April 27, 2009

On the walk into town today there was a man playing guitar and singing Where Do You Go To My Lovely.

 

From inside a bin.

 

Only his fingers were visible, his voice muffled.

 

Somewhere else there was another man. He dropped a tennis ball from his top floor window at my feet, and stared down at me with something not quite expectation in his eyes. ‘I have millions,’ he says, still staring, ‘don’t worry about it’, when I ask if he would like it back. There is a long, long silence, which he fills with words. ‘This must be the strangest conversation you’ve ever had’, he shouts down from some distance above. I don’t say anything, and think about running away. If he has recreated Romeo and Juliet, then I must be Romeo and he Juliet.

 

And yet another man. He sits on the floor. I am looking into the crown of his head, only also avoiding it. I imagine not knocking but walking straight in and finding. Past the full-stop after the finding which is the small lump at the back of my throat when I imagine imagining finding what finishes the sentence. I imagine finding a hot wall of sticky seeping air, and a foot, and two more feet, and another one, chafing and toes flexing, unflexing and flexing like the salty forever backwash of the very shallow edge of the sea.

April 24, 2009

We are drinking vanilla rooibus tea a lot, at night when we sit too close to single-glazed windows pressed up with our noses squashed against the glass, and from there if it weren’t for the fog of breath we might catch every tearing off of hangnails, every bowl of cereal on the bed, every far-off tangle of  limbs and the folding of underwear and hankerchiefs into perfectly small squares. And we experiment with feet, naked feet on the coarse stubble grass of the upper field where playing frisbee counts as sport, naked feet on the cold concrete slabs of in between buildings,and amongst the daisy-weeds of hippy crowns and broken links. And in the seven am dew, which we drink up with our touch-starved toes, (and orange juice and later three fig coffees).

April 23, 2009

A week of hardcore exam prep, six packs of post-it notes, essay writing of speedy proportions, to the extent of my little finger of the right hand coming away all shiny-and-worn-down-almost-to-the-bone-like, and finally, finally, I have the internet set up in my room. The timing could be better, for Richard II and Henry V must be read by tomorrow morning. Some dude is flying in from Paris, said our Director of Studies, to give you a class on the Bard, and then he is flying back. I disguised a little incredulous laugh behind Henry IV Part Two (not his actual body because obviously he is dead.) Then, said he, he will fly back to Cambridge to pick up your essays, six pm on the dot, the next day pick half-formed ideas from your brain and tease your incoherencies into something resembling academic language, possibly grill you to the point of tears, and then he leaves for Paris again.

 

It is exam term for everyone but English and History first years, only for some reason the scientists never shout abuse at the historians. Across the courtyards blows tumbleweed. In between exams a porter came to where we sat on the grass, and demanded silence, pointing at the QUIET EXAMS sign. We ARE the exam, A told him, and he mumbled sheepishly into his beard and left. The senior tutor sends emails about sacrificing Facebook profiles, having them voluntarily held hostage. Also we have our very own flasher. He stands in a well-lit room opposite Churchill wearing nothing, when it starts getting dark.

and you thought good things come to those who wait April 14, 2009

14th April, meant to write a ‘Mother’ 2000 words and send it in. I have a sneaking suspicion she’s reading. Hello mother, if so.

 

Ben says, ‘if you carry on reading you’re boring.’ I’m sitting at Judith’s kitchen table and around me she is making a birthday cake. In the living room her father is playing chess against a computer and singing ‘that’s not my NAME. that’s not my NAME. THAT’S NOT MY NAME’ over and over, only possibly with different words and even the tune is not quite right. I’m reading bits of ‘The Prince’ and ‘Henry IV Part One’, one eye on each. ‘You. Are. So. Boring.’ I’ve  come round to deliver a lemon drizzle cake, which is Judith’s favourite, and to say goodbye to daytime Judith; I’m seeing her later but she will be nighttime Judith, who is a completely different person.

 

‘Ben,’ Judith says, with not very much force. The dog is going crazy, running from cake to cake mix. I make a few scribbly boxes on Judith’s Shakespeare handouts, so that if anyone flicks through her file they will think she’s read through them, maybe even some of the plays.

 

‘BORING BORING BORING.’ I remember Ben being three and very cute, kissing me on the cheek. And now that I think of it, attacking me from behind, when I wasn’t looking. (‘THAT’S NOT MY NAME!! THAT’S NOT MY NAME!!!) Then I remember him in France last summer, screaming and attacking people from behind and choking on spaghetti, not because someone pushed him into the pool, but because we laughed. Now he is eleven or twelve, and not so cute any more. He also sings, badly ‘you’ll have me suicidal. suicidal. suicidal. when you say it’s over’, with rapper fingers spointing at the carpet, only I don’t think he knows the word he’s singing is suicidal, he says it wrong, the three suicidals as one long non-word.

 

The dog gives up and looks with liquid brown eyes up at me, sadly. She has very long lashes, her eyes remind me of those of my cousin. ‘When I grow up,’ says Ben, dancing around the table, ‘I want to go somewhere FUN to university.’

 

‘She worked very hard,’ Judith reprimands, ‘ to get where she is. If you work hard, maybe you will get in somewhere good like she did.’ She glosses over the implied assumption that good is not fun. Ben shrugs, he doesn’t really care, because eleven or twelve is a million miles off from being old enough to have to start deciding between good and fun. (‘They call me HUH! They call me … AHA! They call me HAL! THAT’S NOT MY NAME! THAT’S NOT MY NAME!)

 

Ben tugs at my arm. They dog stares into the depths of my eyes, soul-searchingly. Judith and I lick out the bowl together. This time last year I was living in this house, practically. My mother had to come by after work, to someone else’s house, to visit me. I still feel a little bit bad about that; she sat on the corner of a chair and Judith’s father said ‘What is SHE doing here,’ but flirting with his eyes and beard as he said so, and we all had a pork pie and a cup of tea, She gave me good luck exam presents, and then she went home. Judith and I worked very hard, eating ice cream from the tub and learning election results for 1906 – 1945.

 

‘BOOOOOOORRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNG!!!!’

 

So I play Mario Kart on the Wii, fall into lava a lot and lose each round, and he is placated.

April 11, 2009

The queen of procrastination is back.

 

I carried out some cleaning experiments this morning, and concluded that on the Scale of Cleaning Satisfaction, the closest match to taking a file to the space between long nails and skin (10) is the attack of the laptop; the hoovering away of baby dust bunnies and cake crumbs lurking beneath the keypad, the refined art of scrubbing-without-scratching at incriminating fingerprints besmirching the screen, the washing away of sticky coffee stains, of contact lense solution and tequila, and the final inch-by-inch fine polishing. My father’s special blue laptop cleaning cloth (five months on, and he has still not removed his protective plastic laptop cover) comes away satisfyingly, disgustingly grey. My fingers don’t peel reluctantly from the keys anymore; what once was a breeding ground for student germs and diseases is now no more.

 

On the downside, I can no longer use dangerously reduced-visibility as an excuse to further procrastinate. I have dug my own grave, probably about time as I’m back in Cambridge on Tuesday. I have bought unkillable felt flowers and a dust-disguising rug, dream in rhyming couplets and have been shifting dauntingly tall, wobbly stacks of weighty tomes from room to room for almost a week. I have almost erased all outward sign of indignation at the inforced two months of ’quiet period’, (no parties, no films with loud noises, permission for ‘any activity’ must be granted by head tutor, grass-cutting at 7.30am, etc etc), and have mentally and emotionally prepared myself for a week of being sequestered away in a dark corner of the University Library, perhaps shoulder-to-shoulder with a crumbly academic who goes home only for weekends, or a third-year, Ritalined-up-to-the-eyeballs.

April 9, 2009

Well, B says. We’re sitting at the bar, neither of us have eaten. I’m floating somewhere way above myself. Well. I say. Nothing changes. She smells the same, she looks the same. They’ve been together for two years. She will, one day, be a solicitor. She is moving house, even that is nothing new.

 

What I really want to talk about is a large pink body plastered against the window pane, waiting, about the netted curtain pattern dappling the kitchen wall, the chlorine smell of a turquoise towel hanging on the balcony in the sun, and half a bottle of bad vodka a day. I tell my grandmother, water. She clutches my hand at every dip in the road, at every curb. We walk very slowly and still I’m sweating. ’Don’t stay away long,’ she pleads, and the next morning she says she thinks she might die, the world lurches and spins when she moves. Perhaps this is the last time we’ll see her, C and I decide. ‘When I die you can take my rings, they won’t fit you, and when I die I will leave money for driving lessons.’ By nine every night she is tearful, shakes up half a bottle of Klarer in an old chocolate sauce bottle we had the last of with ice-cream. She pours the chocolate alcohol residue from the bottle and squirts cream into shot glasses. C retches. One night she pulls out the old photo albums, the first time since he died. In my favourite photo she wore a white dress, stitched the hearts on herself, and danced flamenco with my grandfather, who was eight years older. Even in black and white she is very colourful, at twenty-two. ‘I used to be thin,’ she says wistfully, ‘56 kilo. How much do you weigh?’ She really really wants to know, she’s leaning forward in her seat. I pretend I only know in stone, and she sighs disappointedly.

 

For breakfast, a glass of proseco, one bread roll - butter salt - soaked in black unsugared coffee.

 

The love of her life  will always live on a mountain in Bayern. Sixteen, tall, blond-haired blue-eyed boy. C and I laugh, we need photos to believe her. When she dies we will find the lost box of photos. At 6:15 am the day we leave she listens to her old voicemail messages. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, angrily into the voice of my great uncle talking about his new Mercedes, at a soft-around-the-edges shape in a dressing gown. ‘Checking,’ she answers, and makes fleishwurst-und-senf breadrolls, a Hanuta in tinfoil, a bruised apple. This is the first time I have left angry; when we were younger we cried and waved from the back window of my father’s newest fiat, but then that was when she used to stand on the curb and wave back.

 

Instead B talks about J’s drugs, J about B’s leaving early. People shoot snide side-ways looks across the no-man’s land which is me. I walk home in the rain, fall into a shrub on the way, run past the ominous noises in Sainsbury’s carpark, like foxes screaming only worse, and eat a pepper muffin.