to try and find this hope.’
We live in a rabbit warren of an estate, an old school that has been turned into flats. And finding particular flats isn’t easy. There is no logic to their numbering, at all. I don’t know how the postmen and women do it. It must be a bit like the London cabbies have to do when they learn the knowledge.
I sleep with my window open and I often hear our neighbours beneath me. Usually it is their TV (she is profoundly deaf and has it on very, very loud) or it is him coughing as he smokes at his open bedroom window. Last night I heard, on two separate occasions, a delivery driver ask him where a certain number flat was. I lay there in my semi-sleep trying to work out for myself where no 44 was. Our neighbour seemed to know but he has been here a long time. I saw him myself this morning on my return from my walk. He too is having his jab today.
I dreamt that I asked J for some of her old dresses. She seemed reluctant to part with them and when I asked her for advice about getting a job she suggested I become a lawyer.
I’ve begun writing. It’s a scary thing facing that white emptiness of creating. What if I find there is nothing there? Or that what is there is ordinary? He listens to my questions. Just let it be so, he says, in his wisdom.
So many dreams, many of which seem like an assault. I wake disorientated and bleak. In one two of my sisters were there, I was naked and had tried to cover my nakedness with a transparent plastic bag. I wanted clothes and went with one of my sisters to her car for my suitcase. We’ve come as a family to tell you that Leah has been running wild and free, she said. (In my dream Leah was her grown up daughter (not my sister’s but hers). We’ve been swimming with her, she said. I felt a pang that they’d experienced an intimate moment with her and I hadn’t. When I got to my sister’s car, a white bubble car, most unlike hers, and opened the boot it was full of food. In a later dream I was talking to a woman from South America. She said she was from Begonia (it was only when I woke that I realised my subconscious had probably meant Patagonia). A TV was on in the background showing all sorts of horrors including hangings, in one a man’s face filled the screen with a noose around his neck, he had one of the S&M masks on. Then I was in a kitchen with her and several other women. What are you going to cook? she asked and I realised that I had no food. Other dreams were clear anxiety ones with people coming to our door with no masks and then I was in a mass of people at a party, again they were maskless. (That’s understandable, he said at breakfast. And yet, I said, I’m not aware of fretting about it.)
He lost his keys. I had them in my hand, he said. He lost them somewhere in the car. Don’t be cross with me, he said. And I tried. Honestly, I did. He got a hypo and we had to go in to get him something to eat. After lunch we made another attempt to find them. He puts them down, you see. He’s always done it. We emptied everything out of the boot and I heard a chink on the ground. There they were. They’d fallen out of a shoe that is on its way to a charity shop. Phew.
His friend died at 7.30 am on Saturday night. His daughter rang to tell him on Sunday morning. I heard her, weeping as she spoke. I cried too. He didn’t. It’s hard losing a parent, there are no words for it. We speak of him, the memories, for him at least, are rich. I knew him better later when he came to live here. A rogue, a chancer, a sometime charmer, a misogynist, a lover of Oriental women, mostly girls, a gambler on the never never, he usually landed on his feet. Not this time. I wish you a speedy journey, rest in peace.
I often see the grit lorry as I walk in the early mornings. It’s not really a lorry, more like a little truck and it’s yellow. The grit comes out of a funnel at the back straight onto the road. I see bits of it on the pavements that have flown there from the wheels of cars. There was no need for it this morning, it wasn’t freezing so there was no ice. The moon is slowly losing its fullness, I missed its peak. I’m sorry about that, I’ve been distracted getting myself into a fever pitch of fretfulness over this article. I’ve sent it off so we shall see.
He was a star. He steadies my ship always.
There was a immense tree on South Beach as I walked this morning. It lay there like something from a petrified forest, stripped bare, parched, broken. How can the sea carry such weighty cargo? Where do they come from?
I think about all those children and parents who are having to manage home-schooling without expertise, or even in some cases interest. How is it done? Would I have fared any better?
When will it lift?
Work. I must work and face the clumsy stuff of yesterday.