Category: Writings

I am cross. I woke up cross. I don’t know why. Is it something that happens in sleep, a residue from a dream? I try to fight it, to keep it in check, to contain it but it leaks out. Should I just let it be? Should I allow it room like other more pleasing emotions? Did you know that anger was one of the seven deadly sins? I didn’t, at least not until it came up as a crossword solution yesterday. These days anger is not seen as a purely negative force but a source of energy that can be tapped and put to good use. However, I’m not angry merely irritable, which isn’t attractive or useful. If I let it be will it dissipate sooner? Or should I spend time trying to find its reason?

He has gone out already. He says he will walk before his coffee.

I think I am cross about what is happening to my body. Pockets, pouches of water keep building in odd areas. Is it age? Is it the menopause? But I’m also cross about having to write today. You don’t have to, he says. And he’s right, I don’t but if I don’t I will be less at ease with myself then I am now. It has to be written, all of it. When I’m in it it is not so bad. I’m encompassed by it, lost in it. Trying to find a way of saying what I want to say. It is interesting reading another author’s work when one is writing, for one’s critical faculties are heightened. I finished one book and went straight onto another. And I’ve been so immersed in Ann Tyler’s writing after having read two in quick succession that to move onto another, so entirely different, was a challenge.

There was a dead seagull just off the pavement along Mill Road. It was lying on its back, its wings splayed out as if crucified and blood, a deep red, had oozed from its nether regions. What had killed it? The red against the white of its plumage was stark, almost beautiful.

I saw something move from the corner of my eye. It was still a little dark, the gloom of night had not yet risen to allow the blue of morning. It looked like a piece of clothing, a clump of fabric, something dark that seemed to roll of the edge of the kerb then stop. It was by the entrance to our estate just by one of the gateposts. I bent down. It was a hedgehog. A large hedgehog. Was it dead? It was perfectly still. I spoke to it. A soft voice. I’d never seen an adult one before. Are they nocturnal creatures? Then it seemed to raise itself. It snuffled and snorted, tiny pig like noises, then trundled off around the bottom of the post and down the road. Such encounters feel like gifts. Our paths have crossed. Like the female blackbird yesterday on the path up to work just hopping ahead of me, refusing to fly off. And the scattering of bunnies when I turned the corner. And the two elderly magpies (well they look elderly, a trifle ragged, seen better days) sitting in the sun outside my bedroom window. They make me feel part of something other, something that rolls on parallel to my petty concerns, all inward and dank. Their view of the world must be so different to mine.

A windy walk. The three bakeries in town did me proud. Utterly gorgeous bread smells. Ta.

I wanted to talk it out and he wanted to watch the cricket. But he acquiesced, he always does, perching his bottom on the edge of my bed. I just needed to hear myself talk it out. I didn’t want advice, just clarity. You might even end up making it untrue, he said. What like a piece of fiction? I asked. Yes, that might make sense. That might happen. I felt better for that possibility. I just know I have to keep writing. The process is almost as important as the content. I’m working myself out of the gloom. And yet, as I walked I thought about all the richness I wish to ‘speak’ about. It is enough. It is project enough, even if its destination in a drawer. It will be out, it will be formed, made sense of, articulated.

I can’t remember his exact words. We were getting ready for bed. For instance, with that journalist, the one who is in prison in Iran, he said, I saw that you wrote about her in your journal. You don’t have to feel for them so strongly, he said. But I do, I wanted to say. I want to stand by them, to sit with them, to be with them in their pain, their fear, their desperation. It is all I can do. You empathise too much, you give away your light, Steven Speed the medium-extraordinaire said to me, all those years ago (may he rest in peace). I don’t know how to temper it, I tell him. How does one live with the knowledge of so much inequity, so much darkness and yet be light? I have tried to empty myself each night. To make myself white, cleaned out. To be an empty vessel, open. I don’t want the darkness but nor do I want to forget. I listened to a radio documentary yesterday morning, its premise being that the brother of an abused and then murdered boy in 1945 was being taken (now a grown man) to see Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, a play that was based on his, their story. In the interval he told his story. He and his brother had been evacuated to a remote farm to be fostered by a farmer and his wife. They were beaten daily and practically starved. It was a harrowing account. His elder brother took the brunt of the abuse and died. The farmer was tried for manslaughter and the wife, neglect. They were both imprisoned. The story horrified the public and prompted huge changes in Child Protection Law.  I carry it with me. As I do with the fictional abuse of Jim ‘The Prof’ Lloyd in The Archers. It is a truth for some, for many. I weep for them. I have read their stories, such as Don’t by Ellie Danica. I want to understand from where the cruelty stems. Are we all not born with the potential to be kind?  

I dreamt I was pregnant. Pregnant at 56. Well what a thing, I thought. I may miscarry. He was sanguine. And I dreamt that an ex-lover was planning to tear out my vagina. He was sweet-talking me, but I knew his plans. What is to be made of that? I suspect the pregnancy refers to my writing. It may miscarry. I tightens my back. It is so clumsy, so awkward. Yes, I must just write it out. Keep going. No one need know. I can just do it for myself. Can’t I?

Has it made any difference? Her hunger strike, has it made any difference? Will they set her free? Now? She had some porridge and fruit, her husband said on the news. So prosaic. Did it taste good? We haven’t forgotten.

I heard it before I felt it. A pitter then a patter on the pavement behind me. I looked up. I thought it was a sudden rush of wind in the trees. It was still dark but the morning was coming up, bringing its blue and I could just make out the spots on the ground. Nothing on my face or head. Not yet. Summer rain brings gorgeous smells. The earth seems to open to it, porous and thirsty. It smells of longing, of promise, of visceral life, teeming. It didn’t make me wet. It was a kiss, a breath of freshness.

I tried to write. I tried to take that second-hand advice about how the artists should not be their own critic but just make. Just make. Just write. Just write. The right to write. I’m trying to find something through my writing and to get to it I must go through the murk of clumsiness, of awkwardness of excruciating lumpen-ness. There is no other way. I think. Least not for me. I want to take her guidance. I want to work like she does, with all that petite elegance but it is not my way. I’m trying to loosen up, to find my expression. Mine.

We went down to what he calls the ‘Coll Fields’. Groundsmen were marking out the white lines on the pristine grass for the school’s sports day. There were too many people coming and going. I wanted to lie on the grass and show my skin to the sun. He kept having to cover me up. Someone’s coming, he kept saying. I let him do it. It was nice to be so protected. How I loved him yesterday. The grass smelt divine. Summer days. A group of Muslim men, some in those long kaftan-style over dresses they wear hung back near the car park, talking. They must be cool in this heat, he said. Then two women drove up and left their car. Where are they off too? he said, cross and territorial. He talked about cricket and how his Dad taught his brother, and playing tennis on the grass courts. All his life is here. Cambridge is forgotten.  

House cleaned. Hot work. Spots of rain on the window. Lovely. Work now. I may keep the silence for a little longer.

It was all too much and I started to cry. Sitting on the floor of that train carriage, my head in my hands, weeping. It was that series of unkindness’s. Or what felt to me like unkindness. To them, the perpetrators, it was probably just a show of irritation. And it was the delays, the heat, the cramped carriages and the fear of never getting home that did it for me. And on top of the same chaos two days before. I don’t seem to be able to keep the flow back. And I didn’t care. It felt better to just let it out. She’d been pointed, spiky. She’d picked on me. And the others, the Virgin staff at Birmingham had been rude. Was it my fault? Had I given off negativity? Had I seemed unreasonable? Can someone help me? I’d asked. He’d barely turned his head. We’ve all had a long day, he’d said, dismissing me. The woman on the train had been equally unsympathetic. A young woman, blond with catches in her tights. We’d all like to sit down, she’d said. And I hadn’t taken a seat just lowered myself onto the ground. Later, the kind man with the red beard who’d put my case on the overhead shelf, had turned to me and smiled. Ignore her, he’d said. And then when he left he’d touched my arm. You al ‘right?

And I’d had such a lovely day the day before full of sunshine and peace. And he came. He drove all that way to rescue me from the train that was going nowhere. Someone on the bridge threatening suicide. What can you do? Wait? Then the duck in the carriageway. Almost laughable. Move little one, move. And then the final straw. A diversion. That’s going to add another 30 miles, he said. Don’t take it out on him, I said. It isn’t his fault. It never is anyone’s fault. Just systems. They treat us like cattle, I said to the man without a coat waiting to press into the train along with hundreds of others. And the woman who objected to the smell of my hand cream or was it my mouthwash? It took me aback, I thought she’d turned to me to pass the time of day. And then there was the blind woman. How else was she to get to the toilet? And she couldn’t find the flush button or the out button. And there was a tiny poo in the bowl. She smiled the whole journey, lost in her happy darkness, trusting. So trusting. Humming, singing under her breath and laughing after every sentence. A holiday to Cornwall. Her holiday. And why not?

I thought at first it was a collection of plastic bags of food from a barbecue. It was in a jumble on South Beach near the kiosk that sells coffee and ice cream. Then I noticed the silver foil. It was a silver foil wrap the kind they put around the runners at the end of a marathon. It was draped over something, though one side had come lose and was waving in the breeze. I didn’t want to stare. I keep to myself when I walk in the early mornings and I respect others’ privacy in equal measure. I guessed it was a man sleeping and the bags were his belongings. There was room in the shelter on the Prom but perhaps he wanted to sleep alone, even if the beach is pebbled and far from comfortable to lie on, I know I would. I saw two groups of kids huddled around bonfires on the North and South beach. It looks so evocative. A lovely way to see in the morning. Which, this morning, is rather overcast. 

I am sleepy. Sometimes I shut my eyes even as I am writing.  

A gentle day today to prepare myself mentally for the journey. I shall read through it and hunker down as best I can. It will be good to be on the move. And to see her. Quiet and talk. Quiet talk in the garden. And tea. Lots of tea.

He is there in the background whenever I call her these days, crowing. Though it isn’t really crowing, more of a cawing, carolling sound. I understand why children are told it’s a cock-a-doodle noise but that isn’t it either. I can picture him in my mind’s eye with his head and throat extended to the sky calling out for all his might. I don’t think she hears him anymore. Apparently, he runs to greet her daughter’s car when she returns from work. The idea of their relationship (hers and her daughters that is)  warms me, though I can see that it might have it’s issues. They are so intertwined, so scared for each other. Scared of their separate fragilities. It reminds me of L. P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone, though the protagonists were a brother and sister not a mother and daughter. In the end there is much love and that has to be a good thing, a warm thing. She’d broken her rib. Gosh, you are in the wars, I say. She is sanguine about it but admits to being in pain. She fell walking, luckily she wasn’t alone. She has to go, she’d got a doctor’s appointment.

The scent of a woman’s perfume hung in the air as I walked along South Marine Terrace. It was 3 am. A cluster of students were sitting on the beach warming themselves before a bonfire. They had some music on but it was low. The all stared at the sea.

I saw them twice during my walk. He was tall and thin with a long white beard. He had on heavy walking boots and strode ahead. He looked distracted, a little lost. Behind him trailed a youngish woman wrapped in a rug or blanket. She was waif-like thin.

Housework done for the moment, ironing later. And my admin. A beautiful morning shines through my studio window. Another cup of tea then work.

It had been placed directly outside the Elim Christian Fellowship Church. A kind of make-shift barrier made up of a plank of wood laid across two chairs. The plank looked like a painted floorboard, its layers of paint long since peeled. Several A4 sheets of paper printed with the words RESERVED FOR WEDDING CAR had been sellotaped to the board. Some had come away from their tape and one was trapped under a wheel of a car further up the road. The chairs were plastic, austere. There was no hint of any extravagance, pomp or flurry to come. What would the wedding car look like? Would there be confetti thrown? The Elim Church was the congregation that Jeanette Winterson’s adopted family belonged to with the now infamous exorcism and full-body baptismal insertions. It makes me shiver a bit. When I walk past. But that was then and perhaps now they are a little less fundamentalist. Even so, the prospect of a wedding car arriving there bedecked in ribbons and bows seems an anathema. We wonder if Elephant’s parents are members, it is the only way to explain their utter lack of sociability. 

He started speaking to us as if he knew us, or at least him. He’d been doing up a mobile van, a bright red thing. It’s going to New Zealand tomorrow, he said, pointing at it. It had to be cleared of all cobwebs before it went, he said, proudly. It gleamed. We admired it noisily and walked on. The mobile van parked outside Alexandra Hall is a little shabbier. The raised, glue-d on lettering on its bonnet looked like Japanese script, illegible to me. But as I walked past I suddenly saw it. It wasn’t oriental at all but English. The word was MABEL.

Two girls were sitting hunched on a bench near Pier Pressure. A jacket and two phones lay on the ground ahead of them just beneath the railings, looking like they’d been thrown there. One of the girls was crying, the other was comforting her.

I see the slug trails as I walk along North Road. The glisten and shine in the lamplight. There are shiny things on the ground everywhere. My eyes search for them: silver paper from a chewing gum packet, bits of cellophane, an odd coin, a button embed into the paving.

No writing today. There are my accounts to do and I must do a few hours on his quilt, then to work.

She was a healer, undoubtedly. Her hands were hot with it. But things were a little haphazard. I don’t find even a small amount of chaos relaxing. I want it all to go smoothly. She asked questions of me, I didn’t want to talk and was mono-syllabic. Did she think me rude? She was good. I felt floaty and out of synch afterwards.

We sat on a bench in the sun. He was loquacious, happy. Let me show you Prospect Street, he said.

• 

They called him to say that they’d got some in. And there they were when he picked me up, a cardboard punnet of them covered over with a brown paper bag. How I love them. They are so evocative of summer, of orchards, of skin prickly with sun and from thorns while delving for currants, fingers stained blue from currants. I lump them all in together. Soft fruits. The tartness of them. I don’t use sugar. Too sweet, to dangerous. The next quest is blackcurrants then damsons. A concentration from childhood. A punnet of joy, zinging on the tongue.

The prospect of writing spasms my back. Let it happen. For when I am in it, when I am writing, it is peaceful. I accept what comes out, letting it do so, without judgement. I need to get somewhere. And it, this outpouring flow, is taking me there. What a learning curve. I’m trying to find my voice, authentic, unforced, mine. The sewing I’m working on echoes it. Just doing it. Just working it. More books arrive. Two from the library. I go there for them when I can. They excite me. Thrill me at times. Two are from Amanda Vickery. The interior lives of eighteenth century women. Fascinating. I merely dip my fingers. I want to find a something, a hint of a path I might follow. This is why I am doing what I am doing. Perhaps it won’t come like that. Who knows?

I am nervous about later. A new practitioner. A new space. I hand myself over. You have to trust in the end don’t you?

Sometimes it feels like I am writing her alive again.

I set my alarm for an hour later. I was nervous about doing so. I hold tight, too tight I know, to my regime. It keeps me in place, like a corset, held in, taut. But I’d had a late session the night before and knew that I’d be too tired to function well if I didn’t snatch an extra hour. But everything is shifted forward. I missed several of the radio programmes I like to listen to while I make breakfast. Though I did catch the end of one of Julia Darling’s series of short stories about the Post Office, which was nice. I must listen to the rest. And I did try to see the positive side of being later. Such as the oncoming daylight as I walked. A blue really. A lifting of night. Different people were out. I’d missed the woman with the Tesco Bag for Life who seems to do all her shopping in the 24 hr petrol station on Mill Road. A woman with a shock of white blonde hair passed me but kept her head down. A few lights were on in the houses along South Marine and someone had neglected to switch off the fairy lights in the breakfast room of the Shoreline guest house. They were flickering their candy-like colours wildly when I passed. I love looking in on breakfast rooms in B&Bs. I love the tables all laid out ready. The cups upended in saucers, the ironed napkins, the posy of flowers, the butter pats. It’s the order, the pre-planning, I think. It calms me. The walls are full of paintings of ships and ships in bottles grace the mantlepiece and window sills. The lights of Aberaeron glimmered across the water. I couldn’t see Aberdovey, the mist hid it from view. We were supposed to go there today but worked called. No matter. The earth smelt sweet, damp, cloying as I walked along North Road. Still wet with rain. 

I saw it on the pavement on one of the back streets that lead up to the little hill. A bright azure blue. A fiver. Thank you, I said. I told him of it at breakfast. Shall I take it to the police station later? he asked smiling.  He knows me so well. I am sorry for the person who lost it. But I am also grateful for the abundance, the gift, the sign of something unexpected.

I wrote. A wrote a thousand words, well almost. I like having written, said Andy Robbins on the radio, the stress being on the ‘having’. Be patient, you have to find what is lost, said the spirit guide in Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time. That is what I am doing. Writing to find it.

The comfort of smells. Old Spice. He wears its, always has. I come downstairs and its aroma permeates the fuggy air. It makes me feel safe. It is him. The comfort of him.