Good bye!
May 4, 2009
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.
April 27, 2009
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.
April 24, 2009
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).
April 23, 2009
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 April 14, 2009
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.
April 11, 2009
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.
April 9, 2009
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.
March 31, 2009
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.
March 31, 2009
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.
March 26, 2009
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.
March 24, 2009
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.
March 22, 2009
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.
March 21, 2009
…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.
March 17, 2009
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.
March 14, 2009
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.
March 9, 2009
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.)
March 6, 2009
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.
March 2, 2009
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.
February 28, 2009
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.
February 25, 2009
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.
February 20, 2009
C comes to stay. She draws pictures for my walls and we drag a term’s worth of clothes down to the laundry room in bin bags. She makes garlic and pea soup which we eat on the floor from a tray we make from our new shoe boxes, watching Hugh Laurie. Your bin overfloweth, she says, empty it. Change your bedding. Come to London. She sits at the fountain in the middle of the market as I talk to A in Nero, my heart in my snow-stained boots.
They flee from me, who sometime did me seek, I say - C is still in bed, kicking and whimpering, dreaming of Dodo flying into fire – and A is sitting opposite me white as a sheet, J next to him adding to his hoard of words. (He writes the long ones he does not know onto the back of his hand. Possibly he is compiling the ultimate list of long words.) S has her eyes half-closed, H her pink slippers up on the coffee table. I have written down what I want to say, because if I don’t who knows what will come out of my mouth, but as it is I can’t say anything anway. I wish for my long hair back, you can’t hide behind a bob.
C climbs into the taxi without me, leaving behind a clean laundry smell and a floundering resolve to kick-start myself back into something resembling action. A has left for home, and I would do the same only I think maybe I would not come back.
February 17, 2009
We tripped over his guitar and eventually I went to bed with the curtains open and wearing woolly socks, picked at a hangnail and thought about a giant grasshopper, eating time.
February 17, 2009
There were when I looked very closely
meeting his eyes
two shored-up salty rims, dried and whitened tide-marks
foam of the surf
wavering in the wet blue.
February 14, 2009
Cinderella at the ball tears her feet to shreds drinks something sickly red and misses her curfew. At 3am I think I might do anything within the realms of physical possibility. Oh wait. Remember where I am. Later I dream of being in another city, of straight streets and buskers and bus rides and pink lady apples. A terrifying, exhilarating anonymity, a being almost foreign and not understanding, a being very far from home.
(I also dream of the Queen with a lung infection, and the father of a primary school friend drawing chalk lines on a picnic table.)
February 13, 2009
Add water and grow your own husband, it says in capital letters on the box above the made in China stamp. Day one a seed, a little plastic form no bigger than your little fingernail. Day two he sprouts arms and legs and grows an inch. A little anaemic: place him on the window sill in the sun and submerge him, ignore the choking gasping panic of drowning you imagine he feels, your miniature fiance in his watery glass prison. Day three, a smile a shock of jet black hair. His skin pressed against the inside of the glass, waxy pale and plastic still, bubbles rising from his tiny gaping mouth.
Day four the woman from next door comes in for tea. She has not seen you for days and thought (you think) maybe you are lying on the black and white chessboard of your kitchen, decomposing slowly. (Six bottles of milk on the doorstep, curdling slowly, and your post on the doormat.) Her hair from across the table smells of coconut milk and pineapple chunks, and after a little while she leaves, inevitably, falsely breezily. She says nothing about the tumbler-sized man packed uncomfortably tight into his cylindrical glass space, making O shapes with his mouth up at her from the mahogany top of the coffee table, where you placed him earlier. The cocktail scent of her hair lingers for two days.
Days five and six you watch him growing from the tumbler. Shedding glass shards he expands upward and outward rapidly, like the timelapse video of a sprouting sunflower they made you watch in primary school, right before you grew your own. He makes noises as he grows, waterlogged wood creaking as it dries. Stretches vowel sounds with his new tongue, aaaaeeeeeiiiioooouuuuuu. The woman from next door calls through the letterbox, and you clasp your hand over his mouth. Shhh, you say, his open lips and the shape of his teeth against the palm of your hand.
Day seven he clambers stiffly from the coffee table where you have been watching him sleeping standing, naked, bends rigidy at the knee and says, will you marry me?
February 10, 2009
Making origami planes from the PLEASE LEAVE slips in the library. Your folding is very noisy but you look like you are having fun, so I think no one minds. PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE Winston Churchill’s worn blue chair. From time to time the man in the corner stares suspiciously at my grapefruit. If anyone is crazy here it is the guy wearing a masking tape loincloth, standing on a marble pedestal and grinding the thin air with swinging hip rotations, open mouth and glazed eyes. A vacant head by night. For him to be here in the first place there must be something up there by day, or might have been when he first arrived.
(On the wings of the tiny paper aeroplane it says I am a paper aeroplane, throw me.)
In the time between stumbling from my bed tripping across the silver fish following the cracks in the polished floorboards and falling into my wardrobe where I keep the amplified mocking laughter of a duck which is my alarm clock, and waking up again sad and a little bit mad at the rain and being late, missing the gym and the enthusiastic American lecturer -
in between thinking a forearm in my face and then knowing a foot behind my knee -
I dream that I leave two of you in a room alone together, accidentally, and I have to be gone for a while. Possibly I dream I am listening to the enthusiastic American lecturer with half an eye on the clock when I realise that I have left you alone and that you might kill each other, or worse, one of you might run away and the other might laugh. Both eventualities scare me into nearly waking up, but I remember the rain and the dark chaotic corners of my wardrobe and the silver fish, and go on dreaming. That I run back to find the two of you playing cards, and you have that heavy duty thermos flask my father used to drink coffee out of at the petrol stations on the way from England to Germany. It is full of hot chocolate, which you share. Out, I say, to one of you, but the other grabs onto my upper arm and squeezes desperately, digging fingernails into flesh. I can’t live without him, you say, he is my sun and moon. Don”t make him go, and your faces screwed up with pity and desperation and a little hint of mocking twist the insides of me into knots. I dream your smells intermingling, and it is the most sickening saddening thing I have ever smelt.
and this is where I wake up sad and mad to my steamed-up windows from too much breathing, and the rain, which is relentless and cold and sticks all day to the tiny hairs of my forearms. I spend too much money and don’t work enough, and whilst my supervisor asks about the double-meaning in Herbert’s Jordan II and the etymology of Eucharist and how would you offer a Calvinist reading of Dr Faustus, I wonder about the three pieces of fruit on his desk and whether he will eat them or draw them or throw them away, and whether his wife packed them for him this morning.
I make some pretty hot fairy cakes with chocolate icing and sprinkles, however.
February 6, 2009
With thespian love she kissed the air near my cheek good bye. I sat and listened to the silence for a little while, in a large room with polished wooden floorboards and a beautiful black piano, wearing someone else’s orange jumper. Walking back in the dark, I caught a glimpse of the old weekend feeling and chased after it for a while, until it threw itself with reckless abandon into the five-inch pool of water which some call a pond, where it drowned. I felt partly responsible. To commemorate the event I cooked a celery courgette carrot potato butternut squash mushroom onion soup, the colour of which there are no words to describe. I mashed in a few sliced almonds for good measure, and now no-one will eat it, not even me.
Between the stacks in a secret room upstairs in the library a second year law student dances with a a tattered paperback in his hands. He tells me about how he picked something by the same author from the shelf of a hostel in India. (I am picturing your high ceilings and your new white white room and you sitting in your chair with feet up on the window sill.)
It is ten to three am and you are somewhere else which is not on my scratched wooden floorboards beating yourself up, and if you had a bike you would ride it far away and maybe never come back. You would like to hear I will come with you to London. You left with your heart in your knee. I heard you sobbing at the bottom of the staircase.
it’s beginning to look a lot like
not Christmas, he said, but Romanticism, and laughed into the corners of the lecture theatre. It has been snowing, and walking to the salmon monstrosity of the Faculty is like wading through spilt grey slush puppies on an epic scale. I accidentally knock my elbow into the guy sitting next to me several times, we are sitting too close. Sorry, he says, and fumbles apologetically with his narrow-ruled paper. This lecture circus is oversubscribed; on the window sill a petite blonde rolls cigarettes and lines them up on her blue jean knees, for fifty-five minutes. Through the rape of the daughter of the Duke of Arcadia and the Thirty Nine Articles. Romance is the genre of the epic losers, and the Epic of the winners. I see a famous person a little further down from the blonde girl. It is reassuring that without make-up she could be anyone. She could be the guy next to me. Her yawns do not look scripted.
It is half past three, a week later and the soup I made is festering in the top shelf of the fridge. The bedder wrote a note in tiny uniform print about kitchen hygiene. Her name is Tracy, I know this from the black marker pen on the half pint of semi-skimmed milk.
I don’t know what I will do when I wake up from not sleeping.
Write two essays maybe.
I have never seen anyone tear hair out on my account, other than my father when I knocked over his prized possession, a black vase from the fine arts show at Staffs Uni, and it broke into three jagged pieces leaking roses. It is not okay to agree with you when you do not mean what you say. It’s the third person, the invisible three-hundred mile away one. I am too into this invisible Mr Far Away Man, and you think each time you leave to be somewhere I am not, I call him up and listen to what he does not say, and his breathing.
It is also my hacking cough. It is here to stay, how I get through supervisions. What did Petrarch mean, Rime Sparse? What is sparse? Hack hack. Someone says sparse. I think scattered. Don’t be ridiculous, he says, the correct answer is asparagus.
a sea of forrest January 27, 2009
Wanted to say something about my for once relatively impressive anger drowning out Bob Dylan, and cooking pasta in your mouth, and also Edinburgh last year, walking all day for three days, and harnassing energy to power lightbulbs, also my mean chicken fillet, and the Cat Woman’s dynamism, but made the mistake of checking my mail and then ambling over to my pigeon hole and I could actually spend THE REST OF THE WEEK reading everything for tomorrow’s supervision. If there were some parallel universe in which my supervisor and his hideous orange-brown Simon Cowell trousers with the yellow-brown pinstripes culminating in an unavoidable, unmissable, a screaming-out-for-attention triangle (one could say arrow) at his crotchal area did not exist, that would be very nice. Also if in this parallel universe I had not walked in on him in the bathroom, that would be even nicer.
coffeecoffeecoffeePROPLUS ANYONE?
Anyway so yes. I won’t talk about those things. Ben Johnson and the million and two people who wrote things about his green world and his corpulence are whispering seductive things into my earlobe. Hell yes.
January 23, 2009
J rings me. It sounds windy where she is, or else she is speaking from under the duvet.
I’M AT THE SEASIDE! she shouts. I have not been to the seaside for years and years. Mami used to make wholemeal cheese baps, and we ate them with peanut butter and flew a pink and blue kite, and one year C fell from a roundabout and stopped breathing.
I LOVE YOU!
I am sitting in Nero with A reading ‘Apology For Poetry’, and the man behind us is talking very loudly about his trip to India, to a blonde woman with a mop of frizzy hair. She sits right on the edge of her seat and clings onto his every word. She fills every gap with breathy laughter.
EXAMS ARE OVER AND I CAN SEE THE IRISH SEA! I think I hear seagulls behind the duvet-rustling, roaring sea. Can you IMAGINE what I’d have done if I’d missed the flight, stuck in New Delhi with no money, hahaha! The blonde woman throws back her head and laughs with her eyes shut for an inordinately long time.
THE TIDE IS OUT! I imagine J tottering across a stretch of wet sand in inappropriate footwear, crunching shells underfoot.
COME SOON, she shouts, I WILL TAKE YOU TO THE SEASIDE!
January 21, 2009
Between sieving eyelashes from rice pudding, learning to juggle with soft oranges and doing a little bit of pitiful weeping into literary criticism in Nero, I find I have very little time. Ocassionally I meet Dylan Moran’s gaze of cutting disdain shining unto me from my pinboard. I am developing new and drastic procrastination techniques – for example I have begun taking daily stock of the vegetable situation in the fridge; examine the black bits of my bananas, peel icey carrots from the back wall, and count my Sainsbury’s Basics onions, which tend to fall apart when I tentatively touch their wrinkled skins. I ring J, who tells me she has slept with her flat mate, that he has a girlfriend who is also her flatmate, that she has become a social outcast overnight, and that she is running out of money. I duly make noises of suprise and empathetic outrage. Also, I have had a fight with the woman behind the bar. (My empty capuccino cup made the table look messy.) My director of studies writes ’sentences!’ pointedly on my essay, by which I think he means they are not very good.
procrastination January 16, 2009
Things I have not had time or space or finger energy to write about since I got back to uni are the footprints with the four toes leading from the shower and down the corridor to the door of my room. Very suspect.
Pleasure in Bacon. There is very very little, only he did say ’some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested’, which is fitting since I have been only tentatively licking of late. Real bacon I haven’t had since back home. No one here understands the avocado-bacon toastie combo.
Visited the University Library for the first time and got lost somewhere on the fifth floor of the south wing between heavy navy-blue journals on the economics of farming. The UL is a paper maze guarded by fierce guarders of books stalking the aisles, the corridors, the toilets and tearooms, hiding little scanners up their sleeves and saying aha very quietly into their bristling moustaches apropos of nothing. Fiercely.
I bet underneath the many onionskin layers of impenetrabe, invisible armour you also are human, and you have bubblebaths and weep into tubs of haagen daaz and drink coffee with your friends and wake up with your hair plastered against your forehead or with pillow imprints on your forearms. And you will walk not stalk, sometimes. Enjoy the smell of cut grass maybe and perhaps a long time ago you once just for a laugh or because no one was watching at that precise moment, or perhaps because it was dark out, you took a running jump and landed on top of a crisp autumn leaf mountain.
Ridiculous! You sleep standing up in your flinty grey suit and for lunch you eat the silent fears of trembling subordinates.
How to cook curly kale and fritter away valuable minutes of the day January 13, 2009
I am back in the concrete block which lurks at the outskirts of the town of spirals. Witnessed a brief interlude in what I thought was the fixed and unchangeable lengthiness of the bar woman’s face. I have never seen her smile before. When we make eye contact my legs quake. Darling, she called me, as she took £1.40 from me for my bowl of cereal. Half an hour later she all but spits into my cappuchino. It looks as though in order to accomodate this window of pleasantness I may have to adjust my breakfast time this term to 10:30 – 11:00am.
I never wroted January 9, 2009
An ode to your little toe, and all those other things I never oded for fear of your scrupulous eye finding out the cracks in my creative foundations, the faultlines in my fictions, and discovering that what you are reading here is in fact (not?) yourself, ill-disguised and painted purple with sweeps of alliteration and pointillistic fragmented letters of your name in capitals where they should not be.
See I guess I always thoughted and maybe at times still thinkit that you are possibly the most complicated person I have ever met, like the knottiest knot in a three mile stretch of string or those four page equations I chose English Literature for never having to unravel… I guess what I am trying to say is that the knottier the knot in a three mile stretch of string, the greater the sense of achievement after unpicking. (I am not sure I want to unentwine you, however, and leave you straightened out but crinkly.)
There is letter space for the elevators of my nightmares and the common at your doorstep and the violet colour you stole from the garden, and possibly even your little toe and the hardened honey on the shelf, but mind the cracks, the paragraph breaks in which the you from the bit before morphs into a you which might be my father or even Dodo the Budgie.
(I would write you an ode but I am not the most poetic of people and you would laugh and then run away very quickly. Perhaps once I have reinvented myself as Philippa, the Pip of the neon fishnet stocking, of never saying never maybe I guess, the Pip of the carrot stick and the Pip who says no to the curdled butter, the Pip of the hidden musical talent and authorial genius, the brashest Pip in the apple core…)
January 8, 2009
I went back, my legs shaking a little bit. My words ran into and over the top of one another, alphabet soup into the bowl of the room. I said like and intense too much, and only just in time stopped myself from putting my feet up on the coffee table. From my bottomless bag of diversion tricks I pulled a packets of Halls, unwrapped one very very slowly and tormented the paper as she spoke. I used to be a chronic tissue-shredder. I remember being very excited about her baby. She said, when I used to go off to Woolworths on my own, that’s when they stopped talking to me.
I left feeling elated and sixteen and stupid. B said over her hot chocolate, you love tupperware too much. And then she told me a secret and I told her a secret, and I felt sixteen even more, like the next thing we might do is camp out at the bottom of her garden and make up games with scraps of paper and a stubby Ikea pencil and talk about boys. Did we do this when we were sixteen? Maybe eleven, twelve, thirteen. I don’t remember what we used to say about them, but I know we used to picture them vividly, perhaps a few gardens down, making their own top-ten lists. What do you look for in a boy? Number nine, good forearms.
I haven’t slept in a tent for years, not since truth or dare went wrong, and B talks as if she might get married next month. J fucks and tells over facebook, or else we are witness and invited to join. (No thank you, I say at five in the morning, I have known you too long.) And if not we end up with our heads under her kitchen tables, woken by the cleaner at 8.30am. I ring her and she tells me she is in bed with Specimen A. We don’t talk for long, she tells me about pills and MDMA at some warehouse rave and I am a little bit scared and her voice is crackly with tension and I can hear Specimen A breathing.
January 6, 2009
Doggerel is ironic highbrow, rhyme clanking, says my father. Stop me, I could go on for years. He’s talking about Heine, or I think he is, when he started pacing I stopped listening. Doggerel catches at my ears.
I spent a lot of my time in London both in bed and on the tube. Not at the same time, however I did sleep on the tube, brief uncomfortable bursts, my head on a shoulder dreaming of string. I have two invisible bruises, one on each hip, from the slats of the futon bed. A only disappears in the dead of the night once, to be where the wild things are maybe, trees sprouting from the living room carpet and A in a little white cat outfit (is this how it happens in the book?), only I think I dream this, because when I wake up he is saying things into my back like look at the snow. I am still dreaming, of cat people putting out fires, and anyway I am not a morning person which I should maybe have tattoed into my back. So I missed the snow but not the cold. This morning we watched the rooftops, and I imagined falling off.
I have Tamsin Greig’s autograph (and her love) in purple pen on a little corner of an old envelope. I do not want to think of what I said to her or how inanely I grinned. We are at the actor’s bar after Oedipus at the National. A little man who insists he has met me before says, she is so thin, did you see her WRISTS and how THIN they were, did you WATCH HER WRISTS as she wrote? I run away to a Latin bar and drown my embarrassment in a pina colada.
happy new year baby, we could probably fix it if we clean it up all day January 1, 2009
I am not making New Year’s Resolutions. They came with a warning on the radio, may cause mental damage. Last New Year’s Eve being almost certainly less that a year ago, I remember exactly what my resolutions were. We escaped from the party for a while (everyone asked about you this year), the kids scribbled on the cream bedroom walls with wax crayons and we got high in the black on the hill above an invisible lake. I counted them off on my fingers walking back through a deserted campus. I’m not sure how big an effect these seven promises I made out loud (and the few secret silent ones) had on my mental wellbeing. If by this time next year I am not doing anything such as sitting in a draughty attic room with my head wrapped in cling film, then this will be an improvement and it is irrefutable that the resolutions were to blame.
This year I was the sole young person floundering in a sea of the inebriated middle-aged.When Big Ben said so I ate twelve grapes, one on each chime. The Spanish did this in 1909 to solve the problem of a grape surplus, and are still doing it today. Everyone got very excited about this and forgot to swallow the grape from the previous chime before shoving in the next one with reckless abandon, and after the twelfth they fell about spluttering and spitting out little bits of grape skin. I did not like this very much, the darker hours of my childhood years having been spent perfecting the art of Magically Compressing Time Using Nothing More Than A Single Grape And My Two Wobbly Front Teeth. Stage one was pulling the membrane from the fleshy part of a large green grape with nails and teeth, which could take up the better part of an afternoon depending on size and ripeness, and stage two was keeping the remains under my tongue for as long as possible, testing both my willpower and the defenses of the naked grape. Those few seconds of what was intended to be joyous symbolic grape consumption were overshadowed by a remaining shred of childish ritual. (DO NOT SWALLOW THE CLOTHED GRAPE, a booming voice from above commanded.)
My father, momentarily blinded by the champagne cork, tripped over the coal shuttle. I flung myself at his ankles, and it was only by a mere two inches and as a result of my quick reflexes and sacrificial dive that he was saved from a firey toasting in the open fire.
This did not actually happen. I wish it had; it would have been immeasurably more exciting than his waxing lyrical about his new FiloFax and the London tube map inserts he bought for it from WHSmiths for £4.50.
All the way to India this summer to stalk your sexyness. Yes? December 29, 2008
I have a friend who got very excited about this and jumped up and down in the Rimmel aisle of Boots. Yes yes yes! she squeaked.
December 27, 2008
Sweating, wrapped in rising waves of wet heat, kettle steam from damp grass. When I move, the hot green and the mud beneath folds around me, sucking mulchily at my fingers and the space between my toes. With the noise a tumbler makes, pulled upside-down from suddy washing water, a perceptible space in time and sound and movement in which gravity grapples pressure. Shored up immovable on the perameters of a stagnating body of net-shrouded water, steaming clorophyll tangles of algae and blanket weed and nylon, blanketting stupified pond life.
Some time ago a blonde couple tripped past, naked, falling over their feet and each other’s, tearing the choking vines from a solid tree trunk. Not with purpose, a coincidental brushing past, a grasping, a simply not letting go and a simply not stopping tripping, sheer momentum carrying them inches past the pliable hollow from which my goldfish-silent mouth formed little round ‘o’s. Then they were gone, leaving this blinking tree and my unblinking eyes and their twenty toe dents in the mud.
Elsewhere girls meet boys with beautiful crinkly heavy-lidded eyes and curling lashes and writers create ink and paper versions of their mothers, curtains pulled over smeared single-glazed panes for thirty-four years. Prettier and more purple than real life, these mothers behind their curtains live up on the top shelf and never say you shouldn’t have said that, talk to your father, brush your teeth. Put that down.
December 27, 2008
Someone other than Christian Bale should be here to witness the curious wild fennel smell emanating from my person. It happens every time I move my head, an overpowering waft akin to that of the bulbous stem is released into the biting cold of my room. It mingles with the draught seeping in from invisible holes punctuating the window frame, lingers for a second, dissipates. (Fennel, apparently, is a member of the parsley family. I bet the parsley family does not subject itself to the annual torture of the fraught family board game featuring elves which are in actual fact little painted nobsules the size of my little fingernail.)
briefly breaking hiatus December 24, 2008
I opened my eyes half-expecting to see the naked twigs of the birch white-frosted. No such luck, only thing different this morning was J not flinging herself starshape across my double bed, and my father doing manic hoovering in his underwear to Jimmi Hendrix. He has been drastically weakened by a bout of man flu; the empty space on the shelf at the supermarket where the peppercorns should be reduces him almost to tears.
December 21, 2008
Standing up sitting down and even sleeping, dreaming, you’re a slave, and underwater, dancing in the dark, washing your hair. To something your body won’t live without, so either you’re a slave or you’re dead. Walking very fast around the block does not make you free. Smoking into air vents, at the bottom of the garden, in someone else’s kitchen, does not make you free. Not moving to the other side of the world, not starving yourself, not sleeping all day, not cutting your hair, not coming back after a long time, not New Year’s Resolutions.
December 21, 2008
Show me your teeth, he said, smile and show me your teeth. If there had not been a sticky bar stool standing between us he might have squeezed my cheeks with his fingers, forced flesh into tooth. He might have pinched my nose between index finger and thumb, embedded in resisting cartlage the hidden tip of my nose stud, and waited for me to come gasping up for air and smile, gritted.
I smiled. He nodded and disappeared into rhythm and blues and sinuating sambuca-stained people.
A long time ago I won twenty pounds for my smile. I played mute courtier to a sleeping queen, and whilst the other courtiers shuffled and yawned into the spotlights I bared my teeth. By night I pulled tight my lipstick red smile and gestured submissively from arabesque par terre; by day I limped into school and inked over the capitals SCIENCE with a violent black ink nib, which tore right through to the first pristine page, before limping back home to have my hair scraped and plastered back.
December 17, 2008
I feel D’s gluey eyes on me, and when I look up he’s looking back. At my elbow she is silently bristling. He’s saying something about an eccentric who spent his life in a bath tub. But I’m boring you, D pulls up short after he has talked for a long time, shooting daggers with his eyes above the little potatoes. Boiled in skins. In their pyjamas, he says as he serves them up.
Ha ha ha, L says, and we roll our eyes across the table. You can’t joke to save your life, L continues, ignoring the slur in D’s voice and the uncomfortable stretch of his lips.
How about this for an annecdote! he says, slapping the table. It is not so much a question. He tells us about a colleague, and how his woman-stalker found him working in a library in Glasgow. What are you doing here, she screeched from between shelves, and his colleague replied, this is a library.
I am mentally undressing the potatoes on my plate.
His gluey eyes again, on each of us.
And how he saw them together on a train platform opposite his, conversing exuberantly, and how he waved and…
…they waved back? L asks sardonically, his voice dripping boredom.
The palm of a hand on the table. Exactly. A pregnant pause, in which we should be laughing if we want to avoid bringing down the thing floating around the light fixture.
He embarks upon another annecdote, one about the fishnet stockings of the woman-stalker, and dangerously I do not laugh or even look up from my potatoes, and she is still bristling and L is questioning him, so you saw them on a platform, and they were talking and you waved and they waved back?
Which is an irrelevant question, L should be laughing.
Bristle bristle.
Between the fishnet stockings and the skipping jive track, I feel nauseous.
Bombed again, he howls, pressing his fingers into his eyelids and writhing into his plate. Bombed again! and the thing floating around the light fixture smashes down.
December 15, 2008
I remember this man from years ago, a sallow slivver of suit and stubble then. Now ill-defined, blurry around the edges. A heaviness of the jowels pulls his face chest-wards. He lets the knocker fall from too great a height, as he used to, and I jump from my skin on the other side of the door. I’d forgotten he existed until now, standing on the doorstep with a blond child in his arms. (They kick empty milk cartons around the park on Sundays, he says. I picture him in his too-tight polo T-shirt.) It has high Polish cheekbones and round saucer eyes, enjoys snowmen pulling torn fingernails from the nail bed bellyflopping into living room carpet, and reminds me of Creatures.
not the same you don’t worry December 14, 2008
Today I found some new words by someone I had forgotten about, and it made me happy, despite having lost some other words. It is not like I lost them exactly, more like they have been forced into hiding, or you hid them from me. The words I found were about feeling powerful kicking pigeons, which reminded me of that time I watched you kick a pigeon, or maybe someone told me about you kicking pigeons, and how I was a little bit shocked but secretly more proud.
I like imagining the beautiful people you fall in love with. I would write a story about them if it wouldn’t freak me out, imagining you sleeping with people. It would be Nabokov’s A Nursery Tale, only your imaginary harem would not be imaginary and you would want an uneven number of beautiful people.
I am freaking myself out imagining your unimaginary harem.
Like watching your step-by-step smoky-espresso-eyes trick (despite not knowing you) also made me happy, as did watching Breathless and Jean Seberg, and then knowing I have nothing to wake up for tomorrow, so I may as well not sleep.
I talked to you on the phone today, I realised everyone is getting a little bit older, and next time we look up everyone you grew up with and I grew up with will be grown up, apart from maybe us. Everyone needs a little distance from themselves, so maybe if we swap places?
Someone said don’t look at yourself, or if you must do so only in sections. Today I had my hair cut, and if I look at a ten-by-ten centimetre section encompassing a tiny bit of chin, a tiny bit of neck and tiny bit of hair, I look like Louise Brooks. So that was good advice, thank you.
You have the bluest eyes of anyone I have ever met, I almost called you Micky Blue Eyes by accident today, thankfully my fingers found the delete button just in time. I don’t know anyone called Micky, don’t worry.
December 12, 2008
We’re not together, he says, flushed. We’re not. We’re best friends.
I peer at him over the rim of my stolen starbucks mug. He feels my silent appraisal.
Come on, he says feebly. Adam and Eve were best friends.
I power-walk to J.’s house. I have not seen her for two and a half months. Her father is not there, and I collapse into the couch with relief. When I go swimming I see his bearded face bobbing before me, even when I close my eyes. I would like to forget I ever found myself with his liverspotted hands on my leg, breathing toast and coffee into my face. J. kisses me when I walk in. She has very little hair left. I tell her her neck looks vulnerable, please grow it back, but she is a model now and gets paid to have herself subjected to hair experiments.
I ask her how she’s doing. I feel better being me, she says, and tells me about the Chinese guy she brought back to her flat, without a name. She has largely abandoned this old part of her. She is bisexual now, she says, writes 2,1 essays, goes to cello concerts and is never alone. This makes me feel a little better; we are not bad at being alone but social butterflies. She shows me the homemade notches on her belt. I have missed worrying about her.
December 11, 2008
This is the loneliest place in the world out of term time. I’ve packed ten weeks into my suitcase and peeled Venice from the walls. Last time I opened the fridge I found myself face-to-face with a wizened, yellowing block of hacked cheese and the crumbling remains of a Christmas pudding.
There is a lot of music I can no longer listen to, and places I avoid thinking of. You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me; collect your novel petals for the stem. I don’t smoke waiting for the bus. (Everything is within walking distance.) I did not go to the fancy dress party wrapped in a toga. I do not drink Jack Daniels and coke, spoon peanut butter from a jar. (I don’t believe I ever did that.) If I turned up on your doorstep, would you let me in? Natalie Portman’s face hurts, so did dragging the bags of the last to leave past the porters’ lodge and saying good bye at the car.
I never say, I think I should leave. This is because I never want to leave. I have fed people too much of myself; when I cry I don’t have to point at the black whistling sky, say I have eyes bigger than my stomach. I am bad at being aloof, it is hard to be so when verging on the vertically challenged, my gaze involuntarily finds itself encountering yours. If I were a head taller my eyes would perhaps skim your big hair and find the greasy white-tack stains on the wall for which I might get fined. I am just as bad now as I was ten weeks ago at untangling my words. I have not read Dawkins, nor do I want to. I cannot ride a bike without endangering myself and others, and I would still like to be sitting on that train.
December 6, 2008
Term finished two days ago. I am completely uninspired; my dreams when I have them are less shiny, and my thoughts travel in dull, straight lines. For every undergraduate left for home, Churchill is invaded by ten conference guests. The weekend papers have been shredded by the children of conference guests, fashioned into dubious three-legged paperchain dogs. Those which have survived are being, as I type, trampled underfoot to the eager footshufflings ‘Home For Christmas’ and other such nasty tunes have excited. I had planned on spending the next six days reading every book recommended by famous people in the Guardian Review; it transpires the dog of a conference guest has subjected this part of the paper to a slobbery half-mastication, and I must read Paradise Lost and Utopia and Tudor court poetry, and write an essay on Seamus Heaney’s bogs.
It has not yet snowed in Cambridge, despite the tap water in my room clinking forth in little icicles.
December 2, 2008
On the contrary. Drawing what may or may not have been a Hitler bunny on your pint bottle of semi-skimmed milk does not make me think twice about drinking it.
