My father has taken up his crusade to save The Couch. It is not all that dissimilar to the crusade of last year. He is adopting very similar techniques; once again he has martyred himself to the cause of A Clean Surface. Please, he says hoarsely when I get home, flagging, my sun burnt shoulders little beacons of red warning light in an ocean of pale skin, please… and waves almost hopelessly in the direction of a spotless Couch. I admit to him that the burnt sienna pattern comes as a nice surprise.

So it should, he says weakly, this took me all day. He clutches his back and hobbles to the kitchen drawer in search of paracetamol. The entire kitchen unit collapses with a wooden crunch onto his left foot.

SCHEISS VERDAMMTER MIST, he screams. He is a mere crispy, frazzled shell of his former self. German swearing is a tell-tale sign of last-strawdom. I realise at this point that the existence of The Couch (once a dumping ground, always a dumping ground) is a very real, very tangible, very dust-free threat to his precarious sanity.

So I am not surprised that when Chrisie appears at the foot of the staircase looking forlorn, hamster cage cradled in her arms, he leaps onto The Couch and stands with his arms outstretched and knees slightly bent. He reminds me of Dave The Mad Gym Instructor standing on his wooden milk crate, about to embark on a vigorous set of thigh squats. Oh no, he says, no no no. He shakes his head and smiles grimly, the grin of a man on a merciless mission. No THINGS. Absolutely no THINGS.

But they’re hot up there, she wails, and indeed, they lie panting heavily on their furry backs, taking turns at feebly lifting their heads up to the water bottle. She ducks under an outstretched arm, anyway, they’re not THINGS! They have a NAME! Fatty One and Fatty Two became The Fatties, and in their old age have become indistinguishable and ugly. The inevitable tussle ends badly, with my father lying spread-eagle and limbs akimbo in a heap of sawdust and nibble-sized chunks of old toilet paper rolls. I have to laugh, for a long, long time.

So it goes that we humour Couch Militancy. In my father’s presence, Len drops to his knees with a magnifying glass and picks laboriously specks of dust from The Couch with a pair of tweezers. I recreate the complex creative geography of my revision notes (almost a masterpiece, with its subtle multi-layering and cross-referencing) on the living room carpet. The Fatties, when my father is home, are banished to the cold cellar where they squeak sadly into the darkness, and Mami’s sock-sorting activities no longer take place on The Couch (no longer take place, full stop).

Fingers crossed, this is temporary regression.

Read through old blog, marveled at both eloquence and relative amusingness. Caught a whiff of nostalgia.

One year ago today I counted down exams to go and shielded my head from a rain of flying ring binders with my mouth very very close to the telephone mouthpiece, back pressed into the ridges of a radiator and feet braced against the door. My father thinks one day he might move his chess pieces over the checkered pattern of the couch, one move per day, playing against himself.

Two years ago today I counted down exams to go and the strands of my hair left behind on the pillow.

Not a lot has changed. In between things I stand on the threshold of the kitchen and draw circles on the tiles with my toes until I’m unstuck with the irritated flapping of tea towels. T. says, Lucy has been sitting exams every year since she was fourteen. Lucy is the unattainable 100%. He describes how the yellow post-notes adorned her pastel walls, fluttering in the kind of summer breeze we get only in the exam months. I ask him how he knows what colour her bedroom walls were, and he says, it’s platonic. Lucy is studying at Oxford. He talks about jumping through hoops a lot, and Lucy.

Decided to resurrect the past tense. Made a decisive effort. Picked through a history essay gluing -ed to the lonely short words. Concluded writing about the past more effective in past tense. Crossed out all that’s and is’s and and’s scribbled over indents crossed out full stops stopleavingspacessoitlookslikeiwroteholdingmybreath.

Made a string of resolute resolutions, in the past tense.

In capital black biro letters on my left foot it says RIGHT. And on the right, LEFT. Put your best foot forward. As if we’re not confused enough.

Everything is suspended again, least of all, lastly, my shirt on the line and a checkered tea towel caught in the branches of the birch tree, stolen, dug up in the dead of one night with a trowel and ten split fingernails.

Counting down the weeks and days backwards. Exploring the roof of your mouth with no torch, not sure which way the right way up, meeting teeth and tongue barriers in the bottomless topless dark.

And a bloody trace of determined weak nails between the serrations of rib cage, from when we were angry or I was restless, flattened under a close suffocating ceiling. Or maybe just bored, or dreaming.

J -

I pulled a bum muscle in excitement.

I do not usually do memes, but as I was tagged by Imogen, and as this is a book meme…

1. Pick up the nearest book.
Here I encountered difficulties. I am sitting at my desk. Directly above the computer monitor there is a shelf. Not wanting to go in search of a measuring device, I closed my eyes, spun three turns on my chair and let my index finger decide for me - Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. This was one of those books I read way before anyone thought I should have done. I was maybe ten, eleven. I read a lot of Atwood; I went through an ‘Atwood phase’. Mami’s friends would look from me curled up with my head submerged between pages, to Mami and back again, disapprovingly. With Cat’s Eye, when I was nine, they shook their heads and said, if she was my daughter… Same with Alice Sebold’s Lucky. In my last year at primary school, my Year Six form teacher - tall, blonde, shattered my naive teachers-are-not-real-people illusion - confiscated a cold-blooded murder mystery from my locker, and read to me with loaded intonation the first page, in which the victim is found at the bottom of a cement mixer on a construction site.

2. Open to page 123.
Fifth page of chapter fifteen. I flicked through the pages before and after; none of it familiar other than the disjointed first person narrative, which could pretty much be half of anything by Atwood.

3. Find the fifth sentence.
If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do.

4. Post the next three sentences.
But how did they evolve, where did the first one come from, they weren’t an invasion from another planet, they were terrestrial. How did we get bad. For us when we were small the origin was Hitler, he was the great evil, many-tentacled, ancient and indestructible as the Devil.

She is writing about Americans. After having met some who killed a heron, or did something disgraceful with fish.

5. Tag five people.
I can’t walk past a person reading a book in a public place without a surreptitious glance at the cover. Some woman engrossed in a paperback as she floated awol into the centre of a cloud on a miserable day in the middle of last winter collided with a lampost. She looked up and apologised profusely before drifting on with a finger pressed into the spine. I did some remarkably speedy yet unobtrusive catching up. What is it, I asked over her shoulder, and please read me the fifth sentence on page one hundred and twenty three. She enveloped the mystery book in the folds of her roomy duffel jacket protectively and scurried away into the cloud, astutely avoiding further collisions.

Anyway, your go.
Useless Rants
No Plan B
Ziv Catbee
Jonathon Mercer
Jules (in any shape or blog form)

Mami tells me he seriously thought of -

and for one heart-stopping second I really thought she might say killing himself, he thought of killing himself of killing of stopping being there -

She watches the shape my thoughts make of my eyebrows. On some days we read each other like this.

(Yesterday when - fire engine shirt, shoulder length hair, Hawaiian wooden beads - drifted past in a haze of aftershave reminiscent of sultry summer days and ice creams at the fountain in wet water-bombed T-shirts, she caught my eye from across the room and we swapped silent thoughts until the corners of her lips began twitching with ill contained hilarity.)

Not that, she says, without dismissing my unspoken suggestion with a laugh. It is not so ridiculous a thought, considering.

- institutionalising her.

I haven’t considered this. Institutionalising, an ugly word. I wonder what it would mean. An institute. I think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And Girl, Interrupted.

How serious a thought? And how was it said? I imagine him weeping with his face pressed into the double-glazed glass walls of his homemade prison. Muttered into the pillow, at a dreadful 3am. An ear-piercing painting of ugly words when she refuses again. To be. To do. Everything. And nothing.

Mami says, He rowed very fast across the lake and decided against it.

Thank God.

I want to kill your hamsters.

Please stop leaving them at my door. Like abandoned babies in moses baskets on doorsteps. Only noisier. And smellier.

Strange to think you have my number when several months ago we played the Flicky Eye Game from under our fringes. Over the fringes of other, less interesting, heads. I think mutual suspicion gave way when my tongue slipped and I told you, by total accident, that I can smell your hair from three daffodil-yellow corners and two corridors away.

If you want to believe I kissed a butch man-girl called Ursula in the pulsating strobe-infested dark, go ahead.

I am very sorry I didn’t make it to meet your sheep and the live-in army ex sleeping on your sofa. Some other time. But only if you refrain from telling yourself to shut up mid-conversation.

Saturday night, stumbling up curbs and snapping open shaken cans with a fizz. Two hundred unwieldy gazelles tripping past, lopsided, hobbling, screeching, fighting. A stab, a scratch, a nick, a moonlight scar running up (and down and up and) the taut skin of the back, a similar weave of silver criss-crossing tracks scritch-scratched over his wrists. In blind fits of rage he smashes his head against the wall, forehead coming away patterned with the irregular imprints of wooden chips from the wallpaper. Joins the chase, ungainly, hangs back catches up over-takes and stops. From behind a line-up of corrugated tin bins comes the revving, the pounding heart beats, the adrenaline. Two wheels, an engine, one carving knife. Four wheels, two engines, two carving knives. Six wheels. Eight. These gazelles don’t stand a chance.

Always someone waits at the phone, finger hovering over redial.

She is perched on the rim of the cold bathtub, bare legs sticking to the white porcelain, shifting uncomfortably. The picked at broken skin behind her knees weeps. She refuses to move, watches the way the forced cascade of steaming water hammers a relentless dent into the area between her mother’s shoulder blades. She herself refuses to shower. She refuses to leave, despite the choked drowning voice from behind the glass, which drips condensation. She refuses to leave the house. Only once in the past year has she pulled on her coat and climbed into the backseat of the car. Five minutes down the A34 and she’s screaming hollering pounding at the green-tinted glass windows. She refuses to breathe till they get back home. She refuses to look away when her mother pushes against the glass door and steps into her own wet footprints, asks, breathing resentment, for the towel.

It’s the not listening that’s eating him up. The not listening to his clumsy advice, delivered crouched down, eye-to-eye. He’d told her, he remembers, to stay away from boys now, boys and men, to imagine them as vampires. He’d formed with his fingers a cross and hissed. He cringes thinking about it. She had rolled her eyes and he’d laughed awkwardly, feeling decidedly too old and too male. He grits his teeth. He finds out she didn’t listen from the penultimate in a chain of Chinese whisperers, himself at the very end, breaking the circle with no one to whisper the distorted truth back to. He reasons with himself. How exactly would he liked to have been told? Um, you know how you said a few years ago… well I didn’t, and I’m … yeah. He shudders. Best someone else heard it first, maybe.

And on the bus

she asks what if questions and he says you’d kill it? and likens it to pushing a small child from a precipice.

I wish I were young and small enough to justify a temper tantrum.

My throat rasps roughly when I draw deep breaths.

I would like to stay at home and pick the crisp, curling strips of dried galia melon skin from between the keys of my keyboard. I want to watch Lolita again.

And then I would like to alphabetise something, and make fairy cakes with raspberry jam faces.

Ever since seeing Judith sprawled across the kitchen in her underwear last night, I have had an overwhelming urge to press my face into the terracotta tiles of our dining room floor, and have people step over and around me. Only I am not drunk.

(This might be a lie, I am not quite sure.)

I would also like to go back to bed, and not have to fill up my time with carefully measured out half-hour slots of (in)activity like

making bullet-point lists
or whispering French sweet nothings to myself in the forgotten top-floor corners of a university library I don’t belong to
or sticking yellow post-it notes to the slope of the ceiling above my bed, where they will fade in the sun and eventually rain down onto me as I sleep
or pushing indecipherable and half-hearted notes into plastic wallets whilst ignoring my father’s damning of the elusive essay condom.

Goddamn.