The dark is beginning to assail me once more, particularly as I can see the mornings are coming later and later. I try my best to remain buoyant but it lurks. Seeing the boat helped. I’d noticed his lights first but when I walked down towards the harbour I thought I’d imagined it, for there was nothing. And then as I came back from the Perygyl he was there, his lights blazing, heading out to the open sea. I looked down into the interior of the vessel (it was just a small open fishing boat) and saw a lit screen (it looked like a TV but must’ve been some sort of radar/sonar navigational aid). The lights are such a comfort to me, as is the fact that someone else is awake and going out into the wild. What must it be like setting out into that wide expanse?
The sea was gentle again, making no foam.
And there is an excess of gulls. Baby ones stand there in the road, in the street, immobile and staring. Some are flattened into the tarmac, a shambles of feathers.
Is the butchers on the corner of Bridge Street closing? Business has never been brisk, I think.
It was hard to define the sound. I tried. A kind of cracking, like that of breaking of hay stalks, infinitesimal. What was it? I was sitting reading outside. He had gone in. Sometimes I would raise my head and watch the butterflies, mostly white ones (are they Cabbage Whites – I heard someone say there is no such thing?) fighting or mating (again who knows?), at one point there were five of them. I could make out the grasshoppers (he says that they are not cicadas – we don’t get them in this country, apparently) but that other sound was different. It was lovely sitting out there in the heat but with the occasional wisp of a breeze. And with that own private mystery – a field mouse?
The sea was lapping again this morning.
What am I doing it for? Is it for an audience of one? And is that enough?
I got my assignment comments back and my heart sinks at the negative, even though the positive far outweighs it. It’s a habit that makes him cross.
I dreamt that my mother, then still living, was her mother. I spoke to them both, though separately. I often see or speak to her in my dreams and it is always lovely, though a rare thing in real life. My mother told me that they were to meet in Morocco. And was happy about it. She had a renewed energy, I think. I also dreamt that all my artworks were in another person’s house and it was due to be decorated. The decorators were in the middle of putting together a pile of dust cloths that they were going to set fire to. It was to be an insurance scam on behalf of the owner. All my work would be lost. Did I mind? I asked myself. I thought that I could take the most precious away with me but that might incriminate the decorators and the owner. So I let it be. Though I woke before the conflagration.
I feel for them, all of them. Houses were swept away, they say. I cannot imagine the pain of it. To lose so much. I hope that they find kindness, and some solace. And they will recover. And then there was more (after weeping over Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge) when I listened to Fergal Keane’s beautiful writing on FOOC. He writes with such clarity and such compassion. He quoted W H Auden, I forget the poem, something about ‘We had a Country….’ He spoke about refugees and how they don’t leave their lands because they want to, but because they have to. It is there home, after all, where they were born, where their families live or are buried. So much loss. Is it not the same? That same pain of being dispossessed. My heart bleeds for them. All of them. And for my sister-in-law, her voice all slurry from sedatives, or the fall, we do not know. She sounded lost too. She wants to be home where she is safe (though perhaps no longer so) and with her husband.
Town is full of baby seagulls. They stand in the middle of the roads, looking perplexed, often opening their beaks and soundlessly calling to parents that have now abandoned them. They are big, though not yet white. Their mottled brownness equates their gaucheness. They don’t know what to do.
He got a text and then called. She had fallen out of bed and is in hospital and her husband kept forgetting. It is sad. It shakes one. I am fond of her, and she is his family. She wet herself too. She would’ve been mortified that her son would’ve found her that way.
We both remembered that attic hotel room in Paris. I remember being inside you, he said. It felt lovely.
We went to sit out after a later supper. We were both tired. He’d wanted to cut his fingernails out and had got out his scissors and clippers in readiness. Walking to where we sit, he’d complained of his left foot hurting. I need to explain a little. He has neuropathy which means that he doesn’t really sense things properly through or on his feet. These are my walking shoes, he said, and they feel really gravelly. I need to explain something else. He has a little bit of a thing about shoes (perhaps I do too), though these days he leans more towards comfort than fashion. Anyway, he’d recently got some new ones and had worn them earlier. Perhaps it’s a result of having worn your new ones too soon, I said. Well, we eventually sat and I offered to look at his foot. He was right. It did look sore and there were strange wheals on it. Two circular ones and one long straight one. Having taken off his shoe he put his hand in it and pulled out his scissors. He’d walked with his scissors in his shoes. I’d put them there to remember them, he said.
While I waited she told me about her son’s wedding that was supposed to be in Sorrento but had been moved to Bridgnorth. I’m not sure how we got on to talking about noisy eaters. I can’t stand them, she said. Oh, yes, she’d been telling me about seeing patients in an institution in Carmarthen and how she never ate with them. She makes me feel a little grey. I try to combat it, but she is a powerful persona and colours things.
Oh, those floods in the low countries. Poor loves. May there be some light for them. There was a light this morning far out to sea, a boat possibly.
I scrabbled around and he was a saint. But it’s OK. I can rest now.
They’re painting the Prom railings again. It is a long job. I think it is over a mile and half long. I smell the gloss as I walk.
The window cleaners came on Tuesday and most of the huge splat of bird shit has gone, though I noticed a little smear this morning. A sign that perfection is never truly within our grasp, perhaps?
One of the Krays is on the Americans’ balcony, I shouted up to him. What? he shouted back down. One of the Krays has got onto the Americans’ balcony, he’s lying between the pots, I reiterated, more loudly this time. I’ll see to it later when I’ve finished up here, he replied. He was laughing when he came into the studio some time after. You should put that in your blog, he said. And here it is.
Do you remember the Krays? They are one of our neighbours two cats, Ronnie and Reggie. They are stunning but lethal. And expensive (she has them tagged and follows their ‘jungling’ exploits in the undergrowth around the estate on her phone, often going to ‘collect’ them when they stray too far). Did they climb up to get on the balcony, which I can see from my studio window, or did someone leave the back door open? Either way, Ronnie or Reg had gone when he went down. (I can’t tell them apart – it’s a mother’s prerogative, I suppose.)
I want to sit and write but must go out and have my feet done. A six monthly thing that never comes at the right time. Breathe. All will get done. It’s beginning to work itself out in my head, now all I have to do it get it down on paper.
I walked through the Castle Park this morning. There’s a temporary sign up with directions as to how to use the play area during the pandemic. Someone has put a piece of black tape over the ‘u’ and now the sign reads ‘Sing the Play Area’. Made me smile.
Shambles was one of our crossword answers and he told me that the space outside The Angel was a shambles. I didn’t know. Then I told him what shambles means. There’s a car parked in the street just before that said walk street with all four of its wheels flat.
I thinking about the town sleeping as I walk. Some are awake, as I see the lighted windows, but most slumber. Some of them I know and I send them wrapped up comfort and others are passing acquaintances and I wish them well too. I like the quiet. Though this morning there was a shouting girl.
It’s open, he shouted at her, pull it. It jars a little the way he talks to or shouts at his mother. She is profoundly deaf (and sometimes I shout at him too, though he is not so deaf) but nevertheless she is such a stately being that it still appears rather disrespectful. I wonder if they are happy cohabiting. Perhaps he stays up into the early hours to have that time to himself.
Must work now. Three days of it. So be it. She was lovely. Ah, the weight of doing such good people justice.
I was sitting out reading when one of the estate’s cats sauntered into my eyeline (I heard the jingle of its collar bells first). She or he (who knows) stood for a short time staring at something (I couldn’t see it, perhaps it was the cicada-cum-grasshopper that keeps me company in the afternoons) in the undergrowth and then did a rather clumsy pounce, but caught nothing. She walked off, seemingly unperturbed. I saw her again later when I walked back to the flat. She was running then with a strange brown contraption attached to her hindquarters. Her owner, a girl in a black and white striped t-shirt was running after her. Come here, Heidi, she shouted. C’mon girl. I heard the owner continue to wheedle and call, but Heidi didn’t appear. We crossed paths up the little hill and I asked her what it was that was caught on the back of her legs. Flypaper, she said.
Lifting my eyes from my book I saw a plume of white smoke beyond the trees and in the valley. It took me a while to work out what it was. The toot toot came later. It was mesmeric to watch. Those lovely puffs of white clouds, leaving their slow trail in the air as the little steam train chuffed and huffed up the hill. The shouts from the children on the Col Field (as he calls it) having their sports day was equally pleasing. An unexpected pleasure. Aren’t they the best?
And the reading fills me with so many questions and yearnings.
I dreamt of my mother’s house. It had been sold but there were still things in it that were ours. I could see them. I was there looking at them while still with my sisters discussing them. There were coffee pots and coffee grinders. The old fashioned kind with a wee drawer underneath. I need one of those, I told my siblings. And there were foldable ladders or stairs – like the kind you get in old libraries, several of them with beautifully turned, beaded – I don’t know what you call them, uprights?
They’re renovating the paddling pool in the Prom. I told him of it at breakfast. Yes, he said, I read about it. They’re going to put in seats. Seats? I asked. Yes. So there won’t be a pool any longer. No, he said.
The house I liked on Queens Road has sold. I felt a pang when I saw the sign this morning.
The seagulls dominate the town in the early hours, particularly above the empty streets where they scavenge for litter. They are nesting and soar and dive and squabble with each other over territory and food. In the sky they are magnificent. I saw seven of them in a makeshift skein, white and majestic high above the castle. On the ground they are huge, and somewhat scary. They are part and parcel of a seaside place like this. Though more jetsam we discard the more they will breed.
A rook sits on the rooftop opposite, preening. And I can see a gull resting on a distant chimney pot. The sea looks straight and calm.
I finished it. A restful day today, I think, till the next one begins again tomorrow.
