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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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.

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.

a sea of forrest

Wanted to say something about my for once relatively impressive anger drowning out Bob Dylan, and cooking pasta in your mouth, and also Edinburgh  last year, walking all day for three days, and harnassing energy to power lightbulbs, also my mean chicken fillet, and the Cat Woman’s dynamism, but made the mistake of checking my mail and then ambling over to my pigeon hole and I could actually spend THE REST OF THE WEEK reading everything for tomorrow’s supervision. If there were some parallel universe in which my supervisor and his hideous orange-brown Simon Cowell trousers with the yellow-brown pinstripes culminating in an unavoidable, unmissable, a screaming-out-for-attention triangle (one could say arrow) at his crotchal area did not exist, that would be very nice. Also if in this parallel universe I had not walked in on him in the bathroom, that would be even nicer.

coffeecoffeecoffeePROPLUS ANYONE?

 

Anyway so yes. I won’t talk about those things. Ben Johnson and the million and two people who wrote things about his green world and his corpulence are whispering seductive things into my earlobe. Hell yes.

J rings me. It sounds windy where she is, or else she is speaking from under the duvet.

 

I’M AT THE SEASIDE! she shouts. I have not been to the seaside for years and years. Mami used to make wholemeal cheese baps, and we ate them with peanut butter and flew a pink and blue kite, and one year C fell from a roundabout and stopped breathing.

 

I LOVE YOU!

 

I am sitting in Nero with A reading ‘Apology For Poetry’, and the man behind us is talking very loudly about his trip to India, to a blonde woman with a mop of frizzy hair. She sits right on the edge of her seat and clings onto his every word. She fills every gap with breathy laughter.

 

EXAMS ARE OVER AND I CAN SEE THE IRISH SEA! I think I hear seagulls behind the duvet-rustling, roaring sea. Can you IMAGINE what I’d have done if I’d missed the flight, stuck in  New Delhi with no money, hahaha! The blonde woman throws back her head and laughs with her eyes shut for an inordinately long time.

 

THE TIDE IS OUT! I imagine J tottering across a stretch of wet sand in inappropriate footwear, crunching shells underfoot.

 

COME SOON, she shouts, I WILL TAKE YOU TO THE SEASIDE!

Between sieving eyelashes from rice pudding, learning to juggle with soft oranges and doing a little bit of pitiful weeping into literary criticism in Nero, I find I have very little time. Ocassionally I meet Dylan Moran’s gaze of cutting disdain shining unto me from my pinboard. I am developing new and drastic procrastination techniques – for example I have begun taking daily stock of the vegetable situation in the fridge; examine the black bits of my bananas, peel icey carrots from the back wall, and count my Sainsbury’s Basics onions, which tend to fall apart when I tentatively touch their wrinkled skins. I ring J, who tells me she has slept with her flat mate, that he has a girlfriend who is also her flatmate, that she has become a social outcast overnight, and that she is running out of money. I duly make noises of suprise and empathetic outrage. Also, I have had a fight with the woman behind the bar. (My empty capuccino cup made the table look messy.) My director of studies writes ‘sentences!’ pointedly on my essay, by which I think he means they are not very good.

procrastination

Things I have not had time or space or finger energy to write about since I got back to uni are the footprints with the four toes leading from the shower and down the corridor to the door of my room. Very suspect.

 

Pleasure in Bacon. There is very very little, only he did say ‘some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested’, which is fitting since I have been only tentatively licking of late. Real bacon I haven’t had since back home. No one here understands the avocado-bacon toastie combo.

 

Visited the University Library for the first time and got lost somewhere on the fifth floor of the south wing between heavy navy-blue journals on the economics of farming. The UL is a paper maze guarded by fierce guarders of books stalking the aisles, the corridors, the toilets and tearooms, hiding little scanners up their sleeves and saying aha very quietly into their bristling moustaches apropos of nothing. Fiercely.

 

I bet underneath the many onionskin layers of impenetrabe, invisible armour you also are human, and you have bubblebaths and weep into tubs of haagen daaz and drink coffee with your friends and wake up with your hair plastered against your forehead or with pillow imprints on your forearms. And you will walk not stalk, sometimes. Enjoy the smell of cut grass maybe and perhaps a long time ago you once just for a laugh or because no one was watching at that precise moment, or perhaps because it was dark out, you took a running  jump and landed on top of a crisp autumn leaf mountain.

 

Ridiculous! You sleep standing up in your flinty grey suit and for lunch you eat the silent fears of trembling subordinates.

How to cook curly kale and fritter away valuable minutes of the day

I am back in the concrete block which lurks at the outskirts of the town of spirals. Witnessed a brief interlude in what I thought was the fixed and unchangeable lengthiness of the bar woman’s face. I have never seen her smile before. When we make eye contact my legs quake. Darling, she called me, as she took £1.40 from me for my bowl of cereal. Half an hour later she all but spits into my cappuchino. It looks as though in order to accomodate this window of pleasantness I may have to adjust my breakfast time this term to 10:30 – 11:00am.

I never wroted

An ode to your little toe, and all those other things I never oded for fear of your scrupulous eye finding out the cracks in my creative foundations, the faultlines in my fictions, and discovering that what you are reading here is in fact (not?) yourself, ill-disguised and painted purple with sweeps of alliteration and pointillistic fragmented letters of your name in capitals where they should not be.

 

See I guess I always thoughted and maybe at times still thinkit that you are possibly the most complicated person I have ever met, like the knottiest knot in a three mile stretch of string or those four page equations I chose English Literature for never having to unravel… I guess what I am trying to say is that the knottier the knot in a three mile stretch of string, the greater the sense of achievement after unpicking. (I am not sure I want to unentwine you, however, and leave you straightened out but crinkly.)

 

There is letter space for the elevators of my nightmares and the common at your doorstep and the violet colour you stole from the garden, and possibly even your little toe and the hardened honey on the shelf, but mind the cracks, the paragraph breaks in which the you from the bit before morphs into a you which might be my father or even Dodo the Budgie.

 

(I would write you an ode but I am not the most poetic of people and you would laugh and then run away very quickly. Perhaps once I have reinvented myself as Philippa, the Pip of the neon fishnet stocking, of never saying never maybe I guess, the Pip of the carrot stick and the Pip who says no to the curdled butter, the Pip of the hidden musical talent and authorial genius, the brashest Pip in the apple core…)

I went back, my legs shaking a little bit.  My words ran into and over the top of one another, alphabet soup into the bowl of the room. I said like and intense too much, and only just in time stopped myself from putting my feet up on the coffee table. From my bottomless bag of diversion tricks I pulled a packets of Halls, unwrapped one very very slowly and tormented the paper as she spoke. I used to be a chronic tissue-shredder. I remember being very excited about her baby. She said, when I used to go off to Woolworths on my own, that’s when they stopped talking to me.  

 

I left feeling elated and sixteen and stupid. B said over her hot chocolate, you love tupperware too much. And then she told me a secret and I told her a secret, and I felt sixteen even more, like the next thing we might do is camp out at the bottom of her garden and make up games with scraps of paper and a stubby Ikea pencil and talk about boys. Did we do this when we were sixteen? Maybe eleven, twelve, thirteen. I don’t remember what we used to say about them, but I know we used to picture them vividly, perhaps a few gardens down, making their own top-ten lists. What do you look for in a boy? Number nine, good forearms.

 

I haven’t slept in a tent for years, not since truth or dare went wrong, and B talks as if she might get married next month. J fucks and tells over facebook, or else we are witness and invited to join. (No thank you, I say at five in the morning, I have known you too long.) And if not we end up with our heads under her kitchen tables, woken by the cleaner at 8.30am. I ring her and she tells me she is in bed with Specimen A. We don’t talk for long, she tells me about pills and MDMA at some warehouse rave and I am a little bit scared and her voice is crackly with tension and I can hear Specimen A breathing.

Doggerel is ironic highbrow, rhyme clanking, says my father. Stop me, I could go on for years. He’s talking about Heine, or I think he is, when he started pacing I stopped listening. Doggerel catches at my ears.

 

I spent a lot of my time in London both in bed and on the tube. Not at the same time, however I did sleep on the tube, brief uncomfortable bursts, my head on a shoulder dreaming of string. I have two invisible bruises, one on each hip, from the slats of the futon bed. A only disappears in the dead of the night once, to be where the wild things are maybe, trees sprouting from the living room carpet and A in a little white cat outfit (is this how it happens in the book?), only I think I dream this, because when I wake up he is saying things into my back like look at the snow. I am still dreaming, of cat people putting out fires, and anyway I am not a morning person which I should maybe have tattoed into my back. So I missed the snow but not the cold. This morning we watched the rooftops, and I imagined falling off.

 

I have Tamsin Greig’s autograph (and her love) in purple pen on a little corner of an old envelope. I do not want to think of what I said to her or how inanely I grinned. We are at the actor’s bar after Oedipus at the National. A little man who insists he has met me before says, she is so thin, did you see her WRISTS and how THIN they were, did you WATCH HER WRISTS as she wrote? I run away to a Latin bar and drown my embarrassment in a pina colada.

happy new year baby, we could probably fix it if we clean it up all day

I am not making New Year’s Resolutions. They came with a warning on the radio, may cause mental damage. Last New Year’s Eve being almost certainly less that a year ago, I remember exactly what my resolutions were. We escaped from the party for a while (everyone asked about you this year), the kids scribbled on the cream bedroom walls with wax crayons and we got high in the black on the hill above an invisible lake. I counted them off on my fingers walking back through a deserted campus. I’m not sure how big an effect these seven promises I made out loud (and the few secret silent ones) had on my mental wellbeing. If by this time next year I am not doing anything such as sitting in a draughty attic room with my head wrapped in cling film, then this will be an improvement and it is irrefutable that the resolutions were to blame.

 

This year I was the sole young person floundering in a sea of the inebriated middle-aged.When Big Ben said so I ate twelve grapes, one on each chime. The Spanish did this in 1909 to solve the problem of a grape surplus, and are still doing it today. Everyone got very excited about this and forgot to swallow the grape from the previous chime before shoving in the next one with reckless abandon, and after the twelfth they fell about spluttering and spitting out little bits of grape skin. I did not like this very much, the darker hours of my childhood years having been spent perfecting the art of Magically Compressing Time Using Nothing More Than A Single Grape And My Two Wobbly Front Teeth. Stage one was pulling the membrane from the fleshy part of a large green grape with nails and teeth, which could take up the better part of an afternoon depending on size and ripeness, and stage two was keeping the remains under my tongue for as long as possible, testing both my willpower and the defenses of the naked grape. Those few seconds of what was intended to be joyous symbolic grape consumption were overshadowed by a remaining shred of childish ritual. (DO NOT SWALLOW THE CLOTHED GRAPE, a booming voice from above commanded.)

 

My father, momentarily blinded by the champagne cork, tripped over the coal shuttle. I flung myself at his ankles, and it was only by a mere two inches and as a result of my quick reflexes and sacrificial dive that he was saved from a firey toasting in the open fire.

 

This did not actually happen. I wish it had; it would have been immeasurably more exciting than his waxing lyrical about his new FiloFax and the London tube map inserts he bought for it from WHSmiths for £4.50.

All the way to India this summer to stalk your sexyness. Yes?

I have a friend who got very excited about this and jumped up and down in the Rimmel aisle of Boots. Yes yes yes! she squeaked.

Sweating, wrapped in rising waves of wet heat, kettle steam from damp grass. When I move, the hot green and the mud beneath folds around me, sucking mulchily at my fingers and the space between my toes. With the noise a tumbler makes, pulled upside-down from suddy washing water, a perceptible space in time and sound and movement in which gravity grapples pressure. Shored up immovable on the perameters of a stagnating body of net-shrouded water, steaming clorophyll tangles of algae and blanket weed and nylon, blanketting stupified pond life.

 

Some time ago a blonde couple tripped past, naked, falling over their feet and each other’s, tearing the choking vines from a solid tree trunk. Not with purpose, a coincidental brushing past, a grasping, a simply not letting go and a simply not stopping tripping, sheer momentum carrying them inches past the pliable hollow from which my goldfish-silent mouth formed little round ‘o’s. Then they were gone, leaving this blinking tree and my unblinking eyes and their twenty toe dents in the mud.

 

Elsewhere girls meet boys with beautiful crinkly heavy-lidded eyes and curling lashes and writers create ink and paper versions of their mothers, curtains pulled over smeared single-glazed panes for thirty-four years. Prettier and more purple than real life, these mothers behind their curtains live up on the top shelf and never say you shouldn’t have said that, talk to your father, brush your teeth. Put that down.

Someone other than Christian Bale  should be here to witness the curious wild fennel smell emanating from my person. It happens every time I move my head, an overpowering waft akin to that of the bulbous stem is released into the biting cold of my room. It mingles with the draught seeping in from invisible holes punctuating the window frame, lingers for a second, dissipates. (Fennel, apparently, is a member of the parsley family. I bet the parsley family does not subject itself to the annual torture of the fraught family board game featuring elves which are in actual fact little painted nobsules the size of my little fingernail.)

briefly breaking hiatus

I opened my eyes half-expecting to see the naked twigs of the birch white-frosted. No such luck, only thing different this morning was J not flinging herself starshape across my double bed, and my father doing manic hoovering in his underwear to Jimmi Hendrix. He has been drastically weakened by a bout of man flu; the empty space on the shelf at the supermarket where the peppercorns should be reduces him almost to tears.

Standing up sitting down and even sleeping, dreaming, you’re a  slave, and underwater, dancing in the dark, washing your hair. To something your body won’t live without, so either you’re a slave or you’re dead. Walking very fast around the block does not make you free. Smoking into air vents, at the bottom of the garden, in someone else’s kitchen, does not make you free. Not moving to the other side of the world, not starving yourself, not sleeping all day, not cutting your hair, not coming back after a long time, not New Year’s Resolutions.

Show me your teeth, he said, smile and show me your teeth. If there had not been a sticky bar stool standing  between us he might have squeezed my cheeks with his fingers, forced flesh into tooth. He might have pinched my nose between index finger and thumb, embedded in resisting cartlage the hidden tip of my nose stud, and waited for me to come gasping up for air and smile, gritted.

 

I smiled. He nodded and disappeared into rhythm and blues and sinuating sambuca-stained people.

 

A long time ago I won twenty pounds for my smile. I played mute courtier to a sleeping queen, and whilst the other courtiers shuffled and yawned into the spotlights I bared my teeth. By night I pulled tight my lipstick red smile and gestured submissively from arabesque par terre; by day I limped into school and inked over the capitals SCIENCE with a violent black ink nib, which tore right through to the first pristine page, before limping back home to have my hair scraped and plastered back.

I feel D’s gluey eyes on me, and when I look up he’s looking back. At my elbow she is silently bristling. He’s saying something about an eccentric who spent his life in a bath tub. But I’m boring you, D pulls up short after he has talked for a long time, shooting daggers with his eyes above the little potatoes. Boiled in skins. In their pyjamas, he says as he serves them up.

 

Ha ha ha, L says, and we roll our eyes across the table. You can’t joke to save your life, L continues, ignoring the slur in D’s voice and the uncomfortable stretch of his lips.

 

How about this for an annecdote! he says, slapping the table. It is not so much a question. He tells us about a colleague, and how his woman-stalker found him working in a library in Glasgow. What are you doing here, she screeched from between shelves, and his colleague replied, this is a library.

 

I am mentally undressing the potatoes on my plate.

 

His gluey eyes again, on each of us.

 

And how he saw them together on a train platform opposite his, conversing exuberantly, and how he waved and…

 

…they waved back? L asks sardonically, his voice dripping boredom.

 

The palm of a hand on the table. Exactly. A pregnant pause, in which we should be laughing if we want to avoid bringing down the thing floating around the light fixture.

 

He embarks upon another annecdote, one about the fishnet stockings of the woman-stalker, and dangerously I do not laugh or even look up from my potatoes, and she is still bristling and L is questioning him, so you saw them on a platform, and they were talking and you waved and they waved back?

 

Which is an irrelevant question, L should be laughing.

 

Bristle bristle.

 

Between the fishnet stockings and the skipping jive track, I feel nauseous.

 

Bombed again, he howls, pressing his fingers into his eyelids and writhing into his plate. Bombed again! and the thing floating around the light fixture smashes down.

I remember this man from years ago, a sallow slivver of suit and stubble then. Now ill-defined, blurry around the edges. A heaviness of the jowels pulls his face chest-wards. He lets the knocker fall from too great a height, as he used to, and I jump from my skin on the other side of the door. I’d forgotten he existed until now, standing on the doorstep with a blond child in his arms. (They kick empty milk cartons around the park on Sundays, he says. I picture him in his too-tight polo T-shirt.) It has high Polish cheekbones and round saucer eyes, enjoys snowmen pulling torn fingernails from the nail bed bellyflopping into living room carpet, and reminds me of Creatures.

not the same you don’t worry

Today I found some new words by someone I had forgotten about, and it made me happy, despite having lost some other words. It is not like I lost them exactly, more like they have been forced into hiding, or you hid them from me. The words I found were about feeling powerful kicking pigeons, which reminded me of that time I watched you kick a pigeon, or maybe someone told me about you kicking pigeons, and how I was a little bit shocked but secretly more proud.

 

I like imagining the beautiful people you fall in love with. I would write a story about them if it wouldn’t freak me out, imagining you sleeping with people. It would be Nabokov’s A Nursery Tale, only your imaginary harem would not be imaginary and you would want an uneven number of beautiful people.

 

I am freaking myself out imagining your unimaginary harem.

 

Like watching your step-by-step smoky-espresso-eyes trick (despite not knowing you) also made me happy, as did watching Breathless and Jean Seberg, and then knowing I have nothing to wake up for tomorrow, so I may as well not sleep.

 

I talked to you on the phone today, I realised everyone is getting a little bit older, and next time we look up everyone you grew up with and I grew up with will be grown up, apart from maybe us. Everyone needs a little distance from themselves, so maybe if we swap places?

 

Someone said don’t look at yourself, or if you must do so only in sections. Today I had my hair cut, and if I look at a ten-by-ten centimetre section encompassing a tiny bit of chin, a tiny bit of neck and tiny bit of hair, I look like Louise Brooks. So that was good advice, thank you.

 

You have the bluest eyes of anyone I have ever met, I almost called you Micky Blue Eyes by accident today, thankfully my fingers found the delete button just in time. I don’t know anyone called Micky, don’t worry.

We’re not together, he says, flushed. We’re not. We’re best friends.

I peer at him over the rim of my stolen starbucks mug. He feels my silent appraisal.

 

Come on, he says feebly. Adam and Eve were best friends.

 

I power-walk to J.’s house. I have not seen her for two and a half months. Her father is not there, and I collapse into the couch with relief. When I go swimming I see his bearded face bobbing before me, even when I close my eyes. I would like to forget I ever found myself with his liverspotted hands on my leg, breathing toast and coffee into my face. J. kisses me when I walk in. She has very little hair left. I tell her her neck looks vulnerable, please grow it back, but she is a model now and gets paid to have herself subjected to hair experiments.

 

I ask her how she’s doing. I feel better being me, she says, and tells me about the Chinese guy she brought back to her flat, without a name. She has largely abandoned this old part of her. She is bisexual now, she says, writes 2,1 essays, goes to cello concerts and is never alone. This makes me feel a little better; we are not bad at being alone but social butterflies. She shows me the homemade notches on her belt. I have missed worrying about her.

This is the loneliest place in the world out of term time. I’ve packed ten weeks into my suitcase and peeled Venice from the walls. Last time I opened the fridge I found myself face-to-face with a wizened, yellowing block of hacked cheese and the crumbling remains of a Christmas pudding.

There is a lot of music I can no longer listen to, and places I avoid thinking of. You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me; collect your novel petals for the stem.  I don’t smoke waiting for the bus. (Everything is within walking distance.) I did not go to the fancy dress party wrapped in a toga. I do not drink Jack Daniels and coke, spoon peanut butter from a jar. (I don’t believe I ever did that.) If I turned up on your doorstep, would you let me in? Natalie Portman’s face hurts, so did dragging the bags of the last to leave past the porters’ lodge and saying good bye at the car.

I never say, I think I should leave. This is because I never want to leave. I have fed people too much of myself; when I cry I don’t have to point at the black whistling sky, say I have eyes bigger than my stomach. I am bad at being aloof, it is hard to be so when verging on the vertically challenged, my gaze involuntarily finds itself encountering yours. If I were a head taller my eyes would perhaps skim your big hair and find the greasy white-tack stains on the wall for which I might get fined. I am just as bad now as I was ten weeks ago at untangling my words. I have not read Dawkins, nor do I want to. I cannot ride a bike without endangering myself and others, and I would still like to be sitting on that train.

Term finished two days ago. I am completely uninspired; my dreams when I have them are less shiny, and my thoughts travel in dull, straight lines. For every undergraduate left for home, Churchill is invaded by ten conference guests. The weekend papers have been shredded by the children of conference guests, fashioned into dubious three-legged paperchain dogs. Those which have survived are being, as I type, trampled underfoot to the eager footshufflings  ‘Home For Christmas’ and other such nasty tunes have excited. I had planned on spending the next six days reading every book recommended by famous people in the Guardian Review; it transpires the dog of a conference guest has subjected this part of the paper to a slobbery half-mastication, and I must read Paradise Lost and Utopia and Tudor court poetry, and write an essay on Seamus Heaney’s bogs.

It has not yet snowed in Cambridge, despite the tap water in my room clinking forth in little icicles.

On the contrary. Drawing what may or may not have been a Hitler bunny on your pint bottle of semi-skimmed milk does not make me think twice about drinking it.

Quick quick, before the woman with her scalding aluminium teacup returns. I have become, unwittingly, reluctantly, a mind-stalker, I will start with the top layer and work my way down. In other words, I do not remember who said this, I want to kiss your brain. (I have become, just as reluctantly, a word-stealer.)

I though of a very beautiful love story earlier, it involved someone finding your lost (last) crumb of sanity and slipping it into your pigeon hole. (You see umbrella flocks when it is not raining and press your nose into window panes. Only ever when there is someone sitting close on the other side staring into the milky depths of their cappuchinos, frappucinos, chai tea lattes.) I don’t get much further than this; someone always steals this crumb before you get to it.

I am not supposed to be here, I think.

Or this one where she is always there, you think maybe she lives there, in this cafe. Ha, you think, she sleeps under the table with the day’s papers scrunched beneath her head. And when she wakes she steals coffee beans and steams stolen milk. Only, again, I never get past the bit where you realise with a flash of lightening clarity that she must think the same of you, you always being there when she is. So next time you come wearing a false moustache and it is the moustache she starts talking to, and the disguise she falls in love with.

She is back, her footfalls shake my chair.

There is a monster in my bed. It talks about conceptual mice and carries my mushrooms in a brown paper bag.

I am told that nothing much has changed. On the ‘home front’, as they call it, without much trace of irony. The avocado tree is still standing, last year’s Christmas tree is three inches taller, and that is all. There is a me-shaped vacuum at the dinner table. Perhaps they throw wine glasses at lampshades still, I shall check for red wine stains when I get back. 

It is bitterly cold, so cold that when I wake I could dance before my steamed-up windows naked with the curtains pulled back and no-one woulkd see. If I wanted.

squirrels are people too

Let’s get married today, when everyone else is doing the same and we have wedding dresses on our minds (she twisted her engagement ring around her finger, wrung her hands together without thinking much about how she sat or what she did with her furrowed brow, her scrunched up shoulders. As she talked about how easy it is to read the unconscious.)

Tomorrow we will have forgotten I got down on one knee and she didn’t have the heart to say no. And if we wake up remembering we’ll pretend we don’t. Remember what people have said. (Twenty four and it ruined her life. Or: How much more difficult it is to pretend twenty years later we never happened. The second time round there is no white dress.)

If we refuse eye contact it will be very easy to forget I got down on one knee and she said yes.

(Perhaps next week she will arrive wearing a veil and we still won’t ask, who’s the lucky guy.)

WORK. (goddamnit.)

The leaden circles dissolved in the air

November 17th happens, my besocked feet foraying blindly where no shoeless foot has forayed before. And we write semi-colon poetry on library slips which say on the reverse side PLEASE LEAVE.

Every cigarette is a transitional object

I have begun involuntarily psychoanalysing myself. I am sending home photocopies of good mess/bad mess theories and the depressive infantile position. And why it is detrimental the parent does not interfer.

Also I never want to see another carrot in cake form again. This is something I may not recover from.

Her voice a warm squeeze down the line. She is sending me her black dress, she says, which booshes out at the waist.

I stood outside a coffee shop today opposite Kings, and wondered what it would be like to be the sleek pinstripe woman with the plum hair sweeping through the gates. What does she eat for breakfast? Does she have blistered heels, a French accent an espresso machine a matching sleek pinstripe partner? Does she live in a varnished wooden attic space amongst white objects varying in degrees of matte?

My father asks, are you well? Remember. Three things. Dress warm, sleep well, eat. He sounds kind of tired. He tells me his synapses are fizzling out. I’m not entirely sure what he means by this, but remember what happened last time I put the words man flu out there.

toeing the line

I lock myself out and hear voices in the stairwell, my own replicated down the line. Standing where I am and looking down into an angular spiral of cold brick corners there is nobody but the flitting shadow of the professor who lives one floor down with his suspiciously slim briefcase and grim post-box mouth. I say he looks like Wiesler from The Lives of Others, and A says maybe he has your room wired up.

Talking of margins, after scrubbing my sink I will mark mine out for you in black marker pen.

 

I would like to go home now and unsuspend people from their lemon jelly prisons.