Author: Kirsty Lewin

Categories
exercise Flash fiction

A short story about roots

Roddy’s mother made it her business to tell that story. To waiters and curators. To librarians and life guards. To street cleaners and pig weaners. To train drivers and vanguards. She told the visiting Minister to St Anne’s. She told Miss Shoal, his primary one teacher. And Dr Kenny Tempest, his second year philosophy lecturer. She even told the canny wee bloke in the betting shop that day she lost a fifty on a horse with his name.

He’d heard it so many times, with so many frills and fancies, that he’d stopped hearing it years ago. It was just part of his mother. Like her Yves Saint Laurent Opium perfume. Or her nude beige nail varnish (never chipped). Or the periwinkle and jasmine Liberty floral apron she wore to dust the piano.

He’d stopped hearing it until she told his new girlfriend, Sally. Sally was hot, fit and foreign. With French hindquarters, she’d said. Touch my roots. He wasn’t sure which roots she meant but he’d leant into her against the cleaning cupboard door in the community centre and snaked his tongue around her teeth and tasted mint and horse steak and flecks of tartare sauce.

His mother told Sally the story as they sat in the Queen’s Fancy patisserie eating afternoon tea off vintage china crockery on a white linen tablecloth. Sally’s hand was dancing incy wincy spider up his leg and he was groaning when his mother got to the end of the story. Sally’s eyes widened and her eyelash extensions flickered ultraviolet. ‘Slimey’, she said.

‘What?’ his mother said.

What?’ Roddy said.

‘It must have been slimey’, Sally said as her fingers pulled at the buttons of his fly. His mother reached for a thumb-sized chocolate eclair on the cake stand, inserted it into her mouth, and chewed. Droplets of cream escaped from each end of her lips.

‘Why would you say that’, his mother asked, once she’d swallowed the eclair.

‘It’s obvious. You said you found him in a bulrush basket in the mud.’ Sally was lacing her fingers through Roddy’s as he tried to push her hand away from his crotch.

‘Who said anything about mud’, Roddy asked. Mud was new. His mother had never mentioned mud before. She must have beeen trying to impress.

‘Your mother, darling. Clearly if you were in a bulrush basket on the Thames and your mother found you at low tide it must have been on the mud flats. And, she said, as she lifted her cup of Earl Grey tea to her lips and sipped, ‘it must have been slimey.’

His mother followed up the chocolate eclair with a piece of lemon drizzle cake cut in the shape of a star. She stared at Sally. Sally reached out with her spare hand and flicked a crumb from his mother’s chin with a slim ringed finger. Her fingernail was decorated with iridescent moons and suns.

Her mother raised her hand. It hovered by her shoulder. She stared at Sally.

‘Are you not telling the truth, Mrs Danders?’ Sally paused, and sipped her tea again. ‘Or was there some sort of miracle, you know, where the mud wasn’t slimey’.

Roddy forced the spidering fingers away from his groin. Looked at his mother. Looked at Sally. Something was loosening. Coming undone. His mother put her hand over her face. Her neck flushed pink. Her fingers shook.

Fuck, fuck. Could the whole thing, the mad tale, the fable she told to amuse, to charm, to entertain, the whole Moses thing. Could it actually be true? Who was he? Where was he from? She wasn’t his mother at all.

Slime. Slime.

Jesus Christ. He was a slime baby.

This piece is from this morning’s cafe writing. The prompts were ‘slime’ and ‘moses’ and we had fifteen minutes for the exercise.

Categories
blog diary

The cat

The cat is ill. We, the cat, myself, and a friend with a car, have been to the emergency vet because cats are always ill on Sundays. The fifteen minute consultation cost £240. There were antibiotics, painkillers, and instructions. I nodded and kept my voice steady. I had prepared for the worst. It wasn’t the worst, at least not the first part.

The cat is now wearing a cone of shame. The cat, a fourteen year old tabby, is struggling with the cone. She is off balance, out of kilter. She walks along the edges of walls and gets trapped by skirting boards, the corner of a bench, the edge of a filing cabinet. She sticks there until something within her prompts her to reverse.

There is a mouse deep within the kitchen cupboard. The cupboard with the gap in the kickboard. The cat knows the mouse is there. The cat is trying to get through the half inch gap in the kickboard while wearing the cone of shame.

The cat will not lie down. To lie down is to admit defeat. When the cat is not at the kitchen cupboard, the cat is sitting in the hall, staring at a blank wall. The cone of shame is rimmed with Gourmet Gold cat food. The cat will not allow me to clean the cone.

The cat is learning to eat Gourmet Gold off a saucer in the cone of shame. The cone hooks onto the saucer and the cat arches her neck, pulls. The cat licks the food to the edge of the saucer. I sit on the floor beside the cat and push the food under the cone with a clean finger.

The cat must wear the cone of shame for seven days. Or maybe ten.

The cat is not normally permitted Gourmet Gold. Or Gourmet anything. But the cat has lost a half a kilo in weight. The cat has not been eating as she should. The cat did not want Felix for two days so the cat is having Gourmet Gold. When old cats lose weight, it can mean their kidneys are failing. The cat will have bloods taken on Thursday to check for this. I cannot imagine life without this cat.

The cat and I go way back. 2007. There were four of us at the beginning. Myself and my partner, this cat and another cat. They were kittens, only seven weeks old. We went to Broxburn to collect them in a City Car Club. We picked out the black first one, (we named him Jack) from half a dozen that all looked the same. He had Tipp-Ex on a paw. They all had Tipp-Ex on different parts of their anatomy.

That’s how I tell them apart, the woman said. The woman said she went round the local farms, asked farmers if there were any kittens that they were about to drown and then offered £5 each for them. She then sold them on for £40. Was that true? Who knows. There were certainly feral when we got them home.

We went for one and came back with two in a cardboard box. Our pirates, we said to each other laughing.

This cat is called Betty. When she was wee her ears were as big as her face. She was more pixie than cat. She was always brighter than Jack. Always one step ahead. Three weeks ahead in developmental terms. And always in better health. When they were big enough to go out, they would trot downstairs to the back green, and climb the trees that overlooked the Forth. There they hunched, tight in the wind, staring out to sea.

Our pirates.

In summer evenings, Betty would leap for moths in amongst the bushes between our garden and the promenade. Jack was never much of a leaper. He was pliable and prone to falling and stealing.

I can’t remember which came first. The chopping down of the trees or the end of the relationship. Either way, at some point it was just the three of us and the cats didn’t fancy the garden without the trees, so they hung about inside, and occasionally got out the windows and strolled along the guttering four storeys up.

The cats were there after I was run over by the lorry. The cats were there when I was stuying Spanish with the Open University. The cats were there after a bad day at work, a good day at work, a long cycle, the death of a friend, another death of a friend. The death of my father.

Cat sitters came and went, cat illnesses came and went, and a lump appeared on Jack’s back. It was small, the size of an acorn. But I knew. I was in bed when I found it, the cat on my knees, and I cried for days. I couldn’t bear to lose that cat. The vet was kind and pragmatic. We decided that treatment, aggressive and probably pointless, wasn’t fair. I can’t remember how long he lived after that. Perhaps a year, maybe more. The lump grew so big that he was lopsided when he ran. He was a hunchback of a cat. It never bothered him and I got used to it. Until the tumour burst and it was over in a matter of days.

I wasn’t brave enough to manage the death of that cat. My mother did it and I wept and wept in a cheap hotel in Bolivia. The cat was put down in the room I’m sitting in now. Even years later, there are tears over that cat. The vet and the nurse took him away and later my mother picked up his ashes. A small plain cardboard box with a posy of dried flowers in a pretty bow. It was two years before the neighbour’s children and I scattered the ashes in the shared garden and planted a peony tree above him.

Then we were two. The cat and I. Me and the cat. Betty didn’t seem to miss Jack. He’d bullied her for ten years. Jumping on her in the litter tray. Stealing her food. Pushing her off a favourite cushion. Demanding my lap (no room for two). It was domestic violence, feline style and, although I’d done my best, I was unable to stop all of it. I was complicit in his abuse.

I fall apart when the cat is ill. I catastrophise (no pun intended). I follow the cat around studying every move. I imagine cancer, kidney failure, bladder problems. I pet, I stroke, I massage with the Zoom Groom. And yet, this time, I allowed the cat to get too thin. Why didn’t I spot this? Why did I not do something when I noticed her waist getting more and more pronounced?

The cat has cheered up. She has eaten two tins of Gourmet Gold. She runs towards me when I wave the purple Zoom Groom. But on Thursday we will go to the vet. We will talk about her weight. I will pay for the bloods. And I will wait for the results. And cry. Because the cat cannot live forever.

I am far too attached to the cat.

Categories
exercise Flash fiction

Pep Talk

A pep talk, Harriet says to Gordon. It’s time we had that pep talk.

Here, he replies, in an airport?  Stay classy, love, he says. He blows her a kiss.

You always get to pick the place for the pep talk, she says.

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? Gordon is laughing at her. She hates him laughing at her. She wipes her nose on the sleeve of her blue floral dress and looks around. There’s only them and a man holding hands with a little boy in red dungarees on the other side of the hall. The boy is staring at Gordon and picking his nose with his pinky. The man is checking his phone.

Behind Gordon there’s a clunk and a revving and a whirring. He adjusts his position on the large fluorescent pink trolley suitcase. His jaw tightens. He puts his hands on his hips. Plants his feet hip-distance apart on the floor of the carousel. He and the bag move off. A jolt first. Then an increase in speed, and a steadying. As he passes her, his pale blue eye stands on hers. Out on a wheaten stalk.

Did I mention he has just the one eye?

Paris was a mistake. Paris is always a mistake. But they go anyway. For birthdays. For their anniversary. And for every Black Moon. He throws armfuls of leaves at squirrels in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and howls like a wolf. He sits down on the pavement in La Huchette, takes his shoes off, and plays piano with his bare toes along the tarmac. He does handstands in the hydraulic lift in the Louvre and pockets the euros the tourists tuck under his thin spread fingers. He does a headstand in front of the Mona Lisa. We need to talk, she says to his upside down form. We are unaligned, undetermined. We can’t go on like this. He spins three full revolutions and folds back onto his feet. Takes her arm. Kisses her elbow. Pulls a new Hermes scarf out of her ear. They eat escargots in Café de Mars. He makes her an anklet out of the shells.

Her crotch itches. Candida. Always after Paris. And they haven’t even made it home yet. You should go commando style, he says, if he catches her hand creeping her groin. He is heading towards the black curtain flaps where he’ll burst out of sight for a few seconds. She rubs at her groin through the thick cotton of her dress.

She looks around for the security guards. No walkie talkies. No running feet. The airport is small, rural. It had been her idea to move out here. Parochial, Gordon always says. Properly Parochial. Only twenty people on the flight and the rest of them had hurried on, exiting with carry-on luggage only.

Daddy, the child shouts. I want to ride the carousel like that man! The man puts a hand over the child’s mouth. Whispers in his ear. Takes something out of his pocket and waves it in front of the boy’s face. Whatever it is, is on a heavy glinting chain. It swings back and forward in front of the child. The child’s face follows it. Tick tock. Tick tock.

He’s never told Harriet how he lost his eye. Or why the remaining one is stuck on the end of a wheaten stalk. In their twelve years together she has never asked. He bursts back into the hall through the black curtain flaps, still astride the pink trolley suitcase. He has lifted his legs up and is balancing just on his bum. He no longer has his shoes. His Union Jack socks are on his hands, aloft. The eye on the wheaten stalk swings and dips on the shuddering ride. She should buy yoghurt for the itch. There was no plain yoghurt in Paris. But then, nothing is plain in Paris. Nothing at all.

I wrote this piece off the back of the prompt ‘pepper’ in a café with a friend this morning.

Categories
blog diary

The Jockey

I am reading Lucia Berlin’s posthumous A Manual for Cleaning Women – Selected Stories (2015). In the foreword, Lydia Davis describes the stories as electric, palpable, embedded in the real physical world. I would describe them as bonkers, extravagant, and wildly imaginative. Berlin is a master at creating and capturing unusual and seductive details about her characters, their relationships, and their surroundings. The stories are high velocity fragments. Fiction on speed. I am bewitched by both the stories and the intense craft of her writing.

My dead friend Scott was a cinematographer and a teacher of cinematography. Scott taught my the concept of craft. In film, rather than writing, Craft, as I understood it from our long, reflective discussions, requires making or producing something with ingenuity, skill, integrity, and most of all, care. What care Berlin has shown with her stories of transformation, her imagery, her clarity, the intimacy of her voice.

I loiter outside Frank and Jimmy’s boxes of cabbages and onions in the store frontage across the road, waiting for Berlin to pop out for a cigarette. She glances at me as she comes out of the laundrette, puts her hand in her bag, pulls out what must be a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, puts a cigarette in her mouth, cups her hand around a flame, and lights up. Her shoulders drop. Her bra straps are astray, ashen.

I cross the street and sit down beside her on the rough hewn wooden bench outside the laundrette. She is leaning back against the glass but I hold myself stiff, upright. Tell me how you do it, I ask, as I light my own cigarette. Do I say the words aloud or just will a response from her? I am star struck. Or if not, I should be. I don’t smoke but I do in this conversation. I look at my feet, rubbing the heel of my sandal into an errant purple cotton thread on the pavement, waiting for her answer.

She takes another draw, and pulls her bra straps up under her dress. I compare our feet, our sandals, the mottle of our goose skin in the unexpected chill of the morning. My feet are wider than hers, and my toenails are naked. Hers are wild plum. I am wearing a dress of my mother’s. The one in the photo of me aged around two with my mother and a chestnut horse, its neck outstretched as it reaches for the cheese sandwhich in my mother’s hand. The dress is sleeveless, cotton, with vertical stripes of sky blue, periwinkle and lilac. I’ve picked this dress because Berlin wears a similar one for a photoshoot for the Paris Review in 1961. Berlin is four years older than my mother. On the bench outside the laundrette we are the same age. In our thirties. At the height of our hair.

Berlin’s story ‘The Jockey’ is just over a page long. Written in the first person, the narrator works in the emergency department of a hospital. When the jockeys come in, fractured and seeping, bloody, depleted, she gets them because she speaks Spanish. The jockeys are Mexican. This story is light on plot and heavy on feeling. Its heft leaves me pondering the relationships between those in need and the strangers that tend to them after catastrophes. It is about compassion and tenderness. But it is also, I believe, about power, differentials in status, and what those who proffer a moment of tenderness get out of it. What’s in it for them?

Is Berlin posing this question in the last paragraph of the work?

‘We waited in the dark room for the X-ray tech. I soothed him just as I would a horse. Cálmate, lindo, cálmate. Despacio… despacio. Slowly… slowly. He quieted in my arms, blew and snorted softly. I stroked his fine back. It shuddered and shimmered like that of a splendid young colt. It was marvelous.’

It was marvelous.

I am accosting Berlin because it was marvelous. Lucia, I say. Can I call you Lucia? She turns to check on her two children. They are playing chariots with a large green plastic laundry basket and two teddy bears beside the oversized tumble dryers. The bears, lank and disheveled, have been tied to the basket with orange baling twine and the boys are sitting in the basket side by side, lashing the bears with imaginary whips. The boys are just in their underpants, the rest of their clothes presumably thunking round and round in washing machine number 3.

Berlin tilts her head back and blows a smoke ring towards the tram pulling up outside the florist across the road. I should have bought her flowers. Febrile daffodils. Or a slim bunch of bobbing tulips to go with her dress. Swaddled in translucent tissue paper. She doesn’t answer. Has she heard me? Lucia, I say again. I want to ask you about marvelous. Behind us there’s a scream from inside the laundrette, then another, and a woman’s voice scolding. Berlin doesn’t flinch. The screaming stops. The boys are fighting. Or the teddy bears are. Or the bears have turned on the boys.

When his back shuddered and shimmered, I go on, ignoring the growing kerfuffle behind the plate glass window, what was marvelous? The fact that the broken jockey glistered like a young colt? Or the warm feeling you got from tending the foal-like man child? I have said ‘you’ in error. It’s an easy mistake to make when the work is written in the first person. I don’t apologise. I’ll only make it worse.

Berlin gets to her feet. Smoothes down her cotton dress. Stubs her cigarette out on a broken red brick by the bench. Drops the butt into the metal bucket of sand. The bucket with the butts and the sand and the scattering of bloodied teeth. Waiting to be planted. Or dug in. I don’t look at her face. I should have bought the tulips. There is still time to cross the road. But the tram is blocking the flower shop. And old Mrs Ramson is so slow at the till. Her fingers too arthritic to pick out the coins for change. Or so she says.

Berlin’s boys are out of the chariot now. One has dropped his pants and pressed his bare bum to the window behind me. It flattens dimpled cream against the smeared glass. He is shrieking with laughter.

Lucia, I say. ¿Lo que es maravilloso?

Ah, she says, as the door bell tinkles on opening. Eso es un pregunto.

Categories
blog diary memoir

Both Sides Now (2)

You leave your family wedding ring in my jewellery box. I find it when I find the courage to return to our flat. Not straight away. Why would I look in the jewellery box? I can barely choose clothes never mind trinkets. The ring is tucked deep into the green velvet slot with my other rings. I tell your father. Your father asks for it back.

I don’t protest.

I see you for the last time in the Indian restaurant. You are shade and blur and long woollen sleeves curling your fingers. Your knuckles are tight on the pen. You sign a cheque for the meal and leave. There has been an argument. About what? Kristine follows you out. Let me do it, she says. Later she says you walked directly into traffic, in front of a bus. She says she pulled you back onto the pavement. You head home. We finish our meal and go home to find you.

It is too late.

You smash the flat windows from the inside and call a glazier. Is that so that I don’t find you? That he will instead? We tell ourselves that. Over and over. But we don’t know. Perhaps you smash them in anger and call the glazier to clean up the mess and then. And then. And then you make a decision. Nobody knows but you.

I want to ask Kristine about this again but Kristine is dead. She survives you by twenty-nine years.

Such different deaths.

The glazier calls the police when no one answers the door. He boards up the windows from the outside. To secure the property, he says later. I don’t remember paying the bill.

I wear the ring until I have to hand it back. I don’t recall for how many days or weeks. Twisting and wheeling. Coruscation cold in the lean October sun.

I let myself into the stair. Kristine and Simon are behind me. We are puzzled by the broken windows. We think we’ve been burgled. Our flat is the first on the left on the ground floor. The windows open directly onto the pavement. It is around nine, ten in the evening. In the stairwell, there is a policeman guarding the door. The policeman asks me who I am. Then he tells me you are dead. Not you specifically. Not your name. Rather he says ‘the bloke in there’. And he tells me how you’ve died.

Just like that. With no ceremony. I am twenty years old. Nine days away from my twenty-first. You are dead. We were in a restaurant. You were signing a cheque. There is no other way of writing this. You are dead.

It is true what they say about knees giving way.

You wear the ring and you take it off and you put it in my jewellery box.

To be continued – maybe.

If you are struggling to cope or worried about someone with suicidal thoughts, please contact the Samaritans.

Categories
blog diary

Homarus gannarus

More Didion. This time two essays; ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ and ‘On Self-Respect.’ Both can be found in the volume Slouching Towards Bethlehem, first published in 1968. This is our reading homework for our writing class. While reading ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ I have a sudden memory of a lobster. I turn to the back of my jotter and write ‘measuring the lobster with a tape measure. Photographing it. Evidence. Black Rock. Outdoor toilet. Childhood. Eels. Wind-up motorboat toys.’ I finish Didion’s essay and ponder the lobster. What should I do with it?

In her notebook essay, Didion outlines why she takes notes, and what she does with them. She argues that the notes help her ‘remember what it was like to be me’ and that the notes are ‘bits of the mind’s string too short to use.’ While this is interesting, I am more intrigued by her deftness in taking a note and turning it into a story with just a few lines. My favourite example of this is her note ‘what’s new in the whiskey business.’ With just this, she conjures two icky men with a woman in a bathing suit by a pool in Beverley Hills. Many years later, she ‘sees’ the same woman, now worn out and worn in, in the wrong coat in the wrong season. I fill in the blanks. I make judgements about the woman’s character. I hope the seedy men are now in jail.

Should I write the true story of the lobster and the measuring stick? Or turn it into something sinister or mischievous or wistful?

The truth is there is no lobster story. Not yet. I recollect only the moment. The faded yellow linoleum floor. The lobster, still alive, stretched out beside the stick. Two long thin antennae swaying grace. My uncle leaning over the lobster to take its photograph. Someone, my aunt maybe, exclaiming over its healthy size. Which pot to boil it in? Crustacean eyes on crustacean stalks. Homarus gannarus lurching forward to leave the scene.

I remember the lobster as dark. Navy or black. I search for Scottish lobsters online. This one would have been a Blue Lobster, with both claws intact. If they are one-clawed, they are referred to as Crippled Lobsters. I am surprised by this. Isn’t there a kinder word? Another online search reveals that the lobster can regrow its claw, although it will take several moults to do so.

I’d like to regrow my leg. Do away with it and start again. Lobsters have a lot going for them.

I have more lobster facts. Should I provide them now or save them for the story? Carapace is a nice word. Each ‘a’ pronounced differently. I try it as if it were Spanish. Then look up the Spanish word. Caparazón.

Lobsters flick their antennae to smell. What are they smelling? Does my lobster smell the peatsmoke from the hearth as it sways beneath the camera lens? Or gloopy cannelloni casserole with garlic and late summer green beans? Or breakfast scones with bramble jelly and slabs of hard salted butter, reheated over the fire on the griddle?

Didion wrote that she had ‘already lost touch with people I used to be.’ I was a little girl with bow legs and ugly blue spectacles and braced buck teeth and petulance on lobster day. I believe we’re still in touch although we’re both surprised the way we’ve turned out.

Emily let the lobster, who was as old as Cicero, who had been gravely wounded in the Battle of Gannerus, who had led his militant factions to revenge out of the underwater trenches in the Sea of Jura, who had lost count of his murdered wives, his armaments, his pandalus platyceros slaves, his rhetoric and his principles, sleep on the blue and white gingham cotton pillow beside her curled-up fist.

Lobsters can survive two to three days out of water. On the west coast of Scotland they are generally caught in baited creels or pots on the seabed. The fishing season is between May and September.

Robert had never danced with a lobster before. Tom had talked him into it. Look at her, he’d said. All alone over there. In such a beautiful gown. Do us all a favour. Get her up on the dance floor before there’s an almight scene. ‘I was pleasantly surprised’, he confessed to Tom on return from his honeymoon, ‘by the way she moved and shook.’ ‘And the crusher claws?’ Tom asked, pointing at Robert’s groin guard.

Lobsters can take up to seven years to get to their legal catch size. They are especially vulnerable to predators in their first months of life with barely 1% surviving to reach adulthood. Threats from marine pollution and overfishing are putting Scottish stocks at risk of collapse. The climate crisis is an existential threat.

They will cook the lobster. Boil it alive. After the meal, the homemade mayonnaise, the Irish soda bread, the wilting beeswax candles, he will leave without speaking, without closing the door. When she learns he will not return, she will leave the dirty dishes out, the cracked and skuppered carapace shells, the hammer, the scald-red knuckles, the splintered claws, the sucked out legs, the wooden salad bowl with its watercress and iceberg lettuce and yellow geranium flowers, just leave it all there on the spagnum orange oil cloth. A still life. Life, still. The measuring stick, she will take with her. Eventually. She will remember what it was like to be her and she will go.

Categories
blog diary memoir

Both Sides Now

On Saturday I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) in one sitting. Didion’s memoir maps the year that follows the sudden death of her husband on 30 December, 2003. Their daughter was seriously ill in hospital at the time.

As I worked my way through Didion’s moving and at times agonising account of her grief, I considered writing about my own grief in more detail than I had done before.

Not the grief from Scott’s death in 2013.

Not the grief from Kristine’s death in 2014.

Not the grief from my father’s death in 2015.

No, the grief from your death in 1985.

I started this morning. I wrote for a couple of hours. During that time I got up and searched my flat for memories of you. Some of them are now in a loose pile on my desk. Dust motes swaying funeral dances in the sun. I caress each item in both hands. Breathe in the distance. Hold the scent and shut my eyes. You are not there. The damp wool of your Christmas sweater when you run in from the rain. Stale cigarette smoke after a late night gig in a club in West Lothian. Unfussy soap around your wrists and hands. The aftershave in the deep plum square bottle (I can no longer recall the name).

1984

These days, we meet people who will become our lovers in pubs.

It is 1984. The miners’ strike kicks off in March. Protestors are evicted from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Tommy Cooper dies live on television. I don’t have a television. I don’t understand the fuss.

I am twenty years old. I am living in a two-bedroom flat, sharing with three other young people. Two men in one bedroom. Two women in the other. We sleep in single beds. We don’t use the central heating. We are on low incomes and we get rent allowances. One night the shorter of the two men staggers into our bedroom, pauses, swivels, and pisses on the bed that isn’t mine. His aim is pure and true. My roommate is out on a night shift. The smell of piss and dettol is hard to shift.

PC Yvonne Fletcher is shot and killed by a gunman during a siege outside the Libyan Embassy in London. The Queen opens the Thames Barrier. Climate change is not a thing.

Robert Maxwell buys the Daily Mirror. Los Angeles hosts the Olympics. My two sports are dominoes and darts. And drinking in Bannermans’s Bar and Sneaky Pete’s. None of these feature in the Olympics.

I am in my second year of nurse training at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary. In pubs, when asked, my roommate and I tell people we are training to be air traffic controllers. We spin this fantasy for over a year. Late one night, in a bar in Rose Street, we celebrate passing our final exams. Strangers buy us drinks. We are toasted, cheered. We walk tall. We are air traffic controllers. We are contrails, spinners and we prevent dots colliding.

These are my memories. Some of them may not be true.

I meet you for the first time in Mathers Bar in Broughton Street. It is warm, steamy, fugged with Benson and Hedges and Silkcut. Everybody is shouting. It is a Friday night. The barmen are sliding double vodkas across the counter. Pints of Tennent’s Extra. Half pints of Snakebite. Bags of salt and vinegar crisps. Box of matches and stained beer mats and filthy cloths to wipe down spills. Everybody is shouting over Frankie Goes to Hollywood or George Michael or Madonna.

You speak to me because I am dressed as a garden gnome. Long red socks. Tackety leather boots. Corduroy breeches with lacing tight over the knees. A gnomic hat. Red or green. The colour I don’t remember.  You establish I am going to a party. You want to come too. You offer me a lift.

You are beautiful. Dark eyes, soft dark feathery hair in need of a cut. You have cheekbones. You have long fingers that trace shapes through the thick drunken air. You are older than me. Your trousers are loose and rumple around your ankles. You are not tall. You are, you say, a musician. And a painter.

I am starstruck.

Your lift is a small-wheeled brass-coloured bicycle. It is the only memory I have of that bicycle. We buy booze from an offie and swing the two plastic bags from the handlebars. We ride two-up. We are stopped by the police in London Road. They let us go with a warning. We are laughing and my arms are wrapped around your narrow waist and I lean my face on your back and breathe you in, and you pedal us through the dark cold shredding mist all the way to Milton Street in Abbeyhill.

Joan Didion opens her book The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) with the words:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

These were the first words she wrote after it happened.

My friend Mo opens the door of her flat. She opens the flaps of her fur coat. Black bra and matching frilly knickers. I shriek. We hug. I’ve brought a friend, I say. We squeeze through the narrow hall into the living room. Is it Mo’s birthday? Or mine?  My diary entries for the following year may be in the attic. I cannot go up there to check.

We are late leavers from the party. What did we talk about? Who did we talk to? What did we drink?

We leave the party for your bedsit. Where is that? Closeby but I can’t recall the street. You share a kitchen with four or five others. Your room is cluttered and freezing. There are music sheets on the floor with handwritten lyrics. A saxophone in the corner. White walls. We pile our clothes on top of the duvet for extra warmth. My breath is cloud on yours.

Your father was born in Vienna, and aged 14, emigrated with his brother to Scotland via the ‘Kindertransport’ in early 1939. I discover this in your father’s obituary as I search for remnants of you online. He married your mother in 1954, but she died in 1978.

You have two small children, but you don’t tell me that straight away. You are separated from your wife. You don’t tell me that straight away either. Do I puzzle about your living quarters? How spartan they are? The veering towards poverty? Probably not. Most people I know don’t have much money.

Grief and mourning are not the same. I learn this from Didion. It has taken me thirty-five years to get around to this lesson. I tell people I am over it. It was all a long time ago. Yes, I say, it took around ten years to get a grip on it, but I got there in the end.

I am not.

Over it.

Your father, an esteemed vet who researched poultry diseases, dies in 2011. He collapses in his garden while feeding birds and squirrels. No one contacts me about it. But then who would? And why should they? I would like to know where he is buried. Or where his ashes are. But it’s none of my business. Not now. Perhaps not even then.

Some years before his death, your father and I meet in a restaurant in Ocean Terminal. It is across the road from my office. He must be in his early 80s. He is smartly dressed and smiley. We sit by the vast glass windows overlooking the harbour. The sun fills the building with violent white light. Too much light for the subject in hand. We talk about birds and activism. Do I tell him I wrote my Master’s dissertation on genetically modified poultry? I fiddle with my linen napkin, the bread roll. I twist the pepper grinder with a trembling hand. We talk briefly about your children. I want to do the right thing. I don’t know what that right thing is. He says no. I say the offer is there but I understand. It is his decision whether or not to pass on any message. I don’t blame him if he doesn’t.

Somewhere, I have your old passport. I thought I knew where it was. I dig around the top drawer in the filing cabinet. My current passports. My cancelled passports. The cat’s vaccination certificate. Stamps from Chile and Ecuador and Pakistan and China. Bus tickets. My blue plastic EHI card, expiry date 2024. Dear god. Brexit.

Where is your passport?

After the party in Milton Street, we are inseparable. We move into a basement flat in Dean Village. We rent the flat, which comes furnished. It is dark, damp, and smells of supermarket own brand cleaning fluid and spoiling moss.

You are working at a print press. You are playing gigs with various bands. One of them is called Bananas. You are a photographer and an artist and you also do some translation work. I have no idea why you are interested in me. But we are, I think, in love.

I have so few things of yours. And of those I had, some have been lost between Scotland and Australia and Scotland and New Zealand and Scotland again. Each move another moulting season.

I have your father’s English German dictionaries. They are small, pocket-sized, navy, their spines damaged. On the inside of each one your father has stuck a label. EXLIBRIS WALTER SILLER. The label is hand-done and has what looks like a black and white woodcut of two dogs, both with collars. One of the dogs seems asleep. The other has an expression of suspicion, disdain. The dictionary was printed in Berlin, copyright 1929. Your father was four then. Who gave him the dictionaries? Was this for his ‘Kindertransport’ trip to Scotland?

Above my leather horsehair rolled-arm sofa with its large milk stain on the seat and the cat claw scratches along the back, is a painting of yours. On the back of the painting, hanging from long-dried out Sellotape, is your card. The card has your name, followed by the initials DA, then Painter Printmaker. Then your address and phone number, the price of the work at £130, the details of it (acrylic and collage/board), the name of the work, White/White, and a tattered number taped across it.

0106.

The card falls into my hand as I touch it. What am I doing? Why am I opening all of this up. It is not one year of magical thinking. It is three and a half decades.

You use your father’s dictionaries for your translation work. Do you ever speak to me in German? I don’t recall. I am young and silly and don’t know what someone like you is doing with someone like me. I am an imposter and you are beautiful, funny. A musical clown.

All of my friends love you.

We travel to the Highlands. I am introducing you to my family. You sit on the damp grass on the grassy hill high above the fank park at Resipole farm and sketch the view. It is a view I have known since I was nine or ten years old. It is no longer my view but ours. I am waving my arm across my history. You are pencilling in your present. You push your hair out of your eyes. Smack at the midges. You sketch the contours. Fill in the blanks with water colour. I have your notebook in my hands now. I cannot look at it without crying.

We still have a photograph of you sitting astride our pony. The photograph is framed. You are wearing a jumper I bought for your Christmas. The pony is dead now, too.

There are pink cotton sheets in the Dean Village flat. And olive black curtains that twist and sag in the breeze. And your paintings. There is a row over one of these paintings. Maybe our first row. I am shocked when you destroy it at the peak of your rage. I have never seen anyone destroy art.

There is not much else of us in this flat. We own so few things. I am young and you have left most of yours behind.

Often, in the morning, if I’m off work or on a late shift, you struggle to leave. You lie on the bed fully clothed while I bury my head under the hard pillows pretending to resist you. You make me feel sovereign. A queen. This is not good for me.

Or you.

I meet you before the Internet. I can only find you on the Internet in the context of your father’s obituary:

… his wife and son predeceased him in 1978 and 1985 respectively.

I meet you before mobile phones. We use landlines and phone boxes. You push coins in and your words tumble. You always have a purse of them.

You have an address book with phone numbers scrawled in black and violet ink. You have so many friends. There are so many numbers.

There is one drawing of me in your sketch book. I am faceless but I know it’s me because of the trousers. White and grey leopard skin jeans. These heady 80s days. I have no style and no shame. You have drawn the spots on my jeans but my face is turned away. There’s an ear. And hair that curls soft at the back of my neck. I am sitting on a chair or sofa, my feet out of view. I don’t like being drawn by you.

Later, after all this is over, I am a nude model for my aunt’s life drawing class in North East Circus Place, a few minutes’ walk from where you take your last breath.

To be continued – maybe.

If you are struggling to cope or worried about someone with suicidal thoughts, please contact the Samaritans.

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blog diary

So Much Water So Close to Home

For the last year or so I’ve been working on and off on a short story involving three young teenage girls in a Scottish Highland village in the early 1980s. It is played out through one scene – two of the girls sitting in a gutter in a street outside a row of council houses playing jackstones (also known as knucklebones). One of the girls, Margaret, is a well known bully. The other girl, Mary, is a friend of sorts. The friendship is based on Mary’s deference and Margaret’s domination. To fall out with Margaret means social annihilation. Or worse. Mary will do anything to keep on the right side of Margaret. Even her mother doesn’t cross Margaret’s abusive and, at times, tyrannical family.

I have written the story from Mary’s point of view as the two girls grab and throw their metal jacks, competing through the game’s cycle until one of them wins, successfully picking up all five of the jacks at once. Playing on the tarmac is fraught, and the girls’ knuckles begin to skin and bleed. Mary must not beat Margaret, but she must not lose too badly either. Margaret does not tolerate the overly weak.

The third girl appears only in Mary’s internal dialogue. She and her family are incomers to the village. They have peculiar accents, they wear unsuitable clothes, they eat strange food, they struggle for acceptance. The reader never knows the third girl’s name; she is referred to only as the ‘foreign lassie.’ As the jackstones game continues, the events that bring the three girls together in a wretched denoument is intimated, and then revealed. However, given Mary may be an unreliable narrator, the reader cannot be certain of the exact events and who was responsible for what.

My story is fiction, although it does draw on some of my experiences of growing up in an isolated rural area as an incomer. The kernel of the denoument arose from Raymond Carver’s short story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ published originally in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Paul Kelly and the Messengers went on to release an album with the same name in 1989. The tenth track, ‘Everything’s Turning to White‘, is based on Carver’s story. I bought the CD in the early 1990s. Played it to near death for years in New Zealand. 

When he holds me now I'm pretending
I feel like I'm frozen inside
And behind my eyes, my daily disguise
Everything's turning to white

I still have it. Scratched and red-wine stained. A lightning crack crashed across the rear side of the plastic case. I find it on YouTube and play it as I write this. Scroll on to play ‘To Her Door’. Throw my arms in the air.

They got married early, never had no money
Then when he got laid off they really hit the skids
He started up his drinking, then they started fighting
He took it pretty badly, she took both the kids

The 90s in New Zealand. Tararua Rambling Society (TRC). Ministry Against the Environment. Big shades and big hair and flat-bed trucks and phoning in sick and sliding down the greasy satin-silver snow of erupting volcanoes. Bottles of Lindauer lugged in backpacks. Cooled later in milk-blue mountain run-off. Wedged safe between rocks while someone gets the pasta on. Banquets in batches. Big frocks and mud-skeined boots. Skinny-dipping. Private anthems. Us to them, ‘heh mate, you ever been witness to a murder? No? Shame. You can stay, then.’

Stormed it.

Mate!

Carver’s story also appears in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts movie (1993) – where the director weaves nine Carver stories (and one other) into a single narrative. Where did I see the film? Was it in New Zealand, too? Or on a rare trip back to the UK in the 90s? I went to the movie not knowing the story would appear. Did I shout at the screen when I recognised the narrative? Who was I with? Did we sing? Did I murmer Kelly’s chorus? Did I hold someone’s hand across scarlet velour seats? Squeeze their arm? Did I stumble out into the dark warm night, popcorn stuck in my sleeves and teeth, raising a fist in the air, berating the world for male violence against women?

So this is what they did
They carried her downstream from their fishing 
Between two rocks, they gently wedged her
After all it was late, and they'd come a long way
The girl would keep, she was going nowhere
They stayed up fishing there for two days

Back in the UK I buy Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Was there ever such a cossetted volume? Through Carver, I discover the poet, essayist and short story writer, Tess Gallagher. Gallagher lived with Carver up until his death in 1988. I find Gallagher’s poem ‘The Hug’ in an anthology when I move back to Edinburgh from Cambridge and start work as a Scottish civil servant. I stand in my rented flat overlooking Arthur’s Seat and I read it out loud.

Over and over.

To the walkers winding up to the crags, blips of orange red yellow.

To the swans breaking bread in the pond by the car park.

To the geese and their sayonara lament.

To the Tararua Rambling Society (the TRC).

A woman is reading a poem on the street
and another woman stops to listen. We stop too,
with our arms around each other. The poem 
is being read and listened to out here
in the open. Behind us
no one is entering or leaving the houses...

You can find the ‘The Hug’ yourself. It’s all over the Internet. Or better still, buy it. It doesn’t feel right to reproduce all of it here.

So back to the jackstones story. The story is not about male violence against women. Indeed, no men appear in the story at all. There is a river scene, and it is violent. Girls’ violence against girls is a terrible thing. I hadn’t thought to introduce any of Gallagher’s themes from ‘The Hug’. Human connection, compassion for strangers, the inate need we all have for physical human touch. But now, on rereading the poem, and listening to ‘Everything Turning to White’ (over and over), I realise that some tenderness in the work, somewhere, is essential.

Categories
blog diary

Daffodils

This morning, I woke at 6. It was unusually early for me, and still dark out. I turned the radio on. Something Understood was just starting. The long running show on BBC’s Radio 4 has a different theme every week. In this episode, the poet Kenneth Steven reflects on poetry that brings healing to the heart. Steven selects poems by Edwin Muir, Robert Frost, WB Yeats, Ted Hughes and others (mostly or all men?) to explore the idea of why people are drawn to poetry at moments of crisis.

I was dozing, and didn’t hear all of the programme, but I woke properly, sat up, when I heard mention of Syliva Plath and Ted Hughes. What would Steven say about Hughes, and his response to Plath’s death, and, crucially, his role in it? Steven says that ‘Daffodils‘ is the most beautiful of all the poems that became the Birthday Letters volume, published in 1998. The poem, he says, is a love poem that reaches out to the long deep scar of death.

I hadn’t heard the poem before, and I wonder, now.

Where have I been?

Where has it been?

Why is this poem not pinned to my desk, folded in the backpage of a notebook, dog eared in a volume that I proffer and parry? Have you seen this? You must read this. Borrow my copy. No no, have it, I don’t need it back, I’ll buy myself another one. Take it, just take it.

This intimate tender poem catches at my throat.

It talks to me now of the suicide of my partner in Edinburgh when I was just twenty years old.

It talks to me now of sun-bossed springs and doughty dreams and naivity and lost landscapes and a time before we understood climate change and the devastating impacts of modern agriculture.

It talks to me now of aging, weathering, withering even, stems cut and sliced, a gathering in, ephemeral beauty, transience, and old grocers curtailed by a winter, concrete in its frigidity.

It talks to me now of keepsakes, the keepsakes I didn’t keep, keeps I tried to treasure but failed, keeps that dulled and muted and curled, pulled out of the blue leather wallet less and less, until finally the keep, the passport photo with its soiled pale frame, wasn’t there and isn’t there and though I search for it most octobers it has gone, as if, as Hughes wrote, ice had a breath.

I don’t know this poem ‘Daffodils’ because I blamed Hughes for Plath’s death and I stopped reading Hughes’ work once the grudge cantankered and coagulated. Plath died before I was born. But somewhere along the way, having studied both Plath and Hughes in English at school, something I read somewhere laid the blame for her suicide on him. I didn’t stop to analyse this. Didn’t ask myself about Plath’s long struggle with mental illness. It was convenient to look at his behaviour, both before and after her death, and to point the finger. The dreadful suicide of Assia Wevill, and her killing of Wevill and Hughes’ four year old daughter, some six year’s after Plath’s death, also with a gas oven, merely cemented my conclusions.

But is this why I blamed Hughes for Plath’s death? Or was it because, for years, I blamed my partner’s death on myself? Was my default to look for external influences, for obvious explanations?

I don’t know. This seems too glib, too neat. And it’s irrelevant. It doesn’t add or take away anything from this extraordinary poem.

Read ‘Daffodils’. Hughes wrote more than one poem with the same name. Ensure you find the correct one.

Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.

Categories
blog diary

6 January, 2022

Yesterday the police helicopter was slow, lumbering. Chopping through Periwinkle blue sky. Too low to be just passing through. We looked up, all of us. From our houses. From our flats. From our paddle boards. From our coffees. From our sandcastles. From our dogs pulling on extendable leads. From our wetsuits. From our bobble hats. From our crutches. From our greasy pizza boxes. From our first days back at work. From our notebooks, our insurance claims, our daytime television shows.

We knew, although we were not certain.

Later we learn through media reports that it is a part of the search for Alice Byrne. Alice was last seen on New Year’s Day in Portobello, Edinburgh, in a neighbouring street. Police officers are going house to house, asking to search gardens and sheds. Those of us who don’t know Alice struggle to make sense of our emotions. We are united in our fear, our concern for this woman and her family, the distress of trying to understand what they are all going through.  

Where is Alice Byrne?

Today, locally organised community searches, set up with the best of intentions, have been stood down following police advice. These could compromise the work done by the police, we are told. But the public should spread the word and continue to check their properties and any photographs they took on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. 

I am of no help at all. All I can do is retweet official requests for information. On New Year’s Eve I was on my bed with a bag of frozen peas on my knee. Even the fifty metres to the beach to bring in the bells was too much pain to push through.

I stand in the kitchen and watch several police officers walk across the beach, all carrying sticks. They form a loose wide line working their way west then returning eastwards. One, maybe, is in a hi-vis vest.

My knee hurts. I am hollowed out by pain. I go for a swim. It’s a five-minute hurple to the local Victorian baths. I carry the crutch rather than using it. A test which ultimately fails. I don’t repeat the error on the way home. The wind is rancorous, raw. Cleaving through my thin merino sweater, my soft thermal long johns, my wrong-season socks.

I am supposed to walk up and down in the water. This is the best exercise, according to my physiotherapist. But now I can’t. Even with the water at my chest, it is still too painful. As are the squats and the knee bends.

Instead I swim slow respectable widths of front crawl with tentative kicks. I lengthen my core, breathe out through my nose, rest my head briefly on each outstretched arm as I pause to take a breath. I watch the minute hand crawl around the wall clock and urge it onwards. I want to go home. I am sore and miserable and it all feels like such a waste of time.

At 1.30, exactly thirty minutes in, I lean back against the pool edge, push through my toes, and haul myself out of the water backwards. I walk stiff-legged through the exit door for staff and disabled people. The blue kinesiology tape on my knee wrinkles and curls.

In the shower beside me, a woman tells a little girl how to wash her hair. She is very particular, and I wonder whether the woman is an aunt taking her niece out for the day. She tells the girl to start with the crown and work through to the tips. To work the shampoo into a good lather. I miss any instructions about rinsing. But later they will do their nails. This is a promise the woman will keep. And the little girl will hold her to.

Out in the lobby, I sit down to push my shoes on over damp socks. A woman I see every week in the next lane (and have long forgotten her name) sits down beside me on the red plastic chair. Unusually, she also has a stick with her. We exchange lugubrious smiles. Shared smiles from a shared clan. A clan I don’t want to be in. I start to say something about my stick.

And stop.

It’s awful, she says, that poor girl. The woman mentions the helicopter. The house to house search. We nod to each other. I cast around for words. All options seem trite, unhelpful. I hesitate.

She leaves before me. I follow her down the steps.

Stick, bad leg, good leg, repeat.

Stick, bad leg, good leg, repeat.

Stick, bad leg, good leg, repeat.

If you have any information about Alice Byrne, last seen on New Year’s Day between 8am and 10am in Marlborough Street, Portobello, Edinburgh, please contact the police immediately.

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