As beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissection table of a washing machine and an umbrella. (Lautréamont)

If all else fails, and if I didn’t care at all, I would write this over and over for an hour and a half for my surrealist film paper.

From the other side of the garden fence my neighbour says very loudly and very sincerely, If I could go back and had the chance to start all over again, I would never have children. Not in a million years are they worth it.

This is a thought that should be left to simmer quietly in dusty, rarely used corners of the mind. A bit of me prickles coldly. Is wishing people non-existent as bad as rendering them non-existent?

.

Spent disproportionately long time standing in the shower after having turned it off watching a spider climb the metal pole of the shower rail. He got about half way up before he slid back down to the soap tray, where he sat and contemplated, waved his foremost spider leg in my general direction, perhaps a you’ll see… He was very close, so close that if I were to sigh he would have been buffeted against the blue sea shell tiles, so close I could see his little black spider tongue licking the tips of his mousy brown feelers. Began again his perilous journey toward the shower head. But why, I asked, there’s nothing up there. Everyone is trying to get somewhere. Even the spiders in my house are restless. He got a bit further, before falling again, which mid-fall it turned into a neat eight-legged leap, possibly for my naked sake. I saw right through his spider facade. Fifteen minutes later he had still not given up climbing, and nor had I watching. It became a battle of wills.

The spider won. Last time I checked he was still there, striving for the unattainable shower head.

One determined spider.

Everyone went out.

My father donned a navy suit and licked what is left of his hair over his forehead. He leaves the house with one eye partly obscured. And a bow-tie. He went out wearing a bow-tie. A spotted blue bow-tie. The parental unit has a busier social life than I do at the moment. (It hurts to say that.) Tonight they are at the ball. Next week my father is sashaying over to Europe in search of his ancestral wooden plaque. Mami is meeting her ancient Oxford Poly lecturer in London, or maybe Kaffe Fassett, I forget which. I may be making my own birthday cake.

Len gets back from Being Out and reads through old sent messages on the home phone, a new-fangled multi-tasking machine which, from time to time, emits ear-piercing angry beeps combined with the flashing of a small LED, like a miniature police car light. Only red. It is a very high-maintenance machine, a bit like having a sixth pet. (Not counting the poor neglected fish. Maud died a long time ago, and Harold eventually floated to a fishy upside-down death after an accident with the filter.)

Sitting in the balmy dark of the garden, recovering from an onslaught of emotionally harmful undertakings, i.e. the watching of a heart-rending ripping apart of two people impaled together on a metal pole, followed too closely by the making of a list of everything I have to do over the weekend, and then the two weeks following this weekend followed by everything until the sixth week from now has finished, which is the exact amount of time I still have to get out of bed every morning. It was a very long list. Cue blind gaspy ambling into the fridge door. I never got the whole brown paper bag thing.

On the other side of the garden fence, Nicky the Neighbour is murmuring softly to her new boyfriend through a fog of candle smoke and flickers, surrounded by lolloping bunny rabbits with inordinately long, trip-hazard ears. I watched them frolicking from my attic window earlier, these impromptu honeymoon acquisitions. The combination of barely audible sweet nothings and the ba-thump ba-thump of rabbits tripping over themselves and their ears is almost soothing.

Len wanders out. I read your old sent mails, he informs me, and sits down, topless. I tell him to work on it. His aversion to shirts may become a problem in later life. Naw, he says, and explains the concept behind Being Out. At some stage someone should maybe start worrying about him. I tell him kicking over garden fences of the elderly is not nice, and that running from police will never catch on as a team sport. He shrugs.

Sup, anyway??! he asks, the intonation of voice an invasion of question marks and exclamation marks shaken about in a little green cloth scrabble bag, pulled out at random and laid down haphazardly. Is it him?? Want me to beat him up? !?!? You love him? He love you??????!?? The remainder of this barrage of questions is neatly drowned out by the sound of a garden hoover. Who hoovers their garden at midnight? Who hoovers gardens full stop, other than professional garden hooverers? We listen for a while, Len throws a cigarette butt into the devastated shrubbery of our overgrown garden, in the vague direction the dying avocado tree, and I quench a bubble of panic.

Pushing his pesto and mozzarella pizza into the oven, I think, right now, the parental unit is drinking their smuggled-in alcohol and devouring cheesy party nibbles. Possibly dancing. For my father’s sake, I hope not.

I am bad at living alone. I know that without having to try it out.

My father has taken up his crusade to save The Couch. It is not all that dissimilar to the crusade of last year. He is adopting very similar techniques; once again he has martyred himself to the cause of A Clean Surface. Please, he says hoarsely when I get home, flagging, my sun burnt shoulders little beacons of red warning light in an ocean of pale skin, please… and waves almost hopelessly in the direction of a spotless Couch. I admit to him that the burnt sienna pattern comes as a nice surprise.

So it should, he says weakly, this took me all day. He clutches his back and hobbles to the kitchen drawer in search of paracetamol. The entire kitchen unit collapses with a wooden crunch onto his left foot.

SCHEISS VERDAMMTER MIST, he screams. He is a mere crispy, frazzled shell of his former self. German swearing is a tell-tale sign of last-strawdom. I realise at this point that the existence of The Couch (once a dumping ground, always a dumping ground) is a very real, very tangible, very dust-free threat to his precarious sanity.

So I am not surprised that when Chrisie appears at the foot of the staircase looking forlorn, hamster cage cradled in her arms, he leaps onto The Couch and stands with his arms outstretched and knees slightly bent. He reminds me of Dave The Mad Gym Instructor standing on his wooden milk crate, about to embark on a vigorous set of thigh squats. Oh no, he says, no no no. He shakes his head and smiles grimly, the grin of a man on a merciless mission. No THINGS. Absolutely no THINGS.

But they’re hot up there, she wails, and indeed, they lie panting heavily on their furry backs, taking turns at feebly lifting their heads up to the water bottle. She ducks under an outstretched arm, anyway, they’re not THINGS! They have a NAME! Fatty One and Fatty Two became The Fatties, and in their old age have become indistinguishable and ugly. The inevitable tussle ends badly, with my father lying spread-eagle and limbs akimbo in a heap of sawdust and nibble-sized chunks of old toilet paper rolls. I have to laugh, for a long, long time.

So it goes that we humour Couch Militancy. In my father’s presence, Len drops to his knees with a magnifying glass and picks laboriously specks of dust from The Couch with a pair of tweezers. I recreate the complex creative geography of my revision notes (almost a masterpiece, with its subtle multi-layering and cross-referencing) on the living room carpet. The Fatties, when my father is home, are banished to the cold cellar where they squeak sadly into the darkness, and Mami’s sock-sorting activities no longer take place on The Couch (no longer take place, full stop).

Fingers crossed, this is temporary regression.

Read through old blog, marveled at both eloquence and relative amusingness. Caught a whiff of nostalgia.

One year ago today I counted down exams to go and shielded my head from a rain of flying ring binders with my mouth very very close to the telephone mouthpiece, back pressed into the ridges of a radiator and feet braced against the door. My father thinks one day he might move his chess pieces over the checkered pattern of the couch, one move per day, playing against himself.

Two years ago today I counted down exams to go and the strands of my hair left behind on the pillow.

Not a lot has changed. In between things I stand on the threshold of the kitchen and draw circles on the tiles with my toes until I’m unstuck with the irritated flapping of tea towels. T. says, Lucy has been sitting exams every year since she was fourteen. Lucy is the unattainable 100%. He describes how the yellow post-notes adorned her pastel walls, fluttering in the kind of summer breeze we get only in the exam months. I ask him how he knows what colour her bedroom walls were, and he says, it’s platonic. Lucy is studying at Oxford. He talks about jumping through hoops a lot, and Lucy.

Decided to resurrect the past tense. Made a decisive effort. Picked through a history essay gluing -ed to the lonely short words. Concluded writing about the past more effective in past tense. Crossed out all that’s and is’s and and’s scribbled over indents crossed out full stops stopleavingspacessoitlookslikeiwroteholdingmybreath.

Made a string of resolute resolutions, in the past tense.

In capital black biro letters on my left foot it says RIGHT. And on the right, LEFT. Put your best foot forward. As if we’re not confused enough.

Everything is suspended again, least of all, lastly, my shirt on the line and a checkered tea towel caught in the branches of the birch tree, stolen, dug up in the dead of one night with a trowel and ten split fingernails.

Counting down the weeks and days backwards. Exploring the roof of your mouth with no torch, not sure which way the right way up, meeting teeth and tongue barriers in the bottomless topless dark.

And a bloody trace of determined weak nails between the serrations of rib cage, from when we were angry or I was restless, flattened under a close suffocating ceiling. Or maybe just bored, or dreaming.

J -

I pulled a bum muscle in excitement.

I do not usually do memes, but as I was tagged by Imogen, and as this is a book meme…

1. Pick up the nearest book.
Here I encountered difficulties. I am sitting at my desk. Directly above the computer monitor there is a shelf. Not wanting to go in search of a measuring device, I closed my eyes, spun three turns on my chair and let my index finger decide for me - Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. This was one of those books I read way before anyone thought I should have done. I was maybe ten, eleven. I read a lot of Atwood; I went through an ‘Atwood phase’. Mami’s friends would look from me curled up with my head submerged between pages, to Mami and back again, disapprovingly. With Cat’s Eye, when I was nine, they shook their heads and said, if she was my daughter… Same with Alice Sebold’s Lucky. In my last year at primary school, my Year Six form teacher - tall, blonde, shattered my naive teachers-are-not-real-people illusion - confiscated a cold-blooded murder mystery from my locker, and read to me with loaded intonation the first page, in which the victim is found at the bottom of a cement mixer on a construction site.

2. Open to page 123.
Fifth page of chapter fifteen. I flicked through the pages before and after; none of it familiar other than the disjointed first person narrative, which could pretty much be half of anything by Atwood.

3. Find the fifth sentence.
If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do.

4. Post the next three sentences.
But how did they evolve, where did the first one come from, they weren’t an invasion from another planet, they were terrestrial. How did we get bad. For us when we were small the origin was Hitler, he was the great evil, many-tentacled, ancient and indestructible as the Devil.

She is writing about Americans. After having met some who killed a heron, or did something disgraceful with fish.

5. Tag five people.
I can’t walk past a person reading a book in a public place without a surreptitious glance at the cover. Some woman engrossed in a paperback as she floated awol into the centre of a cloud on a miserable day in the middle of last winter collided with a lampost. She looked up and apologised profusely before drifting on with a finger pressed into the spine. I did some remarkably speedy yet unobtrusive catching up. What is it, I asked over her shoulder, and please read me the fifth sentence on page one hundred and twenty three. She enveloped the mystery book in the folds of her roomy duffel jacket protectively and scurried away into the cloud, astutely avoiding further collisions.

Anyway, your go.
Useless Rants
No Plan B
Ziv Catbee
Jonathon Mercer
Jules (in any shape or blog form)

Mami tells me he seriously thought of -

and for one heart-stopping second I really thought she might say killing himself, he thought of killing himself of killing of stopping being there -

She watches the shape my thoughts make of my eyebrows. On some days we read each other like this.

(Yesterday when - fire engine shirt, shoulder length hair, Hawaiian wooden beads - drifted past in a haze of aftershave reminiscent of sultry summer days and ice creams at the fountain in wet water-bombed T-shirts, she caught my eye from across the room and we swapped silent thoughts until the corners of her lips began twitching with ill contained hilarity.)

Not that, she says, without dismissing my unspoken suggestion with a laugh. It is not so ridiculous a thought, considering.

- institutionalising her.

I haven’t considered this. Institutionalising, an ugly word. I wonder what it would mean. An institute. I think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And Girl, Interrupted.

How serious a thought? And how was it said? I imagine him weeping with his face pressed into the double-glazed glass walls of his homemade prison. Muttered into the pillow, at a dreadful 3am. An ear-piercing painting of ugly words when she refuses again. To be. To do. Everything. And nothing.

Mami says, He rowed very fast across the lake and decided against it.

Thank God.

I want to kill your hamsters.

Please stop leaving them at my door. Like abandoned babies in moses baskets on doorsteps. Only noisier. And smellier.