ellen bell

The weather report was wrong and I got soaked. Two heavy downpours between four am and five. Cold rain. Was it sleet? My feet skid on the pavement. I gave in to it. I don’t usually like walking in the rain without an umbrella. The rain hard on my face. I gave in. I succumbed to the sensation. Paying attention. Rain like tears on my face. My coat saturated, only my feet in my blue wellies, dry. The wind was strong. This is like being alive. This is being alive. Accepting. It isn’t personal, you know. It’s just weather, doing what it does.

We watched the end of The Imitation Game about Alan Turing and the Enigma machine. I had no idea that they had such moral questions to deal with. No longer a game. Can’t we save the human convoy? one of his assistants asked, My brother is on it. Sorry, Turing kept saying, I’m sorry. Sacrifice for the greater good. You are not God, he shouts. The greater good.

They told us that in the event of a terrorist attack the police may have to walk over the bodies.

We’ve a budget-freeze, said the Librarian, we can’t purchase any more books until April. It’s gone missing. The book I wanted has gone missing. Shall I buy it and donate it to the Library? Which book would you donate? Could you choose just one?

We’re stopping the be-friending service, she said over the phone. We can’t fund it anymore. No more one-to-ones. You can keep calling your client, she said, but we’re not taking any more. But isn’t that what we all need, I want to say, though I know it isn’t her fault. One-to-one. Tete-a-tete. Intimacy. The focus on one. Honing in, listening to just one. One life. One life for the greater good. Yes. I think so. Don’t you?

It was a crossword clue, the Word of God. He didn’t know it either. How is it that we didn’t know? The Word of God. Logos. Logic stems from it, reason. How things have changed. Many believe that to have faith shows a lack of reason. At least that is want I have found. The faithful considered to be fanciful, sentimental, unable to explain their feeling. A feeling of something like joy. Is it not? Sometimes it is the only thing that makes sense. Stands to reason. Stands for reason. All else is merely illusion. The Word of God. Amen. Amen to it.

The Christmas ridiculousness begins. Has begun weeks ago for some. I don’t mind. Waves of nostalgia flow through me. I loved this time of year. I loved the ritual. Though I am happy to let it pass these days. To be quiet. A quiet puritan. It is enough to hear the distant music, light candles, succumb to the dark.

Work emails are full of seasonal requests and offers. Last week a mother was asking if anyone had a camel costume for a six-year-old. Number of humps, it read, not an issue. Then there was another offering skis for sale, with a Chanel logo. In brackets, they wrote (logo painted on to humour shallow teenager). I love the whimsy of these communications. And there are hundreds each day.

At The Shilam Shubert is eagerly anticipating setting up the Nativity scene. We have some new things, he told us last Monday. He loves Christmas. I make so much money, he says, playing my music. He wants to be home then. Goa. They are all from Goa. Nice boys, so warm, full of smiles. I miss Wellington. He will be back in two months, Shubert tells us, grinning. They share a house, live in each others’ pockets.

The radio maps out my day both as my work and as my pleasure. Voices. Certain actors’ voices. There was a book being read recently by Bill Patterson. He played the father in Wives and Daughters on the television, years ago. A rich, sticky Scottish brogue, his voice comforts me like hot porridge. No-nonsense, unsentimental, he tells it like it is but there is soft roughness, like the tongue of a favourite Labrador. Who else? Alex Jennings is a favourite. Radio voices. It sounds easy, it is not. The people I put before the microphone are not usually professionals. They don’t know how to use their voices to best effect, are nervous, tentative. Breathe. Feel your power. It is there.

I think about paper boats.

Yesterday I was blue, heavy with greyness. Sometimes just going out takes a herculean effort. Speaking to people. Too much. My skin is thin then, I worry what they think, too much.

He says the nights will start to draw in soon. You wait, he says, three minutes each day. Light. Candles. Shining.

She was there in the gym again today. I like it when she is there. She doesn’t ask too much of herself. The bike, maybe a couple of minutes on the rowing machine. The bike is best because she can read on it. Today it was a free gift catalogue, its front page emblazoned with images of Christmas baubles. On the TV a Syrian man told us how he lost his brother and his family to air strikes. Should we bomb? they asked him. No, he said. Thank you for your opinion, they said to him, now its over to the weather.

Logos. Are we listening?

There are three lads messing about on a park bench along Terrace Road. It is 4.45 am. Across the road one of their friends is calling to them. Matt, Matt, he calls, Matt, Matt, Stu over here.

There are kids everywhere, mostly drunk. Along the promenade I watched as a large boy in a t-shirt stumbled his way round the corner past the Aber American Diner. He lurched as he walked, banging into walls and finally stopping in front of the Ceredigion Bay Hotel where he proceeded to bang hard on its glass-fronted door. When I looked back he was still there, sitting in the covered doorway, head falling into his chest.

At the top of town there are more. I walk through the Castle grounds and come upon a form in the dark. Another large boy. Then I see a young man walking towards him. Ray, he shouts, Ray. Hey man, I’m really sorry, you alright? Ray lets out a loud wail. By the town clock two skinny boys in parkas are calling up to a window over Agnelli’s Trattoria and Deli but there is no response. They walk back towards the Pier. There is a loud burst of noise, like a salvo of gunfire. One of them has just jumped on a balloon. Two students are sitting in Superdrug’s doorway. I always do it that way, the girl is saying.

The smell of baking bread from Slater’s Bakery has the aroma of salted peanuts.

The Christmas lights are up, as is the tree, but they are not turned on.

My blog article for New Welsh Review has been liked and retweeted several times. A small pleasure. To be read. That is all. That is enough. Might you read it too? https://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=1115

Idea for a short story. The Visitors. A small moment, but one of profound poignancy. But is it a story? He might ask. And my memoir. Write it as fiction, she said. She may be right.

I was meant to be in Bath today. I was sorry we couldn’t meet. I miss her. I sent white roses instead. I hope they please. And I think of another in Cornwall. What can I ask of her?

Keep safe, always. I love you.

Last Sunday I heard Shirley Henderson reading Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. What a marvel. I first saw Henderson on TV in an adaptation of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. God knows how many years ago. She was like a wild animal, snarling, with a long curling mane of black hair. Fine black hairs dusted her upper lip. But it was her voice. A reedy, throaty, sometimes high, sometimes low, animal sounding voice. I’d never heard Rossetti’s poem before. I was made breathless.

Wind. It howls and batters. We’ll have it for five days at least, said the ex-Golf pro in Morrison’s. It makes me feels edgy. At night-time it frightens me. I am unsafe. The house rattles, its windows bowing and buckling. Will they burst?

We finished Mr Turner last night. Timothy Spall was stunning. As was ‘Jane’ from Midwife. Painting as compunction but not as a salve. There was comfort in Mrs Booth. She oo-ed and blustered around him. Mrs Booth, he said, you are a profoundly beautiful woman. He wanted to be remembered, now I will be a non-entity, he said on his deathbed. Have you seen his later paintings? Or even his sketchbooks. Profound beauty? Absolutely.

Four purple candles for Advent. Ready?

She talked about a wedding and funeral. There were three swallows trapped inside the church during the wedding. A jazz band followed the cardboard coffin as they carried it to the natural burial site. Then they had a ‘Jacob’s Join’ at the Village Hall. I only met his wife once. A glamorous woman, beautiful even. She gave me a lift from the station when Dad had hurt his knee. She reminded me of another woman from Cambridge. A neighbour. Contained emotions, fit to spill. She’s gone to Scotland to scream.

Archers soon, must fly. x

I can hardly hear her on the phone. Her voice is muffled, it trails off. But she is mid-flow, is laughing, and I don’t want to shatter her joy. We talk about Christmas. We both like the carols, don’t like the fuss. Do you send cards? she asks. We used to take round a sponge to our neighbours, she says, but they’ve mostly passed away now. Her tooth is still troubling her. Bye, Bach, she says.

Two men in the dark walking towards me, I can hardly make them out in the gloom. They’ve both got wooly hats on. Yeh, he’s banned now, one of them is saying, banned from The Angel. There is silence. And then the same voice, I can’t believe he said that.

I only have time for a list. A memo for tomorrow, maybe Sunday. I need to get it down. All these threads that may come to nothing but maybe, just maybe they will manifest. Here it is: Charlotte Bronte’s letters, handwriting copied on a light-box, the endurance of the men on Scott’s Antarctic expedition, Victor Borge and my mother laughing, laughing with my sister over Turkey fricassee, food and mothers, and what else? Advent, yes, advent. The saga over the purple candles. I am all about detail. Too much sometimes.

There is a misily rain outside. November rain. Have to go. Speak soon. Juggling plates. A sluggish writing day. Its never wasted, he says. Don’t judge. Not yet. Just keep writing. That’s all.

They used to call them sea-pies. Oystercatchers. They look like pies when they stand squat on the sand. Turning into the stretch of promenade before South Marine Terrace, I disturbed them. A glut of them, hugging close to the sea wall. Hearing my steps in the dark, they started to hop about, moving closer to the sea. Becoming disorderly, pip-pipping, bobbing forward. I moved on quickly, not wanting to upset their slumber. Was it because of the storm that they came closer to land?

It was a wild night. The windows were bending, blowing inwards, I swear. And now all is calm. Gone. A perfect blue sky. Colder though. My fingers nipping with cold, even with two pairs of gloves.

We walked yesterday afternoon, even in all that wind. He didn’t want to but acquiesced. He always does. The sea, what a sight. A churning mass of chocolate brown fury, fringed with white. Bubbling with white. Frothing. It is so powerful. I catch my breath. There is nothing compared to it. So alive. So elemental. It forges its way to the shore, hurling stones, debris. The Perygyl was lost to water time and time again. Two students stood behind a movie camera on a tripod. Making a film. Freezing, stamping feet and chafing hands.

The early morning was silent except for the flump flump of my wellies. An occasional blackbird would dive down onto the pavement before me. A black shape darting. Then gone. No robins this morning. Too cold.

What a rich life. I am replete with it today. Grateful. Content.

We argued over socks. He swore and I sulked. It was over soon. It’s rare these days, generally we live peaceably with each other. A good marriage. A happy marriage. Just over-tired. They always say that don’t they, about children? We were being children then, weren’t we? It’s OK to be so every once and awhile. And the socks? They turned out to be just lovely. Thank you very much.

I have to make lists. Lists of thoughts, experiences, conversations. I write them on post-it notes when I get in from my walk, having chanted them to myself all the way home. Lest I forget. His office used to be covered in post-it notes. Telephone numbers, book references and things to do. Guaranteed that once written down they’d be forgotten. Guaranteed.

I want to remember, to preserve those little snapshots of something like life. The weather for instance. It dominates here. Always has. Wind, rain and sun. The wind the other day. Gusts of seventy miles off the sea. I couldn’t help laughing. Stop giggling, he said. We clung to each other. It pounded us. You feel winded. Literally. Three of the iron railings were uprooted. Just as if they were pot plants. Wrenched from the ground. And yesterday the rain, it was as if someone was just hurling buckets of water at our windows. You can understand our ancestors seeing strong weather as retribution from the gods. The glass rattled in its panes.

There was a hand-written sign in Merlin’s Cobblers and Key Cutting Shop. Closed today, it read, personal issue.

He is often there at his window smoking. It is still dark. I walk towards him, a little frustrated at feeling obliged to break my reverie. We talk about the weather, my walk. I wish him a good morning. It is 4.30 am and he is yet to go to bed. I like him though. There is intelligence, a wryness.

Two identical looking girls stand under a lamppost talking. It’s so much better living with someone, one of them is saying, much better than when I was alone.

A man is banging the flat of his palm against the glass-fronted door of the Ty Hafan Guest House. It is not yet 4.00 am. I find a pound on the ground, later there is a ten pence piece. A figure walks towards me out of the dark. I am safe in my defenceless, I whisper to myself. He walks on, coatless, the leather soles of his shoes sharp against the tarmac. The smell of baking bread from Slater’s Bakery comforts me. It still escapes even though the door is shut. A man is running down South Marine Terrace. He too is coatless, just a t-shirt. By the castle I see a girl. She is barefoot. I shine my torch on the ground, she scurries off. The wind is not so strong in town though The Angel sign creaks and swings.

From a distance I thought they were fairy lights. Coming closer I saw that they were the tricolour. The Belle Vue Hotel lit up red, blue and white. Nice touch. Solidarity. An elegant, restrained gesture.

I watch from the upstairs window as a cat leaps through a window.

It was unsatisfactory as a ending. I kept going over and over it in my mind. Would he have stayed? Really? Was it his child? Did he really sleep with her, after knowing that she was a murderer? I don’t know. Folk are strange. And marriage is compromise. The devil you know and all that. But it just makes you care less. That’s all. Should I read the book? I don’t think so. No empathy. Gone girl. Going, going. Gone.

I sent them off, into the ether. I don’t know. Are they good enough? Who knows. It would be nice but it is just ego stuff that. Mostly it is about sending them out, letting them loose to be something else. And that’s good isn’t it?

He gets back into the car and tells me that he’d just heard a man in Starbucks asking for a roll of toilet paper for the Gents. It’s rather urgent, the man had said to the blonde barista. It doesn’t bear thinking about, the girl had said to him as the man scumbled off loo roll in his hand. I like her, he said, she makes me laugh.

On the TV in the gym a woman in a tartan dress is talking about the Foundation for Peace. Prevention is better, she is saying, though I can only read the subtitles, the sound is muted. Prevention is what we are about. Yes. Amen to that.

I saw the moon yesterday. It has been a while. We are moving into the dark. Advent. I remember the Abbey lit up at the final moment, everyone holding their candle aloft as the great doors opened. I cried, from grief, relief and trepidation. Not now. Not now. My life is warmer now.

He tells me that it was forty years since he went to art school and now he’s painting again. He can’t get enough of it. He paints all day. He resents having to come into town. You come to the dentist, he says, you talk to people and before you know it that’s two painting hours lost.

Oh, ‘im, he says, they bought a painting of his of a chapel and gave it President Carter. His ancestors were from there. Was it good? I asked.

What does it matter? What does it matter? You do not have to be good, intones Mary Oliver, you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. He loves to paint, let it be.

Town was full of kids this morning. Early. 4.30 am chucking out time for the clubs. They were everywhere. Coatless and heedless of the wind. A chaotic queue of them at the fried chicken place on Pier Street, one of them shouting at a group of lads across the road. Down Great Darkgate Street and a young man is sitting on the pavement, his arms encircling the metal rod of a bus stop sign, his head bent over. Further down the street a young girl in a sleeveless dress is striding up the hill. The soles of my wellies slide in a mess of discarded chips and pizza slices. Pizza boxes, paper wrappers, cans and bottles are strewn across the pavements. The wind stirs up a sense of havoc. Post-apocalyptic. Down on the prom the mess is nature’s work. Sand and pebbles left by the high waves, crunch under my feet. A white plastic Aldi bag dances in the air.

I see her in the gym regularly. A tall, dark, gazelle-like girl, aloof and unsmiling. Dutch maybe, or Scandinavian. Certainly from Northern climes. The other day I said hello and she smiled. She brings her own yoga mat. The tall, dark, gazelle-like beauty with bruises on her arm.

Monet choose to paint in Etretat in November. Outside in the rain. The skies just grey. Once a wave came over and stole his painting away. Sisley died in poverty, bitter at his lack of success. So they tell me. And yet, he was good. Wasn’t he?

Walking into the wind is hard going. Sometimes I shout. Other times I succumb, leaning into it, against it. I remember our horses and the wind stirring, agitating them. Their manes flurried. Sometimes they would whinny and then canter hard around the field. The wind makes me feel alive.

Shall we walk today? The sky is still white. No sun. No break in the thick membrane of cloud. Sunday morning. Sunday morning.

The sky is milk-white. I can hardly see the rain, though I know it is falling for the roof tiles outside my studio window are shiny with wetness. A grey whiteness. And I am cold. I sit at my laptop, a hot water bottle against my stomach and a blanket wrapped around my knees.

The session this morning was cancelled. I thought it might be. It would be inappropriate to talk of such inconsequential things after last night’s happenings in Paris. I didn’t know till he told me at breakfast. I’d missed the radio news bulletins. How does it make you feel? I asked him over coffee. Feel? he’d said. Yes, what do you think of? How do you cope with such knowledge of such pain inside your head?

I know that I am not making much sense. His voice gets sharp. I usually cry then. I have not made myself understood. It’s something to do with standing in another’s shoes. I am compelled to do so. To feel what they are feeling.

Does it help? How can it help? I want to hold them, to touch. To love.

We talk about forgiveness. But what about punishment? he asks. Do you think they should be punished? This step brother, he continues, should he be punished? Of course, I say, but society must mete out the punishment not the individual. But what do I know? And who am I to dole out judgements? I do not want to. I just want to find a state of grace. For myself, for all.

We need to find a way to talk. For doesn’t it always come down to this, a need to be heard, acknowledged, understood?

Is there such a thing as evil? Is it separate from what we are?

Preparing breakfast I’d listened to the end of Jack London’s Sea Wolf. Wolf Larsson is dying but even in death he tries to choke the life out of Humphrey van Laden. It is so that I can feel alive, he says. His last muster of strength. The night before he dies Maud asks him about his soul. He is dismissive, Pah, he says. He loses the power of speech. They give him a pen and pencil. The next morning they find a crumpled piece of paper in his hand. Just one word written there. BOSH.

I told him. Serendipity, he said. Yes. It had been a crossword clue. Nonsense. I’d suggested bosh but he’d said, no, there’s no such word. It’s tosh. I’d relented. Not trusting my judgement. This morning I checked in the dictionary. Bosh = nonsense.

It gives me comfort. A kind of reaching out. Sometimes we are so far from home. That’s how it feels.

Writing my life is tough. I revisit it’s bleakness and I am made grey. It is inevitable. No walk today. I think I shall sleep. Sleep myself into a lightness. A light lovingness.

Please.

I know it’s nonsense. A sugary kind of nothingness that is easy to watch after a long day. Snuggling up on his bed. With him stroking my feet. I know. But sometimes, even in the most cloying of TV nothingness there is wisdom.

We watch them through, the box sets. They call them costume dramas. The original books are usually weighty, important even. Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, Elliot’s Middlemarch.  But they are tinkered with, adapted for contemporary taste, lightened, sugared. It’s OK. They are easy on the eye, on the mind. We are almost through with Lark Rise to Candleford. I borrowed the book from the Library. A great tome of a book. Hardback. Much-borrowed. Some pages are falling out. It couldn’t have been more different. This is social history. The adaptation, a saccharin nothingness. Though the actors do their best. Linda Bassett as Queenie Turrill. Last night she’d been to Banbury Fair to sell her lace. I’ve been at the pillow since I were a little girl, she said. No one wants hand-made lace anymore. It’s all that machine-made stuff, now. She is thrown. I always saw the purpose before, she says to Ruby Pratt of The Stores, her hands crisscrossing the bobbins, now I only see the beauty.

Is creation still creation when there is no place for it? No one to buy it or even see it? Do we, can we create just for the sheer joy of it?

He is so cheerful. A truly contented man I think. A photographer by trade. I’ve known a few. And in so many cases they’ve been bashing sort of men. Not tender. And yet, their craft is a careful one, is it not? A patient one. All that waiting, that blowing away of dust.

I saw it shimmer in the light from the lamppost. Black sequins, the large ones. A skirt. A sequinned skirt. I could make out a skirt, and stocking tops with bare thighs. It was still dark after all. Not yet five am. There were two of them. I heard their voices first. They were arguing. Standing on the corner of North Road and Loveden Avenue. The skirt was tiny, a mini skirt. As I approached I saw it was a man. A man with a beard wearing a mini skirt. A sequinned mini-skirt.

If he doesn’t die soon they will have to move him out of the hospice. They are only allowed two weeks dying time there. But he likes it there. He is safe, he is cared for. Will they move a dying man? Disrupt this period of grace. She writes that she fed him bananas and custard. Nursery food. Baby food. Everything turning full circle. They have reached a state of grace those two. How potent death makes life.

The drugs are making him hiccup. He doesn’t understand.

I am having my feet done. I love her voice. Warm treacle. Syrup. The condition makes him so honest, she tells me. We’d gone away for the weekend and my husband needed a haircut. We were at breakfast and Dad said to my husband. David, he said, can I ask, is that a wig?

Have they moved him from the second floor?

Sian’s meant to be taking care of the weather in Aberystwyth, he told me over the phone. I think there is supposed to be some flooding along the sea front.

Ulster. That’s it. That’s the answer to the crossword clue. A long overcoat, ending in r. I found it. I asked and I found it. In Lark Rise to Candleford.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for. He quotes it a lot. I will try. I just want to send it out. These little pieces of something. He looks concerned. If it gives you joy, then fine, he says. Joy. There is joy in the making, certainly. One just has to learn to care less, that’s all. Care less. Careless.

I’ll try.