More Denis

Yes, I know: this is rambling and directionless. But that's how I find novel-writing works for me; I find something, and follow it, and it wanders in a certain direction until it reaches what feels like an end-point. My writing isn't driven by tight plotting (not this time, anyway...), and these digressions and meanders are part of my 'finding the story' - I have a broad framework for the story and the characters, but I find that these parallel streams take on a life of their own, and I have to follow them until I find out where they are going. Even if they go nowhere useful, writing them out is, I think, all a part of finding the 'truth' of the characters and the story, a kind of background research that gives me a sense of where these people are from, and what's important - both about them and about the part they play in the story. So...it's going to be quite an edit. :-)



I put my finger in my mouth, between the bottom lip and my teeth, and then took it out again to see if there was any blood; to see where the blood-taste was coming from – but there didn’t seem to be any source. My lip felt very fat, though. I wondered if pappi could see how fat it was – whether he suspected that I had fallen over.

Pappi had just said, “Would you like to come to work with me?”, and of course I had said ‘yes’. I hadn’t thought about what we would do when we were there, or about how we would fill up the day. At first, it was just like when I went with mummy to the store: I wandered along a couple of paces behind her, trying to look as if I knew where I was going, and trying to seem as if I was on my own. Whenever she stopped to talk to a friend or a storekeeper (which was often), I would try and hide myself behind her coat so that the person she was talking to couldn’t see me – just like I had done on the bus with pappi. Always, though, it seemed that she wanted to introduce me to her friend, even if they’d seen me many times before. She’d half turn and shoo me round in front of her so that her friend could make the usual kind of comments about my age and size, and ask me questions that seemed stupid or which I thought were trying to catch me out and make me give a stupid answer. So I would mumble my stupid, monosyllabic replies and look bashful, stepping from foot to foot and trying to get back round behind mummy again as soon as possible.
Pappi made his slow progress around the [edge/terminus??] of the tram terminus, and I followed him reluctantly, like I followed mummy. Just like on the tram, there was lots of laughing and handshaking and, as I’d feared, I had to be stared at and smiled at by lots of the big men, some of whom wanted to pat me on the head, or pinch my cheeks, or ruffle my hair with their big, meaty hands. Some of them were quite rough, and hurt my scalp, and most of them smelt of tobacco or of last night’s beer.

After half an hour of this, and the men all talking about incomprehensible things, I was bored and a bit annoyed. I wanted to have something to eat, and I wanted to sit down somewhere or play with some toys or just be somewhere where I could be on my own. But pappi shows no sign of stopping his wandering and talking, and I wonder why he brought me here with him. The next time we’re on our own as we move between the different groups of men, I start tugging at his overall pocket and saying, “Pappi? Pappi?”

“Hmm?” He looks round at me, as if he’d forgotten that I was there with him.
“Can I go home now please, pappi?”
“Go home?”
“Mm.”
“Why do you want to go home? We’ve only been here for five minutes. Hm?”
“I’m tired.”
“Tired? Don’t whine, Denis. Come on – you can play on the trams while I talk to the boys.”

He grabs me by the elbow and we head off towards the men standing by the big block of trams in the centre of the terminus.
Once pappi let me get onto one of the silent, still trams, I was happier.

Denis (poor little lad)

One day, when I was still quite small, pappi took me to work with him. He was wearing his dark green [? – and cf earlier ‘coming home from work’ memories…] overalls that smelt of washing soap and oil, and a black cap with a little stiff peak that he pulled down over his eyes a little bit. I remember sitting on his lap on the tram, feeling the judder and bump of the tram as it crossed the rails (?), and feeling a bit sick from the chocolate bar that he’d given me, telling me “Don’t eat it all at once.” Naturally, I had devoured the whole thing at speed, barely stopping to chew. I looked out of the window, because it took my mind off my tummy ache and the horrible smell of all the cigarette smoke inside the tram. The sky wasn’t properly light yet, and it seemed like dark clouds were hanging low over the street. I couldn’t see very well, and I had to keep wiping fog off the inside of the window where it had steamed up from all of the passengers’ breathing and smoke. As a city employee, pappi travelled for free, and I travelled free with him: I felt proud and special when he held up his travel pass for the conductor to see; she’d smiled and nodded to him in a friendly way, and I had tried to catch her eye and have her smile at me too – I liked her face and red lips and her dark hair, and she was all smart and clean in her uniform. It occurred to me that I wished my mummy looked all smart and colourful like this lady. […]

It was raining quite hard, and the outside of the glass was covered in raindrops that ran together as the tram moved and jarred along. Sometimes the tram driver would ring his bell, and sometimes there was a little fzzzzzt and a flash of blue electricity from the top of the tram. After a while the sky got a bit lighter, and I could see that we’d left behind the apartment buildings and were moving past factories and warehouses. Soon, pappi let me stand up on his legs and pull the little cord that rang the bell to ask the driver to stop at the next [stop]. When we stepped down onto the wet pavement, with the dark clouds moving fast underneath a wet sky, I could feel the raindrops, small and sharp, against my cheeks. The air smelt of tar and coal smoke, and there was another, sharper smell – something I couldn’t identify that smelt like hot metal and paint and the iron-like smell you get in your nose when you have a nosebleed.

We had to cross the road to get to the stop for our second tram. I stood at the side of the road holding pappi’s hand, [confused/stunned/dazzled…?] by the numbers of people passing and crossing the street, which was thronged with horse-drawn and motor wagons, buses and trams, all rattling and grinding and speeding in different directions, a ceaseless blur of motion and intention. It made me blink and shy away from the road, but suddenly pappi said “Now,” and jerked at my hand, half-dragging me into the road in the midst of the traffic. My boots scrabbled across the rough stones of the road, the toes bouncing and scraping in the grooves where the tram lines ran.
We waited at the tram stop behind a queue of men all wearing identical-seeming dark grey trousers, jackets and hats; all with the same heavy boots, scuffed but solid; all with the same short back and sides haircuts, and the same weather-wrinkled necks. Only the repairs and the discolouring stains were different. As we moved forward as the tram arrived, I was squashed between pappi and the back of the nearest man, and all I could see for a moment was a white patch of sky above the funnel of their dark clothing. The man in front of me smelled bad, and I turned my face away from his clothes.

It was noisy on the second tram. We had to climb up the curving staircase as the back as the tram jerked and wobbled away from the stop, my face level with pappi’s boots as they ascended the worn wooden stairs with their embossed metal edging. Once we reached the swaying top deck, there was a chorus of greetings from men wearing the same kind of overalls as pappi. Through the fog of cigarette smoke they called “Aye aye!” and “[nickname based on his surname, with a ‘y’ added at the end], and “Wakey, wakey!” and “Eh, what? Eh what? Eh? Eh?” (to which pappi replied “What, eh? What, eh?”, and they all laughed and winked. Pappi was transformed from his usual still, quiet self into a more relaxed, tactile, smiling version of my father; he grabbed men’s elbows as he spoke to them, and laughed with his mouth open. Once, he took off his cap and slapped somebody on the chest with it. I tried to stay out of sight behind his legs and the bottom of his jacket: these men were all big and gruff and jolly and frightening, and I didn’t want them to laugh at me or to see how silly and small I was – if they did laugh at me, pappi would laugh with them, I knew. They were a gang that I wasn’t in: big men who knew things about cigarettes and drink and work and ladies and secret things that I couldn’t imagine. My cheeks were red and hot with embarrassment.

The tram swept round a curve and, before I could react and steady myself on the rocking wooden floor, I overbalanced and banged my mouth against one of the shiny metal handrails that looped above the back of the tram’s seats. My mouth went numb and I could taste blood in my mouth, and tears came into my eyes with the shock and pain of it. Fortunately, the tram passed immediately into a dark space, and no-one could see me cry or hold my hands to my face while I shook my head and moaned. My head started aching immediately, and I knew that my whole day was spoiled. The tram stopped, and the men all started moving in the near dark, back towards the staircase. I hung back in the gap between the staircase and the side of the tram, then followed them all down the stairs. Pappi hadn’t said my name or tried to find me in the darkness. I felt like crying all over again. My jaw was starting to throb.

I stood on the platform downstairs and looked for pappi, wondering if he had forgotten that I had been with him. But no, there he was on the edge of the group of men standing there in the gloomy interior of the tram terminus, shaking hands with a big fat man wearing a suit and waistcoat. When they’d finished shaking hands pappi looked back at me and jerked his head sideways to indicate that I should join him.

There was a great block of trams parked in the [gloomy] centre of the terminus. The space inside the building seemed huge and high to me, with great, windowless brick walls climbing into the shadowy roofspace. The roof was all zigzaggy, with some small skylights in the angled sections {???}; the windows were grimy with dirt and spiders webs and pigeon poo, and let in very little light. There were a few electric lights in the offices that ran around the bases of the brick walls, but otherwise the only light seemed to come from the massive doorways at two ends of the building.

There was a line of men formed across each of the two entrance doorways, and, at the far end from where we had come in, there was a brazier full of burning wood. As I watched, the men all raised their hands and waved as a blue tram passed by in the street with its bell clanging.

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Blossom. January 5th...
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

I Know, I know...

Still a bit dormant at the moment, because trying to reconcile the new year, being back at work, being out of condition, living in a new environment and - the result of all these - feeling like I'm really short of energy. However, there are some promising signs: I wrote a few (novel) words tonight; I'm back on a healthy eating regime; and I have been laughing and smiling a lot more than in 2006. I feel as if the wheel is turning, and the days of creativity, energy and fitness are on the way back. The solipsism will continue...

Anew

Happy new year to you - whichever calendar system you happen to be on.

Dream and Memory Flood

I'm in one of those funny phases at the moment, when all of the channels are open, and all of the pipes are connected, and memories and vivid dream images are able to flood through into my consciousness and my subconscious.

Last night, for example, I had two extremely vivid dreams. The first one involved me standing on a football terrace with my little brother, in a time that was a mixture of the 1980s and a future time, and a stadium that was a mixture of various London grounds and more northerly constructions but, at the same time, was absolutely Griffin Park, the home of the mighty Brentford. We seemed to spend most of our time moving around in the early evening light (my favourite time for standing in a football stadium, preferably at a pre-season game in August, with the smell of roll ups and beer in the air), trying to find a place to stand where we could get a clear view of the pitch. Secondly, I was dancing with Nigella at a school end-of-term disco, the last, slow dance. She was beautiful and warm. It was very exciting. The main component of this dream was the warmth that was passing between her and me, and that warmth carried over into my waking state, when I was semi-conscious, and seeing that imagery in my mind, with that warm feeling echoing powerfully through me, and feeling that poignant feeling you get when you want that imagined/dreamed thing to persist, to be real.

Thinking about the poignant beauty of that dream later in the day, I found myself smiling at the warmth and desirability of that dream state.

I also found some other bits and pieces of memory creeping in unbidden: the subtle, splendid mouldings of a plastic model kit that I bought in - what? - 1977? - the Airfix B-26 Marauder (a WW2 US light bomber): I remembered how I'd been excited by the excellent moulding of the wheel bay interiors, and the subtlety of the control surface mouldings - I just knew that these would all look superb once they had been painted, complementing the aesthetically pleasing curves of the aircraft structure itself. I could unwind a whole other set of associations from this, so tactile and real are the memories that are living in my fingertips and in my nostrils - but I won't bore you with them (not yet...). I guess what I'm getting at here is that the things that really hit you, and the things that make an impression and spring easily to consciousness are not necessarily the things that you would choose if you had any conscious choice about it; the grand narratives that you create for yourself are undercut by the minutiae and randomness of your actual experience, creating a gap (and tension) between the imagined self and the reality of the living physical organism with a definite timeline and set of contingencies.

What you are, and what you want to be. The essence of being alive, and human, and fallible.

Transformations

[Calendar note - this refers to Saturday 23rd December]
Travelling in to London on the train yesterday, I noticed that there were patches of foggy countryside where the trackside trees were all liberally sprinkled with a Christmassy frosting of - well, of frost. These trees looked clean and crusty white - like the thick white icing on a home-made Christmas cake against the duller grey and off-white of the surrounding fog and mist, and where the sun broke through (only very occasionally) they were lit up bright and dazzling.

Our village has - like most of the rest of the country - been covered by near-freezing fog for days: a heavy, dull blanket that's been damp and unremitting, making moisture that's dripped off the trees and reducing the daylight to dusk-like levels throughout the day. Today, when I went out on my bike for the first time in ages, the fog ceiling had lifted a little, and you could see the roofs of houses and trees in their entirety. It was still chilly and damp.

Cycling up the long slope to Eydon, mist still clung to the top-most branches of the tall trees and, as I climbed, I saw that the trees up here were showing the same whitened effect as the ones I'd seen from the train. All of the lane-side hedges and bushes Strangely, though, the whiteness seemed to fade away as I got level with each tree. I slowed down a bit and tried to look a bit more closely, but the residual ground-level mist was collecting in tiny drops on my glasses, so I stopped to wipe them dry, pulling up at the side of the lane and putting my foot up on the verge while I fished my hankie out of my jogging trousers' pocket. Thus unencumbered of obfuscating moisture, I could see that the 'white' frosting was actually clear ice: each branch, twig, berry and dead leaf had, courtesy of the fog's condensed moisture, collected an extra layer on its windward side/underside - a partial sheath of ice that refracted the flat winter light so that the ice looked like a white covering; the closer you got, the more easily you could see that this uniform whiteness was composed of frozen rivulets of ice and, increasingly, of individual droplets as the daytime temperature rose and the ice began to melt.

As I cycled further around the route, the drip, drip, drip of falling water increased in intensity as the ice melted, sometimes quickening to a rain shower-like sound under the bigger trees. This drip and fall of water was interspersed with sudden scratchy flurries of melted ice tinkling onto the road surface as - seemingly - some kind of critical mass is reached and large quantities of ice crystals melt and fall in slithering sequence. My bike's tyres scrunch over the ice.

Denis again: starting putting words in a line again at last

Further along, the shopping streets give way for a while to some more open areas, flanked by grass- and tree-planted green spaces with benches and flower beds, and sometimes a small bandstand or an over scale chess set.

Then you came to the part of town where all the [Jews] lived: the poorer [Jews], that is – the men with their beards and their funny hats, and the women with their proud faces and their bold way of looking at everybody, as if they didn’t have anything to be ashamed of, living here in this poverty and squalor.

There were Jews in his story books. Richer Jews, not like the ones who lived close by in his city. They weren’t always called Jews, as far as he can remember, even though there were sometimes references to the ‘the rich Jew’, or ‘the Jewish shopkeeper’, or the ‘miserly old Jew’, but the parental readings of the books, and the accompanying commentary and the answers to his ‘What’s that? Why? Why? Why?’ questions made it clear that these characters were Jews.

These characters usually lived alone, in the last cottage in the village, or in a large, dark, looming house in the city, with bare tree branches in front of the windows and the moon rising above the chimney pots. The front doors of the town houses were always black, with a door knocker in the shape of a monster’s head – all scales and teeth and blank eyes beneath venomous lids.

Open/Shut

I took a lovely drive this morning: cross country from Woodford Halse (Northants) to Long Stratton (Norfolk) via the A14/A11/A140, to pick up my 70-year-old mother, newly-returned from her latest late-flowered holiday trip - Prague, this time.

I had intended to drive over on Friday night straight after work, but a sleepy head and the prospect of crawling round the M25 and along the A12 made me change my mind. As it happens (guys and gals, uhuh huh huh huh huh uhuh) this turned out to be a good call.

I left the house at 0405, closing the door as quietly as I could, with chilly air at my back and the night's rain reflecting the cold white light of the sparse streetlamps. It was marvellous to be on the roads at this early hour - the first time I'd been out this early for 18 months or so. I'd forgotten how much I like the feeling of 'owning' the road, that sense of solitude and independence that creeps over you when you put your headlights on full beam and head off into the darkness, knowing that you've got a 3 hour drive in front of you: there's something of a sense of mission that seizes you (me), the feeling that your mundane journey assumes a deeper meaning because it's being undertaken under a rain-scattered night sky, with the vague, soft orange glow of distant towns staining the horizon. It's true that the mood is momentarily shattered by a stupid grouse (?) sitting in the road for too long and eventually taking lazy wing and bouncing off your windscreen, leaving behind a wet, feathery stain on the glass. But a swift flick of the wipers sweeps away the bird residue, and you carry on.

On the radio, England take an early wicket against Australia. In the voices of the commentators - even the earthy, bitter tones of Geoffrey Boycott - you can hear the Australian heat, sun and dust and, despite the early wicket of Hayden, you can hear England starting to fall into the darkness of defeat, somehow more poignant for being on echoey, scratchy long wave. At the lunch break (some time between 0430 and 0500, when I've negotiated all of the twisty country roads and have reached the A14) I switch over to FM and search for something else to listen to. I fall into a hypnotic regime of channel-hopping, trying to find music that's either (a) familiar, (b) nocturnal or (c) somehow appropriate for night driving. In this state, I find that I'm really keen to buy records (CDs, that is) by The Feeling ("I love it when you call"), Snow Patrol ("Chasing Cars") and Keane ("These songs all sound the same, but they've got something about them"). Weirdly, in the rain and the dark, alone and unspeaking, passing a lorry in a haze of spray, I start to feel as if I'm back in touch in life.

Something by Joss Stone comes on - "Super duper love", I think. It feels horribly bogus and manufactured - a strong, interesting voice that can't quite carry off the material: it just feels too mature for a woman of her age, and it rankles. I switch channels. James Morrison (I think that's his name...) - he's another one with a voice that sounds older than his years, but somehow it feels more believable than Joss's, as if it's easier to think that he will grow into his voice through his experience.

I have to pull over to blow my nose (the ridiculously long-lived remnants of a cold). The parking spot is on a bit of heathland I know well from daylight stops: scrubby grass and yellow-flowered broom (?) bushes, Scots pines in the distance, and a lichen- and grass-covered pillbox from World War II (this area was heavily airfielded until recently, when the US Air Force withhdrew their fighters and bombers). I get out of the car and feel the cold wind and the swirling mist of the passing lorries. I feel very vulnerable all of a sudden, and move around to the front of the car to stand in the headlights' light so that (a) the lorry drivers can see me, and (b) any potential killers are confused by my silhouette, and might think twice about attacking because their maniacal features would be revealed to my (non-existent) passenger. I quickly get back in and carry on.

This all makes me think about being an editor...(of which more tomorrow).

P l a c e h o l d e r

Well, here we are...my cold starting to fade, and my new job starting to lose its grip on me, freeing me up gradually so that I can give my attention to other things apart from work. It's always all-encompassing and knackering at first, innit?

Anyway. Having access to a broadband connection, I had a bit of a play at 'Second Life'. After registering and setting up my avatar, I logged in. It was weird: as soon as I emerged into the light of the 'arrival island' and saw the other avatars around me, just starting to find their way along the paths amongst the grass, I did exactly what I do in real life when I pitch up in a strange place with lots of people in it: I headed off, away from the crowd, and tried to find somewhere where I could stand on my own, unobserved, and get my bearings while I built up some confidence to engage more fully with the environment. I thought it was telling that my personality was projected unconsciously and instantaneously through the keyboard and into that virtual environment. I guess one of the interesting things about such an environment is that you can train yourself to behave differently from your usual modes, more safely. Hm.

S t i l l o n p a u s e, s o m e w h a t

A bit quiet around here, I know: I'm a bit preoccupied with my new job and living arrangements, plus I have a reet manky cold (bah humbug). I've pledged to myself that I'll start to get back on track on...Wednesday this week.

Thank you for your patience.

H i a t u s

Just started a new job in a new location - hope to return to prolificness next week...

Gabriella half-pissed rant fragment – for somewhere...

The central paradox, it seems to me, comes down to this: one, you look at the world around you every day, at all scales, and it’s boring and hard and ugly and plain fucking brutal for most – especially for the people who don’t live in our cosy, economically dominant little Western/Northern bubble, with our historically supreme capitalist system of accumulation; two, all the books you read, and all the songs you listened to – no, heard up to age twelve, and all the films and comic books and television programmes you looked at, and all the things adults said to you – if you were lucky, and if they were kind, – they all told you that the world was fair, and that things worked out all right in the end, and that good people got their just rewards, and bad people got paid off and punished. And you have to resolve that paradox for yourself, using a set of values and taught/absorbed rules that just don’t equip you for the random, meaningless, empty truths of the world – all the stuff about emptiness, and injustice, and realpolitik, and power and cynicism and brutality and death, and the irreducible differences between belief systems.

And it’s because you can’t escape that taught set of rules and assumptions that resolving the paradox is so difficult – you’ve got this emotional commitment to fairness and rationality programmed deeply into you, and your rational mind is yelling at you to reject it and let it go, but your emotional self is screaming back saying ‘no no no – without that trust and faith in the world, you’ve got nothing, nothing.’ And you’ve spent the first twenty or so years of your life either thinking all that sentimental stuff was true (or at least clinging on to it as a romantic ideal), and it’s so, so hard to let it go, because you have no idea how you’ll orient yourself towards the world, how you’ll reconstruct your life with an alternative, realistic worldview without becoming cynical, bitter, acidic, hopeless and misanthropic. Fucking cheated.

Christ.

Denis - from the 'dark' novel...

That Sunday, when mama had stood at the sink peeling potatoes in the cold water and told him to go away and leave her alone, he had stood outside their apartment door in the still gloom of the afternoon, hearing the muffled sounds of families behind their closed doors, smelling the smell of their green vegetables boiling, and sniffing up his own tears and run snot, trying to clear his head of emotion and upset before he has to expose himself to the world. His tears and self-pity only live in these certain small spaces: the hallway, the gloom of their doorway, his bedroom in the dark, the lavatories in the playground at school after a bigger boy has hit him or humiliated him.

He thinks he’ll walk in his usual direction: up the street towards the main road, the park, the city beyond. He can take a shortcut through the hole in the chain link fence on [Bahnhofstrasse] and go play in the wasteland where the lead factory used to be, where the stone pavements are cracked and rain stained, and where nobody ever goes, except the kids like Denis who want to play on their own, and bigger boys who want to be somewhere where there are no adults. The weeds are already high there, grown up like hedges, and you can find spots where you can lie down and be invisible while the sky blows across the space between the weeds’ waving seed heads. Somewhere to be alone, where no-one else can reach you or touch you.

The hallway is empty, the well of it opening out into the darkened space around which the doorways all cluster on the balconies rising up to the roof.

The apartment building’s sounds are familiar to him: the sound of his boot soles descending the bare wooden staircase echoing up into the stairwell to dissipate there in the shadows. But as he reaches the last turn of the staircase, he recognises the sound of the main street door handle rattling and the door opening inward. He hangs back on the stairs, in the shadow of the [banister post??], not wanting to be seen, and hears the door close, followed by the sound of shoes shuffling across the linoleum. Once he gauges that the person has passed, he leans around and looks past the [banister post??]. There’s an old man standing right in front of him at the foot of the stairs, getting his breath back and mopping sweat from his tall forehead. He’s holding his hat in his other hand. He sees Denis’ face and says, “Good afternoon, young man. And how are you?”

Denis looks back at the old man, wide-eyed, but says nothing. The old man has a smart three-piece suit on under his overcoat. He also has thick, heavy-rimmed glasses, and the stereotypically large nose with big flaring nostrils.

He’s a Jew, thinks Denis. I shouldn’t talk to him. But what’s he doing here?

“Are you all right, young man? You look a little…strange – upset?”

Denis speaks at last: “No, I’m not upset, not at all.”

“I’m very pleased to hear it,” {He’s talking like Rabbi Lionel Blue, I think, in my head…}, “I don’t like to see young people upset. Life is long enough for sorrows enough, and I recommend that you put them off for as long as possible.”

“Oh.” Denis has never heard anyone talk like this: he thinks that it’s kind of sugary and false, but…he quite likes the sound of it, the way the words flow together and the rise and fall of the old man’s voice. He smiles involuntarily, hoping that the old man will say something else. He still feels like he shouldn’t be talking to this Jew, but there’s something holding him here.

“Ah, sorrows,” the old man goes on, “they are both our misery and our salvation.”

Denis feels like there should be more to follow this statement, but nothing else is forthcoming. The old Jew looks down at him, smiles, and then raises his hat again (?) before turning away and walking across the [vestibule]. Denis watches him go, wanting to say something – ask a question, perhaps – that will make him stay a little longer: while the old man is there, talking, Denis doesn’t have to think or reflect on anything – he can be led, and advised, and informed. [obviously he’s still at the stage where he thinks that any adult must know infinitely more than he does, and thus that these adults have inherent authority…]

Outside, it’s a typical gloomy Sunday. The street is quiet, with the usual Sunday afternoon torpor, the suspended space between (a) the working population’s belief in the infinity of rest that seems to stretch ahead of them on Sunday morning, and (b) the eight PM realisation that their shirts aren’t ironed, the chores aren’t all finished, and they’ll have to be getting out of bed for work again in nine hours’ time.

There are a few people on the streets, but all of the shops and cafes are closed, and the blank glass shop fronts and empty pavements make Denis feel more comfortable in these public spaces – as if he owns them in some way. It gives him an unusual confidence as he pushes his face against the shop windows, cupping his hands around his eyes so that he can see as much of the interiors as possible: washed butcher slab tiles; pale yellow fly papers suspended from the ceilings, carrying their loads of dead and decaying insects; shadowy back rooms seen through doorways and lit by small, barred windows; and sweet shops with their sterile rows of fat glass jars, the colours of all the sweets dimmed in the shadows.

Further along, the shopping streets give way for a while to some more open areas, flanked by grass- and tree-planted green spaces with benches and flower beds, and sometimes a small bandstand or an overscale chess set.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Reading and Remembering

At the moment I'm reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation which, as the title doesn't really suggest in an obvious way, is his collected/reworked journalism/memoir from his foreign correspondent postings in the Middle East (as it used to be called when I was a nipper). This is an excellent read so far, for three main reasons: (1) The prose is very tight, powerful, vivid and descriptive; (2) The material deals with Big Events but encompasses the small and the personal, and covers issues that are still resonating powerfully all around us; (3) It reminds me about the big things that I have lived through (vicariously), and which I had half-forgotten - for example, the first section of the book is about Afghanistan, and deals in detail with the Soviet invasion in 1979 and its aftermath, touching peripherally on other contemporary stories - the hanging of President Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Iranian revolution, for example. These stories, and the pictures that Fisk paints of them, remind me of the news coverage of the time, of how I felt about those things, and of my political standpoint (I was switching out of a emotionally Marxist phase and coming to see the Soviet Union as just another self-perpetuating state - I also swallowed [hook, line and sinker] the idea peddled by the media I watched that the mujahideen were 'freedom fighters', and assumed that they must share the democratic values of the liberal west. Ah, happy innocence and simplicity...). These kind of reminders are very powerful for me, and make me realise how...'insulated' i seem to have become as I've grown older - that classic thing about how the middle aged become more conservative (with a small 'c'). It reminds me that I feel more alive when I am intellectually engaged with the wider world.

Pieters

Maybe I am too soft. Like that time I found that blackbird in our back yard, mauled by a cat. This is – what? – fifteen years ago now? And I tried to kill it, to put it out of its misery, but it just wouldn’t die. I can’t really think about it still, it’s such a horrible memory. I think I got a bit tougher for a while after that – closed off a bit, and didn’t let things hurt me or get close to me. I didn’t like to feel that helplessness and panic like I’d felt when that blackbird’s head had spun back round after I’d tried to throttle it, and the way it just sat there looking at me with its eye fixed on me and its head all lopsided and the flesh and blood showing through the feathers where the cat’s claws and teeth had hurt it. I was still pretty young then, of course.

There was a swan with a broken wing in the field last week, and that reminded me of the blackbird again – brought back those horrible vivid memories. It made me feel very upset, actually – kind of shaken up and sad. You know, like when…well, I don’t really know like what – not like anything I can think of that you might have experienced. But sad and empty, but sort of clear about everything at the same time, as if the thing you’re doing is not really happening to you – it’s more like you’re looking at yourself from outside. And that clarity stays with you as you walk away, breathing in deeply. It’s as if everything else in your everyday life suddenly seems simpler and more manageable. As if you’re ready to take something new on. Funny.

I sat down on a fallen tree trunk, quite close to where the swan was, but not so close that I would frighten it. I just sat and looked at it, feeling sad, knowing that there was nothing I could do. The swan was sort of folded up into itself with its neck swept around and its head facing backwards, but its eye was looking at me. The broken wing was stretched out on the stubbled edge of the field, the feathers very white against the brown earth. The swan looked as if it was trying to shrink away from the world, to hide itself inside itself, as if it were embarrassed or ashamed, and didn’t want to be seen.

It still felt strange to be sitting there, doing nothing, just looking. I thought about going over to the swan, maybe trying to pick it up and move it closer in under the hedge, or between the tree trunk and the bushes, where it would be more sheltered, but I knew that it was just going to die anyway, wherever it was, and I thought that if it was left a bit more exposed it might die more quickly – which would be the kindest thing. It didn’t seem right to kill it myself, even though I had the shotgun with me, so it would have been easy to do. So I just left it to die on its own.

Pieters

It’s almost frightening to think about how long ago I started in this job…how long I’ve been here. It’s nearly eight years. Christ, just thinking about that number takes me aback every time – how could so much time have passed, almost without me noticing? Frightening, frightening.

Anyway. Back then the department didn’t even supply the free boots, so you had to wear your own. That year, when I went home on leave in the autumn – that was the time when the gabbling bloke with the funny laugh was here covering for me while I was on leave…the one who left the toilet in a disgusting state – when I got home my mum had bought me some winter boots (second hand, of course). They were nice boots. Well kept. But they were a bit stiff, and the seamed pieces at the back of the heels dug into the backs of my ankles, just there between the bone and the tendon, where your skin is stretched and sensitive. And it really hurt, the way that that stiff leather and the stitching chafed on the day before’s scabs and sore skin. But I kept wearing them, for mum’s sake, even though she wouldn’t have known if I’d have left them off. It just doesn’t feel right not to appreciate and make use of the things that people have bought you out of generosity or love, does it? Not to me, anyway. That’s always been something big in our family – the whole extended family, not just our houseful – even though we don’t talk about it out loud with each other. We look after each other. We want everyone to be OK. We care about each other, and we look out for one another. Like I say, we don’t talk about it, not really, but it’s there in the handshakes, in the pats on the back, in the arms around the shoulders. That’s the sort of thing that makes our family – the whole community, really – hang together: those kind of instinctive values and unspoken understandings. Hard to put your finger on where they come from, or how you learned them, but they’re there all the same, and you wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t learned them.

Although sometimes I wonder if I’m too soft – if I think about these things more than some of the others. Sometimes they can blank you, or treat you like you don’t deserve the same attention or time as some of the other relatives. That’s especially the case with some of the younger men, I think, like at Christmas parties or at family weddings, when the younger men cluster around the bar in an aggressive little group, smelling of cheap aftershave and beer, with their smooth skin and their sleek black hair, and all they’re interested in is shouting and laughing and the young single women. It’s almost like you don’t exist for them. They just sort of look past you if you talk to them, tapping their fingertips on the side of their glass, nodding, but desperate for you to get out of their line of sight. I know it’s them, and not me, but sometimes you can’t help but feel hurt – ignored. But that’s me being too soft, as I say.

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