Category: Writings

The found his body in the next town, washed up, I imagine, they’ve given no details. We don’t need them.

He drowned. He was a good swimmer, he swam most days, I believe. He’d gone out the day before to take pictures of the sea. He was a professional photographer. Was he found with his camera round his neck? He always carried it that way. I didn’t know him well. He’d come into the studio now and then to do paper reviews or the occasional interview. ‘Rent-a-mouth’ he called himself. He was loud, opinionated, made good radio and most importantly in this town he spoke Welsh. His pictures were mostly good, always of this place, he didn’t go anywhere else. He was proud of what he did. We’d see them sometimes in the dailies. His body lacked finesse, the way he inhabited a space, clattering, banging. He was a male, male, strong, strong-smelling. But something had happened. He’d gone thin. I didn’t ask why. It wasn’t my place and we weren’t close, nothing ever shared. Work can be like that. He spoke of his new grandson, and his swimming and his work.

I hope they don’t delve. It’s a private matter. A matter for the family. He was a well-known figure in this town. He was always to be seen walking up and down the Prom with his camera. Always alone. I’d met his partner before I’d met him. I hadn’t put two and two together. It was only when she upholstered our chair that we found out that they were together. I am sorry for her. She once said that living with him was a ‘challenge’ and that she’d bought herself a campervan with her mother’s inheritance money so that she could do her own thing. I don’t want to make assumptions. It is not my business. I am sorry for his family. I hope he is at peace. The bluff, the noise, the hail-fellow-well-met, I suspect was all show. A way of coping. We all use it. I’m sorry that he had to die that way. But perhaps it is fitting. A chosen way. So be it. May he find rest.

We met. I didn’t want. Yesterday was a tough one. The water filling me up, frightening me. I’ve returned to the pills. I thought I was making the right decision, it seems I wasn’t. I hold my hands up. I will acquiesce until something can be done. She is a sweetie. She brought me children’s films and her books from childhood. It will help me to learn. And I will endeavour. I want to get a hold of it. To make the language mine. I am touched by her solicitude. She is so open, so clear of heaviness. What she makes of me – God knows. He was kind and he was a wobbly as I. I am blessed.

I walked with his drowning in my head.

Crosswords. We do crosswords together. I love the play of them, the images that the words form in my mind. I don’t always know what they mean. Is Cinnabar a spice, a perfume or a place or all three? It is exotic, eastern, mysterious.

He is anxious. It builds up like Etna threatening to blow. He didn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to frighten me. It doesn’t, I’d rather know, and share it with him. Anxiety is like that, it searches around for something to fix on. It has kept him awake and no doubt increased his blood pressure. He gets angry. He shouts. It is just fear. Fear that needs to be articulated. Always. It is always worse when it is kept inside, ready to explode. Life brings them, these times when all seems bleak. It isn’t. It is an illusion. All of it.

We talk about his symptoms as ‘coming out in sympathy’ with mine. We are close. It could happen. It can happen. Like a phantom pregnancy.

Crosswords again. A remembrance. The clue was about Deputy Dawg. A cartoon from way back. My history not his. He remembers watching cartoons in the Church Hall on a Friday night. I loved them, he said, Hanna Barbera and Disney. I can see it. I love that look that comes over his face when he is taken back like that. Life was light then. And he was so loved. As he is now.

He always used to say it to me when I wanted to run before I could walk. It has always been so. Small steps. Take small steps. Small steps are sufficient. They will do. A chink of light. A new idea that she has embraced. A chance. A small thing but a nice thing, I think. It is a connection with minds that I respond to, to work that I respond to and the way they form their working spaces, those rooms of our own. Safe places where small challenging things happen. They are happy to invite me in, it seems. And I am touched. I want to do my best by them, by myself. To write well, whatever that is. And this other one who is to meet me tomorrow. A stranger who has let me in, who is open and kind. Young. Fresh. With the world ahead of her. I want to contain it though. I need this time alone, at home, to heal, to recover so the steps out there are small. But they will do. They will do.

Meanwhile she breathes somewhere else, far away with her two young things. My love.

Words crop up, words that have featured in a crossword particularly, words that I didn’t know the meaning or provenance of and afterwards they keep cropping up. I love it. Someone called it serendipity, I prefer to see it as a connection, however tenuous, with something. What that something is I cannot say.

Gilt also means a sow. A young sow, I believe.

A short one today. There is too much I want to do. The day gets eaten up, swallowed up with time. I resolved the clock issue. It was in want of a new battery. I changed it and it whirred round then stopped for a least ten minutes at midnight. Was it thinking? Then it started to whirr again, slower this time, stopping at the correct time. All is well with the world.

A blackbird sings outside my studio window. A brisk, cold morning but lovely.

I’ve been pee collecting for the last 24 hours. What a palaver. At least it’s not poo, eh. What they want it for, I’m not absolutely sure. Don’t ask me, said the healthcare worker (not a nurse) who took my blood. She’s off to Disneyland Paris with her 11 year old son. It’s to be a surprise. They’re going by coach. What are you looking forward to most? I asked. Coming home, she said.

Another hour to go and I won’t have to pee in a container any more. How much easier it is for men.

I got a reply. It looks like it’s going to become real. How nice. Thank you. I need a fillip these days. The darkness comes thick and fast. I enter the tunnel of winter with foreboding but a glimmer of stoicism. Long may it last.

It was in my dream. It was huge. A man was supposed to be taking care of it. I thought he’d got rid of it but it was lying dormant, but still alive. He put it in a cupboard, out of the way. My fear, my anxiety about a threat of some kind the online dream dictionaries say. Possibly. Where do we start?

It was her birthday yesterday. I didn’t know. I am out of it there. We work, exist on different planets. It is OK, I don’t really mind. I have my reading.

Zadie Smith spoke briefly about writing this morning, making comparisons between it and dancing. She quoted someone, I can’t remember who, who said that we shouldn’t judge the content of what we write, or responsibility is to just get it down. I paraphrase, of course, but it make sense. I liked it.

The doings of the radio-controlled clock in the kitchen threw me. It always starts whirring around at about 3.00 am turning to midnight then righting itself. Today it did the usual but spun forward maniacally to 4.30 am. So far it is stuck one hour and half ahead of time. Is it on the blink? It is his not ours. It may have to be consigned to a cupboard and replaced. I am a little shifted off course as a result. The hornet did it too. Busy day today. So be it. I think of them that little family. She seems so happy. I am glad. It is all I can wish for her.

Clearing out the garage of her new house she found some of my old school reports and sent them to me. My father must’ve saved them. They came to me in a neat plastic sleeve.

They got me thinking about ambition, about outside judgement and about what I want to do with myself. Now. Here. I wasn’t yet five in some of them. A wee girl. A precious girl for whom I feel a great deal of fondness. I know her. I love her. She always tried hard. Much of life perplexed her. She did her best. Always. Quiet, self-contained, she worked hard and tried to please. Others. She always tried to please others.

Art wasn’t a strong point then. At least not the art they taught, nor was writing particularly. Reading was, and so was craft. Whatever, that was. Making things I suppose. I always thought of myself as ham-fisted, clumsy. But if these reports are to be believed, I wasn’t. Such is memory, eh?

I felt a little lost yesterday. What am I doing with myself? Getting hung on making something perfect. And fretting that the review I sent wouldn’t do. That it wouldn’t please her. And it did. She wrote it that word brilliant. And she wants more. More of what I can do. Nice, eh?

Zadie Smith is reading from a collection of essays on the radio as I make breakfast. Lovely. Beautiful, in fact. I really enjoyed them. There is an ease in her writing that I really aspire to. No puffing up. A conversation. Easy. Not, I know, but that is how it comes across. Effortless. Super.

They called me from the hospital. If you put that you are claustrophobic on the MRI scan form they won’t do it, the man’s voice said. Well, I say man but he sounded more like a boy. Can we scratch that out? he asked. Yes, I said. Let’s just do it, eh? Fear and all.

Just for a moment the sky was pink, a wispy streak of cloud lit pink. All is calm. The calm before the deluge. Silence, just the whirring of my laptop, which has just reminded me that the blurring on its screen will have to be fixed. Which then brings in all sorts of stress about when is the best time and who can do it. But I park that away in the back of my mind. I’ve things to do till then. It will be solved in the end as all things must, death being the final leveller. I think about it now and then. Not a bad thing to do, I think. I thought of my body this morning, this carcass that at the moment is waterlogged and heavy to carry around, and how it will one day be consigned to the furnace. Gone. All my careful nurturing of it, ended. And his. His precious frame will go the same way. What a grief it all is. I must detach. It isn’t all there is. It is a small thing. A tiny thing. Focus on the sky. Now ain’t that marvellous?

I like her. The woman who served us this morning. I asked about her tattoo. She is still determined to cover it over with a feature. We talked about her garden, how she likes flowers. I slowed her up. But I like her. I feel safe with her. She has nice eyes, he said.

His phone has gone kaput. Gone, died, just like that. It stresses him as it would stress me. He’ll go to see the man in the market about it. Most towns have an indoor market full of stalls selling broken biscuits, pet food and cheap cards. I like them. They also have men who can fix things. Super. We couldn’t find rubber bands this morning in the supermarket. There was a time when there were hardware shops for that sort of thing. No more. It is no more. I’m getting old and the world is getting younger.

Almost completed the review. I’m not sure about what I write or say. I wobble. No, I should accept that this is my opinion. A little damning with faint praise, but perhaps she won’t see it that way. I hope not I want to be honest but not hurtful. Never.

Still no name. Will she let me know? They must have their hands full. Are the family putting in their pennyworth?

I cannot call him. It is like so many of my dreams, I’m trying to find him, get in touch with him and can’t.

The owl was hooting when we came home for Tesco’s. No, not a hoot more like a wail. A wail owl.

Enough. Work now.

I was later preparing breakfast this morning and ended up hearing the whole of the radio programme hosted, this week, by the poet Brian Patten. The premise is that each weekly host selects a series of written pieces that are read out by actors, it could be poetry, prose, songs etc. Mitchell ended the programme with a reading from Dirk Bogarde’s last book from his 5-volume memoir. I think it was the last page, for Mitchell introduced as an example of how to end an autobiography. The writer has lost his long term partner to cancer, has left their home in France and is now living alone in a flat in Chelsea. He has had a mild stroke and is contemplating going out for a walk. Putting on his anorak and going out into what I think is rain. He muses as he walks and quote comes into his head, I don’t know where it has come from.

‘If you can’t have what you love, love what you have.’

I met Bogarde years ago when I was a FOH person at a theatre in Manchester, he had come in to give a lunchtime reading. It was a brief hello as I opened the door to the stage for him. He was shy, polite, self-contained but with a weight of sadness about him. I read many of his books as a young woman. Perhaps I will return to the last one.

Love what you. Accept what you have. What is here now. Like my knees that are huge, bless them. No room for pity, just keep moving forward. Perhaps next week I will see Lily. No coffee though. So be it.

I have a review to write. I shall begin soon. Get some words down, allay the fear. It will come. It always does. A damp, muggy day. The house is heavy with it. We are all waterlogged.

As we drove home I saw her lines everywhere.

Two students walked ahead of me along Llanbadarn Road, arms linked. A girl and a boy. He was talking and she was giggling her encouragement. It’s the fucking haircut, he was saying. She laughed. I don’t think that I’m attractive, he continued, but…. I lost the rest as I overtook them. She was a tiny thing. Tall but tiny in waist and in rib. They have it all ahead of them. Careless, light.

A new poppet. A new darling. With lips like rosebuds. It is joy. He is joy.

I try to capture the sentences that come into my head just before I wake. Perhaps I will make a piece of work with them. The other morning it was:

‘I want to be the biggest shut in the world.’

The morning after it was:

‘My mother used to call it broom.’

A night of dreaming. I was travelling, variously in an airport and train station and I lost things, left things behind. Someone else’s coat. Then I was overhearing a conversation in a restaurant kitchen. The kitchen staff member, a man whom I knew was being bullied by his boss. It distressed me to witness it, he looked so downtrodden, I determined to talk to his boss.

Dave Sheasby’s play The Shifting of Sands (?) is delighting me. An elderly lady visits Cornwall reliving her time there at 18 working as a chambermaid at the Tregenna Hotel. He writes so poignantly and with such kind, compassionate wit.

I feel lighter today. I hold the new joy to me like a treasure.

I’m heavy with it this morning. My legs are rigid, unmoving. I push through as I pushed through the wind and rain on my early walk. We fight over it, he and I, in the car outside work. He wants me to go back and try something else. I want to wait, to take stock, to get clean inside. I’m tired, weary and this hard rain against the window doesn’t help. There is little light. More like a grey November day than a September one. It will clear. I will heal. The sun will come out. Meanwhile I get those scrappy things out of the way, all my endless notes to self.

She answered this morning. We talked about the cat not missing the kittens that have gone. Do they really do it as easily as that? She still scratches her. I keep going back for more, she says, laughing. A feral cat, clearly who prefers to sleep in the shed for all her coaxing of her into the porch. Such a pretty cat, she says.

We are going. We’ve booked, though the prospect of the journey makes me weary today. But it’s fine. It will be so wonderful to see her, to see them, and to be on the move, carried. And to sleep. And to see her. Let me heal. Let me find my energy, my lithe-someness soon.