I am struggling, she said. Everything feels hard. A trial . I’m finding it difficult to see the lightness in things. He stroked her hair.

I’m not stupid, she whispered. I know that ultimately life is meaningless -that we have to give it meaning. But I am tired of the looking for meaning being so hard.

When she was younger it had been different. Then all it took was a switch in her head, a change of perspective. Pressed and hidden against skin and hair she suddenly had in mind her own story of the night butterfly.

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I have been rummaging around in what I call my drawers. They’re files really. Little electronic compartments of words. But I like to see them as big wooden oak smelling heavy drawers. To pull open and leaf through; pencil behind my ear, spectacles tipping my nose muttering, hmm, let me see……..and well, I find the strangest of things. Words written that I have no memory of ever writing. Take this as an example…….

“I mustn’t read anything else until I have read this, until I have finished it, until I have devoured it, because I sense it was written to be devoured. But, before I begin I must write some more of my own words. First I must give these ideas form, swell their skin, make their eyes sparkle and their lips as full as they should be. I must give this longing a voice – throaty and delicious. Put into words the battle of stealing and strengthening. Attempt to capture the particular essence of two particular bodies,  fucking, joining , in effect losing themselves. It feels like an impossible feat. To find the words. Because sex is enigmatic, it is both self-centered and dependant. It changes like the weather.”

I can’t for the life in me remember what it was I was reading which sparked such words. I’m half wondering that it could be Little Birds. By writing this, I’m saying it was Little Birds. I want it to be so. And then I follow with…..

“I want stories which will grip me by the heart, written with words to make me sigh, to make me ache, to make me smile. Words to make me think.”

If only I could take my snippets and meanderings and fashion them into something worth reading. Make each word count like a stitch. In the necessary sense, not as embroidery or adornment, but to pull the story together. Stitches thick enough to hold a canvas bag full of letters or strong enough to secure the luff edge of a sail. Good enough to stand the test of time and the elements of fashion and criticism. But too often I am haunted by a line from a poem or novel which in its simplicity manages to convey the whole of what I was trying to write. Sparse, careful words which seem to throw scorn on my own efforts.  The placing of a single word can send me into pleasures I find hard to hold in my own writing. The plumpness of ‘astonishment’ amongst a line of verse can set my heart racing. The cool placing of a metallic word, shiny-hard, laid flat like a knife at the table can catch my breath. Edges.

“Oh, it is so close; a whole world beyond the reach of my own words.”

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We are what if sort of people, she said,  it’s what we do.
Yes, he said , and carried on, what if we lived on a house boat. We’d travel slow and quiet through dark countryside.
Oh yes, she said, and sometimes we’d go for days without seeing another soul. It would just be you and me.
Perfect, he said.
We’d cook together and we’d sit on the bow to see who saw the first kingfisher.

He smiled because he knew what was coming next.

It wouldn’t matter who won, she said,  either way something would happen.

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When I was young I hung about what seemed to be the highest cricket ground in the world. A clipped green square held tight by high stone walls separated only from the rough of the moors by the sweated graft of times before. The men in white were fluid exclamations in an otherwise coarse and raw landscape. I made no conscious distinction between such formality and the natural chaos of the moors beyond, but the rush was palpable as I slid away behind the sheds where grubby boys pissed into nettles and rose-bay-willow herb and girls on the cusp of adolescence parleyed games of sex. On the other side of the wall I could press my back against the cold stone, feel it riddle my shoulder blades and breath in massive lungfuls of distance. And now at night when we lie in bed in darkness the wall comes back to me in gritty clarity and I see my fingernails picking islands of yellow-green lichen, I smell the damp rough grass and I am transported back to lugubrious skies at the top of the world.”

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Remember Joe?

Joe?

Yeah, the guy who hanged himself.

Oh yeah, I remember Joe.

I was never intimate with him. I never slept with him. I never even kissed him. I hadn’t known him for half my life or even a quarter of his. He was tall and striking with blue eyes. He rode a Velocette and was always dirty. I never once saw him with clean hands. He was beautiful in the way children are beautiful. Guileless. It was the summer of 1994, my youngest daughter was a baby. He lived in a small flat two doors down from the tiny shop I rented.

The first conversation we had was about childbirth. I was sitting outside the shop in the sunshine with my baby in my arms. He was outside in the small yard in front of his flat doing things to his bike. He was always doing things to bikes. Sometimes it was hard to see where the bike ended and he began. I knew that feeling. It was a good feeling.  The way edges would blur. Perhaps it wasn’t like this but I remember it so- that his first words to me were “does it hurt very much to give birth?”  He was in earnest. Each word mattered and I knew each one I gave him back in reply he would remember. “Yes. Yes it does, it hurts a lot”.  He looked right into my eyes, concerned. “But, well, it’s the kind of pain that’s easy to mythologise. It can be turned into a story, that helps somehow”.  He nodded. I think he understood.

Over that summer he told me how he slept very little. He drank coffee to keep awake because he was so tired because he couldn’t sleep. I’ve never seen someone smoke so much. His bike growled over the cobbles each evening he came home. He wore an old-fashioned helmet and he rode quickly for the feeling. I think I understood why. He liked to recall his childhood. The thrill of first times. He said with resignation that being an adult was disappointing, monotonous even. He told me about the christmas when he was eight and had stayed awake all night. He was waiting for a train. A train to take apart and put back together.  I have always been in awe of people who can take things apart and put them back together again. It’s as if they are playing God.

“Waiting for and getting the train was one of the best days of my whole life”. I could see he meant it.

I wish I had something profound to say about his death. I don’t. His friend found him hanging from a hook in the cellar. The hook he hung bike frames from to spray. At his funeral his sister read a poem. The Train. All of a sudden I was six again with my eyes closed and my dad’s voice in my head. I wished with all my heart I could have said something to have made a difference. I wished I could have rearranged things.  But I cannot take things apart and put them back together so they work.

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