Revelations 1:19

Write what you see, he said.

And that’s what I tried to do. But it was hard for me. To assimilate images on scraps of paper, or to form from fingertips, written pictures, torn from endpapers and random scrawls on a carnet of Métro tickets. What I saw prompted memories and they multiplied and grew inside my mind until what I saw was different to what was there. It has always been this way.

It made no difference, whether I looked long enough, or glanced, snapshot shy, things would always change.

One of the earliest memories was in my Grandparents’ bathroom. It was a cold and draughty damp place. The silverfish sparkled to me at night as I caught them love-dancing in the dark. It amused me to think they ate flakes of me like sugar. I would sit in the cold and think. My Grandfather’s aftershave sat opposite me, on the sink like a small bottle of milk from school.  Its smell wasn’t of sea and wind like the adverts promised. For me it told of cold tiles and slivers of soap, of crisp toilet paper and broken mirrors.  I imagined it held the essence of the bathroom which would disappear as the light-cord was pulled, as the dark took over; a vapour vanishing back inside a magic bottle. In this way, what I saw, always led to something else, to something behind. The tap dripped and left a golden road  down the sink, a passageway to the underworld through pipes and sewers, a leaden link to the center of the earth.  The wallpaper was florid 1970′s kitch. Its Biba swirls and flourishes terrified me because in every wisp and curlicue there lurked a demons face; a Medusa’s head and a catalyst to visions of the picture which horrified me the most as a child. It lived in a book on the highest shelf of my father’s office and pulled on my heart like the sweet sweaty lure of addiction. The wild staring eyes were the whitest of whites and ‘eaten alive’ and ‘Goya’ were the reddest of words in my mind. It was as if Saturn became repulsed with himself as he gnawed the still warm body of his child.

Then there was a small picture, opposite the bathroom, along the landing, above the stairs. The white frame was yellowed from nicotine like the saffron tips of my Grandfather’s fingers . It was a reproduction of a watercolour of an old house, that’s all. But the words underneath spun darker stories. ”Haworth Parsonage”. And so the top of the stairs became a bleaker place,  filled with purple heather on twisted stems. I had visited this very house on the stair. In hushed museum tones it held tiny dresses preserved behind glass where I saw waists so small I thought the sisters themselves were miniatures. With moorland thoughts of secret worlds,  I would walk along the corridor shadowed with a sense of not quite belonging .  The room I stayed in was small and musty. Higher than it was square, a boxroom with an iron curtain rail which rattled like train tracks and looked like a piece from a Heath Robinson contraption. In this room that was most certainly not my own, I have a fragile memory, gossamer light, of waking in the night and my Grandmother appearing. ”There’s a mouse in my pillow” I sobbed, ”I can’t get to sleep because it might get tangled in my hair”. But the mouse was my heartbeat. Its tremblings and scurryings filled my muffled ears .  In the dark I was startling myself. It was at times like this I found comfort in the familiarity of me, from thumb-sucking to masturbation, there was always a relief in repetition. A place where body and mind melded seamlessly.

Write what you see, he said.

And so describing leads to introspection and idiopathic meanderings. Like an animal startled by the wind,  I’m off with no hope of being pulled back.

That’s my problem. I think. Perhaps I need my eyes testing.