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.
