ellen bell

A flu jab and then two hours drawing in a café. A good morning’s work, I felt. The rain was relentless and the cafés door being open meant that the flow of customers was constant. I make him sit downstairs (he is my companion in all things these days) where it is cold and stark but for me, at least fruitful. I like the buzz of having to draw quickly, to make snap decisions – though I have yet to use all the drawing materials I spread out on the table. Most people don’t notice, though yesterday, a woman did come over and say something. I’d drawn her and her husband (he was a joy to sketch, she not so). She had one of those rather washed-through faces, without any real feature. A gentle, benign face, framed with soft, careful, blue-rinsed grey curls. Can I just say? she asked with a purring Welsh lilt. I looked up. Can I just say that you clearly have a talent for drawing people? I thanked her, wondering how she could’ve seen from where she was sitting whether I had talent or not. Then she went on to tell me about a girl she knew who used to draw in Chapel. She turned to her husband, you remember Sian, and how she used to take a pencil and paper into Chapel? She said this in English so that I might understand, though they were both Welsh speakers. I was touched. It seemed a big deal for her to come over and say that. We said goodbye when she left. I’m beginning to recognise some of the people I now habitually draw. This is a small town and people in small towns nurture routine. I want to get better, to find other ways of representing them, capturing them, listening to them, showing compassion through line. Can I do it?

Town was busy this morning as I walked (on the first dry morning for an age). The clubs had just ejected the young, and they flooded the pavements like un-shepherded cattle, coatless and wild and shouting. I find it hard to adjust to from being quietly in my head. Sometimes I think the wind (it was strong this morning) can make them so (I’ve seen it in horses). Though most were coatless, it was the spindly-legged girls in high heels, their thin summer dresses or scanty shorts offering little cover against the blasts of cold wind, that shivered and skittered like new-born foals. A middle-aged woman (tiny she was) stood at the bottom of Terrace Road, shrieking at a cluster of young men outside the 24hr SPAR. LUKE! she shouted. LUKE! I’M TAKING A FUCKING TAXI! No, response from any of them. Was Luke there? LUKE! she shouted again. LUKE, I’M GOING HOME ON MY FUCKING OWN!

I was, too tired to draw well yesterday afternoon. I’d finished my writing and still went out. I have to, I want to but I recognise that sometimes it’s like flogging a dead horse. I tried. That must be enough. He equates it to playing sport and talked of ‘form’. To him it was just as important as this is to me. I kept trying different situations – in front of ARGOS, then a digger behind ALDI and then the bus station and then finally a tractor on the col field. Nothing really worked or inspired me and wind (finding me wherever I went) didn’t help. Put it down to experience, he says and try again tomorrow. Which is what I’m going to do now after our flu jab. And it still rains……

It’s too wild to go out for my early walk and it throws me. I miss the air, the dark and the solitude, though I am alone here at my desk, it isn’t the same. It’s that battle with the elements and the surviving of it. I am unsettled. My body isn’t right and it has taken its toll on my spirit. It’s been too long. He is unsettled too and watches me. And then there is our neighbour downstairs. We rarely see him these days or indeed hear him smoking and coughing. I did see him briefly the other morning at his window. He was unshaven and unkempt and his voice was so quiet, too quiet. What can one do? He is a proud man, self-contained, and it doesn’t do to pry? (And what would I be doing it for?) Is he in pain? He is clearly fading. And what of his mother, who will care for her? There does seem to be a rather sharp-faced woman going in and out, perhaps they’ve arranged for help. Nothing stays the same. This is the time of dying. Another of his friends and work colleagues from our other life died this week. His ex-head of department had tears in his voice as his told him of it over the phone. I knew him a little. An ambitious man. Ah, this weather. And the winter comes….

The rain came down steadily. I took an umbrella and avoided the Prom. Students were out, coatless as per. Three girls ran in tight vests and high heels down the slippery paving stones of Great Darkgate Street, shouting and screaming. The rain is stinging my eyes, shouted one.

What do you think this is? I asked the nurse who was to give me a smear. It’s a skin tag apparently. Quite harmless, as cell gone wrong. Oh, how our bodies continually surprise us, thinking up such things. It’s a mercy it’s not on my face. Heigh ho.

My first interview in weeks. She seems lovely. A gentle return, I hope.

I wore two coats today, one on top of another. It was mostly to protect me from the rain that was promised (and came). Though I was still cold. The wind bit through the fabric. Ah, that’s because it was a north wester, he said later. It’s funny how obsessed we have become with the weather now that we take our daily walks. And it does dominate here. One is so exposed.

I dreamt I was naked and about to set off on a journey. I’m often naked in my dreams, not a shamefaced nakedness but a matter-a-fact, this is what I am kind. I was about to set off and then I thought, I don’t have to do this, I don’t have walk about so open, so exposed and so vulnerable and have people stare at me. So I went and got a dressing gown. It wasn’t quite correct and people might still stare but I was covered, and warm. I told him about it at breakfast. I think it was good to realise that I had a choice and took it. I don’t feel so under the weather today. Is it passing, this thing, this mystery dis-ease? Dentist now and then a smear later. Both are so unpleasant, the soft warmth of my body shrinks from such intrusions (all that cold metal) but it must be done, mustn’t it?

I meant to write about him yesterday but only remembered it as I got into bed – so it is with an ageing brain, I fear. It had happened when I was walking in the rain yesterday and getting soaked. I’d decided to turn back as my gloves were sodden and rain was getting into my boots, so I’d taken a left into Pier Street. He was standing outside Chickin’ Lickin’. I heard him before I saw him. Fuck off, he was shouting, you just fuck off. My heart fell. I sneaked a quick glance at him. He was alone. Who was he talking to? Did you just tell me to fuck off? he said. No answer. Well, you can fuck off, he continued, just FUCK OFF! By then I was almost running.

It’s Fresher’s Week, or as the banners around town would have it, FRESSURE. They are everywhere, poor loves, looking lost and wide-eyed, making friends where they may. Pairs of girls wander around. I heard two yesterday, as I walked back from drawing in the bus station. It was definitely beyond Premier, one said, no doubt trying to remember where their digs were. I drew outside the SPAR and tried to sketch a boy, much-tattooed and sporting a bright pink quiff underneath his black beanie, and then listened to a group of school kids trying to work out where to go now that school was ‘out’.

Pier Pressure night club has clearly opened its doors again in celebration of the students’ return for they can be seen making their way back up the hill in the early hours or sitting on the Prom’s benches, coatless and in the rain. I saw one sleeping standing up in the doorway of Godwins Solicitors.

He leaves me notes for when I wake in the morning, purportedly from John Kettley, the weather man. Ketters here, he writes. I love seeing them on the stairs. He got it wrong this morning. Some light shower! So be it. It is only weather.

Not feeling 100% today. It will pass. It always does. Meanwhile there are things to do, things to do…..

It was chucking it down when I woke. My heart sank. I need to walk. Should I or shouldn’t I? I went. And got drenched. I did 50 minutes of it and then gave up. I was a pool of water standing on our door mat. I tried to savour it. It is just rain after all. And there were the inevitable students about, coatless and running. The sea looked wild.

We talked about fear and vulnerability (mine mostly) at breakfast, in between my reading about Dorothea’s cold marriage and his reading the news. It all melds together into one, I cannot extricate one from t’other.

It had rained just before I went out for my walk and when I got out the air smelled fresh and cleaned through, despite the warmth. It is always good to get out no matter how reluctant I feel beforehand. My legs are still cranky. Perhaps all will be explained on Monday. Rain is forecast for the whole week, so today may be my last drawing day for a bit. I went do to the harbour again yesterday to try out my new dip pen. Some days it doesn’t flow. I know it but I keep going. I stood for a while by the mouth of the bridge watching a woman. She was leaning against the wall and a downpipe, her stick resting against her arm. She appeared to be nodding off. Should I help her? Is she distressed? She didn’t seem to be. Is she drunk? I thought and then felt guilty for thinking so. Her attire was a little garish – snazzy shorts topped with a pink cardi. I couldn’t work out her age – 60 or 70 or maybe younger. I left her in the end, my uncertainty and fear of unwonted intimacy making me passive. It turned the day. I didn’t like myself and consequently my drawings.

Notions of the Taliban and their intentions come through via the news bulletins. So dark. What is to be done? Oh, to be child again, blind to such chaos. Though not all are, are they, Ellen? Think again.

Returning home the sky, behind the National Library was purple. Is that a man-made phenomenon or is it natural?

The sun is trying to come out through the clouds. It isn’t as grey and bleak as they promised. Might there be sun?

I dreamt of a man, he had a big white face with barely any distinguishable features. I think he was married to a woman that I’d met on an Arvon course. She told me how he’d put together a kind of family tree for his grandchildren but it involved heavy precious stones which I was concerned about carrying as I had such a long way to travel. I tried to do the same but worried about what I had brought them with all those familial complications. Don’t worry, he said to me oh so kindly, you are good and kind and beautiful and will be forgiven. (I paraphrase what I believe he meant to say for the words weren’t spoken but made tacitly manifest. Either way I felt beloved.)

I just planted some hyacinth bulbs. So our few pots are now, seemingly barren but awaiting spring. Will they sprout (along with the crocuses)?

I think too much. I think too much in the mornings. They are bleak times for me. But I have my mother’s genes and I keep going on.

It isn’t exactly pain. It is more of an ache, a discomfort. But it is constant. I thought it might be muscular, or worse skeletal. It’s been there for over 3 months and it hampers my walking and my yoga practice. I went to see the physio yesterday, a kind woman who is sensitive to my oddities, I think. She looked bemused, got me to stand and stretch. It’s not your muscles, she said, it’s your glands.

It scared him. He panics. I saw the same with him and his mother. I understand. I need you, he said. It may be nothing, I say in return, just a long-standing bladder infection, probably. And it probably is, just that. But he still dashed over to the surgery and booked me in. Nothing till Monday, and that will only be a phone call. Diagnosis at a distance is clearly the way forward. We shall see.

I did still draw, though the tiredness dogs me. I need to keep pushing at my safety. I want to find my line, my way of expressing what I see (and feel) and I’m a long way off. I drew in the boatyard and then the harbour. I wanted to be alone but two blokes sat in a van across from me talking and running the engine. Then I sat and drew a boat on blocks. I love all the paraphernalia of harbours. But they are still static things. I need to manage movement. I did draw a little outside the station. You get some rum characters there, and outside Wetherspoons. I watched as three elderly ladies mounted their bus in a glut of shopping and jaunty hats. It was a dial-a-bus kind of affair – clearly they live in the sticks and have come for their weekly shop. Will I have the nerve to ask someone to sit for me soon?