‘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.  

a february without word

mercredi 16 février

i have to pay for it now (Word) after my far too many months trial and first i have to sell a few packets of tea and a bundle of cosies (Doro thé up and running soon!) ...when this is done ( and my cold fingers warmed to the soul by french winter market ambiance) I will get on and post Violette, my story not my child, written before i could have imagined such a one as she!.  Then I shall send off to editor land my first love Of rhythm and of sleep, and then I shall dig into my norwich novel The Interlude which i started when Bram was in my belly and am still two thirds through! In between times I will hope to blog a few more of my short stories...squirrels, portable love affairs, cardigans, cow shaped clouds etc
for now my other love (my family) go well

i hope you do too
la paix et l amour x

the two littlest are not mine
Bram 6, Eartha, 8 and Violette 4 at nanny mar's house this christmas.

we got chickens, eggs being a New Year resolution....


Take Care