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.
