I went to visit Miss Fitton. A teacher and a poet.
She was in her nineties and still she liked the sound of her own voice way too much. I had this project to do. On women poets. She was old enough to remember the suffragettes but I thought her insufferable. Her skin shone thinly and her hair whispered yellow, stained bright with nicotine at her brow. Her place smelt faintly of ammonia and her demeanor seemed to override everything else I knew about her. She surrounded herself with the trappings of memory. Each book on her shelf, each photograph or etching hung on the wall, a reminder of all her life had been. The decay was palpable. I felt like I was witnessing the closing of a grand institution, the crumbling of an empire. I was only 19. Just because her mind was brilliant, I reasoned with myself, I didn’t have to like her. Her false teeth fell onto her old scarred tongue as she talked. Yak-yak-yak and the pink palette looked like some device inside her old wet mouth. I tried to look past it , but she made me feel angry. Angry that this clever brilliant sharp individual was skin and bone when what I wanted was fire and flesh. All I got was a yak-yak-yaking and a slurp of drivel and a before-you-were-even-born lecture. What the fuck did she know ? For god’s sake, I was 19 ! I didn’t realise I was angry anyway.
When I got back home, I pulled out my notebook and read back her words. Then I got out her poems and I read the ones from the 1920’s. I couldn’t see the link. I couldn’t see the link between this old lady on the cusp of death and the woman who had once breathed words of fire. I didn’t realise then that her words, spiked with frustrations and lush with imagery, stood on their own, were an end in themselves.
I flung myself, angry and hurt onto the unmade bed and I cried hot, hot tears.
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There’s a wall at my finger tips, dry stone and unyielding. A barrier across my mind like black-yellow hazard tape warding off as much as a memory, blocking colour scope and darkening everything. Each damp morning starts with a circling and a squalling. With a clamour and a storytelling as the rooks caw-caw their intentions to the day. Their voices are scratch dry, severe. A cold comfort . A regular happening. An affirmation and a heaving. Their call is imprinted in my very bones, their swirling dipping circling flight, burnt into my mind’s eye like pokerwork. Indelible; with eyes closed shut I can see them blue-black and swarming.
This house by the wood creaks in the wind. Its windows rattle and seep water, sobbing like a lost child. When the trees bend and scratch the panes on the third floor I imagine I’m at sea. All at sea. Light the fire and batten down the hatches ! Watch as flames lick on walls and shadow flick the wooden ceiling, as I lie still until the rooks make their come back, windswept and full. Stretched from cold field pickings and blackened railway lines. Grey beaks hard aching from stubble dig and a hidden iridescence to wings as they open and sweep for the final circle. A curtain call. Their return signals the dark within seconds, or so it seems. Gathered and nested they are finally quiet ; there is only the sound of my breathing , the snap of the fire and the absence of words.
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The summer winds of the Sierra Nevada blow in gusts.
Hot and heavy like an old mans laugh they took my hat and carried it high and within seconds I felt the heat warming my brain into dizzy meanderings. In the mountain air I became giddy and lighter. We lay belly flat on hot rocks and marvelled that we were higher than the birds as we watched them rise and fall on the tides of thermals. At night we watched the black sky and counted shooting stars while Jupiter hung bright.
We talked of Time and he laughed at my always slow clock in the clapped out car. ‘I like it that way’ I said in earnest. ‘I am making the things I love – this time – last longer.’
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Funny how moments become stepping-stones . . . . . . how one thing leads to another , as one leap sparks a memory the floodgates open and spill.
It was a cold February, a few weeks before my birthday. There was still blackened snow-ice on the ground and piles of orange salt in the cul-de-sac where I lived. I was 12 years old and had fingerless gloves and socks with individual toes. It makes me laugh to think of that now. It was a saturday morning and I read the news with horror and excitement. Sid Vicious was dead. In all honesty, I didn’t like him much, his snarling mouth frightened me. But I knew someone who did. His name was Robert Sykes and he was the older brother of my friend Pen and the object of my devotion since I’d been about 8 years old.
I put eyeliner under my eyes . I wore cherry lip gloss and willed myself not to lick my lips. As I left the house that morning clutching the article, torn from the newspaper, I wanted to be older. I wanted to have straight shiny hair and full breasts like Pen. I wanted Robert to look at me like he did at the girls in the rec who wore tartan kilts over tight black trousers and backcombed their hair.
Age is a strange creature. It seems to pay no heed to time. Robert was 3 years older than me and yet when we were 8 and 11 there was no distance between us. We would lay in the fields to the back of the estate, before they built more houses. Once, he flattened a canoe shape into the grass and as I lay on my back he stood above me with a twisted stick for a pole and sang the advert, ”only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate……tastes like chocolate never tasted before” as he pretended to pull a punt through the reeds. The sun was behind his head and he looked like a golden rod emanating rays of light.
To remember it seems like yesterday.
There were other times, always in fields it seems. Watching an arc of gold as he peed into rosebay willowherb, head back and laughing. I was mesmerised by the sight of his grubby hand holding his pale cock which seemed to be like a naked baby bird. There was no shyness. But at 12 and 15 the years had stretched. He was burgeoning sex and introspection. I was still a kids kiss-chase . I welcomed anything that narrowed that gap.
At his house we sat in the kitchen. He was the only one in, I’d woken him up. His eyes were puffy from sleep and his hair was pushed to one side, pillow stuck. He read the article solemnly while I watched him all over. His shoulders were hunched sharp, I saw their outline through the thin cloth of his T-shirt. Sheared off points as if a pair of wings had been cut away and his toes curled around the steel of the kitchen stool.
I knew he sniffed glue and I thought I could smell it about him. I’d seen him, in the woods with older boys. Lurching, a bow-legged underwater walking. He’d laughed when I’d asked him about it, said it made him see things . Blue hedgehogs and faces in the souls of feet. But you see things anyway he’d smiled. He was tender.
And this is the point where memory plays tricks, when it turns and runs away, laughing. Because for all the clarity of that moment, of Robert’s hunched pale frame, of the smell of glue, of the gallop in my heart towards him, I cannot remember how he reacted to the news. Did he shrug it off, did he swallow hard, did he swear and rage ? I simply cannot remember.
The closing scene. I remember the Sykes’ kitchen. Always cluttered with a formica table and a tin opener attached to the wall. Fugged up windows and the sweet smell of slowly decaying fruit . Robert stood up and took a pomegranate from a bowl on the table. He sliced its golden skin and handed me a half. I think it was only the second pomegranate I’d ever eaten. And then we sat, side by side, picking pips. Avoiding the earwax bitterness of yellow pith. We worked in silence savouring the full red beads. Sticky sweet fingers struggling until he found two safety pins and then we pricked in unison, forearms rubbing as we brought the seeds to our mouths.
Stepping stones and memories. Whenever I hear of Sid Vicious, I think of pomegranates in the kitchen and those first rushings of sexual love.
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You are not my mother I shrieked
Through taut glare and clenching.
The ink on the carpet was my stain.
She slapped my face with words -
A clean across wounding -
A Momus to my mum’s Eupheme. I sobbed
Knowing my mother lie broken and stitched
As her sister-witch took care not to mark me.
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