ellen bell

An angel arrived in our town the night before last. He was there when I turned the corner off the Prom. And what a magnificent being he is. All those blades that are now rusting in their exposure to the air and rain. He stops visitors and the townspeople in their tracks. They stand in silence as they read his story. Only one lad said anything in my hearing. ‘Fucking Hell,’ he said, ‘that’s different ain’t it?’ But he had just been passing and had not read about the knives being confiscated by constabularies from across the UK. He didn’t know that it took 4 years to construct. Nor had he seen the compassion in the angel’s eyes and his hands reaching to help, to save, to bless and to forgive.

Driving to Welshpool a young pheasant, as yet un-feathered, dull and pale, ran out into the road in front of us. I hid my eyes. No! I shouted. Did you hit it? I asked. Yes, he said. Silence. There was nothing I could do, he said, there was a car behind me. Poor love. I hope it was instant. He wasn’t so sure.

I’ve written about him before. His plight touches me. Though to be honest I don’t know that it is strictly a plight. I watch him, as I did last Friday or was it Saturday? He was coming up the stairs that lead to his block of flats, holding his little boy by the hand. Apparently his little girl followed behind. They both carried the same striped miniature overnight bag. They stay with him most weekends. His ex drops them off, her face rigid and shut. They seem happy enough, sometimes running into his block with raucous confidence. He looks sad. He smokes each morning his bottom resting on the barrier and his legs hanging, reading messages on his phone. How does he feel to be alone and without them? Does he stay here to be near them? There doesn’t seem to be a partner. Has she met someone new? Oh, the mess of it all.

She came into the coffee shop on her own yesterday and took a table next to ours. I like her. Yes, she is opinionated (Putin: ‘He should be shot’, Town: ‘It’s a disgrace’ and so on) but there is a something warm and motherly about her gruff indignation. She is a small-town woman. I asked if she was going away for the summer. ‘I’ve not been away for what 20 years,’ she replied, adding ‘Why would you want to? I’ve got everything I need here.’ She pronounces about the weather: ‘It’s going to rain this afternoon, and the weather is shocking. It’s so cold.’ He gets her onto the council office closure. Or was it me? We play with her a little, pushing buttons to see what she says. It is a gentle fun, and done with warmth. She never asks us anything. I don’t mind. She is the important one. They are opening at the beginning of the month, apparently. ‘But not the reception, ‘ she says, ‘that will still be closed to the general public. It’s shocking.’ Then its the Queen’s Jubilee. Any street parties planned here? I ask. ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘it’s a disgrace. Aberaeron have got their bunting out and everything. And the town is so clean. Not like here. It’s a disgrace.’ She finishes her coffee. It’s a Sunday but she’s still got two holiday lets to clean. ‘It’s my busiest time, ‘ she says. She calls me ‘Bach’ before she leaves, and tries a smile. Bless her. I love her bluster, her neatness, the psychedelic sweatshirt hoodies she wears over her thigh-hugging leggings. And her voice, a smoker’s voice. She hasn’t mentioned her shoulder or her back for sometime, or how she still misses her cat. That will keep for next Sunday.

I sat in the sun and watched her. She was alone and drank a glass of ginger beer while she waited for her food to be delivered. She reminded me of someone else, someone that I know quite well. She had that same kind of outward peace about her. She wore a simple cotton shirt with a a delicate tracery of embroidery on the collar. She raised her face to the sun and closed her eyes. I drew her and continued to watch. Her hands were under the table and in my process of observing I notice that on her left arm there was a large square of bruise turning brown and yellow.

Later I sat in the sun and closing my eyes I listened to the rustle of leaves and the distant clamour of children playing in the playground.

I heard a flapping on the ground as I walked along Llanbadarn Road. It was a blackbird and it was clearly injured, with one of its legs bent and lifeless. I kept my distance from it not wanted to distress it further. Poor lamb, I heard myself saying, while its yellow eye stared at me. What could I do? How could I help it? The RSPCA would help, he said at breakfast. What a blackbird? Yes, he said, they’d come out for anything. I hope that is the case and if it is still there when we walk out later we can call them. If a cat doesn’t get it before then, I said. That’s Nature, he said.

The town was a cacophony of seagull squawks as I walked. Near the station a baby gull was calling and two adult birds were bending their heads up and down in front of it and shrieking. Where they it’s parents or where they telling it to be off? I could hear the young screeching across the whole area, either from their nests or from their hiding places on the ground. It is such a lonely, aching sound. They are betwixt and between babyhood and maturity and all at sea.

Life makes one’s heart bleed.

He doesn’t much like going that way, and to be honest I don’t like it much either. It is depressing walking along the backs of the hotels and guest houses and then behind Alexandra Hall, a gothic monster with its dark, wrought iron fire escapes. It smells of bins, rubbish is invariably scattered on the road and it is bleak. But, and herein lies the point, when you get to the top of the hill you have this ‘take-your-breath-away’ view of the sea and bay that cancels out any of the gloom of the previous vista. It is marvellous, and even more so on a morning like today’s where the sea is lashing and swirling and the sky is a steel blue. I love it. I love its wildness, the cragginess of the headland and the power of the water, eschewing all attempts at scenic twee-ness. Give me wild any day. And the sun, naturally.

He’d been getting at me to take some rest, so I did so. I had work to do, I always have but I sat out instead. We’d walked home from drawing in a café and I just stayed put, out there in the car park, aka our garden. I sat there for half and hour in the sun and watched my breathing, heard the bees, observed butterflies, smelt the rapeseed and listened to them cutting the grass on the College Field. It was lovely. There was a frisson guilt but my breathing stilled and I felt heaps better. Then I heard the news…..

I do a lot of couple watching, particularly in the M&S café that I go and draw in after lunch. There are some rich pickings of interesting faces, bodies and habits. He calls the women 18 short, which was the size of trousers that he used to buy for his mother. I love to watch their concentration as they eat their triangle-cut sandwiches and drink their pots of tea. Most of the couples I observe cease talking when the food arrives (there is still a kind of waitress service, at least for the hot food) and tuck in. It takes them a while to chew, many with their heads down, others with their heads up like tortoises with bits of food poking out of their mouths (like the elderly lady with the other woman who may have been her daughter, who had lettuce jutting from her lips as she munched). They share a packet of crisps or two, hands digging down while their mouths are still full of bread. I try to capture the industry of it, the flurrying of hands and the crunching mouths. It’s a kind of intimacy, I suppose, perhaps all that is left to us once age takes its toll. There is little touching. Alas, I am often very tired once I get there and the drawing is sometimes lack lustre. I’m taking it in, though, I’m taking it in.

It’s not really the right word – a word and indeed a phrase that I always misunderstood as a child thinking that the son being described as prodigal referred to his return not the wildness of his life when he left. Anyway, he has returned. He left the ‘hell hole’, as he described it, after what? six years or was it more, to work for a famous dairy on an industrial site. He kept coming in to the coffee shop aka HH on his days off, saying that ‘he was getting there’ with his new job. And now he is back. My heart went out to him. He has lost weight and the skin condition that ails him has flared up. His face was positively afire. How do we handle it? we asked each other. In the end I raised it, giving him a way out, a chance to save face. I think it helped. It broke something and he drooped a little less as a consequence. He isn’t an easy man, he can be a little arsy, no brusque – I call him an ‘Eeyore’ like the donkey toy in Winnie-the-pooh. I hope he feels safer now that he is back in the fold.

I walked to the Perygyl from over the Buarth, marvelling at the host of seagulls making in circles in the sky, flashing white from the reflection of the street lights below, magical quite magical. And then, joy of joys there was a fishing boat preparing to set sail. I love that warming thrum of the engine and the stark yellow lights in the still darkness. And I am determined to get strong. These hips are mine and I want to keep them, decrepit or no.

Most we only know to say hello to but that doesn’t stop us spinning stories about them. Not unkind ones but just a means of piecing together the bits of information we get from their habits to form a picture of who they really are. There’s ‘the smoker’ across the way who is up at all hours loitering outside his flat smoking and reading his phone. During lockdown he appeared to be holding seminars in the car park so we have him down as a lecturer or possibly a PhD student with teaching duties. There’s the young father whose kids visit at the weekends, he also smokes and sits on the railings, also reading his phone. There was Alfie the dog’s owner (we discovered later that he was a she but the name stuck) – I don’t think we worked out what he did, and he has since gone taking Alfie with him. I miss her barking and sheer thrill whenever he returned home from who knows where. There was the ‘Scottish Guy’ who has also gone, he who never wore a coat, always that same black t-shirt come snow, rain or shine, and whom he would see drinking during the day in The White Horse, just wine, and always on his own. He since found out that he is actually married and that his wife still lives in Scotland and that he lecturers at the University (we thought, Politics or IT or Literature but no he works in the IBERS department something to do with seeds, I think). But the girl who lives in a flat around the corner was a surprise. She lives with her boyfriend or could be her husband and they can be seen (like us) walking the Prom in the early morning (he always strides way ahead of her). She came once to say that the washing machine was waking them and looked so uncomfortable doing so, bless her. Anyway we met her the other day as she got out of her car (they park next to us) and she revealed that she actually works in a café near Borth. I’d have thought she’d have an office job or was a researcher perhaps. So shy, and so reticent, she blushes at a moment’s notice and there she is doing a job that is all about interacting with others. I like her. She blushed when I said that I liked her new hair cut. A gentle being, I think.