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.
