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.