Here I am again, after yet another extended absence. (Sorry.)

Some things:

I survived being in a musical. In fact we rocked. I went home and read Bernice Bobs her Hair, and reveled in the knowledge that out of the 20 or so people in this musical about high jinx in the 20s, I was the only one with a bob. Raise your skirts and bob your hair.

(I doubt I will do it again. Although, Jules, tapdancing next term is ON.)

I am so insanely bored I could eat my own elbow. I have been driven to the low low depths of experimenting a la the Bulldogs (a notorious sporty drinking society) – I tried licking my own nipple, which indeed is possible. (I did not, a la the Bulldogs’ (re-re-re-)initiations, go the whole hog with tabasco sauce and whipped cream in a can.) This boredom is good. This is good boredom. This is reading-almost-one-Greek-tragedy-a-day boredom. This is red-hair-dying-experiments boredom. This boredom has driven me to complete my first freelance editing/proof-reading mammoth job. It is John Irving-friendly boredom, and finally, finally learning to drive boredom. (Will not lie, I terrified myself and my unflappable father with my behind-the-wheel shennanigans – almost drove into a lamp-post and a man, rolled backwards down a hill, forgot how to break and steer and turn the ignition on, etc.)

The downside to this boredom is that it is the unfortunate couple of loneliness, a crippling, crippling infliction. I am not one of those people who relishes having their own space. I am not sure what to do with it. So, too much space, despite the claustrophobic attic. My partner in boredom, usually (the lovely sister), has entirely moved out, to Berlin. She has turned to the student dream of cheap boho flat-sharing with almost nightly real-russian-vodka quaffing. As I write she is in Serbia on holiday, propably quaffing Serbian vodka. She has enrolled for a university course. She has gone.

The boy is in India for two months for a documentary-making internship. Schnuuuvlen. Sniffle. He will be back, tanned and wise(r) and itching even more than he already was to get away from the UK as soon as he graduates. He is very much a lover of own space, and thus his having to share a double bed with his new acquaintance and documenting partner in crime, strikes me as somewhat of an ironic injustice. (But also a little bit funny.)

Everyone else has forsaken my humble home town. Maybe it has something to do with the emergence of the two in one new superstructure on the roundabout – the Travel Lodge sits smugly atop a harshly lit, sparsely-aisled Lidl. Together they now rule the town. There is only so much depressing a person can take. At seven pm, my mother forced me to face the world beyond my doorstep for the first time in 24 hours. Let’s go to Lidl! she suggested jubilantly. So we went to Lidl. I left it with a strong desire to weep, to bury my head in the large green crate of enormous shiny genetically modified aubergines. All the children were obese. J has given up on Newcastle-under-Lyme completely, and now lives in Liverpool. Against all odds she has a boyfriend, the same adoring puppy who has followed her loyally since we were 15. Running perfectly in line with the odds, her main topic of conversation continues to be drugs. Everyone else I know is scattered around the country, interning (making jellies for famous cooks, manning box offices, being lawyers, reviewing things for weekend supplements).

Thankfully I too will soon join these ranks, playing slave-girl to literary agents. (Joke. I will be repaid in experience and CV-props.) I will be living in London, in the house of the boy, minus the boy. I am as yet still uncertain as to whether/how I will manage a month of being the model perfect-potential-daughter-in-law-ish material. His parents are lovely, but will I do it? Will I break the washing machine? Will I step on the cat? Will I use the wrong towel, at the wrong time? Will I allow The Awkward Silence to reign at the dinner table? Will I be carelessly naked again, in the wrong time and bathroom, about to take a shower when the boy’s father walks in to use the toilet ? Will I commit countless other faux pas? Yes, probably. To intensify the potential cringiness of this living arrangement, for one night only the remains of my family are dining chez the boy, with the boy’s family, minus the boy. The first meeting of parents. Surely the boy ought to be there. My father is a potential minefield. His father is a potential minefield. My mother’s orange flower-power tights are a potential minefield. My brother, the teenager, is probably the only one of this family who will behave. Anyway, watch this space for tales of woe.

After the month of tenterhooks and leaving the house at ungodly hours and hopefully writing at least one book report, the boy’s return is imminent. To stave off loneliness+boredom blues, I may go visit the Norwegian queen of my heart. Until then, and whilst I am here, I will continue my ‘driving’ experiments, and of course will execute the Master Plan (spending large chunks of the day panting and watching my forearms sweat (!) in (the slightly stale air-conditioning of) the gym, and thus achieve, as a direct result of my boredom, a Killer Bod.)

In other news, of late a gigantic collection of music has appeared, as if by magic, in my computer’s music library. Some of it is the music of my past. Some of it is entirely new. Some of it is recordings by faculty members of Paradise Lost So here are a few things which made my night.

I can’t find it on youtube, but Otis Taylor’s Ice In The Desert has been played at least ten times today ❤

argh

I am in a musical.

There was a girl in pink pajamas sitting in the dark hugging her knees and smelling of watermelon and lemons and crying and crying through the thin walls as if something might break, and R says in a text message, she is a monster, I do not know what to do, and there is nothing I can say. She tried, R says, when I ring from Wales. (She has been sleeping in my bed, and when I ring she is watering my tomato plants, and I ask, how is she, what did you mean? She is right here, R says darkly.)

I walk past her door slowly and try not to listen, and listen, and walk back again a little bit quicker. I catch A doing something similar. We communicate with fingers and faces, and a little braver for there being the two of us, knock and march into the darkness.

She says she hates everyone, and everything, and cries. She is very hot when I rub her back, and I decide maybe it is inappropriate. But then when I run out of useful words, I take up the back-rubbing again. A is firm and forceful and still friendly, and says words like GP and counsellor. I want to cry. She says, but I deserve it, I deserve it, and sobs, and I remember outloud feeling the same and look now! (It still amazes me.) I wonder, now that I am sitting in the dark with her and A, how I will ever get out. We offer tea and films and food and books. She wants nothing, she wants to die, so I tell her, adopting A’s firmness, to sleep. Tomorrow, I say, you will still feel bad but maybe a little bit less, in the morning. Yeah, for ten seconds, she says bitterly. Don’t bother, she mutters when A says she will see her tomorrow.

Everything now is silent.

You say, I have been drinking D’s port. It didn’t feel like he wanted me there. I was not entertaining enough. I watched the worst film ever.

I tell you about the crying through the walls. You misunderstand, but I don’t correct you because I remember you lying in bed with the curtains drawn and your face buried in a slightly sandy, salty pillow. I am miserable, you said, I am so miserable, I want to do nothing forever. (I brought you your book back from the real world and offered tea and kissed your face, and reminded myself of the ineffectual affections of children, or puppies).

You tell me now with port-tinged words that you will never run away like the ex of the girl next door. Even, you say, even if you are miserable and angry for a hundred days in a row.

In the shower it smells of burnt toast, and also passion fruit, of which I now also smell. V, the cleaning lady, crouches in the semi gloom at the bottom of the staircase, her eyes shining, and I jump. Today we will have a heatwave, and today we are catching a train to the seaside, to Wales, where we will wait for our tesco delivery and lie in the sand.

the ukulele always playing

Everyone had forgotten that being entirely free is not necessarily an entirely good thing.

‘What is there but sleep,’ she asks, a little bit desperately, chewing at her hangnails.  ‘And drinking, and sleep, and reading, and sleep?’

‘How does it feel?’ asks a boy enviously with folders and the pale look of having lived in the library for too long. And we shrug our sunburned shoulders, because none of us know what to do with ourselves but to sleep, yet when we are up after 8am we feel guilty.

The boy climbs into bed where I am sleeping to pass time (so much of it) at two pm (unprecedented this term). ‘Up,’ he says, very firmly, so I arise like a sea monster from my bed of sulk and emptiness with hair draped terribly in wr0ng directions and over my face, and decide the answer lies in the gym. Which it does, for a while, and it feels good sweating, only now the boy is in a funk of his own.

‘We don’t always,’ he says, ‘have to go everywhere together,’ and walks, feeling strange, he says, to King’s College to see the third years. They have adopted him, or maybe he has adopted them. P has an ensuite room and a projection screen, and film-wise, the boy is excited. ‘I’ve never been in there,’ I say, ‘what is it like?’ ‘It smells of weed,’ the boy says gleefully, ‘and he has a plastic bag over his fire sensor.’ M is mysterious and skinny and depressed, makes moonshine at midnight and has a drawer full of vices. I saw him walking across the court this morning. ‘I’ve just got back,’ he said, looking slightly dazed, and shockingly loquacious for him. ‘I think I might have broken something.’ ‘What?’ we aks, and ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I don’t know.’ he replies, and wanders away.

A sun sets slowly, he says, for example. You could make a cup of tea, you could catch and cook a small fish, you could teach an entire people to catch and cook a small fish, you could plant and watch a tree grow.

i made cappuccinos that made the angels sing

I am finally free from the shackles of English part one. I will never have to think about medieval literature again, or Renaissance or Milton, who, quite frankly, is quite possibly over-rated. Or the functions of criticism (bah). Next year will be beat poets or just Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and tragedy, and practical criticism and another subject of my choice. I have a bruised wrist and blue fingernails, and not much brain power left. I have forgotten what normal people do, and woke up at 7am ready to leap into my desk chair and start writing out record cards and post-it notes frantically.

I have written fifteen essays this week.

Four WHOLE months of freedom.

The boy next door who is called Wilbur of Wilfred and apparently is a yoyo champion, whatever that is, knocked on my door yesterday and asked if he could oil my door. I could hear much barely-restrained anger in his voice. Yes, I said meekly, watched him spraying the hinges passive aggressively. Close it, he ordered, and I pushed the door shut with him standing on the other side, and it did not creak and moan and scream horribly. J imagined for a moment Wilbur or Wilfred standing at my door with a bottle of baby oil in his underwear.

I have time to blowdry my hair again. What will you do, asked Marco behind the bar, as I stood blinking and slightly confused before an array of cakes. Um. I said. Sleep. And have fun. What, he asked, and his face was a picture of confusion. Have you had no fun? So I cleaned my massive, mouldy collection of kitchen items which have slowly accumulated, and did my laundry.

The ducklings are older and bigger and uglier. Singly they are no longer cute, only en masse, when they walk through the porter’s lodge, and the librarian feeds them old bread from a plastic bag, muttering quietly to them.

And the sun is shining.

– i said you were sweet, so you were. Etc etc – now REVENGE!!!!!!!!!

A possibly crucial revision note.

What does it mean?

Faily fail fail.

please mow the lawn quietly and not at 7am

We are disintegrating bit by bit. H has RSI in her hand from revising too much, so now she speaks her notes into a dictaphone and I cut up her jacket potato. (By the end of next week we will all have RSI from writing three or four essays a day.) A’s glands are swollen, and I am infecting everyone who dares cross my threshold with the lurgy.

There are no conversations which are not about work or revision tactics or disintegration.

I will be less boring after next week, if I am still alive/in possession of my sanity.

I have a typewriter. It is blue. I will probably fail my degree.

distracted by kimya dawson

I want something scandalous to happen, I say. I don’t want it to involve me. Maybe. Somebody could climb onto the roof of the library – I point – and dance naked for a bit. Before coming to their senses. That would be nice.

R chews at the paper of her ribena lolly, which I hate more than H chewing her wooden Feast stick. I have ice cream guilt, and chicken and mushroom pie guilt, and not enough Milton and Jonson guilt.

The boy is not around much, he has so much work that it is pressing him into the ground and every day he wakes up a little shorter.

My mother will be happy to note I did some laundry today.

This morning the weak sun shimmered hazily off the roof tops. A girl in a bright pink dressing gown sat on a bench, speaking Spanish from a sheet. I dreamt I was hiding in Sainsburys from a man, with my sister, and that it was a matter of life and death.

I am living in study rooms.

I am tired.

I have no underwear left.

I don’t have time to do laundry.

temporizing

Now that we have almost all flown the nest, my mother has taken to drawing naked people. She pointed out the sweep of  a leg proudly. The foot, my sister says coldly, looks like a claw. According to my father, my mother drunkenly asked her if she wanted to be drawn naked. In a public place. Which is now my new worst nightmare.

And then she pulled forth a cardboard box around which she is weaving. I am mystified. My sister is mystified. We are mystified together, silently, for a day, before it is revealed that one day the weaving around the cardboard box will be a bag.

my favourite people sat on the carpet eating apple pie

The sky is still blue and it is eight thirty five pm.

At home my father tells me about playing agony uncle. He says, a girl came in weeping and pregnant, and her milk soppy boyfriend had abandoned her. So in half an hour over a cup of tea he made her laugh, arranged her finances and a flat.

Milk soppy, I asked? A milk sop, he says, and I notice white fuzzy hairs poking from his ears like cotton wool.

I think perhaps they were testing me, so I examine my aubergine bake carefully and laugh when he says milk soppy. He seems very pleased with himself. I remind myself of being six and coming home from school after French club with two sandwiches left, which I threw away in the little bin in the bathroom upstairs. I came back down the stairs slowly, and whistling, which gave me away, and I spent the rest of the day banished to my room.

On the way back I sat inexplicably in first class, which is no different to second class only they have ineffectual little yellow lights, and a woman who offers hot drinks.

Crow versus magpie. Who wins?

Who?? Who? And what were you doing with the obscene pink and orange and yellow fluorescent beach ball monstrosity at 11.59pm?

The boy says, as I crawl into bed, I am having a lie in, did you know that? Did you? I say, no, I didn’t, but I do now. And I thought, he says dreamily, that if you cared enough you would ring and then I could tell you. I don’t tell him it stresses him out when I ring before midday, in case he is still asleep. Or that I have gone one better than ringing by coming over. Anyway, he is still asleep, really, and sleep-talking, and it is unbearably hot and a bit cave-like, so I leave again.

My hairdresser does not believe in giving conditioner-head massages. I almost cried. This was the main reason I went. I now look like an ostrich and I am thirty four pounds poorer.

I am going home tomorrow, to my family, which has not entirely forgotten me. My sister is back for a week, so we will be all five again.

I am reading Milton’s divorce tract. It is tedious and very long, but at some points he has a point. Otherwise I am mechanically translating Gawain and the Green Knight into something without thorns and yoghs.

I will be glad when people stop talking about the election. S and J had a bust up sitting on the grass outside the economics fac. S says rising fees do not matter because by the time they go up we will no longer be at uni. J says voting anything other than Lib Dem is immoral. I sipped my canteen coffee and stayed out of it.

red wine

Moderately, and boringly, happy. I can see the curly hair of Pip Ash from my room. J is cooking curry in the kitchen with A. ‘Mash the chickpeas’, she says, and then, ‘I have been impertinent lately, haven’t I?’ Last night she interpretively danced boiling milk as I sat on the fridge being Lord of the Kitchen.

After a break from the computer, no longer moderately, but massively, and excitedly, happy. Which is maybe still boring. It was the jacket potato and the balsamic vinegar. And the new New Pornographers album, and the prospect of a bath, and having a full fridge, and being nicely productive, and my haircut tomorrow, and half day off, and the boy being peaceable and wearing my favourite blue shirt, and Shakespeare.

So, I leapt out of bed this morning at half past seven and went for a run with the ‘fitlist’, which, I found out, is comprised at that time only of me and a fourth year linguist called George. I almost died, but having just about survived, I think I should maybe go again tomorrow. I keep thinking of Eddie Izzard and his poor feet. Yoga with Alice is uneventful, only I am constantly, for an hour and a half, terrified that the balding, rather strange instructor will walk past and touch me in a correcting sort of fashion whilst I am balanced precariously with my bottom waving in the air and my leg muscles trembling, and I will scream and collapse onto my mat, and everyone will laugh. It hasn’t happened yet.

At quarter to nine it began to rain onto one half of the court. The other half was still sunny. A leant from my window into the rainy half and watched J, diagonally across the court from me, walking about his room half-naked. ‘He is definitely doing up his trousers now’, she said, breathlessly. (And now he is running somewhere. Oooh, where? Maybe he jogs in jeans.)

At three minutes past nine, that has been the sum of my day, nearly dying and strange rain and a half naked J. It will not get much more exciting than that. On the list of may possibly happen is: the boy does not text back to let me know he has leapt out of bed, so I will have to go round there and open his curtains and then spend twenty minutes apologising for having done so. Or perhaps he will be waiting silently and glumly, staring at his macbook and being morning miserable, and I will have to jump on him. I will watch the ducklings for half an hour and be late for my supervision. I will tell my supervisor that I do not find his sarcasm helpful. I will order a tesco delivery. I will decide to stop stealing milk. I will crawl back into bed.

On the list of will definitely happen (he is running back now): work. Work. Work. Work. Tea break. Work. Work. Cake break. Work. Stare at ducks for half an hour. Work. Listen to the rest of The Tempest in bed. Throw something at the wall hoping it may break through and hit the boy next door who blows his nose like a foghorn. Sleep.

Perhaps this is too optimistic.

My family has remembered I exist. My father rings me to tell me he has not forgotten me, and that he is going to see at Keele Students’ Union (three guesses) The Fall, and I am jealous. My mother tells me she is taking up drawing pictures of naked people with charcoal, under the guise of ‘life drawing’. Her new gay friend is moving to Ipswich, and she is mourning.

Let me win, I want to win, I want to race you to the cherry blossom tree, and you must slow down even though if you told the truth you also really want to win. (I get there first.)

R has a picnic to which no boys are invited. She is full of man-hate at the moment. Alice is going a little bit crazy and not sleeping too much, but she has yoga. J half finishes two crosswords, and each he flings to the ground in abject disgust. ‘I hate crosswords,’ he says, and starts another.

I still miss facebook.

My family has stopped calling me.

I dreamt I killed the snails, the last pets, dried up and starved. The woodpecker woke me up, and R, who has been up since five essay writing, so ridiculously awake that I stuck my head under the duvet till she’d gone.

I am terrible at staying in touch.

I love the smell of you having just shaved.

The mess is creeping in slowly, despite my best efforts.

Between two Shakespeare shelves a blonde girl started talking and did not stop, and I fell in love a litte bit.

Last night in my pigeon hole I found a picture in biro and ink, of a snow garden, a blue moon and a tomato monster floating in the sky, my magnetic poem in pictures. It made me very very happy.

So. My facebook account has a password which deliberately I no longer know. My bike was stolen last night, and last night the ducklings, long awaited, were born. ‘They are so cute’, says H, ‘ that I want to eat them’. The crows are watching, and waiting, patiently. The porters are on permanent stand-by, caring far more, and understandably, for they are cuter, for ducks than they do for us. We celebrated when we found them this morning, half way through today’s painful Troilus and Criseyde translation session, stuck and cheeping in a concrete ditch amongst the brambles. Porter John ladled them out with his large hands, very joyfully. I thought maybe there would be none this year, given the three male to one female duck ratio, and the violent, sexually charged mass male duck attacks which have been happening early in the mornings in empty courts. There are nine of them, and my new bike is prettier and taller than the last, with shiny white mud-guards.

I am very worried about feeling sick, and if I think about it maybe my imagining it makes it real. I am thinking of coffee to test myself. Maybe it is this strange herbal tea I bought back from Germany. Maybe I am tired.

I will read The Girl Who Played With Fire and forget about it.

I am back home, tentatively writing, revising (i.e. being defeated by prosody and imagining I went to the Canterbury Tales staged at the New Vic which I missed by a day), and not at all tentatively working out again, with S who is rowing for the blues soon, and off on a rowing training-camp in Italy next week. (She wears lycra leggings and silently judges all those who dare use their incorrect, untrained erg technique on the rowing machines.) I eat toast without feeling guilty, and sometimes even cake; I have been cured by being away from home, or laziness, or lack of willpower, or A.

I have decided that I can live neither at home or in Cambridge. As lovely as both are for short periods of time. I know it is probably time to go back to Cambridge when my mother’s audible chewing makes me want to throw things across the room. I’m pretty sure, and it worries me, that I sometimes chew audibly, and perhaps one day I will have children who object so strongly (and silently) that they’ll want to leave home. Similarly, I know it is time to come back home when Friday night in Cambridge passes me by completely three times in a row, and I want to hide in my wardrobe for a few days to relearn how to be by myself and escape the endless popping in and popping round and procrastination and frayed nerves and tiredness and anticlimactic drunkenness and work and work-guilt and life-guilt. So S and I will move in together after our third years, preferably to London, because we tolerate each other, even though she sleeps with the light on and I hate shopping and sequins.

I met my mother’s new gay friend from work, which is how she refers to him every time he comes up in coversation. He gives her pomegranates and is allowed to put his arm around her, because, as she says defensively to my father, who suspects rum goings-on, ‘he’s gay so it’s okay’. Perhaps, my father thinks, his gayness is a beard. We sat next to each other at a showing of The White Ribbon, and afterwards he put his arm around me (he’s allowed), and said, ‘how awful, did you grow up like that, do they make you wear the ribbon when get home later?’ I wore my mother’s doc martens, and a crumbly, kindly white old man approached me scattering compliments. A less crumbly, white woman approached my mother to tell her ‘and no offence intended’, that her skirt was tucked into her tights. My mother’s new gay friend said, ‘yes, it’s not a very real town, is it?’ about Cambridge, where he lived for a year before he escaped, ‘and most people there do need reminding.’

I am building an army of pastel cupcakes.

phone call

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? he asks, and I think, now he will ask me to sit down or if I’m by myself. Bad news, I quiver.

The bad news, he says, drawing it out and me in my bare, packed-up room with not enough lights, is that the hamsters are both dead.

Oh, I think of Chrisie, that’s terrible. Perhaps it is a little bit terrible that I am relieved. And the good news?

The hamsters are both dead! He laughs long and heartily down the phone. They’re dead! No more squeaking wheels. He laughs some more, and there is not enough space between his laughter to say a word, until she takes the phone off him.

Also, she says, with him laughing in the background still, one of the snails died. She sounds a little bit sad, and a lot guilty. I think we may have starved him. Next time, I say, maybe we should get stick insects.

sunday

Countless mugs of tea. Half a banana. No blueberry muffin. Stood on the rugby pitch, not understanding, for an hour and froze with the icy, sunny wind whistling through the holes in my top. Watched the whippet eat grass. Watched the whippet lick cold tea from a cold mug. Watched the whippet play games with a sleeve. Wished momentarily to be a whippet. An hour later watched an iceberg and people who lived for icebergs talk about icebergs and how the crunch and grind is the iceberg floating south, and after twenty minutes even Werner Herzog’s voice, when talking about icebergs, bored me. Ate the best roast ever.

It has fingernails. No, it is nothing, it is tinier than a small spider. Is it as small as plankton? Perhaps. But it will grow! It most definitely will not. So you see it is the tiniest deal and soon will be no deal at all, and you are not at all brave.

One hot water bottle in a drawer later. R has visited, zebra striped and cocktail drunk. At the ball J and I watched her sing with one hand on her hip and her red hair fantastically massive and glowing under the stage light. He said as I stood with my shoes in my hand and my false eyelashes drooping, the reason why R is single is because she is so sexually overpowering.

In the middle of R visiting, the boy comes along dragging his feet. At 2pm he still lay with his head under his covers, and he said as I came in NO, very firmly, so I went away.

R says, you’d better not be throwing me out to have sex. She scowls and winks at the same time.

You understand, don’t you? he says, meaning me to understand that he has, after all, been working all day. The prospect is always worse, and today it swallowed up his day whole. I’ll be back, he says, at 2am.

So very quickly he leaves and I tell R, who is downstairs drinking coffee and staring at the pineapple sitting on her chair, not to fall for the guy playing (fittingly) Valentine in the play she is in, but to run away with me. Aww you know I’d like nothing more. Je t’aime, she kisses my shoulder with a flourish as I leave.

sister-sick

From very far away she blinked at me tearily. ‘I’m a little bit lonely today,’ she said, very small, and I almost checked flight prices. She gave me a tour through the flat, her sofa bed in the startlingly bright living room with its homely little mountain of clothes and pictures on the window sill, and a blue packet of German cigarettes. Outside on the balcony the snow lay thick, still. She shows me a plant pot ash tray with spiky cigarette butt hair, and a little yellow hut below surrounded by cars. The mafia use that hut, she says, and drive away in different cars. In the bathroom by the toilet she shows me a porn magazine. I don’t want to know whose it is, she shudders. The parrot has gone now, but she has pot plants and a blue tea pot, and a boy in the room down the hall training to be a paramedic. But, he’s shy, she says sadly. I tell her about Cambridge, where nothing has changed, and spend twenty minutes pursuading her that being in Berlin looking for a job is infinitely more exciting. She blows kisses at the camera before I leave for the weak winter sun and the walk to the library. I miss her very much.

It is Valentine’s Day. R has rehearsals with a boy called Valentine, whose t-shirt she is holding ransome. This morning we have coffee in her room, surrounded by lacy knickers and sponge fingers and last night’s stunning black dress. We left tulips, lipstick kisses and a question mark at her door. (H says, we’re practically married, she cooks me dinner. And J, well, he’s my mistress.)

Later I will make fishcakes for the boy, and dazzle him with tealights which are not mine. Perhaps I will ressurect the dead daffodils I threw away earlier.

The mother rang earlier and said, ‘urgh, your father and I don’t do Valentine’s Day.’ A small defensive pause. ‘I bought him new wineglasses last night, though.’ He is planning a trip to Madrid for her birthday, and when he comes to the phone he speaks in code. ‘For the surprise omelette,’ he says, ‘we must buy eggs from the farmers’ market.’ He realises he’s lost and gives up after he cracks them into the small porcelain bowl. I can hear my mother in the background, snorting anxiously.

It is half past ten and a different decade and cold. I went away for a while, and in the meantime I have possibly forgotten how to string words together in pleasing ways, the only words I really write now being ones like concurrently or thus or lexical.

Tonight I am going to the ball. (I do not have to be back at 12, and if I lose my shoes I doubt any man will pick them up.) Yesterday we sat in my room and did things to our faces and our hair and our nails, and the air smelt of at least four nail polishes, like bananas. A will be there too, in shirt with ruffs down the front. I won’t go away this time, he promised last night, but if  you all dance I’ll be lonely. A does not dance. I will dance anyway, and despite the wine red polka dress which won’t let me breathe.

 A says he is going to America next year, which I am sure has something to do with Max’ one way ticket to Hong Kong. Max still makes moonshine and has his drawer of vice, cigarettes and Prozac and valium. I will move to London or go back home or stalk C in Berlin where she is in love with someone also called Max and living with a parrot and toastable schnitzels in cardboard pop-art boxes. None of us are hopeful. What can you do with an English degree? We came out of the media careers fair sighing and dragging our feet. J says he wishes he’d taken physics.

Something is swallowing up my pixel communication. Oh god I am very very tired. I don’t know how Margaret Thatcher did it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t vanilla rooibus tea.

On the walk into town today there was a man playing guitar and singing Where Do You Go To My Lovely.

 

From inside a bin.

 

Only his fingers were visible, his voice muffled.

 

Somewhere else there was another man. He dropped a tennis ball from his top floor window at my feet, and stared down at me with something not quite expectation in his eyes. ‘I have millions,’ he says, still staring, ‘don’t worry about it’, when I ask if he would like it back. There is a long, long silence, which he fills with words. ‘This must be the strangest conversation you’ve ever had’, he shouts down from some distance above. I don’t say anything, and think about running away. If he has recreated Romeo and Juliet, then I must be Romeo and he Juliet.

 

And yet another man. He sits on the floor. I am looking into the crown of his head, only also avoiding it. I imagine not knocking but walking straight in and finding. Past the full-stop after the finding which is the small lump at the back of my throat when I imagine imagining finding what finishes the sentence. I imagine finding a hot wall of sticky seeping air, and a foot, and two more feet, and another one, chafing and toes flexing, unflexing and flexing like the salty forever backwash of the very shallow edge of the sea.

We are drinking vanilla rooibus tea a lot, at night when we sit too close to single-glazed windows pressed up with our noses squashed against the glass, and from there if it weren’t for the fog of breath we might catch every tearing off of hangnails, every bowl of cereal on the bed, every far-off tangle of  limbs and the folding of underwear and hankerchiefs into perfectly small squares. And we experiment with feet, naked feet on the coarse stubble grass of the upper field where playing frisbee counts as sport, naked feet on the cold concrete slabs of in between buildings,and amongst the daisy-weeds of hippy crowns and broken links. And in the seven am dew, which we drink up with our touch-starved toes, (and orange juice and later three fig coffees).

A week of hardcore exam prep, six packs of post-it notes, essay writing of speedy proportions, to the extent of my little finger of the right hand coming away all shiny-and-worn-down-almost-to-the-bone-like, and finally, finally, I have the internet set up in my room. The timing could be better, for Richard II and Henry V must be read by tomorrow morning. Some dude is flying in from Paris, said our Director of Studies, to give you a class on the Bard, and then he is flying back. I disguised a little incredulous laugh behind Henry IV Part Two (not his actual body because obviously he is dead.) Then, said he, he will fly back to Cambridge to pick up your essays, six pm on the dot, the next day pick half-formed ideas from your brain and tease your incoherencies into something resembling academic language, possibly grill you to the point of tears, and then he leaves for Paris again.

 

It is exam term for everyone but English and History first years, only for some reason the scientists never shout abuse at the historians. Across the courtyards blows tumbleweed. In between exams a porter came to where we sat on the grass, and demanded silence, pointing at the QUIET EXAMS sign. We ARE the exam, A told him, and he mumbled sheepishly into his beard and left. The senior tutor sends emails about sacrificing Facebook profiles, having them voluntarily held hostage. Also we have our very own flasher. He stands in a well-lit room opposite Churchill wearing nothing, when it starts getting dark.

and you thought good things come to those who wait

14th April, meant to write a ‘Mother’ 2000 words and send it in. I have a sneaking suspicion she’s reading. Hello mother, if so.

 

Ben says, ‘if you carry on reading you’re boring.’ I’m sitting at Judith’s kitchen table and around me she is making a birthday cake. In the living room her father is playing chess against a computer and singing ‘that’s not my NAME. that’s not my NAME. THAT’S NOT MY NAME’ over and over, only possibly with different words and even the tune is not quite right. I’m reading bits of ‘The Prince’ and ‘Henry IV Part One’, one eye on each. ‘You. Are. So. Boring.’ I’ve  come round to deliver a lemon drizzle cake, which is Judith’s favourite, and to say goodbye to daytime Judith; I’m seeing her later but she will be nighttime Judith, who is a completely different person.

 

‘Ben,’ Judith says, with not very much force. The dog is going crazy, running from cake to cake mix. I make a few scribbly boxes on Judith’s Shakespeare handouts, so that if anyone flicks through her file they will think she’s read through them, maybe even some of the plays.

 

‘BORING BORING BORING.’ I remember Ben being three and very cute, kissing me on the cheek. And now that I think of it, attacking me from behind, when I wasn’t looking. (‘THAT’S NOT MY NAME!! THAT’S NOT MY NAME!!!) Then I remember him in France last summer, screaming and attacking people from behind and choking on spaghetti, not because someone pushed him into the pool, but because we laughed. Now he is eleven or twelve, and not so cute any more. He also sings, badly ‘you’ll have me suicidal. suicidal. suicidal. when you say it’s over’, with rapper fingers spointing at the carpet, only I don’t think he knows the word he’s singing is suicidal, he says it wrong, the three suicidals as one long non-word.

 

The dog gives up and looks with liquid brown eyes up at me, sadly. She has very long lashes, her eyes remind me of those of my cousin. ‘When I grow up,’ says Ben, dancing around the table, ‘I want to go somewhere FUN to university.’

 

‘She worked very hard,’ Judith reprimands, ‘ to get where she is. If you work hard, maybe you will get in somewhere good like she did.’ She glosses over the implied assumption that good is not fun. Ben shrugs, he doesn’t really care, because eleven or twelve is a million miles off from being old enough to have to start deciding between good and fun. (‘They call me HUH! They call me … AHA! They call me HAL! THAT’S NOT MY NAME! THAT’S NOT MY NAME!)

 

Ben tugs at my arm. They dog stares into the depths of my eyes, soul-searchingly. Judith and I lick out the bowl together. This time last year I was living in this house, practically. My mother had to come by after work, to someone else’s house, to visit me. I still feel a little bit bad about that; she sat on the corner of a chair and Judith’s father said ‘What is SHE doing here,’ but flirting with his eyes and beard as he said so, and we all had a pork pie and a cup of tea, She gave me good luck exam presents, and then she went home. Judith and I worked very hard, eating ice cream from the tub and learning election results for 1906 – 1945.

 

‘BOOOOOOORRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNG!!!!’

 

So I play Mario Kart on the Wii, fall into lava a lot and lose each round, and he is placated.

The queen of procrastination is back.

 

I carried out some cleaning experiments this morning, and concluded that on the Scale of Cleaning Satisfaction, the closest match to taking a file to the space between long nails and skin (10) is the attack of the laptop; the hoovering away of baby dust bunnies and cake crumbs lurking beneath the keypad, the refined art of scrubbing-without-scratching at incriminating fingerprints besmirching the screen, the washing away of sticky coffee stains, of contact lense solution and tequila, and the final inch-by-inch fine polishing. My father’s special blue laptop cleaning cloth (five months on, and he has still not removed his protective plastic laptop cover) comes away satisfyingly, disgustingly grey. My fingers don’t peel reluctantly from the keys anymore; what once was a breeding ground for student germs and diseases is now no more.

 

On the downside, I can no longer use dangerously reduced-visibility as an excuse to further procrastinate. I have dug my own grave, probably about time as I’m back in Cambridge on Tuesday. I have bought unkillable felt flowers and a dust-disguising rug, dream in rhyming couplets and have been shifting dauntingly tall, wobbly stacks of weighty tomes from room to room for almost a week. I have almost erased all outward sign of indignation at the inforced two months of ‘quiet period’, (no parties, no films with loud noises, permission for ‘any activity’ must be granted by head tutor, grass-cutting at 7.30am, etc etc), and have mentally and emotionally prepared myself for a week of being sequestered away in a dark corner of the University Library, perhaps shoulder-to-shoulder with a crumbly academic who goes home only for weekends, or a third-year, Ritalined-up-to-the-eyeballs.

Well, B says. We’re sitting at the bar, neither of us have eaten. I’m floating somewhere way above myself. Well. I say. Nothing changes. She smells the same, she looks the same. They’ve been together for two years. She will, one day, be a solicitor. She is moving house, even that is nothing new.

 

What I really want to talk about is a large pink body plastered against the window pane, waiting, about the netted curtain pattern dappling the kitchen wall, the chlorine smell of a turquoise towel hanging on the balcony in the sun, and half a bottle of bad vodka a day. I tell my grandmother, water. She clutches my hand at every dip in the road, at every curb. We walk very slowly and still I’m sweating. ‘Don’t stay away long,’ she pleads, and the next morning she says she thinks she might die, the world lurches and spins when she moves. Perhaps this is the last time we’ll see her, C and I decide. ‘When I die you can take my rings, they won’t fit you, and when I die I will leave money for driving lessons.’ By nine every night she is tearful, shakes up half a bottle of Klarer in an old chocolate sauce bottle we had the last of with ice-cream. She pours the chocolate alcohol residue from the bottle and squirts cream into shot glasses. C retches. One night she pulls out the old photo albums, the first time since he died. In my favourite photo she wore a white dress, stitched the hearts on herself, and danced flamenco with my grandfather, who was eight years older. Even in black and white she is very colourful, at twenty-two. ‘I used to be thin,’ she says wistfully, ’56 kilo. How much do you weigh?’ She really really wants to know, she’s leaning forward in her seat. I pretend I only know in stone, and she sighs disappointedly.

 

For breakfast, a glass of proseco, one bread roll – butter salt – soaked in black unsugared coffee.

 

The love of her life  will always live on a mountain in Bayern. Sixteen, tall, blond-haired blue-eyed boy. C and I laugh, we need photos to believe her. When she dies we will find the lost box of photos. At 6:15 am the day we leave she listens to her old voicemail messages. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, angrily into the voice of my great uncle talking about his new Mercedes, at a soft-around-the-edges shape in a dressing gown. ‘Checking,’ she answers, and makes fleishwurst-und-senf breadrolls, a Hanuta in tinfoil, a bruised apple. This is the first time I have left angry; when we were younger we cried and waved from the back window of my father’s newest fiat, but then that was when she used to stand on the curb and wave back.

 

Instead B talks about J’s drugs, J about B’s leaving early. People shoot snide side-ways looks across the no-man’s land which is me. I walk home in the rain, fall into a shrub on the way, run past the ominous noises in Sainsbury’s carpark, like foxes screaming only worse, and eat a pepper muffin.

It was a beautiful experiment, you might write, a thinly veiled approximation of the true experiment, which was not so much beautiful as very real. Of course what happened around it was beautiful, a wonderful shade of purple tights, rain-drenched beautiful men with unusual hair, vaulted ceilings and spires cutting sharply into storm skies. The only beautiful spines we stroked were those of books, and the beautiful people we kissed were others in our dreams. The real experiment, in which you probed with a thermometer, watched my temperature rising as you got closer to the not-so-scientific answers to your careful postulations- cold, warmer, warmer, hot – was not beautiful, but a rather ugly peeling back of layers, which were yours and not mine. My hypotheses, the proving and disproving of these, were equally as ugly.

 

You wrote in your notebook full of your findings on me – how you found me on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, where you first found me picked me up and took me home, how you found me then and now – you wrote: found nothing experiment over and drew beneath me a solid black line. What is the French word for ‘to leave’? Sortir. Again, I am that substance chiselled from the ground you know nothing about, tinged a vaguely alluring metallic, most likely fool’s gold, unclassified. Put it back where you found it, and no-one need know, if you dig over it, that you ever uncovered it.

Walk to the tube station with A. He carries my large blue bag, which I later leave on the train, switches it, uncomfortably, from hand to hand, juggling heavy brainfood and too-small clothes between left and right. He says into my neck on the tube, I hate goodbyes, and I almost leave my scarf behind. The woman next to me reads How To Be A Mother, and a little down the carriage someone’s grandfather eats his lunch from a tin lunchbox, an apple and two sandwiches. A says, I bet he’s eaten his lunch from that tin since he was ten years old. It smells of ham and mustard. I have bad bad memories of ham and mustard sandwiches, of finding unchewable lumps of gristle even in deceptively harmless looking teddy bear ham, of the too-thickly spread butter my father sprinkled with salt, of the ill-disguised force-feeding policy of my primary school. Lunchbox checks and secretly dropping squishy tinfoiled bundles of bread into toilet bins with a fast beating heart. Whistling. The whistling gave me away, one time.

 

See you in a min, A says, I drop my bag, my scarf drags along the tiles of Euston station’s platform eleven. Three weeks, I remind him. He disappears and I run. Meanwhile. At home my washing has been washed and dried and folded, stacked into small piles. My father uses my room as an office. His baby, his book, he thinks, is coming along. It is wonderful, he says, surrounded by crinkled bits of paper, how far away everything is. On a yellow post-it note it says BOT in messy black marker, birth of tragedy. On another, in red, NICE, which is a mystery.

 

L invites girls round. Unashamedly they wander through the house in tight tight jeans and the wrong shades of foundation. Ocassionally they say things. Most of the time they are silent in the face of adversity, which is L’s family, and giggle a lot when they think we are not listening. What puzzles me is why, when L eats as he is ordered to and must do before he disappears until night time, expending his energy nobody knows how, the girls hover over his shoulder and watch. They never sit at the table, and they never eat.

Today I sat for six hours in a cafe at a table next to a man and a woman. She cried for three hours and laughed for another three. He handed her tissues and  murmured at her. I haven’t cried for a very long time, she says, laughing and crying. Hmmm, he murmurs. She is leaving her husband, or getting fired, or has worked seven years towards something of which nothing nothing has come. He is her husband’s best friend, her employer or her ski instructor.

 

(I tell CL about sticky eyes. A stringy tall man wearing a navy cagoule and sporting a ponytail catches my eye from the bar. He is tipping cinnamon and vanilla powder and nutmeg into a mug, and staring right into me. CL emerges with submarine stealth from her vampire notes and drills holes into his head, a little bit later.)

 

The table behind me. Someone who reminded myself of me in ten years with a Glaswegian accent, and across from her a low melodic voice. (CL says, I put on my glasses sometimes, and I’m invincible. A long pause. Uh, invisible.) Neck-craning would blow my cover; I am almost invisible behind the wrappers of  muffins, the paper cup debris and the weighty tomes of learning. I think, anyway, that he must be small and sensitive, with short but slender thumbs, and funky neon shoelaces. He has not shaved for several days.

 

I’m a new man, he starts, sing-song, I’m not joking. She does not sound entirely convinced. I look at her, moving only my eyeballs. She catches this minuscule movement, and I sense her glowering.

 

The thing is, she says, she will want you back.

 

No.

 

You will want her back.

 

I will not.

 

Divorce, she says, hurts many many people. My parents pulled even the dog in half.

 

I want you, he says. I pretend I am not there.

 

I want you too, she breathes.There is a long silence, in which they kiss or he caresses her shins or the table leg with his converse shoes, or they hold hands across the table negotiating cold cappuccinos, and she examines his slender, sensitive thumbs.

 

So, she says, finally. I am dying with suspense. What do you do? He talks about Jesus having been a youth worker, teenage pregnancy and finding himself. She still does not sound convinced, entirely.

 

…God was SO ALIVE in me that day. I went home and I said – I told her – we – about you… ? ? …??

 

Sorry, she says, scraping back her chair. I imagine he looks up at her quizzically as she stands. Wait, he says, and they disappear together.

 

And then, behind CL, a large group of ruddy-faces shouts intravenous Jesus! and raise their arms heaven-wards.

My father has a small yellow box which he keeps on the mantlepiece, tied up with a piece of yellow ribbon. A man in his office woos him weekly with the little gifts his Chinese wife gives him. Last week he gave my father a gold-plated plastic plate. The week before it was jewellry box, engraved with a horse-drawn chariot, on which stands Confucius. Is it working? I ask. My father looks confused. We want to know whether he’s been invited to the cinema yet. He promises it is nothing like that. Although, he says, a look of something dawning passing across his features, I do bump into him at the pub a lot.

 

This yellow box is a curious new addition to the evolutionary spectrum which he errected last year on the mantelpiece – a garden rock through to a small bust of Goethe, via a wooden egg, a chunk of lapis lazuli, a magnetic orb and five horrendously inferior clay busts hand-crafted back in our primary school days. The small yellow box has sat to the right of Geothe ever since I got back from Cambridge; no-one speaks of it. Perhaps, I think, it contains a secret. This is what I’m missing out on when I am away learning things, family secrets are made and put in yellow boxes and never talked of again. So today I opened it.

 

In it is a small chirping cricket sitting on a deck chair. It is solar powered, my father said proudly, when I asked. He opens it, and quickly closes it. For some reason it does not stop chirping until he taps the lid of the box gently. Shhh now, he says quietly. He opens it again. This time the chirping is a little quieter, slower, almost slurry. It sounds drunk, L says. I think maybe the batteries are dying. No, my father says, adamantly, it needs more sunlight. From the underside of the tiny tiny deckchair he pulls a tangle of wires. He brandishes it proudly, and holds it to the bulb of a lamp, having removed the shade. 

 

It is dying, C wails later, make it stop! My father sits before the open yellow box and watches with a morbid fascination. I don’t have the heart to tell him it is battery powered. I know, he says, I want to see what happens. Chirrrp chirrp chirrp, the cricket says feebly. Mami rolls her eyes. Chirp chirp. Chirp. Chr. My father sighs massively and lowers the lid. He’s gone, he says.

 

I would like to believe that this is all part of the same midlife crisis which inspired him to shave off his moustache when I was fifteen, and moved him today to demand a ticket to see Steeleye Span. (But you hate them, Mami told him, bewildered, do you remember, you made me get out of the car when All Around My Hat came on.) Otherwise he really is mad.

In my dream you do things that make the walls blush. Inevitably the phone bill will arrive, as it does every few months. I will not be around when it does. In fact I will not be around much at all. Today I am going to rescue Jude from herself. She does not sleep or eat or go to lectures, and has lost her bank card chopping cocaine into lines. It will be amazing, when you come, she says, we will take lots of drugs and make human pyramids with our bodies. As an afterthought, and then we will go and see the Blake exhibition.

 

After this I will visit a friend with a broken leg. I have never had a friend with a broken leg before. Shall I take grapes? Once I have visited my friend with a broken leg, and her dogs, I continue my love affair with National Express and see Joe in Glasgow. He has a new place in the West End. I have missed Irn Bru. More train love to London, where the Varsity boat race is happening, a mere  excuse to sit outside pubs on the Thames for a day. Followed by a week staying at Oma’s in Darmstadt with Chrisie.

 

It is nice to have a life again. I almost do not feel guilty lurking around eating boiled eggs in my pjs and talking to Dodo. Only I do have a train to catch.

…and then, she says, she worked on an apple farm in Holland for three years. We’re sitting in a small cafe, one I’ve missed. At the next table six French students have been playing cards for three hours. Every half an hour they file outside and stare into the grey sky, colourful bohemian chic. People eating pasties from blue paper bags stop and gawp. A small child wielding, unwieldily, an ice-cream, frowns up at the sky and squawks. On my way home I think in snapshots about working on an apple farm in Holland. A wicker basket, the bark of a gnarled old trunk in the dappled light of dusk, a close up of an equally gnarled old woman, her face a landscape of elephant skin wrinkles and cracked tectonic plates. I have read too many books, perhaps, or am no longer living in the real world.

 

I meet Sammy for a drink, and look for the sharp angles in her face. She wears very red lipstick smudged around the borders of her lips, which she leaves on the rim of my glass. As always, kohl-rimmed eyes. I ask about the club. Oh, she says, they told me that since I cut my hair and stopped working out, I’ve been giving clients the wrong image. They take away Othello and tell her, this is not a library. I can see that, she says, pointedly. In unlit corners of the room half-naked wisps of women gyrate for half-closed eyes and three-day stubble, for tattoed forearms and leering jaw-dropped mouths breathing alcohol and fags, and for the tips. They say, Marie Claire and Cosmo under the desk. Then next week they say, we replaced you with a full-time receptionist. As you don’t dance, anymore… 

 

She shrugs. Outside three Chinese women, stone-cold sober and wrapped up in duffel coats and scarves, sell neon flashing sticks and plastic roses to girls with goosebumps in high high heels, and a slinky blonde in a small black dress sidles up to two policemen. On their flourescent yellow jackets it says guardian of the streets. They look mildly impressed. ‘Night, says Sammy, and I walk home, the streets swaying slightly.

We drive back into the familiar murk of Stoke-on-Trent. We stop at a light, at which I spend two minutes avoiding the stone eyes of an ugly bull dog gargoyle. Who buys these things? It is lambing season, and we’ve driven past tiny tiny frolicking lambs. Just past the RAC centre near Birmingham- a nearly-home landmark which reminds me every time of those twelve hour drives back from Germany, miserable sleety rain and jams, of service stations and salami butter potatobread sandwiches, of my father’s khaki thermos flask and that sick coffee-sweat-perfume smell, of falling asleep to Radio 4 and, inexplicably, Mr Blobby – we drive beneath a procession of sturdy black cows crossing a pedestrian bridge, sillhouettes against the rain-heavy sky. I fall asleep to Tracy Thorne.

 

Since I’ve been gone my mother has mastered skype and I have grown. She stands next to me with her new pixie haircut, and comes only just up to my shoulders.

 

A comes back last night. I am very drunk – we have been sitting on the field with a bottle of red from E’s family’s vineyard, which we drink out of brandy glasses, and someone has mother-made apple cake and taboulla in the kind of foil trays they give you when you order takeaways – so when I run into him coming up the stairs as I am stumbling down them, I don’t say anything. I am optimistic, he says this morning when I see him. I picture him at 3am the previous night, staring at the stars and wanting to die. I am also optimistic, crunching on icecubes and reading something other than Renaissance literature, and for a moment cannot imagine how I could have been anything other.

Term is over. I have Eiffel Tower crumbs on my floor, no cigarettes and my sink is blocked. Watched I Capture The Castle with S. What have I done? she asked; we laughed laughs of despair and dissolved the icing from her birthday cake into our strong, milkless, sugarless coffees. She fell asleep with her head weighing down mine, and I wondered how we could have fucked up so badly. I can’t shake the image of A walking all the way to the station last night before walking right back again and passing out. Coffee? he texted as I lay half-asleep this morning. Can’t move, I replied, so he came and perched on the edge of my bed and smelt of soap and we hurt each other a little bit more, and a little bit too much before my ice-cold resolve melted and then it was too late. After that he left for the pigeons, the sun and city-sound of London.

We are all very sleep-deprived. My father is coming to rescue me on Tuesday. He will drive too fast and talk to much, and as soon as I am home I will want to be back.

We built the Eiffel Tower out of custard cream biscuits, each brick cemented onto the one below with icing sugar and bargain margarine, a French flag of white card and toothpick fluttering atop the observatory  bubble. Today the structure wobbles ominously in the breeze blowing through the south court. Those arts students, the natscis would sneer if we were to tell them we spent a morning constructing confectionary wonders of the world. (One Eiffel Tower is equivalent to the recommended saturated fat intake for two months.)

We lick the soil from the tops of your strawberries and set alight the very ends of the green leaves. Burning plastic straws, forming black tar puddles in the ashtray and enlarging your faces in the dead shadow of a crumbling wooden building, where inside RAF pilots wrote on the ceiling with candles, cigarettes and the lipsticks of those women most of whom had given up hope of ever seeing those silver lipstick tubes returned, and their men. I imagine them standing on and falling from tables waving the colour of hazy remembered lips and the morning kisses, kitchen pouts and perhaps the last kiss they forgot the feel of as fast as the blisters began forming. This is what I am thinking when you start talking with the easy unthinking cruelty of a child, of blowing up bullfrogs in your grandfather’s garden, of squeezing apples between the metal clamps in his toolshed.

I am waiting for real life to start, he says, staring into the miniature teaspoon whirlwind I’ve created in my man-sized mug of instant coffee. He thinks there is a cut-off age at which he will stop waiting for the whistle and start running. He thinks there is a deadline. I throw open his curtains and dance, knowing the naked boy in the room across the court, or anyone walking past, that my director of studies even, might be watching. I hang my head upside-down from the open window. It smells of spring. This room has never seen so much light; no-one knew the walls were this colour.

He says, I dreamt I smuggled cigarettes across the border for you. I dream of picking off mascara, pulling out my eyelashes. I dream of being ten stone nine. I dream of missing my cue, of standing blankly in the spotlight for a long time making up the faces of the audience with stick-on moustaches and talcum powder hair. We shiver at the foot of his staircase at 4.30am, and sleep standing up amidst the shrill invasion of the fire alarm. Did you hear it too, I ask this morning, I had the most wonderful sleep. Staircase 47 burnt their toast. No, says J, but I was woken by a fire alarm fugitive. I picture her sprinting across two courts with sleep-bleary eyes, her dressing gown sweeping the mud. She arrives with inexplicable twigs tangled amongst the tight curls of her hair, perhaps she dreamt those too.

Perhaps she is sitting at the table, running a finger over the nail grooves she made last year when in pain and not sleeping she limped through the silent unlit house hurting the wood with a closed-mouth cry. She writhed, a worm callously cut in half, not knowing whether she sat or stood or lay with her face pressed into the grimy kitchen tiles. Her nails in the old pliant wood felt between waves of agony as the sound of chalk bumping down a blackboard does, teeth meeting frozen, softened ice-cream sticks, pulling styrofoam wrapping into squeaky crumbles of fake snow. Like you grinding your teeth into the pillow. Perhaps she is thinking of this when she writes, with stilted language, awkward ill-fitting sentences, like the start of an essay, like she cannot imagine who might be reading.