Len comes into the shop regularly now. He brings back the books he has bought and read. I don’t want to take them back but he brings them anyway. I try and sell them a second time around and then give him the money. He hands me lists of strange wants and needs. An old tape recorder, a glass table, an ostrich egg. Last week in hot sun he smelt fiercer than ever. He wore an old football shirt, inside out and back to front. It used to be white but now it is the colour of winter sky. After he leaves I can smell him thickly. Sweat and musk and dampness hanging in the air like fog. He tells me of funerals in Dorset and girls on platform five at Manchester Victoria with brown eyes. Of homeless boys in all night coffee shops who ask for change, who shout and threaten and laugh at what he is.
I want to slow him down and wash his clothes . Somewhere it seems as if half of him has died or disappeared. He relates tales with a detachment which fascinates me. As if all these things have happened to someone else, not him. It is almost childlike. As if there are the facts and no grey areas between or beyond. And yet his facts are more beautiful than most peoples. He sees things in isolation, in themselves, for themselves, like the colour of eyes and the weight of things. Like the way lovers hold hands as they cross the street. He notices the time of day as if it really was the inside of an ancient watch and on some days, as he walks into town he scans the pavement. I like to imagine he is looking for golden coins but I think that says more about me than him.
In early morning sheet strung and panting I leave behind wracked tales of death and longing.
My cheeks are wet and my pillow is as soaked as my thighs. Why, when dreams are iridescent and mesmerising do they fade and blur so quickly ? With eyes still closed I try to grab and clutch back images as they free-fall away from me, scree tumbling like pebbles down a cliff face or petals caught by the wind, lost in the grainy space between sleep and now. Dreams become interchangeable with memories. Memories are reflected in dreams. As I lay ungrounded and unsure I find myself back at thirteen years of age. In Sally Jones’s bedroom. Side by side, elbows touching we stare out of the window, over rooftops, to treetops, up a grassy tree lined bank to the war memorial and beyond. It is a late summer evening and the sky is red gold. On the horizon an unfamiliar shape billows red and ethereal. It isn’t the dying sun, it isn’t a sinking hot air balloon. We can’t make it out. We want it to be something other, we want it to be something out of this world.
These images, this memory comes to me in seconds. I close my eyes and see Sally before me as if it were yesterday. We leave her house and make our way through the village, towards the fields, towards the trees. We are urgent. We are expectant. I can still taste that urgency of blood pump and heart rush and yet fail to catch the wispy tails of a swollen broken dream I’ve left just minutes before.
The line between truth and fiction is untraceable. It is an obscure and snaking shape-shifter. Pin sharp, clear moments of lucid clarity can be found in dreams and imagination while waking moving sentient life can be scuffed and blurred and as tangled as the roots of a Banyan tree. And so it was.
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