I woke from a night of complex dreams. In the last one I was climbing a hill, it was daylight and I could see the winding path ahead of me. Then there were two women just by me. (It seems to happen that way with dreams, people just arrive with no ceremony or warning.) They were close to my face and I could hear them talking. They were mother and daughter but both were quite ancient. The daughter was doing all the talking. A cheerful woman, but her hair was thinning. It was drawn back with what looked like a barrette but looking closer as I could see that it wasn’t a clip at all but bones from her skull that had burst through her skin.
He keeps quoting him. He is the tree surgeon we used to see regularly in a coffee shop we frequented years ago (and have begun doing so again so that I can draw). We saw him and his wife again last week. He’s had cancer treatment and must be in his late 70s, as is she. He’d seen them on the way to the loo and asked how he was. Me and she, he’d told him, we’ve only one way. (A tall, rangy man, whom illness has made more craggy, he is prone to making big, long-armed gestures.) We’ve only one way, he’d repeated to him, forward. Forward, he’d said, his arm making an arrow and pointing, FORWARD.
