Category: Writings

I shouldn’t have attempted to do it that late in the day (for me). I’ve never at my best, my decision-making and temper-controlling is poorer. And I don’t like that company. Never have. It didn’t bode well. He gets cross with me when I lose it. I understand. He expects calmness from me. And he deserves it. But he softened. He saw how difficult, indeed how impossible it was to do what the website asked. We gave up. Decided to get help from the professionals. But I was discombobulated for a long time. I need to get things resolved. I am not good with frayed wires.

I drew her after lunch. I felt less nervous and the drawing was more fluid for it. She ate most of the mush that was her lunch and all of her pudding, which was also mush but sweeter, I suspect. Afterwards, she kept lifting the lid of the little pot in front of her. I couldn’t work out what it was she as putting in her mouth. What are those? I asked. Maltesers, she replied, popping another on in.

The birdsong in the early hours is becoming stronger, louder and more various. I hear birds’ voices that I do not recognise. The blackbirds I certainly do, and I think I recognise the robins and the blue tits but the others – is that a chiff chaff, a thrush? – I don’t know. I let the song fill me, wash over me, contain me. They command the space, the air. In those twilight hours the birds are king, sovereign. He asks me why I think it is getting stronger. I think its about territory, I say, but without really knowing. I don’t think I want to know. I like the mystery of their world, their rites and instincts. They are more in touch with Nature’s flow than we could ever be. I honour them for that. They grow bolder on the ground too. Blackbirds bounce down on the pavements as I walk, just in front of my feet. The robins have always done this. And by the bus station pied wagtails mass along the tarmac. Little flibbertygibbets they spin and slide around like tiny ice skaters, no roller skaters, for it is as if they are on wheels.

“Excuse me, where is the University.” It was 3.30 am and I’d stopped to post a letter in the box by the station. I’d noticed the group of mostly lads loitering about and sheltering from the rain. One of them had ambled over to me and asked me that question. I told him it was up the hill and he grimaced. I said that their was a bus but probably not at this time of the day. He grimaced again. Then he told me that they were going to have an ‘after’ and asked me if I wanted to come. One of his mates joined us and iterated the invitation. I made some excuse about having work to do. They became a little insistent, almost a little aggressive. I wasn’t scared. They were just boys. “It will be better for you being there,” said the first boy. I smiled and began to walk off. I saw that there was a girl with them. I smiled at her and she smiled back, apologetic. You could take a taxi, I shouted back to them. The rain continued to pour.

I can’t get things clean. It irks me, especially when I am tired. No, in fact it is more than an irking, it unsettles me. Take the vegetable drawer in the fridge, I noticed some black spots of dirt (it may even be mould) trapped between the see-through plastic front and the opaque side. How do I get to it, to them to clean them away? I don’t think it separates, I have tried. And then there is the water jug, again I can’t get it perfectly clean. And don’t start me on the kitchen floor and the line of formica under the cupboards, or the oven. People have lived here before us and their marks, their dirt, their stains remain. I cannot wipe it clean. Like life really. It is imperfect. I am imperfect. Must I accept this?

There’s no other word for it. That is what I am. Tired. There is so much to do, so many loose ends (and I am not comfortable with loose ends) and I am made ragged by it all. I need some rest. A day off. But not yet. I cannot afford the time, just yet. Got to keep going. On and on. Till it is done. Till my work is done.

I have to trust her. Her medicine might work, it might not. I have to trust that she has an intention to heal me. And then let be what will be. He trusted him to pay the rent for the hotel. It seems as though he didn’t. He saw him in the Avenue, he’s off work with stress. It’s all got too much. And the hotel stands empty. I want to not judge. It is not my place, I don’t know the whole truth. I want to trust. I want to trust that he, and indeed all of us, are doing our best with this live that we are in. I hope it all resolves itself. It is hard to fail in a small town, with all those eyes upon you. Some cannot take it, like the photographer who drowned himself. And the part-time crab-dresser, who did the same. So sad that they saw no other way. May they rest in peace.

She told us last night on the phone that one of his job on the ‘Ag & Fish’ was the feeling of bulls balls.

She got me to lie down on my front, my face pushed through the hole in the massage bed. I’d bared my shoulders and arms. It was cold. I was cold. She’d arrived late, all apologies. There’d been a road closure. Traffic, she said. The heating, if there was any, was slow to come on. I could hear the water being run in the flat above. The bed was starting to warm up underneath me, but my exposed skin was freezing. All I could see was what was directly beneath the bed, a series of boxes, a Tesco bag and the wires that connected to paraphernalia surrounding the massage table. My hearing and sense of smell were all I could rely on to orient myself. I could hear her in the shop busying herself about filling pill bottles and weighing out ingredients. She breathed deeply, from the diaphram. A small woman wearing a Chinese-style denim cap. Her soft-shoed feet shuffled along the lino, back and forth. The curtain dividing the back from the front jiggled as she passed through and back, a rustling of beads, of raffia. I smelt jasmine, herbs, though not ones I could distinguish or even recognise. The needles pricked and pierced, some were like knives, others a mere sting then nothing. Her fingers were worse. Electric shocks shot through my limbs, my stomach, my head. Any pain, she’d asked. How about here, or here? Two customers came in whilst I was in the back. One for his usual pills. He wanted a discount. She gave him one. Chinese New Year, she said. I give it to you for thirty-three, normally thirty-five. Your tight, Lily, he said. The other man wanted some ginseng. I usually buy on the internet, he said, but I was told that this would be better. He bought two lots. I used to use when I was boxing, he said, in London. She gave me two more bottles of pills. That will be twenty pounds, she said, and repeated her now familiar mantra. No coffee, no chocolate, no chilli.

The smell reminded me of stink bombs. It was sulphuric, a yellowy, slightly-toxic miasma. It pervaded the harbour and then along the south end of the Prom. Had the sea churned something up? It was too dark to tell. Even the rain made no difference. I tried to draw – my lines ran like tears.

It came back. She never went to collect it from the Post Office. She couldn’t have known it was from me. Or did she? Nevertheless, it hurts. I wrapped everything up so carefully. I put a note, a card inside saying how I wanted her to have them. My jewels. Not much, I grant you but mine to give to her. She could sell them, I said. That would be fine too. She never opened it. Never collected it. The bridge has gone. I am adrift from her.

They come thick and fast. First the leaking boiler then the suspension going in the car, and he having to sit there waiting for the AA for hours and hours, bless him. My heart sinks with it and yet, it is nothing compared to the trials of so many peoples’ lives. I know this. And I try to remain buoyant. If only I wasn’t so tired. I would have more resilience then. I think. His comment on Instagram helped. It helped immeasurably. Though I struggle to ingest it. How could he see beauty in what I do when he is such huge figure in reportage illustration? My oeuvre is small-town, the scribblings of a tiny being. I was moved though and thankful. I want to own it, definitely I do. I will try. But thank you.

I intended to write about ten thousand things, the ten thousand things that seem to constantly fill my head these days and that I spend my time trying to deal with (or at least despatch onto yet another list). And now we have a leak. And the ten thousand things have become one thing. The leak.