Derek Jarman writes about the weather. And famous people. Being gay. And suicides. And the colour of the sky. Everyone he knows is smiling in slow motion. I put my panniers down in the hall and flick on Radio 6 Music. I am home from Christmas. Joan Armatrading lights up the dial. One line, I hear, one line and I’m crying. Not weeping, more a thickening, a welling, the blunting of a sharpening stone. An unexpected unwelcome internal lament.
I am twenty-one and he is alive, and we are dancing on a square of blue carpet on a groundfloor flat in Stockbridge. The same blue as the postage stamp square he later paints in the lower right-hand corner of White on White. To remember, he says. By October that year he is dead. I’ll be your fire side, Joan sings now. Your willow, oh willow. I wait for the name of the song. Willow. I don’t recall ever knowing the name, or even the words. It’s her voice, damn it. The impregnable tone, the elegiacal modulation.
The presenter announces Janice Long is dead. A short illness. She announces Janice before Desmond Tutu. She was one of them, the BBC. Desmond was bigger than all of them. Janice made it to sixty-six. Desmond to ninety. The dancing man had less than half the life of Janice. Of length, not of value. I am not in love, but I’m open to persuasion. Love and Affection, fourth on her set list at the Hammersmith Odeon in March that year. Me, Myself I, the opening track. I imagine the crowd surging, fists in the air. I sit here by myself and I know you love it.
We’d had that talk. I’m going on my own, I told him. I’ll be back, I said. I didn’t care what he thought. I went interrailing. He sent me a postcard to one of the hotels I planned to stay in. The receptionist handed it to me with a smile. He must love you, she said in a language I wasn’t familiar with. She didn’t know that he’d left me a chocolate Rollo taped to my bike handlebars outside the old Royal Infirmary just weeks before.
Thunder, don’t go under the sheets. Boxing day. The Promenade is crawling ant black with coats and winter knits and pure wool pompoms and dogs in sweaty quilted jackets. Women with neoprene gloves and gilt-stained skins stand around waist deep in the sea. I push through the crowds on my bike. My knee throbs. Arthritis is a stiff tin badge I wear with neither honour nor pride. I have not yet heard Joan’s guitar or that shush brush over the skin of the drum.
The cat is a soft mound under the Colombian blanket at the end of the bed. I remember the man, the maker of the blanket. Reaching to the top shelf of the shop that sweated lanolin with his loose knees and his finger tremors. His own sheep, he said, he had six that lived in a scrap of field outside his house. His own work, he said as he sat down hard on the low wooden stool, the blanket warm grey ivory over his lap. It’s not women’s work, he continued. His Spanish was slow and certain. It was his second language. Maybe his third. His fingers were doing better than his teeth.
I still find burrs in the blanket. I pull them out and roll the rough sharp of them in my fingers. It is disrespectful to throw them away. There’s a pile of them somewhere. I can’t remember where. Is it tomorrow yet? I’ve got to look my best.
SANDERLINGS 