I know it’s not a word as such.
But those two letters, as night-time vowels, flint start my colour-scope.
And sometimes, a sighed OE is a sky-wide and gentle tenderness. Exhaled sweetness spilled out. Other times, OE, tungsten-tipped, laser pierced to cauterize sentimentality and inspire lush submission. Swallowed up, frame-dragged. Always a midnight darkness. Never black, but deep dark blue. A cerulean blue so intense that I have to really close my eyes to see it.
And in velvet blue near blackness from eyes crushed tight, the stars come easily.
Thomas lived on a farm when he was small.
He loved to spin around, coat cape-flapping,
He never wanted to be a farmer though.
When I was small, I doodled hurricanes a lot.
I thought in colours quite often
And dreamed of living on a farm.
Now we are older and everything has lead up to this moment.
We swap memories over drink,
His Irish lilt centimetres from my mouth.
Our eyes do most of the work,
And so I get to kiss an almost farmer, and
He gets spun by a sometime hurricane.
It’s a win-win equation.
There are days, when the things we perceive to be normal, twist and shape shift into something different.
Not so long ago was one such day.
It and I began normally, with the sun and myself rising meekly pale but non-the-less there. Tea brewed-drunk, drunk-brewed in fuzz haired stupor while I stared into space and right in front of my nose. Nothing seemed so different and yet I had an underlying edginess of impending doom. But in a micro-cosmic sense, of bulbs shattering and rugs tripping and knives cutting fingers rather than of world imploding armageddon.
The rooks left their nests in the tall trees, like they always do, and I looked up at them, as I often do, sometimes to say, take me with you, other times to say, fly off free. This time I just looked up. I wasn’t sure which way I wanted to go. I got ready, as I normally do and was late, as I normally am. I’ve been told my lateness is almost a compulsion, but I wouldn’t go along with that. It’s just that one thing seems to lead to another .
I got to the shop around 11 o’clock. Opened up, put a few things on the pavement outside. Put the kettle on, put on the kettle. Everything was the same as ever. Sort of. The same as ever. But still, there was this feeling of unease. To the back of me, a shadow on my shoulder making me want to spin around. Like the ghost of one of those rooks, tangled-caught, flapping in my hair. I’m sure the old knives and steels and ice axes hanging from the walls of the shop glinted brighter. The Jesso faced puppet looked more deranged. Eyes flying. Flying eyes. My ankles were more wobbly than usual. I felt that something different was going to happen. Different today and soon.
At around 1 o’clock the shop was empty. I’d just eaten a salad sandwich , some of which had squished free and trickled mayonnaise down my dress. Nothing so unusual there then. I was drinking a cup of tea and contemplating the hideous wind- up baby in front of me on the counter. Made in Japan, circa 1940, 3 inches tall and cheap thin celluloid. Wearing a flowery cotton dress and bonnet with a wind-up key in its side. A wind-up key. When wound up it crawled along on its hands and knees and wiggled its bum. Gruesomely kitsch. I didn’t expect to sell it. Even the man who buys toys and games, who comes in every week, watery eyed and thin -tall, had shuddered.
But , anyway, the door opened with a sharp-bright ring .Two ladies stepped in. Now, call me old fashioned, but it seems more appropriate to describe them as ladies than women. My grandmother used to say to me, ” you’re an old fashioned soul Isabelle, you are wired to the moon.” I never quite knew what she meant, but I always preferred her story spinning company to that of my cousins who made me feel frail in their boisterousness. And so, into the shop, pulling memories of Grandma Millie, these ladies stepped. Basket tweediness and pink lipstick on one and big purple floaty trousers on the other. I could see they knew each other well despite their differences, perhaps they were sisters. They began talking to me straight away. Sometimes it’s like that, people like to talk and sometimes, they just like to come in and look around and say nothing. I can tell now, when to talk, when to say nothing. Well, we talked of furniture and green velvet coats and even the wind-up baby but the up shot of it was , the older tweedy one with elegant hands, bought a table. ( oh, and some candlesticks , but they aren’t the star of the show ) And she was happy, she’d been looking for such a table . And I was happy, because that’s what I do, buy stuff and sell stuff. She wrote me a cheque in elegant copper plate writing to go with her elegant hands and told me she’d be back at 4 o’clock , with her husband, to pick the table up. Nothing so strange yet, but as they shut the door behind them, as the bell bright jangled, the wind-up baby started another creepy crawl across the counter. I just ignored it, a bit of left over torque I said to myself, as if I knew what I was talking about.
At 4 o’clock , a car pulled up outside . I’d already cleared the table of telescopes and scales and wool twisters and wrapped up the candlesticks. The elegant lady and her husband came into the shop. He looked like like a farmer, with thick skinned hands and a solidness that comes from the moors. I wondered in images, in seconds, about her soft hands on his and the ease that surrounded them. The maybe farmer and I manoeuvred the table from the back room to the front of the shop. He was a gentleman and walked backwards as I guided him, my end of the table feeling oak heavy while his was feather light in his hands. The elegant lady held the shop door open and her husband carefully stepped backwards, down the step, onto the pavement as I followed doing tiny, chinese lady steps , the table bumping against my knees and shins. We had just got out of the doorway when a table leg caught on the handle of a big basket I’d put out on the pavement. It was full of old lignum vitae bowling balls, beautifully patinated, bias off center eclipses, the heaviest, most dense and sweetly pungent wood in the world.
Time seemed to go slow from then onwards…..the basket up turned, the balls spilled out. Beautifully. Hard, hardwood conkers clonking onto asphalt, a muffled sound mixing with the exhaust fumes. The traffic stopped, both ways, as the balls began their leaden bounce and roll down the hill, around the corner. The farmer splayed out legs and arms trying to catch and contain. I tripped down the street running as fast as I could but the balls were more than a match, spin bowling into the road as cars braked and peopled stared. Some caught in the channel of the gutter as I tried a spindly football move to catch them. I slipped, legs up-flying, me splat landing, winded and red faced at the bumper of some steely monster. Horns honked and folk sorry laughed as I sat up feeling like some Charlie Chaplin character, birds-eye watching the scene in mortification.
The farmer and me, we gathered the balls up from their nestled resting space outside the ice-cream shop and marvelled at the fact that this was a Carry On moment, rather than a mass , mess pile up. Back at the shop, after we’d put the table in the boot of their car, the three of us laughed. ”That’s another story for our table” , the lady said . I loved her for that.
After they left, everything felt so quiet. The road outside was empty. The traffic rush which is more like a tractor slush in this little village town, had dried up. The cafe bar over the road , shut up . The bike shop next door, ‘closed due to illness’ and even quieter than normal. The wind-up baby was plastic still. I felt so strange. Like I did when I was 11 and fell out of a tree. Strangely elated.
Drunk in the soft fold muskiness of loved-in sheets.
Not days or weeks, but months of moments spent, imprinting a tapestry of little deaths and battles sweet. With skin on skin and under skin to inside deep. Rolling and riding soaked burnt-lust limbs with climb on and slide under fervour, sucking tears and sweet sweat come. Stretched out thoughts contained in the moment, clinging to the fibres, clashing to melding to liberate. She’s starfish spread in her unravelling desire. Face down inhaling sweetness, hips arching, mind creating. He’s grip twisting cotton and falling in emptying abandon. The grained, white grey light from a high window open full . Blowing chill moon air over flesh hot-ripe. And in the morning, a pale light start, as musky hash scented bodies slip together with double S ease. Coterminous curled . The covers are messed and tangled in love . Caught inside a laughed-in-loved-in pummelled soft fibre comfort held between thumb and finger to fall asleep over again in the smell of fucklove soft sheet warmth.
dualism
-
The days and evenings start end darker now. Unsteadying me with their late beginnings and early endings. But still the rooks leave their nests in the tall trees, like they always do, a shoal of black rags sweeping through the sky to mesmerise. They provide some comfort to my feeling of disquiet, in that they always herald my mornings and serenade my nights in a cycle which has been metering my days since I lived in this house, by this wood.
And yet, even within this natural rhythm, within the regular pace of my days. Of work and sleep and the constant activity of just living, his words to other girls cut me rip me bleed my heart rawdown. Disproportionately. And Peter becomes James who is Thomas , but none are him. And, as one pair of hands caresses my pale skin, his are behind theirs. Gripping my mind in hair twisting abandon. As lips lick the sweat trickle from the small of my back his shadowed eyes flash before me. He has taken root inside me, rhizome deep so that regular days twist and shape shift into two parts. Everything else, and him. I think I am lost.
cop out
-
just because I can’t describe it in words, doesn’t mean you can’t feel it.
One of my most favourite descriptions of the past , is by one of my most favourite writers : Haruki Murakami.
He said that the past is like a shattered plate, a plate that has shattered .
You can never put it back right.
And so I like, in my fanciful way , to expand on his theory . The present is our attempt to piece together those fragments . To gather and collect. Sometimes we pick up large pieces ( imagine , if you will, a willow pattern plate ) , where there may be the glimpse of a lovers face . A hand , a bow with leaves dangling soft , the wind in pictures , hints of things . We pick them up and are taken back , to then. Other times . And small sharp shards cut our fingers and make us bleed . But we take them , pieces all , big and small . Sometimes clumsily , sometimes , when life treats us well , almost seamlessly , and we fit them together. As best we can.
Maybe the future is that reformed plate .
Jagged edges and broken pieces , glued together with the now , fixed but different.
Obviously ( obviously ?) I’m not 50 years old today , and yet somehow I remember ‘ sputnik’ like it happened in my childhood. I’m not sure why that is. But , when I was small ‘ space ‘ really was the final frontier. It excited and intrigued me in quite wonderful ways . I didn’t really do what I considered to be the boy stuff with rockets and facts and figures but I spent a lot of time imagining what ’space’ really was , closing my eyes at night and flying through it and I’d have these long involved discussions with my dad about what was at the end of it. Because somehow I couldn’t conceive that there simply was no end . Or that it was expanding. That sent me , paradoxically, in circles.
( s p u t n i k …… how I loved that word , golden of course , made to be repeated like a mantra while skipping or chucking balls against walls )
Doosra
-
My eyes scan his face , like they used to do when I was small , looking for signs….
” You look tired Dad , it’s been hard on you , these last few years , hasn’t it ? ” I sigh.
He looks diminished , his hair greyer and thinner, his eyes , a little rheumy , a lot sad.
“Yes , and , I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to accept it…” his voice trails and I put my arms around him.
Standing in the dining room, as the TV next door plays some daytime dross, to mask our hushed voices.
And so….. almost three long years since it happened and it doesn’t get easier but things become routine . And yet I still jolt-wake at night and worry where this road will lead us . Before it happened , they weren’t old , 65 and 66 , that’s not old these days, is it ? They were the new-young-old , who walked in the hills , stayed up late , drank wine and in their new, work free world , enjoyed life . And with almost 45 years together had created a symbiotic rub-along of cheerful misunderstandings . Sure , in the 70’s , when I was small , I remember the rows and stormy patches , my dad with hippy sideburns and bookish ways clashing with my mums flippancy and flightiness . But somehow they got through those times of betrayal and conflict and had settled into something that looked like old love. Or friendship . Or both.
But now , I see two shadows of former selves and it cuts me too deeply. Things have turned around . My dad has become a father again , to wash , to dress , to care , and my mother is his child . And both have aged . My mum has the meek look of the very old ; her green eyes which used to flash fantastic as she laughed through life have become those of a supplicant. Sometimes I can’t bear to look . Sometimes I leave their house and cry all the way home . And yes , I know it’s inevitable , that we all age , that time moves on regardless , but it’s the loss that she doesn’t miss , that absence of her spark ( I could almost say soul , but religion is an anathema to me ) that breaks my heart.
And through all this , my Dad has been the main ‘carer’ . Oh fuck , how many times have I heard that word bandied around ; in hospital corridors , at doctor’s appointments , on the phone sorting out wheelchairs and walking sticks . I hate the sound and feel of it. It’s small and yellow and smells of piss and antiseptic . I want to say , ” No , he’s not her fucking ‘carer’ , he’s her husband , he’s my dad , he’s a man who used to paint and write and bowl left handed . And I want to scream , “No , she’s not your fucking ‘client’ , she’s my mum , she’s his wife , and she was beautiful with green eyes and golden hair and she always made people feel better about themselves ” . But I don’t . And I look at them , those two old people , so polite and English and reserved . My Mum , simplified inside and broken without , my Dad , tired and weary , bitter and worn.
“Thanks love , I don’t know what I’d do without you”… his eyes fill up a little more.
How I wish I never had to hear those words coming from him now , like this . With a hug in the dining room as my mum watches vegetables on daytime TV .
Of all the things I’ve done and seen , the plain and strange time places , in the life I’ve lived so far ; I feel innocent still . And pure. Tired sometimes-often , angry moments with eyes dark- flashing and caught in throat words ; but not jaded. Enchanted by those small outside things and captivated fulsome by the inside worlds I spin . I shall never tire of gentle touch or being caught sensitive in peeled-back times and raw grip lusts . Enthralled by other minds separate to make me fly. And into this mix of inconsistencies and strands running deep , I place you high.
