Violette du Silence

  There is a prism corner bound, the glint of something diamond inside her head. There is no idea of retention.  Just a loud, brave laugh as the immense confinement of her head comes upon her.  The vague brown room exists somewhere outside, and she slowly breaks up the things in it until they settle back into the same colour as her.  And so her evening begins.  She will stab into it, V-shaped, and make of it her very own kaleidoscope.  But for now she is there in the corner, laughing at the size and shape of her head.

  She didn’t quite know where to put this traverse across town.  She had been there a moment ago.   And now, here.   For remedy – the reason.  And the remedy, because she is human.  And so the walk across town for the remedy.  The knock.  The painful initiation.  The drag (of other people) and then the relief.  Violette is soothed. 

 Of course, before she had gone out, she had felt into the gaps in her room.  She had had the familiar feeling that she would find something lovely between the other useless things, but came up only with the recompense of a gentle persuasion that it was all within the reach of the day. 

*

   “What are you drinking?”

   She looks first at her glass, to remember.  And then up to where the voice came from.  She hadn’t seen him before, not even tonight, at the bar.  She realises she must have been staring intently at the table for a long time, or the lines of her knuckles, her eyes only going as far as that.  But she does look up at him because she remembers how to be polite.  Oh, and because her small leather pouch – so light, unburdened – is flopped over the edge of the peeling veneer table, like a dead bird... She knew it! He is beautiful.  Volcanic eyes giving away his age along with the grey hair that hangs like an adolescent’s about his face.  It is like this, ever since she started coming to the bars in this fashion. Without pre-thought.  With only the desire for a drink.  She wears a dress, one of the bunch she buys for a pound or two, scouring second-hand rails.  She loves her body, its essentiality - there is nothing left over now that she fuels herself on drink and little presents, alone - and does not hide it in folds or frills.    It is thirsty, she lets it drink.  She walks into bars and knows it was always going to be like this.  She was always going to be like this.

  She waits for a voice.  It is her own.

  “I’m perfectly alright on my own.”

  Trying.

  He smiles, “I know.  I can see.” There is a pause. “A drink?”

 “Guinness.”

  She looks at the froth at the bottom of the glass, slipped down the sides, the trail of a drink had.  It is in her belly now, causing this pleasure. She is a part of the world.  There is blood in her.  Blood in the guts of every person in this bar.  The braise of his eye have disappeared. 

 The last drip of froth.  A smile, a scrape.

Out on the streets, she is her father’s daughter.  Under the moon, refracting colours.  Her mother had met him at various twilight gatherings, like that.  But her family had made sure to chase this foreign creature back to his original habitat, and even though they had made of Violette the memory of a colour, a scent, she couldn’t help being what she was.  The name he had given her (so it goes) after a passage in a book he loved.   He had taken to the road years before his daughter was born so she couldn’t really set about finding him.  But she knew his family had a business that stayed put somewhere in a city hidden in the Massif Central.  A shop, a city, and tilting rope ladder streets.  A city of cobbles afloat on the sea of surrounding mountains.  That is how she imagines it.  And the business: a Quincaillerie.  She had thrilled at the name.  The word.     Quincaillerie, the word had jingled and the hardware shop came crisply to her, like the bell ringing on an opening door.  She often went adventuring along the corridors, into the adjacent rooms, tip-toeing under the stock.  So highly, tightly packed; correct and attainable with the aid of lovely old wooden ladders.  She became familiar with the Quincaillerie and at a certain age took to wearing bolts threaded onto utility string about her neck, rubber tap washers circling her fingers.  She became her own jingle jangle Quincaillerie at the sweet age of sixteen, seventeen; so that people may come to her, open the door, and be glad to find what they needed right there before them.  She would be of service to mundane wishes.

  “Fancy a drink?”

  He is young this time, unkempt, wonderfully not at ease.

  She is herself perfectly and they know what that is.  At least, they are learning.

  “Red wine, please.”  (Secretly, inside: shimmering, red.)

 Time to move on, to redden the lips.  She is without cash.  There is blood in her guts.  She must quicken the tempo if she is to reach her haven tonight.

   He gathers their drinks from the bar, and they sit and talk.  Especially alone.   She loves to give this pleasure; a saintly mirage for the thirsty and crumpled…this time he is armed with a larger glass than the previous...handing out soul saving tools…

  She wonders what he would look like back in her room.  Here, rather pink.  But there, in her dwelling place, beige.  She had nothing in her cupboard, in the shared kitchen. He would go hungry in the morning and she would have to make excuses, her belly rumbling like his after a night of antics.  But she doesn`t, and never has, made love to beige.  She doesn`t take men to her room, however sweet, however pliant they make her.  She thanks them for the wine and cigarettes.  And then goes home to make love to her own wine stung lips.  How they gloat in the mirror!  What jewels in the dark frame of the room. 

 She is glad that no-one is there to see the next game of the night (or by now it is early morning) when she slides into gaps, finds things, when her fingers alight it is a little celebration.  Presents to herself.  And where she gets them from, the day could tell you.  But Violette, she forgets, and fumbles for them at night and is always delighted to find and unwrap.  And now she can finish the night, leave behind all the faces that helped her along its way, and place herself in the corner, the victim of her odd-shaped head and her need for this moment of utter delineation.  The white lines deviate into colour and, in this moment, she does not ask where from or where to.

*

  Violette never went to the mountains.  Her mother turned her English.  Turned her father into a farce.  Had she slid her hands against him and with her steel eyes stay any thought of his entering?  Did he, then, a full grown man, disappear into the grey, foreign city, without hope or friends?  What did they do to him that he never came back to look for me?   Violette remembers the muffles downstairs, the tap on the door, and then again, low voices, the door.  Unlike her other memories this one did not become honed.  Rather more vivid than all the rest, she let it lead its own life, and the healing was natural.  But it left a scar.  She became quite accustomed to its size and shape (ever so slightly changing as Violette grew and the years laid shadow and light over it).  She never had the notion to step onto a train bound for a country that could have been her home if it weren’t for a man disappearing into the fog, unaccustomed to pulling his collar up around him (the cold, or the memory of lovely fingers that had lost all their love?).  Perhaps on peeling back the landscape, the blood would seep out of her like a full grown woman, and she would have to take count at long last of her wounds.  She chose instead to stay and live with herself, an English Violet, and with a little scar. 

 

  She is waking up in the corner of the brown room at the top of the stairs. It is still half-light, half-dark dream station outside.  She knows she will probably fall back to sleep.  And the house will be emitting sounds of roused bodies below her when she opens her eyes for the second time.

  In this half-light she lies crooked, and cold.  The skylight is open.  A tiny bird alone in an unkempt nest.  A perfect picture of abandonment.  She should be a lot larger by now, but her rib bones press at her skin and her sweet call for mercy (at least some relief) borders on silent and goes unnoticed.

  She manages to stay awake through the half-light.  She doesn`t usually feel like smoking so early but the first thing she does once on her feet is to head to the right-hand drawer of the chest and fumble for an old packet.   She remembers being given ready rolled ones the whole night through, and after she had left the bar with the pink boy in it, she had bumped into Larry.  He had seen her alright, invited her for a smoke.  She had declined but she is already planning that maybe today she will search him out.

  She finds what she was scrabbling for.  Unsealed, it is old and dry.  Pushing her hand farther back she hopes to come across something more savoury.  What her fingers alight on is a surprise.    She pulls it out of the drawer and barely recognises it.   It had suited her well, she remembers.  Now it is a sorry sight next to how she remembers it crested on her grandfather’s perfectly groomed head.  She had taken it from the house at which she arrived too late.  Everybody else – the cousins, the uncle and his wife, and the rest of the strangers in her mother`s family – had put their colour coded spots on things earlier the same day.  She arrived just as the last quibbling over things marked with two different coloured spots was dying down.  Stained, as Violette as she ever could be.  The stain she carried from being Violette but not being allowed even that.  She wore all this magnificently as she spilt into the terse house, a dye seeping, mocking the boundaries that form give lie to, she had them pressing up against furniture, doorframes to avoid being tainted.  She performed a rapid flight about the contours, and then embarked with the hat.  Unspotted, she would have liked to think.

  She walks on with the hat tucked neatly in the grip between her torso and her upper arm.  She likes it being there, trapped.  And her, free.  She is going home with the hat he wore, the gentleman whose etiquette demeaned those around him.  Simmering beneath the smiles and the strong handshake, the generous eyes, was something that had nothing to do with gentillesse.  She knows that his booming voice gave credence to her average-sized mother’s hands as they slid from the clench of their own fists against the body of someone who was once dear and put a stop to things in Violette’s life.

II                

The hat leaves a little tumble of things behind it as it comes out of the drawer into the room.  Violette is beneath the skylight with the hat in her hands.  By the light she sees clearly the water marks on it, handles its sagging deformity with care.  A while back she had left it in a friend’s car, had left the window open, had let the rain in.  It could no longer retain its original shape. But it is beautiful as it is, as she had made it, soft and ever so slightly stained.  She tucks her fingers in at the curve and pulls down the edges to see if it still remembers.  Do you remember what you used to be?  No, I remember the night of the rain, when it poured down and I sat defenceless and the water came in.  It’s true, the shape does not come easily, and it has no intention of staying.  Breathing in the early morning, small city air moistens the taste of the night before in her mouth … And she hasn’t a penny! And tonight, the same – the fatigue of starting anew when she had reached pretty much where she wanted to be the night before. And every night the descent.  The climb down to the floor, as it were.  Or else it comes up to meet her.  The drink encourages her to bump into things, make sore her existence, and confirm it. And then her little presents rescue her from the soiling, and take her up and away and the hurting ceases to hurt, the present takes charge and casts its glorious spell and she is free.  Free as a bird, flying away. A bird, staining the sky in its wake.

 

  She is going to go and see Larry, see what`s about, on this habitual day-after. She has dressed carefully, and has the hat in her hand.  She had touched each and every hanger that held her clothes.  Fondly, slowly, knowing all the stories. She chooses the dress that she bought for one pound from a jumble sale down south with Gwen, where the women of the village all had their stall on the green.  Gwen did the rounds and had two plastic bags full of ill-fitting (it turned out) jumpers, and one battered pair of espadrilles.  Violette had stalked more randomly, following the flutter of some colour she liked, or the emptiness of the stall.  And then she had noticed a pair of steel grey eyes.  A lady with a stall that looked as though it had arrived late, awkwardly perched amongst the others.  She reminded her of someone.  And then her eyes recoiled and soothed themselves on the soft clothes, the old style, that this woman wore.  The lady had started to talk to her, trying to empty her stall.  Shy and bent now over the clothes, Violette punishes herself with a few more minutes contact with this woman who she will never know, who she longs for, whose eyes told the truth without any intention of doing so.

  She picks a bundle of a dress from the table and hands it to the lady.  It is colourful, old-fashioned but feminine.  The exchange takes place, and Violette departs high.

  Every hanger has hanging from it such stories.  Her collection of clothes is not vast, but selected.  And when she tires of a story she gives the thing away. 

    The dress is folding about her.  Too light really for the still day outside but she hopes for a spot of sun to warm her. 

*

  It’s not the first time she’s tried it, but she was always sick before.    All the day long she had felt herself wilting.  It had turned out lovely.  The sun showing off, the city imitating it below - the sunglasses, the windows rolled down, the jaunt and benevolence of warm bodies and Violette’s mind encircling an idea with the stuttering black lines of a pattern.

  And after this, after this little present, her plan will seem even more worthy and this time she isn’t sick.  Larry watches her as her wings begin to lift, and the choice is evident:  far behind now the nest and the decision to fly away.

  Okay, okay.  She hears someone breathe.  And for this, this freedom – she is willing to pay.  But I’ve got nothing on me and I’m damned if I’m going to put on shoes and go out as if I was normal, and not stained.  Not Violette.  Not bruised.

  And after this, she is bruised – a small mark on her arm, a memory of stinging. And, after it all, she is stained.  It had happened naturally.  He had smiled and helped her out of the one-pound dress.  Had grabbed at her shoeless soles as she lay beneath him and moaned with relief.  And it was tempting for him, her noise, this effort.  He was willing to do this again.  And it was she who smiled, then.  Recuperated the bundle of her frock from the floor, and with it the memory of steel, grey eyes, and left.   Still stinging, still soothed.

And she walks home through the centre where things have begun to close, and night owls are preparing for the feast ahead of them.  Past that and down the hill to where the buzz of the city peters out and the possibilities blanket down. Violette climbs up the stairs to the landing, closes the door steadfastly behind her and then climbs the staircase into her room.  Twelve steps, narrow and steep, leading up to her own mind meanders.   Violette has a penchant for this, for creating and adorning and making shapes to end up with nothing at all.  The corner is calling for her,   Viens là.  Here.  Là, and the stuttering lines began to take form in Violette’s thoughts.  She will put to use her inheritance of the lost quincaillerie - her ancestors beaming at her from behind the counter, and the legacy of the other unremitting family – an unbending steel that she will wield with care.  And she will become Violette.  Quite silent.  A present all wrapped up.

. 

III

Il ouvrit la fenêtre, se pencha au-dessus du vide et respire l’odeur du violette du silence…

  Thursday.  In the city centre, albeit one of the quieter streets, people pass by, sporadically.  This is what the girl loves; she can’t put her finger on it.  Can’t name it, only make shapes from it, and it pleases her, pleases her.  There is a girl, on the curb of a shop that sells nothing now.  She had tried putting shoes on but they just kept having her walk out on job after job.  It was a show of unfaithfulness and the world had let her go.  Some of them pause for thought, but mainly they steer clear of the curb.  Cross-legged, she arranges her things.  Her bag, a book in it.  (She always has it on her, sometimes pretending it really was a present from him).  Right there in plain view.  Nuts and bolts. And her latest find, shapeless from its night with the storm, is pliant in her fingers.  A fold in the curve, the edges lap over.  A hat.  Mainly, an offering.  But an acceptance, too. She sits, her neck bending.  She will more than likely ache at the end of it.  Just like at the end of all the other things she could do.  This is her choice.  And the hat, beside her, is lovely, sagging.  It will perform as best it can, as prettily as it can, just to be full.  To fill up with the only thing now the world can give her.

  She is part of the scene, and can’t quite believe it when the first tinkle of coins dropping stabilise her hat, lighten her heart.  She is in heaven, for her courage.  Her hair unkempt, her skin uncared for.  A cheap dress.  Nothing to prove, they offer themselves freely, Violette and her grandfather’s once-trim hat.

 Somewhere above the street, in a different town, a different country, a window opens and a man leans out.  Perfectly.  For the story that he loves he makes a story of himself.  A perfect moment after the awkwardness of his rising, so still he had been.  He breathes in the cold silence.  So thick it is, it is as heavy as purple.

 There is no girl present in the street below him.  Very few people passing beneath.  He lives in the centre of the town but on one of the quieter streets.  The first moment when he leans out, when he wishes to remember what is outside his rooms, is always cold for him.  Because there is a space in him that no warmth enters into.  Because his annals are devoid of a girl and her growth.  Because his life lacks a daughter he steeled himself against a long, long time ago. Surrendering his right to give to her, he had kept everything for himself.   Roughly stitched up at the beginning but at least not gaping, and now just the stain of a scar where she had been removed.

 La Fin

(Written after a passage from 'La mort dans l'ame', Jean-Paul Sartre [Gallimard, 1949], p.177)

The Interlude/Recto Verso

Ha! just got shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Novel-in-progress prize! Very happy and so will let a bit of it out.....Not decided on the title yet.  For me, it is The Interlude....

I.

Seventeen days later

 Mark Lewison has almost finished everything off.  Just this day left and it will all be in order.  The opportunity that will then arise will be one of solitude.  Palliative, pre-ordained solitude.  He has been alone for seventeen days now with the same noise going on around him.  The lives that jostle past him as he heads to and from work, the snippets of conversation he tunes into, the carrying on, the surround sounds that are playing full blast now that he has been stripped of the show that usually makes of it all a background noise.  The light and shadows are taking on personas as slowly slowly one talks less and less to other people, and instead starts listening to the day, the night.  Both have been intruding upon him mercilessly since he found himself alone.  The day comes all light blue corduroy to dress him up.  She can see that he has become unsure of her so she pulls herself tightly about him until he can imagine the something inside of him – shocked and icy – beginning to thaw. Today’s work is to gently cajole him into the rest of his existence.  But the more callous voice of night pierces him just in time, has him hurrying home to lick his wounds, still fresh, until all he will be one day is the dried scab, and then the ugly scar.  Here are the notes.  Piled high before him.  They will be his only companion in this interlude of absolute solitude that he has engineered for himself.

 “I hear you’re taking two weeks off?”

 He is at the coats.  He has left the long room of partitions and grey shapes (the day had been a grey shape, of all the eyes that he had had to encounter not one pair had leapt from the monotone that washes each day away inside this building and replaces it with another without anyone ever noticing), dragged himself up to the staff room and offices, and is getting ready to go.  He turns towards the voice.  It is Nathalie.  They do the same job here.  Her voice is gentle, her eyes are too.

 ‘Yep’, he is watching her put on her coat and now her hat.  Her outer garments lend to her an appearance of shabbiness that makes her appear more fallible than the sharpness she possesses in black under the uniform light of the long room.

 ‘Just like that?’

 It is well into autumn.  Outside, everybody is buttoned up and here are Mark and Nathalie in the process of doing the same.  He had already taken his holiday in the summer, even sent a postcard to work.  He wishes he could fabricate something light, something in keeping with holidays and relief miles from here, but his chin is in the collar of his overcoat and his breath is all around him, hot and unpleasant.

 ‘Oh.  You know.  Me and Imogen are a bit at loggerheads.  You know...’ he manages.

 Her eyes widen, she is checking in her bag for something.  She looks at him, ‘That’s brilliant.  Most people’d just leave it.  You’re actually going to sort it out...Before it gets ugly!’  She looks genuinely pleased that this is the reason for his two week leave, out of the blue, there in October.  ‘Mind you, if I had a holiday every time Pat and I argued...’ She laughs and is gone.  Mark catches the swing of the door and goes out, too.

 ‘Yep’, he says to the street and the flurries of people walking along it.  This is what I am going to shut myself off from, he thinks, these brief gluts of kindness followed consecutively, like a revolving door, with a whole batch of anonymity and passing strangers.  The pleasantries and the drill are what he is going to holiday from, and the standing here on the verge of the flurry; a still leaf stunned by the movement sweeping along all the others, knowing that in a moment you are going to feel it beneath you, lifting you up and on…But now, seventeen days later, feeling brittle, left in the gutter, no reason to go home.

 The plan is to immerse himself (there is his head going under, bubbles trying to escape from the thick liquid) into a nourishing solitude (like a hot pot of soup it is waiting for him at home).  He is going to look too long in the mirror.  He is going to listen to every creak and groan as the flat becomes his ally, his one true friend.  (Is it my arm or the door?  This tired reach, this swinging open?).  He is going to work out what he is now that Imogen, who he is at loggerheads with, has disappeared.  ‘Oh.  Imogen’s left me’.  How could he have responded in kind to Nathalie’s simple questioning?  How could he have bundled Imogen and three years and that empty, very empty space beside him each night now for seventeen long days into a sentence, starting with ‘Oh’, like she had surprised it out of him?  ‘Imogen’s left me’, like it hasn’t been there all the time, heavy and disabling.  Imogen left me, she left me, she left me.

 Behind him, the building that he has left is darkness.  He steps away from it, trying to catch some light as other peoples’ directions sweep him along and he becomes a small part of this waning October afternoon.  Behind him now, the order which runs from a to z, and constructs systems spinning invisible webs perfectly; in the distance now, the building that houses this, that he comes to five days a week (small, grey, a dot) for three years now. It has infiltrated him and persuaded him (something small, grey, unmoving inside) a little order is desirable outside the hours of the office, too.  Like the food you eat three times a day (and buy on your way home), the flat you rent (being signed for) and the pinnacle of it all coming in the guise of the woman you love (being there every evening when you get home).

 Mark Lewison is entangled in webs, so fine you live in them; a little grey and collecting dust before his time.  He is all upside down and askew, although walking down the street like you or me. Walking forward, an empty bag on a curled shoulder that he is going to half fill with food (something plain, no fuss).  The central mini market is luminous and large making of the dusk streets outside something soft and unreal.  Once done, he will be on his way home to entice back some of the order that vacated the premises along with Imogen.  Perhaps he has it somewhere, written down, some proof that it had existed.  Perhaps he can force it to come back.  But with all the relevance leaked out of his life, all that had puffed him up gone, he doubts he has the strength.  He begins to doubt many things except that it must have been like this.  She must have been leaving him for a long time.  Barely.  Imperceptibly.  But for now, seventeen days old, it still feels like he has been winded.

‘Summer in sandals’

They’ve been around about the place waiting.  First the eyes start squinting for sunglasses, and the shoulders get rid of sleeves, replaced by fine straps.  Freckles come rushing towards the sun galore and, it’s only natural, that her feet, at one with sheepskin lined boots plodding around the mountain all winter long, should be itching for a little mercy….some light relief.  She hasn’t been season shopping, not for years; tends just to sympathise with things getting musty in her wardrobe until the right weather comes along. So her feet might just have an inkling that it’s going to be the same old, the same old…

Some years ago she dived in though; dived into the pool of splashing out, and paid for some very necessary footwear (she does love her feet after all, where would she be without them?)  A pair of simple sandals with a black, capital lettered, 235-year-old trademark embossed on the inner side. A pair of white patent leather, beautiful buckled summer shoes.  They were ready, her and her feet - sole cushioned yet mostly bare, spirits high… and the summer came on…

Not long after there is a picture of her on an English railway platform, surrounded by three little human ducklings.  They are all going back on the next train to the place she had chosen for their nest.  She had once spent a year wearing wellington boots in the northeast of England which was enough for even a tame podophile or, indeed, for any mummy duck who needed sometimes to feel the span of her feet under the sun, or hop to the shade, soles slightly braised.  It was a choice she had made and so there they were on platform 1, waiting for the train which would take her, with six little soles following, back to the warmer country next door, leaving the lady behind the camera to her winters with grandpa and her looking lovely in thick, red jumpers.

She doesn’t look like a duck in the photo despite her gloriously comfortable large feet bedecked in her wonderful flat sandals.  She looks more like a giraffe bending over trying to get into the frame of the photo aimed at three little versions of herself.

(They do look good, go well with what she is wearing, go well with everything and they really do fit like paws.  Honestly.  She was even tempted to write a little piece about them.   She wasn’t pandering.  She wasn’t on any well-known German shoe company’s pay roll!  But she did dream sometimes about getting a little recompense for something she loved doing more than anything in the world. She felt it might give her the validation, the blessing, to sit there and tap, tap, suffering for art - a pay check wouldn’t go so far as buying  happiness- whilst being quietly catered for…well, that was just a Birken dream that she’d have to Stock with the others.[1]  The imagination can run wild sometimes.  Let’s get back to her sandals… )

As a ferreter of second hand shops, bundles of clothes in the market place, and a smile in return for a plastic bag full of ironed rejects, why was she even tempted to go for these sandals that, on that day when she dived in, weren’t exactly flaunting themselves in the display. I will tell you.  They are the brother sister lover cousin of another of her trusted steeds, they simply reminded her of something else she knew and loved.  Like a cousin may remind you of a parent, or a new lover of an old…Or like the summer reminds you of a spring just gone. And so she loved them too, straightaway.  They were of her clog’s family, her fantastic romping red clogs that belonged first to the German company and then to her.  Now this was fashion! London in the nineties, a warm spring and we all felt as young as we were.  Her curly girly friend showed up in a lime green pair and she had to go take a look.  How long did she spend in the store deliberating over colours, walking up and down the floating parquet, a feast of choosing in the full length mirror?  Her purple sari skirt piping up for orange, her dark long dreadlocks swaying for blue, and her knowing in her heart, inside her skinny cage of bones, that it would be red.

And that was that. Spring in clogs.  She gallivanted about.  She wore them for everything – soirées, early morning milk bottle wanders, the city, the sea.  You couldn’t ignore them.  They weren’t wooden, but wonderfully rubber.  They exaggerated her enormous (for a girl) feet, but with such curves that she was proud.  She swung her leg and loved the way her ankle looked.  She never took them off and they defiantly threw off each season as it came.  Wherever she went, they went too.  One would have been forgiven for thinking  that they were attached to her blue flaired dungarees, but they weren’t.  There they all had been with their trademarked clogs, and their messy hair, and their going this way only to find themselves there.  Years later.  Ok.  Or saved.  Functioning.  Or not.  They had been pretty and talented, and their clogs came with them, and they even swapped.

Both lie now in disrepair, separately.  The dungarees worn until the holes conquered decency, and her clogs in the big cupboard at the bottom of the stairs, along with pairs of “too big” shoes-in-abeyance for her growing tribe of six feet.  Her old, red friends peek out from the end of the highest shelf, their sole grave.  She could still wear them, in the garden, or about the house, but the black has become ingrained in the ersatz snake skin red rubber, and the comfortable inner soles got lost along the way; she prefers to leave them in the cupboard, a relic of her spring in clogs. 

So how could she walk past , when it was there on her list and her feet ached and the capital lettered familiar name was calling out Remember?... Yet it was summer this time and she was ripe and they were more classical than clogs and so a perfect replacement for her grown up feet and they had stepped onto her path just at the right moment. And so fatefully, a bit worried that the cheque might bounce, she hot stepped it away with them.  And they are on her feet now, years later, flippy floppy, the swirls of the sole wearing thin.  Dog chews or dumb bells?  Or simply abstract?  Not one to remember to buy after care products, the white patent leather has been patched up with tip-ex and the beautiful buckle pulled as tight as it can go.  Still they are a bit baggy.  Living in this lovely warm country she has been lucky to be able to wear them an awful lot.  But they have not quite lasted as long as her clogs.  She hopes this isn’t a decline in production quality.  Maybe she should write to the German company…She fears more likely that she is heavier on the ground, not as light as she used to be.  Anyway, they really are in a state.  If they weren’t attached to her feet, the first person along would throw them in the bin.  But she is loath to move onto the next pair.  Loath for the disappointment of slight changes.  Loath for that quick flurry of desire as a whole array of unimagined beatitude dallies before her, all with the terrific possibility of entering into her life and meaning something.  No, she thinks, I’ll suffer them through this summer – the flapping soul prevents her natural rhythm, trips her up a bit - see them to the grave.  Then maybe she’ll scribble her next shy cheque as an ode to some sensible shoes for the autumn….

Time is quick now. The seasons are like one song.

I won’t mention slippers, or twigs that have grown to trunks.  I won’t mention snow falling, when she pulls on her sheep skin boots.  She won’t go gallivanting and her summer will be all sandal souvenirs.  This summer seems so much shorter than the others. Bare footed at the end, after all.  Naked.  A sheet will do.  At the very end.  So she won’t be faced with two constant companions losing faith in her, wondering why they’re sticking up, and where they would be without her.

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[1] IBAN  1447489F038

Gloves by Lucy Flowers

 A stunning, suave woman in the God-show was wearing your gloves.  Strutting seamlessly down the human runway from where the angels had already taken off, her tuned arms sang in circles, her body a perfect note and her hands slipped inside fantastic blue imitation leather gloves.  An over-size-tadpole-shaped band unnecessarily fastens across the back of them, making of a patch of skin a beautiful oval, rimmed with white imitation leather piping.  The gloves finish just at the bottom of the hand, baring wrist.  She hip pouted an even amount of times at the cliff end overhanging the droves of us, all applauding her parade, her sparkle, the design; we like to watch and dream, our eyes unclosing, our hands tingling… Another girl is already aiming at us, but the girl in the gloves gifts us with a last flick of a sure regard, a wrist in movement, a goodbye.

 You were not so kind.  You certainly didn’t dress up for the occasion.   You left your gloves, your drawings, scribbles, clothes and every little tiny thing you collected in the space of 27 years behind you.  And you didn’t turn around.  Your goodbye was a little final and taken with less advice than we would have been willing to give.

 The boy next to me points open mouthed as the devil crouches on the rafters of the town hall, dressed in black.  A signature bow on the waistband, his half-length trousers reveal his hairy calves, between which dangles his arrow of a tail. A funny creature this devil, terribly stylish tonight.  God (in white) has already taken his seat in the wings and watches unashamedly as the procession continues; the colour, the nerve, the naughtiness.  He brings forth a little comment here and there; nothing more… you win some you lose some but all in all they’re a handsome bunch.  Adam saunters, Eve struts, the angels take five backstage and the devil comes down from the rafters and the snake ends up being caressed by the kids that have come with their parents to see the show.

 Clothes design by Stéphane V.  Hair by Tif’ani.  Hats, Céline.  And one pair of gloves by Lucy Flowers. He saw them at my house and asked if he could buy them for his upcoming fashion show.  I said No Way, they are Not for Sale, but I would donate them for the sake of Art.  I wanted to give them New Life. The only things I ever touched of yours were your gloves and I gave them away. Stranger as you were, I allow myself to be a latecomer watching as the dirty river glimmered bottle bright.  I find my place, but there is just silence.  You are already gone.  She was wearing your gloves, Lucy Flowers.  Strutting seamlessly down the human runway from where the angels had already taken off.

Living daylights

I was always popping up all over the place; the little master of surprise.  I was blessed to have as my willing victim a grandmother who I claimed for myself alone (despite her other grandchildren).  It was me that would trek the ten mile hike to turn up at her door.

 ‘Heya, granny!’

‘Hello, little man!’ she would smile and make me tea, and then, when I was occupied, would telephone my mum to let her know I was safe.

I was the car boot pirate.

‘Oh, little man, you scared the living daylights out of me!!’  But her pounding heart was forgiving, and when we’d get home, she’d offer me a jam tart because I must be hungry.  I was.  Surprises were hard work

I was the oak staircase spy; dinner parties were my work - the swirl of ladies, the guffaw of their husbands; granny handing back some gloves to a lady, a hint of red in the cheek, which she must have left somewhere…

‘I’m sure they don’t belong to me.’

And Grandpa, at the drinks cabinet, swimming at ease in his little pool of pearly smiles.  I can’t remember any of those ladies faces.  Granny beat them at their game just by keeping her living daylights safe inside.  She glowed; they all imitated.  I watched her from the staircase, glad it was only me who could sometimes surprise them out of her.

I was the mini detective.  I’d swipe the garage keys and penetrate my Grandpa’s secret cell: the Jaguar! Inside, the odour of squeaky leather and perfume was overpowering and I never understood the dangling teddies, encumbered by hearts, the emblazoned I love you’s… This was a side of granny I didn’t know!  It seemed far more in keeping with those dazzling, faceless ladies.  One teddy sat above the glove compartment, his seams unpicked with the years, so long had this collection been going on.

*

After Grandpa’s accident on the A17, I imagined the teddy’s strewn all over, the hearts shaken from their laps …. But then I conjured up granny’s liberation; no supper to prepare, dinner parties to arrange, gloves to hand back.  Her postcard from Canada describing  hosts of wild flowers is still on my fridge, as if she was still over there, as if I was waiting for her to come back.  She died at a ripe old age, a happy lady. God Bless her.  Releasing me to disclose something that Little Man has kept with him an awfully long time…

One night, I went down the oak stair case - torch in hand, the keys pinched during the early evening -and made it into the garage unbeknownst to the alarm lights.  Secret detective cool, culprit keen.  Quietly the Jaguar let me in…and  I stuffed the little alarm into the teddy on the dashboard;  a little surprise for grandpa this time, programmed for somewhere along the A17 which - I promise - was only meant to scare him half to death.

Where the squirrels and sangliers play

     At seven hundred and eighty metres altitude April is stomping off the snow against the doorstep of her old, stone house.  It has been a slow, warming trudge of a morning to the seam of the mountain and back down again.  Opening the tatty shutters this morning, a great joy had swung into her.  A virgin snow coldly protected every inch of the world outside her window. The still leafless trees held bundles of it in their forks, the ground was tucked up tight beneath it, and even the rabbits’ water bottles had their little crowns.  The birds still sang which pleased April.  After all, it was spring, the month before her month; this heap of snow was just a surprise.  She filled up the stove with logs and left the only other human in the house that morning sleeping.  Like a snowball gathering girth, she rolls through the house acquiring a jumper and a coat here, gloves and a scarf there until rotund and ready she throws herself into the crisp light of morning.

     She bleats past the sheep.  Most of them have taken refuge during the night in their cabin, but a few shelter by the exterior walls, licking at the blanket they find at their feet.  They raise their snouts and bleat back at her.  She follows the track that they have all made with their feet, paws and hooves, up through the chestnut grove.  April’s lungs are cold and strong.  They build up a rhythm with her feet – tight and hot – which sees her over and across the spiky broom.  The balm of snow has deftly done away with the sores scratched into the earth by the “sanglier-piggies”.  It was Christophe, her son, who had named the wild boar – perpetrators of such digging and delving – in his bi-lingual fashion.  Living on a mountain side with a mother and a father who didn’t speak the same language provided him with great silences to avoid.  He would absent himself frequently and explore the larger territory about him, full of un-sourced noises.  He would hunt for the piggies with sticks and good-will, chase squirrels up their trees and paddle in the Radha-Krishna stream.  This time it had been his mother who had given the stream its name from memories she hadn’t yet shared with him.  Dancing at the board of the trickling stream, she had reminded him of the rabbits he would watch, settled some distance away, foraying in and out of the higher grass, and on sunny days they would twist their little rumps and jump into the air.  They would be absorbed in their delirium of freedom and not notice him.  His mummy rabbit is alone by the board of her stream, she is twitching her hips and swirling her shoulders perhaps in a delirium of solitude.  He is not sure, but he feels like he is watching her from afar, forgotten, and she is beautiful; from her messy curls whose smell he is a part of, down to her square toes.

     Deep in the virgin cold of the morning mountain, her lungs and feet take her on up over the crop of rocks until the end is in sight.  Mirage-like, it shimmers; the rickety fence that someone laboured to put up years ago, so many candles on top of a cake, celebrating the boundary between this valley and the next. It is Christophe that she has been approaching.  April sits between two leaning candles, ablaze with the sunrise and looks down into the other valley.  She sees the electricity works, the service station, the twelve shrines to Marie nestled into the foothills; all spread out on the immense white napkin.  The cleared road curves; a grey ribbon becoming taut as it spans the river and then winds onto the small town where somewhere, safe, is Christophe, her blood, her love.  Feet cold, heart warm, she nestles down to contemplate the scenery and the flickering memories projecting themselves one after the other in the warm cinema of her mind.

     She misses Christophe each and every week.  Christophe, who lives for being outside, has become an inmate of the boarding school in the next valley.  Her wild Christophe gets on the bus each Monday morning, boards all week and returns the Friday evening to his solitary haven and his gleaming mum, who gets to feed him and tuck him up and keep him close. On their side of the valley, there is no human excavation on view.  From their window, simply the trees cross-stitching the mountain for miles and miles.  Christophe comes home, and it is the most beautiful world that April has ever been witness to. Since she made her home here everything had become ultra-vivid; with her cat’s eyes, the moon turned out to be a companion, and with the gecko’s, darting under stones, sprawling in the midday sun, she was entirely at one.  It hadn’t been a choice that came from within, nor had it been completely involuntary that she had flattened her belly to the ground and waited, her eyes rabbit-wide. She knew something was going to happen. Strangely enough, she had been wrestled into this position by a strand of prairie-grass.  Her ears close to the ground, she could hear the crickets choking with leg-rubbing glee and see them launching themselves into space as if it was normal, there above her awkwardly turned head.  Her nose tickled, her legs useless; but she took comfort and called it Love and began to worry about the things that would right themselves and stop being extraordinary if she got up.  No, she would stay here, laying low, a whole new angle from which to see the world.

But even more extraordinary than the fantastic fit into her April shaped den, and the first rush of heightened feelings on finding a perfect mate, had been the descent into something from which Christophe is taken every Monday and returned to every Friday.  With this thought and the morning fire spreading, April bobs down the mountain, feeling wonderfully small.  A descent of a few hundred metres finds her kicking the snow from off her boots against the doorstep. Even after all these years she never expects it to be hostile.  She can’t imagine this vast difference can really exist; the serene cold joy of the morning in her lungs, so full-up that her eyes are icy, and the heavy silence that begins its motor almost as soon as she crosses the threshold.

From this stifling hostility, it takes a long time to come up for air; she can feel the pressure on the back of her neck, the grip on her forehead hairline, and the fight in her coming from nowhere. Another extraordinary thing: there is never one bruise. He always turns her in such a fashion as to leave not one bruise.  Or was it that she turned convivially, after flattening her belly to the ground, her eyes rabbit wide, waiting?  Could she be at all to blame?

     They had asked her later, why didn’t you give him one?  She lost all ability to move her mouth. Didn’t they understand the vast serenity of the mountain or that she had become intrinsic to it? Intrinsic to this peace that sets in far from human intervention.  They had just been two souls trying out an angle.  Imagine her surprise when he had started chipping away at her as if she was as noble and resigned as a tree.  All she had to do was to understand and not move. Stay there where he had put her.  Not get up.  But all the time, unbeknownst to him, April was more the curve of a squirrel’s brush, more the tangle of sheep’s wool, the tenacity of ivy even after it is stripped down.

     They had even asked her, why didn’t you go to the police? Again, she is dumbfounded.  Feels again the shame at having once, long ago, tried to tell someone that all was not well in the cross channel union, could someone please help her please, because she didn’t know so many folk around here, her home was the mountain now, and her mother tongue a stranger. But she had done her best to express herself, standing in front of the counter, where a poster was pinned at the height of her crotch, so one was obliged to bend down to read it.  April had done so whilst she was waiting for the tense silence to subside and the moving about of paper to stop and the eyes to raise in her direction.  It had decreed in black and white - and colours filling in the cartoon scene of domestic violence - that a man may not abuse his wife, may not leave her in any way un-intact – be it via verbal abuse, psychological, physical.  Verbal, psychological, physical.

1. Verbal

2. Psychological

3. Physical

But the wolves had apparently not read their own posters and leering from behind the counter - or were they smiling the only way they knew how? – April had found herself cornered, wide-eyed, belly down.  It had been a long time ago, when Christophe was still small enough to be bundled into a car without knowing.  Okay, so fear did not get written down in the ledgers of law and order.  At least she knew. She had felt thoroughly ridiculous and scurried away with Christophe still sliding about in the unfastened car seat.  She had not been thinking straight, and was glad that when she got home Christophe’s father had not been there to see her so dishevelled.  She had had time to rub away the shame.

    

     Living out a forced position is not without effect; and on righting herself momentarily - for instance, to take part in the summer or welcome people to their home, or go down the mountain to the police station - there was always the tilt inside, the race of sand particles inside a timer that only counted the minutes before she resumed her customary position.

    

When at last she became an old beast that had lost all remembrance of the magic of its limbs, she shepherded herself before a large lady, camouflaged in a room growing around her.  All manner of crazy plants reached out along the limits of this space that boasted a porte-fenetre and a whole wall of windows that let the sun in to nourish this caged jungle. Not many people peered in at them, but April wouldn’t have been surprised.  The woman before her was her own exhibition.  She was made up exotically in perfect keeping with her environment.  Her coffee was brought to her by the people who worked here, it was obviously exactly the required nourishment for her eyes were bright and a pungent healthy scent exuded from her even in this moment of non-movement.  So, here April was, at the bee all and end all much like Dorothy found herself before the Wizard of Oz.  A new heart?  Courage? Even some brute rationality, please, to make some sense of this human quagmire she had sunk into, would be a treat, thank you.  She does not remember the finer details, just the general mess. He (the predator) had started to perform his uncouth behaviour in front of their son and had undone an understanding (a done-up-standing) that had erstwhile had them rooting for the same cause.  At least that.  At least Christophe between them, their cub, their joy. How could she explain to him, who had no ear for her language, that this couldn’t go on? How could she, who had begun to dream in his language now, dreams that made no sense, tell him that this had to end? Everything had unravelled, and with her useless tongue fatly lolling out of her mouth, she must have buried her head in the earth. Où est Christophe?  The creature emerges slowly from the background snarls of red, sprays of yellow, and reassures her. And despite diversa specie, April comes to have confidence in her. They meet regularly. And slowly, miraculously, like a snake responding to the charmer, she begins to uncurl.  From her slouched position, April begins to feel her spine.  The musky voice wafting out from between two glossy lips is enveloping her, deeming her to be lion strong.  “One fine morning, you get up…” she purrs.  Yes, April must go back to her mountain and rein in the threat. Protect her young.  She leaves the jungle room for the last time, swinging her arms, one fine morning, you get up; the guffaw of a mantra drumming out her steps back to the forest.

*

There are many ways to signal the end of the affair.  In the concrete world of her earliest years there had been postcards of poetry and remorse and then later, sometimes, a just not turning up; an all-encompassing emptiness rather than two pint glasses of Guinness, froth-stained, emptying and two hearts hovering.  This time, it would have to be different.  After all, there was blood involved, and a level of altitude that befitted them both.  There would be a fight for rights; parental, territorial.

  Perhaps he had found out about her weekly visits to a place way outside his jurisdiction.  Anyway, he had let her fall into thinking that he understood that even in this devilish game they were playing out in the middle of nowhere, there were still some rules that had to be adhered to.  He had let her think he understood, once again, tenderness.  He had let her kneel, half hoping, in the space between two pairs of foreign eyes that are seeing the same thing, but then, cunning as a human, he tore her down.  Such was his nature that he couldn’t help himself taking up his old habits. What he didn’t know was that April had become strong as a lion, quick as a squirrel, and staunch as a sanglier-piggy.

     As she approaches the doorstep, knowing exactly the noise her foot will make against it, the snow tumble, the feeling; and she also knows that her snake charmer had been right!  And that it had been this morning.  She had got up.  And left the only other person in the house sleeping.  Left him completely.  And suddenly, she cannot wait to extract herself deftly from this impossible life that someone from her own species had deemed suitable for her.  This time, there is to be no mistaking the perpetrator and the act.  She is ready to make her mark.  Into her arms he will go, for the last time, and she will administer her ointment for all those invisible bruises. The striking out of a beast used to being the prey is an ugly sight but she does it well.  We won’t go into the hairy details.  We’ll leave them to it, at seven hundred and eight two metres altitude, where the squirrels and sangliers play.  Suffice to say that April is hot-blooded and human and as taut as a naked branch unmistakably waiting for the buds to push through.