Category: Writings

He came home with damsons and gooseberries. I was cock-a-hoop. I love soft fruits. I love them stewed. No sugar, just water. I love their tartness, that alive-ness on the tongue and in the back of the throat. He is a star. And just when she told him the ‘fruits were over’. See.

A rain shower. And then another just now that has leaked water into one of my pictures. Two little puddles sitting in the bottom of the acrylic casing. Will it evaporate? My fault. Leaving the skylight window open. Taken by surprise by the downpour. He’s gone out in it nevertheless. We watch two of our neighbours return from their daily walk. He always strides ahead of her. She trails behind. There is no touching, no hand-holding. She knocked on our door once to ask if we could run the washing-machine a little later in the morning, that the noise was disturbing her. I was mortified. So sorry, I had no idea you could hear it. That was when we had the old machine that rattled away during the spin cycle, sounding like a something was going to explode. The new one is quieter. Would six be OK? I asked. She looked uncertain but hasn’t knocked since. How long did it take her to pluck up the courage to come round and say something?

There were  globes of multi-coloured fairy lights still lit behind one of the houses along South Marine this morning. They have built a small roof garden that looks down onto the harbour. The lights twirl around a wooden canopy. What a cheer in the dark morning.

I never what to write. Oh, I’d rather do anything but. Nevertheless, once I am in it the story will take me in, take me over. And I am curious where it will take me today. Coffee first. A bientot.

You may not value it but you’re a good housekeeper, he said during supper last night. But, I do value it. I have accepted it as an important part of my, no our, daily life. Housekeeping calms me. I like the order that it gives our life together. It is a gift I can give to him and to myself. It is not nothing, it is something. The endless lists, the meals planned, the washing and ironing done, the mopping of floors, it is all part and parcel of a rhythm of living, of existing, it sees us through. No, I don’t bring in much money, I never have, it is not something that drives me, though the safety of it is always nice. (A line from Joni Mitchell’s Boho Dance sings in my head: ‘Jesus was a beggar he was rich in grace’.) My existence is small, and when I am gone it will be gone too like a wisp of smoke, unremembered, unimportant. And that is OK. I like this falling away. I think about the things I can begin to let go. All those images of past work, let them go. I no longer need them. And my work. It is important and it is unimportant. It is like the housekeeping, a necessary act of doing that can be forgotten as soon as it is done. A modest life. Modest. Small. And it is OK. I have done this well, this marriage, this love, this care.

She turned and smiled at me, and said goodbye. Usually a rather hard-faced girl, moody perhaps. I don’t know. But yesterday, after I’d touched him on the arm and thanked him and said he had a lovely voice, that’s when she smiled at me, acknowledging my presence. What a turn up for the books. It was nice.

He has a friend that we see walking up and down the hill. A childhood friend, a once close one. The same age as him. He is a small man with a big head. He lives alone now that his parents are dead. He walks everywhere, seeking company. He goes into town for breakfast, porridge and a latte, and reads Dickens. He had two on the go. I don’t know what his voice sounds like. I’ve only seen him, never spoken. They were great mates once. He left here for a short time but soon returned and never left again. There are many like that in this Welsh town, homebirds, homeboys unable to leave, not because of the beauty but the familiar, the safe, the mother’s milk of it.

A blowy morning. I walked under the light of the moon. I saw the woman with the bag for life though she was sans bag. Music pumped out of the Pier, kids shouted.

He didn’t get wet.

Another cup of tea and then some sewing. I’ve a quilt to get on with. My gift to him that is a long time coming.

• 

There is an estate agent’s sign on the wall of The Shoreline guest house on South Marine Terrace. It doesn’t say if it is for sale or not just that it is Business as Usual. Business as usual, everything carrying on regardless. Gwesty Cymru, as far as I know is still for sale and has been for a couple of years now. How long does it take to sell an hotel or a B&B? Are there that many people on the look out for them? I’ve only seen the No Vacancies sign in the Shoreline’s window once this year and not at all at the Yr Hafod B&B at the end of the terrace. Making a living must be tough. Isn’t it tough for most of us? I thought about abundance as I walked this morning, and how to afford a trip to London to see a friend, and how, if we didn’t go to explain that there isn’t the funds. And then I saw it on the ground. A piece of paper with brown markings and shiny metal circle. A ten pound note. It was lying on a cellar grid. Someone had clearly lost it from their pocket. I picked it up, folded it and place it in my pocket. I felt uncomfortable, someone else owned it and was probably looking forward to spending it. So I gave it to him. It can go towards my haircut, he said.

I’m back in Tess Lohan’s world. It is a beautiful book. The sentences are short, spare. Almost of list of things, of sensations, they are treated discretely, separated. Each with its own integrity.

I always have a frisson of dread before I begin writing. Do I really want to go back there, to be in that world, do I really want to struggle once more with creating something from scratch? Wouldn’t I rather tread water and do something humdrum? And yet, when I’m in it it takes me over, then it is my world, my work, it is truly.

The wind has died down and no proper rain just yet. A lovely walk if a little hot. I took my MP3 player and walked to a reading of  Mary Oliver’s The Wild Geese, and the playing of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, Joni Mitchell, Teach Yourself Norwegian, Boz Scaggs and James Morrison.

The moon was as full as my heart.

I need to climb into the story, to be it. To tell the truth of it as I see it, for it is mine.

• 

I watch them from our upstairs window. It looks down onto their driveway and corner of their back garden. There are three of them, Elephant and her two elder siblings, two girls and a boy. They are all primary school age. Elephant can’t be more than 4 or 5. They play out on the drive or on the grass. There is often a rug laid out on the grass for them. Sometimes they are out on their bikes and when they are bored of these they just drop them on the ground where they lie undisturbed, sometimes for hours. They have a trampoline in the front garden and various cages, no doubt with rabbits and guinea pigs. There is also a family dog, a chocolate Labrador that I saw tied on a leash to the fence. It kept them company while they played, it’s head on its paws. It reminds me of my childhood, watching them. I am watching myself. We played like that. We had dens in the ditches of our fields, in the haybarn. We walked through long grass. We played for hours. The summer felt eternal. The boy will sometimes play on his own, talking to himself, hitting a stick against things. Sometimes I’ve seen him dance. They seem to have an idyllic time. They do as they choose. They are loved. They are free to express themselves. Sometimes I have seen Elephant go to school in fancy dress.

Snail and slug trails glistened on the night-dark pavements this morning. Silvery paths of shining slime. Quite beautiful.

The rigging of the boats in the harbour created a chorus of clanging in the wind. Eerie sounds whistling and wailing, clanking and clinking.

Still tense but I have moments of ease. I just need to yield, to let it be. Que sera, he said, as Doris Day said.

My back is taut with it. My worst fears realised. It is a small thing, but to me it is massive. Such are phobias I suppose. And needs. And the fixing of needs onto things. It has all be up-ended, too much change. Small things to anyone else but to me huge. I need to go through it all, make sense of it for myself and breathe. Breathe through it. It is the not understanding. It has always been so. A white sky, empty. I will come through this. This tiny thing, this huge thing and be stronger, more steady. He is kind. Always. I am shrinking.

My back was rigid with anxiety as I walked. I tried to breathe it out. It makes me tired. I am fighting what is. I am fighting change. It feels chaotic as if the world has been upturned. It is nothing and everything. My arms fizz with it as it begins to subside. I need to let it go. To let it happen and see, to watch myself come out the other side, unscathed. Surviving. It’s a false use of adrenaline. My body is being hood-winked into thinking it needs be alert, that danger is round the corner when it isn’t.

I was walking down South Road, feeling less weary, feeling the power, and indeed pleasure of my stride and thinking about Robert McFarlane’s book Old Ways, that I’ve yet to finish but which I returned to the library cause it was due. And then it happened. A true, a genuine rush of adrenaline. My body surged with it. Is that what taking heroin feels like? I’d been lost in my thoughts when a door had opened just by me, the suction of air from its opening catching me in my face and then there had been a man’s voice. I’d been so taken unawares that all I could do was keep walking, moving. The jolt of it, that split second of fear was amazing. My body came alive, alert and alive.

A gentler morning. Few were around, the clubs were shut, as was ‘Chicken Lickin”.

A nice radio doc this morning about Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library where she sends disadvantaged children a free book a month to encourage better literacy. Its been taken up in Rotherham too. I’d love to get a flat there, Dolly said, to hide-out. Who’s she? asked one of her kids. One of her biographers talked about her need for attention. A bit harsh, but in the end if it does some good – who cares about the motives. We love getting them in the post, said one girl. That’s it, isn’t it? That personal touch, never mind DP’s signature and butterfly motif, it’s the present coming through the post. Real matter, something to unwrap and discover. Nothing nicer. Long live Royal Mail (though may it become a better employer).

I wake to voices, often. This morning, I think it was a woman’s voice (it sounded like ‘Trixie’ (aka Helen George from Midwife) or it could’ve been his. It said: ‘I’m letting them go, sweetie, the spiders.’

I don’t know why I am so unsettled. Is it just the prospect of my laptop having to have a complete overhaul and possibly loose all my precious links or is it something else? As I walk I try to talk myself into a semblance of calm for I know that none of these things matter, not really. I reach the Perygyl and look up at the stars in the sky and they, it is magnificent, so big, so utterly beyond my conception. I want to let it all go. To let go my tight hold on it all. It is fear, fear of something nameless. I write to get to the bottom of it. And yet, sitting here in my studio waiting till I can wake him and we can drive to work with Radio 3 on and a cup of licorice tea by my side and my laptop still working, at least for now, all is peaceful. Perhaps it is the onset of autumn? It smelt like autumn this morning as I walked. There was the slight damp odour of rain-soaked earth and dead leaves are beginning to gather on pavements. Would that be so bad? Autumn can be beautiful. I am alive. I am relatively well. I have work to do, and whether it is significant or important to the outside world, is neither here nor there, it is important to me. That is enough. I am trying to live as best as I can with the least damage to the planet and my fellow man. I try to be kind, to do what I can to smooth his passage through this life. It is a small life, smaller than I’d pictured for myself but my interior life is huge, boundless, beautiful. I am ready to go inward, to become quiet. I will not fight it anymore. I am happy to be small.

And I did write yesterday. I managed it. I wrote well. Tennessee Williams apparently wrote for 8 hours a day. I can manage about 3 hours, 4 if it is going well. It is enough for me. Else I end up undoing.

Work soon. Then shopping and domestic things before I can be back here and working. I dreamt I was with H. and we were in London. I love to be in London, I told her as we walked up an open staircase in a grand Metropolitan hotel. The bannisters I noticed were made out to look like railway lines and that they were moving, vibrating, shifting. I was struggling to keep my balance as I talked to her. Can I come to stay? she asked. Of course, I said, realising that I must have a flat in London, but he is here at the moment so not now. Another time. An anxiety dream. So many people I have yet to see this year. For the time being I want to be here, home, working, keeping still.

The blackberries on the bramble bush down the lane towards the ‘coll’ field will be ripe soon. I want to pick some for my breakfast, they taste of childhood, of warm late August days before the return to school, so different from the shop bought ones. He thinks others will get there first. Really? Do people still go blackberry picking? How nice.

The flat smells of fried butter, just like it does when I make him pancakes. It was croque monsieur last night. The fire alarm went off in the early hours in the block opposite. I could see them all out there in their smalls, in the rain, waiting for the clamour to die down. Did someone burn the toast? Were they cross?

I dreamt during my afternoon nap that we were both sitting upstairs having supper. In my dream I told myself that this was a dream and that I was really downstairs lying next to him. I made myself return to my body and woke up.

The wind was wild. The flagpoles along the Prom leant and bent with it. The noise down by the harbour was almost mythical. A screaming through the hollows, a rattling of rigging and bashing of boats against buffers. It jars, it stirs one up, making one edgy and nervous. And yet it is also quite magnificent. The sea was alive with it. Back in town a lad slept outside Wetherspoons Free House. A police car flashing blue overtook a car on Mill Street who had pulled in to let him pass.

I am tense about writing. I make too much of my fears. Just do it. Just write it. Get it down. Simple. A thousand a day. That’s all.  

They were standing outside the Pier Pressure nightclub. She was pressing his body against the wooden fascia of the Ice Cream Parlour, a lit cigarette in her right hand as she did so. They were kissing hard, their faces pushed up close, hungry, urgent. As I walked passed they must have pulled away from each other for I heard him say something. His voice was casual, talking as if to an acquaintance, or someone he had just met. There was no intimacy, no secret code. A stealing.

It wasn’t what they promised. The wind was not so strong. I walked my usual walk. And even the rain didn’t come.

Most of my domestic work is done. Good

I think we have found someone to help. I need to accept what is. I’d like to keep it a little longer but if it is too old, then so be it. Let the abundance come to cover it. For all is stagnant for now. No work. Just this. And this is enough. I think. I worry over it. Is it worthy of my time? Is it well written enough? I’m learning, I told myself as I walked, I’m learning to write. Let that be enough. That is project enough for a life. A life time, I think.

I’m discombobulated. My laptop still hasn’t been fixed and the alternative of having it’s precious memory, my memory, swiped clean appalls me. It would be like a lobotomy. All that history. It spent a night away from me (is this how people feel about their phones?) and I longed to bring it home. He went for it early this morning, bless him my absolute love. It was away and I couldn’t write. I suppose I could’ve written it by hand but I’m used to this way, used to watching the words play out before me. And my other writing, I need the daily purge now. So I sewed instead and got little solace though the listening proved inspirational, namely a radio adaptation of Lahr’s biography of Tennessee Williams. I remember doing some ideas for one of his plays at Wimbledon, I think it was the ‘Milk Train’, marvellous, even to a very naïve eighteen-year-old. Dare I admit to an affiliation with writers these days, it is presumptive?  I see my failings all to clearly but I am trying. That is all I can do. On Williams’ writing, Lahr writes: ‘His mess was (now) outside him’. And when he had writer’s block in Italy, ‘he had fallen under the moon of pause.’ Isn’t that stunning? But no, writing isn’t meant to be beautiful. I try to ape Camus. Just tell the story, simply. I’m rambling. Too much tea and a longing to do this.

The empty room in the flat opposite was still lit. Someone had forgotten to switch off the light, clearly. An empty room and the emptiness of my desk this morning. The room offers possibilities the desk, as it is, none. I love the clarity of empty rooms. I could dance in there.

The rain was torrential this morning. Downpipes gushed water, rattling with the force of it. A coastguard boat was out at sea, its green light a beacon of something like hope. A broken umbrella left on the street. The smell of someone’s perfume, a cloud of it, hanging as I walk through it. A trace a memory of a presence.

The smell of him was too much. A wall of garlic. He’s a kind man. He talks fast, a rushing of stuff. We both were overwhelmed by it. He couldn’t mend it. I am stressed. I cannot see how to solve it. We were both wearied by it yesterday. Can’t you support me in this? I asked. He was tired, and worried about offending him. This morning he is charged. I will sort it, he says. Leave it to me. Gladly, my love. Gladly.