Category: Writings

The sky is the colour of milk. There is no breeze. Will the sun emerge?

As I walk in the early morning I try to commit what I see, hear and smell to memory. Just until I get home. I chant sentences, phrases, rather like he does before we get to Morrisons. Coffee, olive, kitchen roll, coarse black pepper, he says. Have I forgotten anything? Was that it? Tip top.

It is morning but the dark makes it seem like night. Before 5 am. A nightscape. A theatre in the dark, in the round. The club on the pier will be just closing. Kids will spill out, leery. The fog makes the air cold. I walk through pockets of quiet. An odd bird. A robin, chirruping. On North Road taxi speeds past setting off the alarm of a grey sports car. There is no flashing lights just an insistent wah wah noise. Then it stops. Down the hill onto the promenade and I see a girl walking towards Alexandra Hall. She is in pyjamas dotted with what looks like santas and a large black cardigan. Silence. Nearing the new bandstand I hear voices. Three students, one of which is a black girl. I thought the orange fur was the hood of a parka but it is her hair. She is in shorts. Her voice is loud. Like, a FUCKING MILLION times, she shouts. Two bouncers stand in the doorway of Pier Pressure nightclub. They talk in hushed tones, something about identity cards. They wear bright yellow jackets. The odour of lukewarm pizza hangs heavy in the air around the old college. There is no wind. An oystercatcher pip-pips in the dark. A beetle scurries across the paving slabs towards the railing. The Hut is shut up. South Marine Terrace is still. There is a large black man standing in the lit inner entrance to the Serviced Apartments. He is standing asleep. His head lolls forward and his body jerks upright. He doesn’t make a sound. Has he lost his key? Beyond the harbour there is a sharp keening yell. Is it a cat or a sea bird? The Perygyl is wet with dew. The water below laps gently. The screeching echoes through the mist. I can still see some stars. Bunches of students are coming up Great Darkgate Street with plastic bags of food from the 24 hr SPAR. A boy is talking earnestly to a girl. They don’t wear coats. I forgot to smell the baking bread from Slater’s bakery but perhaps the door was closed. A lorry waits for TESCO to open, its lights ablaze. Yesterday there was a man waiting with his bike outside a house on Llanbadarn Road. A light in an upstairs window as on. Had he just thrown pebbles? This morning there is no one. I haven’t heard the owl for a while. The lights still aren’t on in St Davids Road. I am warm now. I shut the door behind me and breathe.

Oh, God it’s her, he says as a woman takes the table just beyond ours. I watch her. She has a handbag and a white shoulder bag. There are three silk flowers in her hair and she places what look like four dried wheat stalks on the table. She helps herself to water. Clearly she has not ordered any coffee. From where I am sitting I can see that she has a book that has been much written in. Lines have been drawn under most sentences. She hunches over it, scribbling. Both of her bags are bursting with notebooks, pens and tissues. She is distracted, worn.

Here we go, he says, as she stands up to leave, she’ll be in the loo now for about 20 minutes. That’s what she used to do in Starbucks. Up and down, up and down. And all that shouting. And that strange laughter. I know, I know she’s anxious, and I am kind to her. She just irritates me, that’s all. I just wanted to read the paper.

I watch her from the window. She pats her hair, pushes the strap of her handbag further down her arm and shuffles into the White Lion.

In NATWEST the staff are wearing Welsh rugby shirts over their uniforms. Do you have to wear them? I ask Dion. Oh, we want to, he says, though there aren’t enough to go around. I shall have to give mine up when Rhiannon comes in. She has better claim on it than me, I was born in England.

You know that the English rugby team sing Swing Low Sweet Chariot as part of their anthem? he says. Yes, I say. Well, apparently Rob Rattray the butcher is selling sausages called Burnt Chariots. Do you get it?

I was ambitious, once. My ego still is. What is that about? All that need for acknowledgment. I want to shrug it off, like dead skin. To let loose its hold. It has nothing to offer me anymore. Not now.

People ask what I am working on at the moment. Is it kindness or are they really interested? I say that I am writing. I talk quietly, for I am not sure how to deliver it. I am writing but what it is to become I do not yet know. Does that matter? It is all nothing. All of it. And yet, it is something. Something that matters to me, at least. I like the process of work. I like to work. I like to be immersed, involved in story. Whether that story reaches beyond my studio matters less than it did. Truly. It is for me. It is me trying to make sense of what’s gone before.

I want peace. I want to accept the littleness of me. I have made many things, done many things but they have brought little peace. The peace is something else, from something else. The space between. So I withdraw. To watch.

Two evacuees. The remaining brother tells their story. Such cruelty. No one cared. His brother beaten to death. The Mousetrap. Agatha Christie took the story. Did he know? No. Was he moved? Of course. His voice catching as he describes the beating. He made us wait. What do we do with such knowing? I didn’t know how to be a father, he says, with his soft Newport lilt. I didn’t know how to love. We are so proud of him, says his daughter, we didn’t know. Now we do. Now we do. Bless you.

He returned, by popular demand, to talk about chapels. He talks with an excitable breathlessness. I like him. He makes me smile. His voice is high, boyish. They had forgotten him. He had to call to remind them. Well done, I said. Good for you. Thank you for the offer of a drink, he said brandishing a half empty bottle of water, but I’ve brought my own again.

This time she answered the phone. She sounds full of cold. It’s the children from the school, she said, my daughter brought it home. We talk about flu jabs, her friend’s fig tree and the weather. She took four figs from the tree. They were rock hard but I thought I would put them on the windowsill in the sun. We sometimes have them with what’s it called? Parva ham? It’s a bit of a treat. I went to the Thanksgiving festival at my church. The sermon was short but lovely, she says. I stayed for a cup of tea. I don’t like too cause of the cakes. I’m tempted, see. And I know I shouldn’t, what with the allergies. Trifle’s my favourite. Oh, they had a lovely one in Mark’s. Strawberry trifle. I couldn’t resist it. My daughter said I shouldn’t. Oh, it was lovely. It gave me pain after, mind.

She’s been sitting in the sun. And the garden? I ask. How’s the garden? Ah, she says, the runner beans are coming lovely.

A young woman falls back into a chair opposite her partner in Starbucks, St Ann’s Square, Manchester. Where are we going to have lunch? She asks, sighing before leaning forward and saying, I’ve got three pairs of Levis but I need some more. The ones I tried on were dead tight.

He brings me my coffee and a plastic container of fruit salad. It’s all mango, I say. Give it here, I’ll get you another. No, it’s alright. Let me. Are you sure? Yes.

The woman is talking about her birthday, her body slumped in the chair. Don’t give me anything that’s a surprise, she says. I don’t want a surprise, that’s what I’m going to London for.

There are two lads sitting on packing cases in the sun painting the Bethel Chapel’s railings. They both sing along to the radio, wake me up before you go go……

Look, he says in the car on the way to the supermarket and pointing at the trees, it’s going over. Yep, I say, it’s starting.

We finished watching it last night. Oranges Aren’t the Only Fruit. It was brutal. Brutally sharp, brutally funny, bleak yet somehow hopeful. I’m going to go to University, she says. She survives it all, even the ‘ropes of love’. Oranges. I love them. Her mother arrives in hospital with a large string bag full of them. In the TV play Jess had a friend, Elsie, an 82 year-old woman from the congregation. I think Jeanette Winterson wrote in her autobiography that this was a fiction. I’m sorry for that.

Northern skies. Rain on cobbled streets. Outside lavs, best place for it, says Elsie, all that muck. Hair nets in bed. Silent husbands. I seem to know it and yet I don’t. The child making the best of it. Will I get a new hat in heaven? She scares the other children with her talk of the devil. Next door are fornicating, she tells the ice-cream man. Are they? he says.

It will stay with me for a long time. Just like The Crucible. Both distortions of love, in the name of God. And yet, within there is so much. So much.

I walk in the light of the moon. Silvery. In the light of the silvery moon, I love to spoon, I sing in my head as I walk. The students are back in force. They sat on benches this morning as I strode by, heads lolling forward. The sea was lapping. The Perygyl was lit up white. I listened to music, to stories, to Norwegian in my headphones. I missed the silence, the sound of the sea, the birds. Tomorrow I will leave them behind.

I write my 1,000 words. I don’t read them back. Not yet. Write 20,000, no 30,000 before you do so. Let it shape itself. Get it on the page and then go back. Give it life, breathe into it first. Give it a life of its own. And then what? Wait. Just wait.

Excuse me mate, the man said after knocking on our car window, have you got a torch? A pheasant flew into me car, he said, and I think he might ‘ave damaged me radiator or it could be the air-conditioning. Do yer know anything about cars? It’s making a hissing noise, could that be the air-conditioning?

He shakes his head. Sorry, mate. The caravan up ahead might have a torch, he said, and there’s a garage about five miles up the road. Cheers, the man said, sorry to ‘ave troubled yer.

At the motorway service station there had been a cluster of starlings. They’d spun around chattering, shell-shocked, lost. They must be babies, I said, and scattered some seeds on the ground. It took awhile before they realised it was food. One of them pecked half-heartedly before the others followed suit, scrapping and flying up at each other.

Below my studio window there is a tiny apple tree in a pot. It is on a balcony and there are apples, six. The fruit looks fake upon the virtually leafless branches, pulling them down with their weight.

 
A large woman stood adjusting her apricot-coloured jumper in the mirror before asking a girl by the hand drier to help tie the bow at the back. Initially I’d thought that they knew each other. The girl looked wary, embarrassed. I don’t think she appreciated me asking her, the woman said to me afterwards. Is a special occasion? I asked. Very, she said and beamed revealing a missing front tooth. I’ve left me teeth in the car, she said, I’m going to put them in after.

The reviews kept talking about the water and the actors ‘sloshing’ about in it. I keep thinking about it. What do I think? It was meant to be a crucible, a vessel for turning base metal into gold. The circle of white light was fantastic and it remained lit throughout the performance. The water. The water was discomforting, and necessarily so, I think. What was it? A baptism, a baptism of what? So many symbols, too much to digest, to think about. Don’t think then, just feel. How did it make you feel? Moved. Deeply moved. And it is still so resonant. So resonant.

I heard them talking about the eclipse on the radio. I’d forgotten about it. And then I saw it, as I walked. It went pink. The moon was rosy. Then the black came and then slowly, ever so slowly the white returned. It was a while before I realised that the birds had stopped singing.

I am a maker of lists. I make lists, often hastily scribbled notes, of what I want to write about here. Just in case, just in case I forget. I’ve been away and came upon one such list. It begins with the line ‘spitting rain’. It must have been almost two weeks ago. Was it raining when I walked? Yes, I remember now. A Sunday morning, and the rain was coming down in a fine wet mist. I had my umbrella up. Walking past the Pier Pressure nightclub there was a man standing outside talking to a young woman. Neither wore coats. I’m from the valleys, the girl was saying, I’m not posh. The man saw me walk by. It’s not raining love, he shouted. I smiled at him and kept moving. You go for it, girl, he said.

I’ve been away. It seems like forever. There is much to write about but not yet, not yet. I want to bear witness. And I will, soon. Soon. Soon.

I often see her coming down Penglais Hill. She is a tiny, wee thing of a woman, always dressed in outlandish clothes. Sometimes it is a South American-Indian style cape or tartan stockings. Nothing fits and nothing matches. It is as if she has rifled through a dressing-up box and found various oddments she fancied. She likes crazy hats. The other day she had on a polka-dot skirt, a black anorak and a bright red woolen hat. I nod my head at her but she barely notices. She walks with purpose, without, it appears going anywhere specific. She wanders. She has a key on a chain around her neck.

A blood vessel has burst in my eye. I get them now and again. When I’m tired or overwrought. It must be from Thursday when I had three bookings, the last one being ten at night. Too late. I only four hours sleep. It takes its toll, that. And I shall be fifty-three next Wednesday. I feel fit but I need sleep. Good sleep. Deep sleep. I try to see the beauty in the spilling of red. Watching its shape.

A seagull flies past my window, wings taut in the window, wing tips like fingers spread against the breeze.

Earlier I caught a young wasp in a cloth and set it free through the window.

How I love Public Libraries. You walk in and come out with four new books to read. What a pleasure to choose. I don’t want to own them, to borrow is such pleasure. A dipping in. A lightness. No committal. Grahame Greene, Ali Smith, Tove Jansson and an author I’ve never heard of, Jim Grace. I wanted slim novels. Handbag-size with beautiful covers. White Noise will have to wait – it is too big to take with me. I suppose I should get a Kindle, I say to him. They’re not doing so well, he says, they haven’t taken off the way they expected. Are people going back to books then? I ask.

I never left them. It is all in the handling of them. The bookmarking. The things left inside them. The date stamps. The smell.

It is time. It is time for an adventure. Are you ready?

We went out for the day. We went to Aberdovey, to the hotel on the hill. The sun was out. All the guests were outside. The lounges were empty. They sat on benches and plastic chairs, on the grass looking down upon the links golf course and the sea. Some sat at tables under umbrellas. One woman lay fully-clothed on a sun-lounger reading the Daily Mail, another sat with her Labrador.They read papers, did crosswords and drank tea poured from metal pots and carried to them on silver trays. Many walked with walking frames or sticks, slowly and steadily like determined snails making their way back and forth to the WC.

We’d saved the Times Jumbo Crossword. He read out the clues while I lay on the bench, eyes shut to the sun. The Labrador sniffed his mistress’ teapot.

My back unclenched. Scaramouche, I said. How did you know that? he asked. I wouldn’t have got that. I bet Ken won’t either.

Later a party of four inched their way onto the lawn beside us. We’d watched as a car had deposited them on the tarmac. One of the party was a tall woman of about forty wearing a sun dress with a low neckline and narrow straps. She strutted on ahead, her heels sinking into the grass, to find seats, carrying a large wooden chair back and forth before she could decide upon where to settle. The other three followed her. A middle-aged woman and then what were clearly her parents. The elderly man came last, his trousers pulled up high over his chest, a hearing aid in his ear and navy-blue slippers on his feet. He was tiny. Can you manage? he said to him. Oh, yes, he said, thank you. And thank you again, he called out, once he had sat down.

Earlier on two women had sat in the same seat. A mother and daughter. The mother deaf. The daughter shouting, in Welsh. When they weren’t talking they sat, both of them, faces lifted to the sun, flat and opened out like the wings of butterflies.

He has had sciatica for quite some time now. A few weeks ago he told me that he’d booked to see Veronica, my masseur. I was pleased. That’s brilliant, I said. It will hurt. But she is so good, I said. I saw her last week. How did he get on? she asked. Has it helped? Oh, yes, I said. She went into the room to prepare the bed. She came to the door and signaled for me to enter. Shutting the door behind her, she said, he’s not very brave is he?

The woman with the handbag was back in the gym this morning. Today she was on the bicycle reading an Sunday supplement magazine pull-out called Originals.

It’s a piece of piss, isn’t it? a man is shouting from the doorway of his flat across the road to a man standing outside Saparito’s Café. They hate it with a passion, he continues, kicking off his tartan slippers and bending down to push his feet into white trainers. He has on a navy blue cardigan over grey tracksuit bottoms.

I heard an owl as I walked this morning. The sound it made wasn’t a twit-ter-woo but more like a wow wow. It echoed through the cloudless dark. As I walked back up St Davids Road the streetlights came on. Five o’clock, I murmured to myself. As clockwork.

Every Monday night we go for an Indian, early. We are usually the first one’s there. Wellington’s bought a Burton suit, Melvyn told us. For the wedding. It’s bright blue. Which wedding? he asked, not his? No, no, said Melvyn. It’s his cousin’s. It’s wedding season in Goa. We saw the Polish guy, this afternoon on the Prom, he told Melvyn. You know, the one who helps out here. Oh, yes, Genius. Genius? he says, laughing. No, no, says Melvyn, I thought it was a nickname too. But no it’s his real name, Genius. We ask him what he does on his day off. What’s to do? replies Melvyn, I go on the phone to my wife, skype my family that’s all. He grins, I’ll go and get your starters.

The boss’s name is Mohammed but they all call him John. Sometimes he is in the kitchen peeling the potatoes.

I caught the end of a radio play this morning as I prepared breakfast. It was about a German couple during the Second World War who left anonymous postcards in public spaces that questioned Hilter’s authority. We must do our bit, the man says to his wife, even if we have to lose our lives doing it.

I dreamt that a large chunk of the ceiling fell in. Later there was a fish high up by where the ceiling had been. I asked him to get it down for me. Is it still alive?

I’ve come to see if there is any mackerel said Genius on the Perygyl.

The sun shone yesterday and warmed my skin.

Any sign of Doris? he asked

I knew someone in Bath who collected heart shapes. He’d wander around the city with his camera taking pictures of stuff on the ground that had inadvertently formed into a heart. Chewing gum, a stone, a bit of spittle, a leaf, a torn piece of paper, seagull shit anything. I started to see heart shapes too. Everywhere. I still do.

The countryside is black with writers walking, said the man in the film.

Writers are often walkers, he said during a seminar.

During the week I end my morning walk down Great Darkgate Street so that I can go past Slater’s Bakery. It’s the smell. Sometimes it catches me before I approach, the corner where Boots Opticians is say but mostly, it is afterwards, when I am nearing Rees Astley Insurance Brokers. It is a gorgeous aroma, warming, salty, yeasty and familiar. Like being inside a womb. Life-giving. Enriching. Today there were three white floury footmarks outside.

Two slugs are pulling their way along the tarmac. One on the hill by Alexander Hall, the other by the Castle. I step over them. Their slime shimmers in the yellowy glare of the street lights like Christmas glitter mixed with glue.

A fishing boat was just leaving as I entered the Harbour. Its tower of lights, red, green and white was ablaze against the black. The engine chuddered softly, the boat clinging to the wall, reluctant to leave. There was no swell, the searchlight was a perfect unbroken line of white on the sea. The boat edged its way out of the harbour, the pull towards home still strong. Then it broke free, upped a gear and it was out into the wide blue-black.

I heard a noise, my back stiffened, I turned. A front door had opened, a woman wearing a cycling helmet smiled at me. Safe. One the Prom nearing South Marine a man comes towards me wearing a hoodie. His eyes are furtive, looking inside. No contact is made. Nothing. My hackles bristle. I want to smile but it would be lost, unaccepted.

He’d told me that there would be no more birdsong but this morning there was. Blackbirds, robins, finches – and it was still dark.

As he gradually lost both the will and ability to speak he started to wave. Everything was put into that wave – a strange, uncharacteristic fiddly, flapping gesture, like long feathers moving separately in a wing. The wave would say hello, yes, I know, that’s funny, I hear you and goodbye. It was a feminine gesture, a gesture of acquiescence, of grace, of defeat.