Yesterday there were like shiny tracks on her bedroom carpet. A slimy silver, a slivery trace. Slugs, I suppose. Her flat is decomposing, as she is. My skin itches when I’m there. A part of me is appalled by its unkemptness. Her smell still lingers but there is this sweetness too, and yet it isn’t sweet, not in the nice, golden-haired way. This is a tacky, sticky, unhealthy sacchrine smell – something man-machine, in-organic, not natural. What is it?
I thought about this alot yesterday, in an attempt to be at peace with that state, that state of not being happy. I want it to be OK. It should be. Why do I think I deserve endless happiness? After all, it isn’t the only way to be. Is it? I don’t really know what happiness is, anyway. Sara Maitland writes of a fierce joy at seeing a hen harrier. I know that feeling. I have felt the same on seeing foxes. Three no four times, I have seen them and the sight caught me up, delivered me to a space of thrill and beyondness. The trembling wildness of them that found mine. The wildness that we have so forgotten. I was blue yesterday, pushed down by the clouds that never lifted. I couldn’t raise myself up, produce, make, write or feel anything. All was grey. But it’s OK. That is living too. That just being existence. And I am all too aware that if I was hungry, cold, living in a war zone, lost, ill or dying, I would think only of being those things, of saving myself. And I am shamed. Always. So let the not happy be happy enough.
It can be the smallest thing, a tiny detail, like the seashell trapped in enamel on the window table in the guest house on South Marine. I’ve forgotten it’s name now, I used to know, I used to recite as I walked. It is a ubiquitious one. Something to do with wind or the sea or a view. Seeing that thing, a cheap thing, mostly to be found in seaside souvenir shops. Something that as a child I would’ve liked to hold in my hand, a treasure, a wonder. Anyway it reminded me of the various craft sets I’d ask for for Christmas. I had a candlemaking one, a macrame one, a weaving one and an enamelling one. I trapped all sorts of things. Feathers mostly and tiny shells. I thought them magical. I still do.
I thought about J., the Russia expert, and her son. I’d seen them making their way to the cafe yesterday morning. I remembered how she’d told me one Saturday morning at the BBC studio that she was going home to make waffles with her son. I’d pictured him as a shining boy, precocious, bright, talkative, small with blonde curly hair. Is that why it plays on mind? The fact that I made assumptions and got it so wrong? He is a savant. He is always smiling but he is not the blue-eyed little boy I’d imagined. He sits with his parents every Saturday while they read the papers and eat breakfast. He stares about the room, seemingly quite content, he eats, as they do, and once I saw him tracing his finger along a line of text in the paper. I imagine her sadness. Perhaps this is wrong. Perhaps there is joy in the other, in the different. We cannot know. I cannot know.
It is an immersion. I am being swallowed up by all this grief. Not mine. Others. Joan Didion’s, Viktor Frankl’s, Marion Coutts’, D. H.’s. It is too much. Sometimes. And now I’ve just come back from drawing in C. I could only see one of the residents. He was sittitng at one of the dining room tables waiting for breakfast to be served. The staff all greeted him cheerfully. Saying his name. He didn’t respond. He might’ve smiled. I couldn’t see. He stared into space and sometimes around the room. He didn’t look distressed or melancholic. Just blank. Blank. How sad, said P. when I told him of him. Is it? I don’t know. He is cared for. He is not in distress. He is leaving, that’s all. Going. Going, going, gone.
It was cold. The chill hit my face for the first time in months. Autumn comes. No wind. No breeze. September smells hung in the air, unmoved. Smells of woodsmoke, mowed grass, damp leaf mulch hung around the residential streets. I don’t want to walk out these dark mornings. I waste time faddling, so as to not go out. Then when I do it is a wonder. Always. I push myself up hills and stand before the firmament agog. I dreamt of an art school. I was visiting. Students were talking to me, showing me their work. I needed to find a loo. I’d crapped myself (though very neatly) in my trousers. It didn’t smell, no one knew, but I needed to deposit it somewhere. I had to go down stairs, an escalator and so on to find one. I got distracted by others telling me of rules, of exams, tests. I woke before my mission had been accomplished.
I think I’d heard it in my sleep and that the sound played into my dream. It was still there on waking. A fluttering, a rattling, a battering wings against cloth. What was it? And where was it coming from? I put my ear to his door. Nope, it wasn’t him. I went back into my bedroom. Yes, it was coming from under the black plastic dust cover hanging over my clothes rack. A moth? A bee? A swarm of them? I didn’t want to know. I left it. And it went silent. For a while, that is. When it began the fluttering again I decided to be brave and unzip the cover. It was a crane fly. A huge one. I set it free. Well, not exactly free. It flew up to the ceiling, bashed against it and then against the light bulb and disappeared somewhere. He offered to catch it and put it out of a window. Leave it be, I said. Let it be.
I never want to go out in it. I wake to it and it makes me fearful, unsteady. He came out of his room this morning after hearing me wake to give me a hug. He said afterwards how much he’d liked it. You’re such a tiny person, he said. I don’t feel it. At least not physically. Inside I do. Fearful. I didn’t walk under the bridge this morning. I felt a bit scaredy-cat-ish and thought it best not to. Can people smell your fear, like sharks smelling blood? Possibly. Can dogs? Mum used to say that they could. Nothing I could do about it. Fear can’t be masked, hidden with scent. I walk anyway. And it feels good that I’ve done so. Now the light comes. Too slowly.
I went out in it. I heard his voice in my head. Stay in. Don’t be a twat. But I needed air and to move my body. So I went out in it. It was heavy. I took an umbrella and dressed up in my fisherman’s waterproof leggings and mac and put covers over my boots. I still got drenched. But the air was warm, there was no wind and the sound of the rain on the umbrella was lovely. Just lovely. I wanted to stay out in it but, despite the covers, my boots, were getting more and more waterlogged. Resigned, I headed home.
I walked through the graveyard on my way home this morning. A man was there tending to a grave. He was too spruce for the work. I saw his shiny white Mercedes parked up near the entrance. He had a plastic pot in his hand and was patting, no stamping down the grass around the plot with the soles of his shoes. He looked cross, irritated. The stone was black with gold lettering. He was too far away for me to read the inscription. Was it an act of love or mere duty?
The blackberries are riper along the path to the avenue. I should bring a small bag next time.
I think about loss alot these days. I read about it. I draw it. I think it. I think of his loss and her’s, less recent. His plays on my mind. Why? I don’t know him, not really. And when I did, albeit it briefly, it was thirty years ago. And yet. I do feel it. I feel his loss, or at least, what I think that loss might feel like. A daughter, gone. Grandchildren bereft. I think he has a capacity to feel deeply. And that is what I tune into. How does he makes sense of it? How does he get himself out of bed each day and face the up and down banality of it without her somewhere presence? I read of hers. I didn’t know her. I know a little of her through her writing. She is foreign to me. Her location is not mine. She is exotic. Sharp-edged. Fascinating. I hope she doesn’t lose both.