When I meet my neighbours on midwinter streets
we do a little dance called the Symptom Exchange.
It is carefully choreographed:
a few steps this way, a few steps that.
Hands touch shoulders, heads nod.
If we manage this one successfully
we may move to the dance-off,
called the State of the Pavements.
Twenty years old if a day are the preserved crumbs in the small yellowed box with its remnants of an address and its faded painted silver carnations and bells. Our translation assignment had been to pour honey where thorns of misunderstanding had grown and blocked the path of love. A set of distraught parents over here had needed to pacify a set of angry parents over there.
We took no fee. Instead, we asked to be sent a piece of the wedding cake if our carefully crafted letter did its work.
"How are you doing?" he texted.
"Have you written much?"
"Don't know," I said,
"But my pencil's much shorter now."
That's the knowledge deep within that somewhere in the house is the half-eaten biscuit or the cup of coffee with the final waiting slurp.
I have that nagging feeling now. I know there is a task that I want to get you to help with. I didn't call you. It was going to have to wait until you came.
I lift my arms above my head to help the memory. It must be something I can't reach. My right wrist is swivelling. Light-bulb? No, I always cope with those myself. It's not the closing action for the top kitchen cupboard. That's a single downward tap and I manage that one with the long wooden tongs for doing stir-fries in the wok. I wander round the house with my arms raised, looking for the half biscuit of this undone task. Finally I find the precious mouthful. In the office near the window my hands remember and they twist and turn. It's the fastener at the top of the jammed sash window. I sigh with satisfaction.
But by the time you get here tomorrow I shall have forgotten again and my wrists will be asking the same question. Where is my half biscuit?
A short walk up the hill you can look at the telescopes developed over the years by single-minded inventors. Next door, if the room with the Longitude timepiece is shut, you can wonder at the camera obscura. In the late afternoon sunshine of July we push aside the heavy curtain to stand in utter velvet black. Gradually our eyes show us the magic. The whole of Greenwich appears, tiny and in silent moving colour, on the table. Young visitors from the East tug digital equipment from their pockets and flash-photograph our view.
The new Minister of Culture has delighted Brazilians over the years with fifty albums of his songs. The interviewer asks about the content of his lyrics. "Oh, everything," he says, sweepingly, in a dark brown voice. He starts the list: Lava Fairs...
My mind arrests fumbling to encompass this new range of unexpected meanings – setting up a hoopla booth on the fertile slopes of Vesuvius, peddling roast chestnuts straight from the crater's mouth, where red-hot passion explodes up into the atmosphere.
At the edge of the sea may come hissing steamy petrifaction, but until then hearts teeter on the volcano's brink, hold hands and jump, deciding to go with the flow.
Sleep-jumbled automat woman
scorches naked alabaster thighs
on the burning metal radiator
and falls from top-floor window in surprise
describing an incandescent arc
head over heels through the frozen night
reduced to a concentrated spark
of unthinking self-immolation.
Weightless with a head of full-moon light
at one with the whole of creation
she tumbles out, tit over arse,
because he phoned:"Look at the stars!"
("The Light of the World" by Holman Hunt hangs in the chapel of Keble College, Oxford)
We went to the knitting pattern building
to see the Light of the World.
The Fairisle College Authorities
have put up a notice
asking visitors to switch off the illumination
on leaving the chapel.
Given the present state of unease
in our crumbling civilisation,
I thought it might be unwise to comply.
Etiolated
This is my gardening word.
It is the reproach my garden makes to me. The syllables run round my head like the tendrils of the neglected, chlorophyll-starved, light-deprived plants. Long, useless stems develop, unable to feed themselves. They are the pale and sickly children in the Kaethe Kollwitz drawings of families in poverty, clinging to the skirts of anguished mothers. I have not cleared the weeds. I have again not cleared the weeds. I have failed my wispy consumptive plants. These ones will not survive my inaction. Etiolated jumps out at me and will not leave my brain, even though I have now walked well past them and have moved into the sunlit section of the garden where no-one needs me. They are not asking here for hand-outs. These shrubs and nettle-banks flourish and jostle each other in rude health and in the knowledge their families are landed gentry - centuries of inherited decayed vegetation have composted down without my help into prime nutrition. No need to emigrate in search of sustenance. Basking in occasional sun is their right and due. They know nothing of the industrial proletariat of thin shadow-bred scrawn that clusters round my badly-sited patio, holding out begging hands. Day by day I brush them off and ignore their needs. But their cries become etiolated, a word first heard on Gardeners' Question Time and that weaves itself into my conscience and will not let me be. Like hearing the opening notes of Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree by mistake as you pass a radio. Your day is ruined by a tune.
Or by a word.
The perfume thing
It happened first when I was pregnant. In a drab store where I'd gone to choose fabric, paint-smell bit at my eyes and invaded my brain so sharply that I blundered, reeling, out of the building.
Since then I have recoiled ever more frequently from the chemical extras of civilised life. I whimper in lighting departments from the halogen. A teenager with deodorant is more frightening than a mugger round a street corner. I cower in terror when passengers are force-sprayed with disinfectant. I cannot walk through the woods where a shower-fresh morning jogger has run.
The thing has meant that from the downstairs kitchen I could tell that only two of my three children in a bathroom on the other side of the house had followed orders to go upstairs and clean your teeth, now.
I am turning into a dog.
I watched the rest of the film of Perfume from behind the sofa when I realised I could smell the cordite from the fireworks in eighteenth century France.
I am turning into a dog.
Lucozade is sick-bed time. It's sticky orange rings on the tray. It's visits upstairs and then being abandoned for hours on end. It's chicken-pox itch and calamine lotion. It's a fizz on your tongue and laying your head back exhausted on the grubby pillow. It's soldiers of toast with butter. It's someone a bit bothered about you. Perhaps you won't last the night. It's something to sip when you are on your last sips. When you can't even swallow a peeled grape. It's being in your parents' bed in the daytime, curtains closed and a box of Fuzzy Felt untidy on the eiderdown. You don't have the strength to put the lid back on. It's an open volume of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia weighing down your legs with whales and steam trains and hot air balloons. If they give you Lucozade and Fuzzy Felt and Arthur Mee and then go downstairs and leave you, they think you are going to die.
I took my notebook into the garden
thinking the writing might come easier there.
The breeze is inspired:
one page after another flips itself over
from right to left
as the wind pours out its story
and fills my book
It is 5.30 a.m. and a freezing dark morning. I have acres of documents that must stay as hand-luggage. I now also have a Russian full-length overcoat, three layers of cardigans to fling off with the hot flushes, and a shawl that could double as a family hammock for half a tribe of Colombians. And a wheelie-bin case. And a handbag. And a hat and gloves. The taxi bit went fine. So I'm early enough to be told I have to wait even longer because they have decided to cancel the flight. Desk lady is uncharming and tells me there was no demand for the 09.10. I contradict. I go through to x-ray. I take off the coat, the shawl, the three cardigans - for by now I am fuming hot. I put them through. And the case. And the handbag. They do no body-search. Obviously I am no longer attractive even to Rosa Klebb. This flusters me. I take my coat. My cardigans. My shawl. My case. I go. I find a seat, quite some way off. I take my paper. I read the paper. I attempt the crossword. I need a pen. I turn to the handbag which must be under the shawl. Or the cardigans.
I go back to the x-ray where my cumbersome handbag, containing the pen, keys to house and bank vault, wallets of money, credit cards, tickets and passport and mobile phone and contact lens paraphernalia and spectacles and the manuscript of the book about female suicide bombers I have been asked to review, is sitting on the machine belt and no-one has bothered to isolate it yet.
I sit, I read some more. Now it's loading time. Oh, no, it's not. The 09.10 was cancelled and the 10.30 is delayed. As I stand tutting at the monitor a middle-aged foreigner brings me my freshly–inscribed Lufthansa luggage labels and says accusingly, "I sink you haff lost it." "You should see me on a bad day," I tell him.
A Chinese lady sees I am writing furiously and approaches. "Can you borrow me pen?" No, lady, I am using pen. Am doing very important calligraphy.
A tall African in a slim-fitting camel coat strides past, wearing Rupert-the-Bear check trousers and smart shoes. The lining and hem of his coat are hanging down, dangling threads. I want to sew it for him. I suppose his need to be admired was stronger than his need to wait until the tailor had finished. He is able to look regal while frayed.
I fear I am not.
Balsa, paper, glass
In fragments on the rug lay brittle pieces of coloured wood,a fret-sawed frame for a circle of glass. Stencilled onto the back was a picture of a Grecian vase in yellows, green and red. The mirror itself was intact, slightly fly-blown, slightly unsilvered.
Only the wood had not survived the fall. Cheap wood, expensive padding. Four small sheets of cream vellum, corners turned down, sixteen stepped triangles, a fortune-telling game.
Open the corners slowly, one by one.
No future was waiting under the folded corners of this soft octagon but the four sheets could be prised apart. Tiny precise grey pencil with open-ended syntax:
"When you break this intentionally fragile mirror"
"you will know"
"how much you are loved"
On the fourth sheet an initial and date from before the war.
The girl took the pieces all in her hands and carried them to her mother, who took them and turned them over, slowly, one by one, laying them out like a game of patience.
Balsa, paper, glass.
"We will glue it back together," she said.
"We need never know."
