Wild Goose Chase

Some things just aren’t meant to be. Which is why I am currently in bed eating ice-cream and feeling profoundly sorry for myself.

It all started 10 years ago, when my beloved grandfather passed and was interred close to our family summer home in the south of Sweden. My cousin, aunt, grandmother, mother and I started going there for a weekend at the end of October every year, to freshen up the grave, take long walks, and most importantly, cook a lavish meal.

Southern Swedish tradition has it, you should cook a goose at this time of year, eat it with apples and prunes and make a black soup from its blood. We chose instead the slightly more refined option of duck, and plenty of red wine in place of the soup. Non the less, the meal requires a good 16 man-hours of slaving above a hot stove, digging hands into cold stomach of bird pulling intestines out, breaking nails shelling chess-nuts, dicing apples finely, endlessly stirring sauce, endlessly adding a bit more cinnamon to parfait, endlessly, actually even spending the summer making the perfect condiments to go with the bird.

With time, this weekend of kitchen duty and autumn storms has become one of my favorite traditions. Most of all though, I have always had a very strong sense that this is something appreciated by more than me – that all the effort and hard work my cousin put in is valued, sincerely, by those who fare by it.

This year, as my cousin and I started to plan for it, we thought we’d make it a bit more…well, more. We decided not only to go all in on the specially preserved mushrooms, the lovingly spiced pickles , and the carefully pondered perfect appetizer of green moldy cheese, pears and chicken liver mousse, but also to share this best experience of our lives with loved ones. So we invited my sister and her husband, my deeply pregnant best friend and hers, and also The Better Man.

Tempting faith, if ever faith was tempted. For this past week leading up to the actual plucking and roasting of the bird has been fraught with calamity.

First off, the Better Man did not want to go. Initially he hid behind a possible trip to the States in order to report from the elections. When that fell through, he claimed he had to work. When I pointed out that the trip would take place over a long-weekend, the Friday of which would be a holiday anyway, he told me he’d lost his drivers license. When I persevered, fixing us a ride with friends, he said he didn’t really like duck.

Finally he gave in, admitting himself to the admittedly torturous treatment of the best of Burgundy’s, fresh walnut loafs, and perfectly crusted Jerusalem Artichokes, and I called up the butcher to order three times our usual quantity of bird. But the butcher had no fowl, only foul news.

Apparently, all the ducks normally available and nicely rotund at this time of year had wasted away in some frightening disease. Unless we were willing to risk it all on the slender carcasses studded with avian flue – there was nothing he could do for us.

Shaken, but not stirred, and hardly pausing to send a prayer in the way of those sadly departed, I called up my Stockholm butcher. Yes, he had also heard of the sad fate of our local winged ones, and for that express reason, he  was flying in a fresh supply of French Canards – they would be arriving Thursday.

Profoundly relieved, I made him swear on his merguez that no one else would get their hands on my chicks, and also, that he should set the biggest ones aside for me, and then my cousin and I spent large parts of the weekend, while flinging manure all about our allotment, planning for the best way of transporting these foreign fliers. I even got a portable ice box after work on Monday, only to arrive home from the hardware store to a phone-call from sister. Apparently, her husbands investment bank employer does not look kindly upon vacations right now, the financial crisis nixing any plans for travel.

Then today, my cousin fell ill and won’t be able to make it. And the friends called, and seem to be having trouble, as they only just now found out it is a six hour drive down to the dinner table. Also, my mother called, and seems to feel, when faced with defection of sister, that the whole thing seems a bit of an overkill. Why go through all the trouble “just for a bird”. Knowing when beat, I rang up the Better Man, and told him the news. A loud whoop of joy was his response, followed by the brightening tidings that now he’ll be able to work all week-end!

Alas, I sit, all on my lonesome, three birds and no guests the richer, sad, sadder, saddest. Think will get another scoop of Ben and Jerry’s – just hoping it’s got eggs in it.

Naked and Torn on Floor

I suppose it was just a matter of time. That I should have seen it coming. I suppose also it is no more than could be expected in this world of strife and struggle, that the tragedy coincides with the official change from autumn into winter. Perpetual darkness, freezing rain and forelorn brown leaves tumbling lost and loosing from their perches – it is almost too precise an external illustration of my wounded, cold, and lonley soul.

Yes, you guessed right. I have run out of perfume. Pressing the last few dropps from the bottle, with a sob, this morning, I haven’t had the heart yet, to throw out the empty shell, the mocking vapid hull.

No tragedy, you say? Well I say, you know not my pain.

I’m not a girl who’s heavy on the make-up. In fact, I should probably be a lot heavier, cause then I wouldn’t be pale enough to work as own moon in these dark and trying times. In my bathroom cupboard nestle old shades and tints and if I think back to the last time I bought any paint that wasn’t plain black mascare I’m thinking back to the times of Hit Me Baby, One More Time.

Clothes? Let’s say it’s a no-frills deal. I look best in bump-and-grind-hiding black, look best in the stark and slightly pissed-off look of an office girl. Any fun I have I have with my shoes and with fun I mean that I sometimes trade in my black patent heels for the slightly more frivoulous black suede heel. As for jewels I can’t afford to send anything but the most demure of messages, as for hair I haven’t patience for more than a simple Sarah-Palin-Went-And-Stole-Then-Ruined-My-Look-For-Ever twist at the back. Add my new no-nonsense barely there glasses, and you’re looking at the poster girl for…well, no poster-girl looks like this, really.

But scent. I want it dark behind my ears, heavy on my neck, overtly sexual and rising from a white shirt, I love it smooth and slightly scary and heaving like it’s out of breath already. I want my perfume to say all that I can’t be bothered to say, and say it in a low voice to just a few. Most of all: I want it right, just right, something to identify with and feel at home in.

Finding a perfume like that can be tricky. In fact, I never have. They are too sweet, too pretend feminine, too much of a bustier, when I want something a lot more leather than a bustier. They are racy red bras, or lacy pink ones – when I want something quite, quite different, something deep blue that make your breasts look like milk. In short, they are terribly obvious most of them, and I am looking for something more -somthing instinctive rather than cookie-cutter.

So what I do? Well, only what any girl does 99.9% of the time. She settles for less. Bringing the bottle home in a bag, I short of shrug and try not to mind its imperfections, spraying it on wrists and chest daily and thinking of Brittain, or at least, of how much worse it could have been – trying to be grateful it ain’t Angel or Miss Dior that cling to my skin.

The first cut was the deepest, of course. When I was fourteen, I actually convinced myself for a while that I had found my perfect match. It wasn’t till three years later that I had the guts to admit that there was just a twinge too much of zest in the Issaye Miyake I had bestowed my youth on. After that, I got sort of disillusioned, and now I tend to change make and flavour every six months or so. You get used to it, and you don’t much think of the hollowness of the relationship. Not in everyday life anyway.

But everytime that bottle is emtpy, and you are forced to face the question: would I spend another six months with this smell in my nostrils – or is it time to break free and get on the market once again – it does hurt a bit.

And it also does hurt a bit, the next day, when you are answering your own question really, finding yourself despondently wandering the perfume department. Still with that faint glimmer of hope: maybe this time, it’ll be right.

The Shit and the Fan

You may remember I was crawling, literally on my belly through litter to the cross on Friday, for my sins. Lacking in housekeeping skills, lacking even the will to keep, I was doubting how long The Better Man would keep the woman who put the Schlepp in Stepford.

My worries weren’t lessened, as I went out for a very nice piece of boiled ox and truffles with my mum, and also to watch The Other Boiling Girl. In it, the two nymphs Portman and Johanssen show to how little avail beauty and wit are, for woman, if her man should cease to enjoy her. Heads fall.

And the falling had me thinking: if such beauty and wit as that of the above mentioned ladies fail to keep their extremities on, then perhaps, my heavy leaning of what I have got of the same might be a bit risky.

The Better Man is no malfunctioning monarch in need of an heir. I tell myself he’d feel a bit iffy about having my top chopped off. But still, as I left the cinema, head full of rolling heads, I decided I’d rather not find out what would be the latter day equivalent of the Towern and then some. It was high time to shape up. Time to stop being the interested conversationalist and the good lay and start being a mean, lean, cleaning machine.

Now, vowing to be the model girlfriend is all very well and good. Execution (pardon the pun) is quite another. All of Saturday I procrastinated, standing instead out at that final frontier that is the allotment belonging to my cousin and I. Hanging out at the allotment is a dirty job at the best of times. But yesterday, it was especially so, as we had to fertilize our lands. Using nothing but the most fresh and pungent cow shit. (oh, and yes, also peeing slightly behind a late blooming aster). It was hard and tough labor, but we were blissfully happy, digging, stepping in, gouging potency off, discussing, praising and smelling of manure and then finally, sitting on a wooden box at the edge of the manure, drinking coffee and wringing the Juice of Manure out of our our gloves.

Sunday, however, brought the end of such Thoreauan liberty. The Better Man said, again with that raised eyebrow connoting Discontent With Girlfriends Lack of Proper Female Pride and as he paid for my lunchtime coffee, that after His Long Hard Afternoon of Difficult and Dire Labor In the Editing Room he supposed he’d better come over and cook me some dinner, or I’d never get any inside me, save Yoghurt’s and Biscuits.

Something in that eyebrow was eerily resemblant to a certain raised sword of justice recently seen on the silver screen, and so I decided to surprise him, by presenting him, on return, with a spick and span apartment.

Alas, first I emptied closet, throwing all washing in great big heap on floor. Then I started on dishes, and broke a glass, and rather a nice one. Scrambling to hide shards at bottom of trashcan, hit my head on cupboard. Went into bathroom to wash face. Noticed funky smell from sewer. Decided to disassemble sewer to get funk out. Realized lack of proper equipment. Built proper equipment from old screw-top and a clothes peg. Burnt hand with lye. Funky smell increased. Realized was late for washing. Hurried downstairs leaving knickers on stairs. Hurried up again retrieving knickers and hanging them, for lack of better place, on front door handle (inside). Realized wasn’t using enough lye. Got out Chlorine. Knocked toothbrush into toilet. Scratched head with hand. Got Chlorine in hair. Plus thumb-print on glasses. The door opens. The panties fall. The Better Man stands there, bag of groceries in arms, greeted by wild woman smelling of Ninja Turtles, bottle of acid in hand, hallway decked in dirty intimates. Tableaux, as the French would have it.

Eventually both the bathroom and I were immaculately clean, and after stalling dinner a few times in order to get down and collect dry clothes, we sat down to an excellent meal. But there was an indeniable froideur in the air. A slight annoyance if you will. Deciding that my plan had backfired miserably, that I had disqualified forever as Woman of Any Substance, I decided instead to fall back on those old faithfulls – more frou frou than a good hand with a broomstick, but as marketable, some would still say – that beauty and wit. Smiling my most beguiling smile, I looked at him through sparkling glasses and asked:

”So, did I tell you about all that shit Hedvig and I dug yesterday?”

Love and Dusty S

First, let me start out by saying – by stating for the record even – that I am not complaining. I love The Better Man deeply, and find him, daily, more attractive and intriguing.  

 

Second, I’ve got to tell you: he’s got me between a rock and a hard place.

 

I sometimes clean, but mostly not. Closet always a mess, the bedroom full of crumpled old papers and mugs of tea, I tend to leave wet towel draped artistically on pillow in morning, and find crumbs on sheets aren’t that much of a hassle, if you have a good book with you.

 

Making a soufflé, preserving home-grown parsnips, curing ham is fun. Peeling potatoes isn’t.  So I tend to buy a curry, have a cheese sandwich or just boil some spaghetti and eat with salt, on weeknights.

 

If I’m tired, which is mostly, I don’t hesitate to ask of someone else to fetch a glass of water, my glasses, another pillow. I do like washing clothes and ironing, but still tend, somehow, to wash clothes and leave them in undistinguished, if clean, heap of sofa.

 

And I demand to sleep with balcony door open no matter how cold it is out. Then my feet freeze, and I need to tuck them somewhere, on someone, for warming up.

 

Now, I find no theoretical snags in my modus operandi. While no raging feminist, I am not of the kitchen kirchen kuchen school of thought either. I do not believe that woman should be confined to the duties of the home, or that a man, should he take them on, would loose any of his maleness. As long as he still goes out daily to fight the battle of the world, wears his hair short, and his pants creased, he can cook all he wants after work.

 

But I do believe that a woman, should she allow her Better Man to not only pick up checks, but also pick up after mess, is veering dangerously close to the borders of that formerly – at least legendary – strictly male emporium: the united states of the fucking spoilt slob.

 

Mind, he doesn’t nag, or complain. He’s cleverer than that by far – just lifting his eyebrows – a threatening message if I ever saw one. Alas, if I want to stay happy and blessed it seems I must clean up my act. Or rather, start translating part of salary into fee for weekly cleaning-lady.

 

Virginia Woolf did, after all, and I would do anything she did if it’d give me peace.

 

Road to Perdition

1.

 

The house was large, the walls were white. On the hardwood floors stood footless floating angular Italians, placed to catch light on steel. On the white walls were large paintings – black and grey, or darkening.

 

I sat at the piano, the ticking of the egg-timer beating out to perfection the imperfection of my own phrasing, measuring the mandatory half-an-hour. Over the piano hung a black house in a dark wood with boarded shut windows. On the piano lay sheaves of delicate music, smelling of my fathers pipe, torn edges.

 

My brother never sang. His pitch was perfect, he’d wince as I hummed. His piano teacher, a girl with brown curls and dresses, smashed to a pulp on a freeway somewhere in Germany. I came home one afternoon: staying silent in the hallway for a long time, listening as he played exquisitely. But never in public, slamming the lid down when forced to dust.  

 

Beneath the large dark canvasses, we spread white papers. I filled mine with two-legged horses and princesses the color of dew: oval faces, dresses bright pink and unyielding. My brothers lines, minutely perfect in detail, were tree or machine and could be turned to be a street of cars flowing, a balloon, and shaded.

 

Me, I after eight years of kicking and screaming I was allowed to let the piano drop, and I retreated, contented, into the library, or to the kitchen counter, the bedside table, the floor, curling up and stretching out, while Goldberg varied in the background and the rain poured like the grey of art, with the books.

 

2. 

 

I remember sneaking out of bed each evening and hiding the Sign of Four Sherlock Holmes I had been given in a drawer, needing some space between its eerie green cover and my warm pillow. I remember being terrified of matches and anything fire, lest they’d blind me like they did The Courier of the Czar. I remember believing absolutely, that the punishment for sex before marriage would be the sign of evil on your child in the shape of a raspberry birthmark (Tora Dahl, Swedish thirties author).

 

Books could be incomprehensible, darkly threatening, suggestive of something red – making me stretch and scratch. But for a long time there was no need for the attending good, popular, excellent. The Eskimos could as well have no word for snow as a thousand. Books could be read and that is all I knew. Each new departure, the bits of novelty scavenged from the low shelves, was met by approving smiles from mother and the grandfather who fed me Jerome on Fridays, and Woolf by eight. Then adolescence hit.

 

I rebelled against the censorship of the highbrow home the only way I could, choosing Lucky over Llobo Antunes. I wore my hair blue and my sleeves long and over my chipped nails, and I refused to carry Camus and I refused to carry Candide and I carried Collins – Wilkie and Jackie – everywhere instead.

 

3.

 

In all that time (spent/gained) reading, did I ever long to be there, on the patio as he died, in the fore of the small boat with my tail wet, holding the heat of the buns, fleetingly, in my hands to warm them?

Of course I did. Reading was always an escapist activity for me. Or not so much escapist – wishing myself away – as alluring, tempting, making it impossible, to stick, to keep faith.

For no matter how content, with the Blanc apples heavy on the bough, with that particular crash of wave, with glance or more than glance: when other, expressly poignant, scenarios take the place of one another at such pace as the closing of one book and the opening of the next, when so many alternatives, so many ways of dreaming, flash before your eyes: how can you possibly stay grounded, true to the truth? Who wouldn’t on the subway or on the bus or, indeed, even waiting for the bus in the rain, rather be roaming whichever heath or mill-garden currently on page?

Not so much wanting to escape then, no more than the happily married want to escape as they walk down the streets, pretty people with open inviting smiles passing them by. But you do dream, and you do ponder difference of skin.

Given the analogy, my first day in Lund, town of my Alma Mater, was that brief first week of a fling when not even the extreme attractiveness of others can tempt you to stray. I did not need to read – walking wide awake into the parks and along the cobbled streets that were so much more: the thunder hanging in the air, the perfect freedom of a BLT under the heavy black sky, the brick walls, the brick walls heavy with vines, the brick walls heavy with vines under the black sky heavy with thunder, so much more than any inked.

An illusion quickly cured.

4.

Required reading for comp lit: first chapter of Man Without Qualities, last chapter of Ulysses, Aristophanes abridged, Canterbury tales referred, Paradise Lost mentioned.

The upside of Swedish education is that it is available to all. The downside is that, availability for all tends to require large quantities, and large quantities have a way of detracting from quality. 

I can understand an egalitarian view on education, I suppose, if it be an equally good education for all. But I cannot condone lowering the standards of the curriculum to ridiculous extent, just to force-feed a few more people through the system, producing plenty of degrees but very few truly knowledgeable graduates.

But this lowering of standards was as nothing, when compared with the Political Side of the Question.

It should have come as no surprise that a society that finds failing an exam unfair, grading demeaning, and expertise oppressive should be adverse to discussing the objective worth of one writer over another. But up until then I had not realized that Politics, and party politics at that, was such a major aspect of academia, of cultural debate. And that I, by my choice in preferred reading and essay topics, would place myself in a conservative camp with which I had never identified.

My teachers did not believe in Quality. They believed in subjective opinion. My teachers did not believe in Canon. They believed in pluralism. My teachers did not believe in classics. They believed in contemporary relevance. What’s worse, they thought discussion on Quality, Canon and Classics horribly bourgeois.

It was an unpleasant moment when I was told, in so many words, that my literary interests would never be catered for by the Literature Department -renowned for its strength in the sociology of literature and workers movement writers.

5.

To tell the truth, I had a bit of a crisis at this time, taking to the tub, leafing through classics in hot water, and eating cheese sandwiches. 

I did not want to have to choose, between my true love, literature, and my political beliefs. I wanted to dissect Middlemarch – and affiliation be damned. I wanted to write poetry and wear pink, I wanted absolute faith in the good of Bloom and at the same time, be pro gay marriage.

And when the crowded shelves, the heaps of books in my pokey flat, were taken as another type of stance,  demanding a type of commitment to cause I could not give, I quit. I left the discussions, the readings. I kept my writing to myself and I kept away from that café. I did not sleep with those men, I did not wear those clothes, I did not march with them and did not drink with them. And then I went and took a job in PR.

6.

Three years passed. I read nothing. I worked. I watched TV. I worried about my hair and weight. I stuffed my library into paper bags and left it in the basement to rot. I worked. I took walks. I cooked. I never wrote. I gave my computer away. I did not keep pens around the house. I took long showers.

Three years passed and then I got a job marketing – you guessed it, literature.

Mercurial Has A Few More Letters Than Four But Shouldn’t

I never could stand writers. Painters or sculptors neither. The bloody lot of them bleeding all over – vastly overestimating their own profundity, they will spend your patience with abandon, and then, cut up or in need of a bed, they will crawl on coals and shards.

 

And as for your local rhythm man – don’t even get me started. When he ain’t drunk he’ll beat you and when he won’t even beat you you’d better bet he’s banging the neighbour. If you’re real unlucky he’s jittery, can’t even keep the beat.

 

While the long suffering muse, the Love Street girl, uncoils and recoils her long locks, puts a cold hand on the fevered brow, shines his syringes stands by her man. I fucking dislike women, too.

 

I abhor the sort of vacillating, hang around the see if he’ll change dopiness you see in the eyes of brown eyed girls.

 

I’d like to line up all those women who gave men the idea that it is ok to be a dick as long as you can rhyme it, and slap them severely around the face with the wet dishrag of my scorn.

 

I want to yell at them loudly and with cymbals: PEOPLE DON’T CHANGE. But it would be all of pointless, cause people don’t change.

 

Ahem. As I was saying. Self destruction holds absolutely no appeal for me. Whatsoever. I like brisk walks and firm apples. I like to know what’s what and I don’t want what to be a bottle of what-not.

 

It is doubly annoying then, for me, to find myself in a bit of a pickle. Hanging round, waiting for new winds. Knowing they won’t come a blowing, but not liking the option: getting on my walking boots.

Paint By Numbers

When I was eight, I tried to get people to call me by my middle name. I thought it would somehow make me more adult, and thus, get me closer to one of those coveted, sophisticated teenage yellow Sony Walkmen.

 

The project was doomed to fail. Once I had written that name all over my bedroom door with green marker, I myself forgot all about the project and went on being A—s: a child, and a runny nose child at that. 

 

In failing, it was symptomatic. Tying on new personaes, and discarding them rapidly, is what I do – in that I am a bit of a blank canvass, a white space, on which may be drawn or inked according to mood or conveniance. Or more like, actually, an etch-a-sketch, where the abandoned attempts at Great Art may be easily disposed of. 

 

The name-change-phase was followed by other attempts at morphing into another. The wearing all black, the few attempts at pixie haircuts, the all meat diet, the obsessive reading of any number of sub-genres, communism, the tennis lessons, religion, mountain climbing, the canoeing, the kitchen remodelling, the filing system, the long nails, the short red nails, the black nails, the blue hair, the camera, the quill… marking the merits of drawing in sand over tattooing.

 

 

 

But apparently, this slight looseness of medium is no longer to be allowed. This weekend, I found out that the slight haziness, the softness of contour that I have been used to is apparently NOT in fact how the world is meant to look. It is supposed to have defined edges, and the people around me are supposed to have expressions, too.

 

Alas, I need to wear glasses, and be damned.

 

Imagine the horror I felt as I went through the opticians array of frames, forced to make a choice, and a semi-permanent one, too, given how fucking expensive glasses are. There were black simple ones and horrible coloured ones, there were sleek metal ones and there were brown, flecked, rounded ones. There were frames of every shape and every kind. They all expressed something. And not a single of them expressed me. It was like a horrific display of every personality I have ever tried on and discarded, with prize-tags attached.  

 

The Better Man, right there with me in my hour of need, did not at all understand my angst. When I started crying, he frowned at me, and then, seeing that frowning did not stop my tears, he tried to cheer me up, saying that now I can choose what I want to be.

 

I can be businessy or librariany, I can be artsy, dorky or laisse-fairy, or sexy or sporty. I can be strictly or funnily bespectacled. I can be any word ending with y. Markedly: me doesn’t end with y.

 

In the end, too weak even to bother any more, I settled for whatever the Better Man said was right, which on closer inspection is a pair of very no nonsense, but also very distinctly there, frames. They look fine, I suppose. But I am not there anymore, on checking the mirror (and it isn’t just because I can now SEE the extent to which the crows have been clawing round my eyes). My comfortable Monet  blur of a face has transformed into something Mondrian, all stark angles and decisive. 

 

Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

 

Meeting my mother yesterday afternoon, she burst out laughing. Then she took me straight to the best optician in town, cut in line, and demanded a pair of horrifyingly expensive but more or less invisible frames. They’ll be arriving next week, and then I can go back to being if not a blurry lake of lilies, then at least move forward in smaller steps to neo-impressionism  rather than full blown abstract.

Till Death Do Us Part

Yesterday, my cousin and I strolled out to our new allotment, on the southern outskirts of town, getting there by crossing the world heritage listed Skogskyrkogården – a cemetery of great beauty and serenity.

 

Which reminds me of a funny story.

 

My father is one out of fourteen siblings, no twins. Born in 1933 he was one of the youngest of this great hoard. Their father was a tailor, their mother a lapsed missionary, they fitted themselves into the nooks and crannies of a three room apartment where most of the space was already taken up by a shiny black piano and other accompanying instruments: hand crafted guitars, drums sent back by sailor brothers, my fathers old violin, still today a rich honey colour.

 

Conventional wisdom would say that being brought up in a group like that would make for diplomats, maturity, and an understanding of the beauty of compromise and collaboration. But not so with this scraggly bunch of individualist, brought up religious, turned artists most of them, either slightly drunk or slightly mad or priests.

 

For instance, when their father and mother died, they could not, between the fourteen of them, manage to collect themselves sufficiently to get a proper headstone. Through lack of organisation, my grandparents were left with a small wooden, unmarked, cross.

The years passed.

 

Then, one late October, late 1980’s, my father decided that it was time for me and my brother to visit this tomb. Bringing a rose or heather to plant, we set out in the darkening night, all soft lights twinkling on the graves, and in the deep dark under the firs.

 

We wandered a long time, with hands increasingly cold. A sneaking increasing suspicion that we were being led on a wild goose chase started to take hold. I remember my sock, all bunched up and uncomfortable, round the arch of my foot. My father got increasingly gruff, my mother increasingly snippy, the night increasingly black.

 

Finally, suddenly, my father bent down in awe at a greying sign. This was it. He got his small trowel, and we stood around, shifting weight from foot to foot, as he started digging in the hard ground. The bush in question in place, he patted the earth, and then, gathered us closer as he told, with solemn eyes, of the people who lay beneath our feet.

 

Only the didn’t, of course. For just as we started to leave, a second family appeared out of the shadows. Strangers. Blonde strangers. Blonde strangers with a small written slip, saying that grave 113 14 did in fact belong to their ancestors, that their tears should water this hallowed spot and most importantly, that our little frayed shrub should not get its nourishment from their decomposing forbearers.

 

Shuffling slightly, humming and hawing, my father bent once more to unearth the roots of the offending verbiage. We retreated, into the night. And my memory ends there.

 

Which reminds me of a funny story.

 

My mothers father, a thoroughly lovely man, died some years ago. We all cried our eyes out at his funeral, of course. Which did not prevent it taking a slightly hilarious turn at the end.

 

His grave, newly dug to fit an urn, was in a small, intimate, country churchyard, all gnarly windswept elms and low slung mossy stone walls.

 

We gathered around it, my father playing the flute. Only the flute had cracked on its way to church and the notes were carried, weak and frail, away by the gathering storm. He played valiantly on to the end, causing deep frowns on all attendant faces, stretched between the misery of loosing a dear one and the torment of listening to a flute gone wrong.

 

As my aunt leant forward to place the urn in its hole, she realized that it was too deep for her. Getting down on both knees, she stretched again. Still no bottom. Throwing a frantic look over her shoulder, we could see she contemplated letting it drop, like a stone to the bottom of the sea.

 

Hissing at her, my mother stepped forward, and grabbed her ankles. My aunt leant the full length of her torso into the cold muddy hole, reaching, reaching, and just then, the bells started chiming, sudden full strenght. Startled, my auntt lost her grip on the urn, and it dropped, with a small thud and crack.

 

And so did he come to rest. We went home, to a meal, and tried to ignore the complete lack of pallor, the roses, actually, that the wind had put in our cheeks.

The Slipper of Truth

It was weird looking in the mirror this morning, darkening lashes and plugging pearls in. I spent last night at my Fathers flat, with my brother and mum, watching old videos from -87. And the face that flicked in and out of frame then, mine, looked just so like the one I carry now, bar a few lines round the eyes. Gestures and expressions, and stray tendrils, seem eternal and unchanging.

When the Better Man heard of last nights plan, he tried to get out of it. Surprised, I looked at him, and tried to keep the scorn out of my voice: of course, he wasn’t invited. A few measly months do not grant access to the inner circle. For another thing I would formerly have jotted down on my list on the indestructible is family dynamics. Bringing outsiders into it is a slow and careful process, and even then, there are some doors that will always remain closed.

Or that are opened slapstick abruptly and to ridiculous effect – as you will see.

I am a child of divorced divorcees. Between them, my mum and dad have children enough to give heft and weight to that old adage of going forth and populating. There are sisters and brothers scattered about with impunity, and I am certain, when one day I stand sad-eyed at a coffin, it will be carried by more than enough previously unknown wild oats.

The effect on me, is that while the concept of “relations” has lost much of its importance by dilution, the need for an inner circle, ritualistic, has grown strong. I can’t be bothered to bat an eye at simple shared DNA, but am fiercely protectionist those who share the memories that count: an older sis and a younger brother that I grew up with, that are on those old videos. Oh, and yeah, the parents.

On the surface, though we rant and rave at each other, this core troop is a strong one. When we meet up like last night, for a meal, we still keep the same seating at table: the same seating that can be traced back trough a long line of scarred tabletops and hot-pot-on-wood-markings.

Relationships seem to have been preserved, the quiet but constant communication between my brother and I – natural in those shared baths sequences – is still in place, we still flick our eyes and each other and move about each other and wrinkle our foreheads in unison: my sister still the pack leader, using teeth if necessary to keep us in line. 

And the parents? Divorced, sure, but far from separated in any true sense of the word. Theirs is an affair with an unhealthy degree of durability, standing against reason, against even inclination, I believe. They seem bound together in a fashion, and though they are now both in new relationships, when we meet up like that, it seems easy to slip back, to gloss over the possible cracks, to go on as if though nothing happened.

However: last night a foreign element introduced itself into the circle and made obvious to everyone, in varying degrees, how much of a shimmering (if angst inducing) mirage that continuum really is. A small yappy dog.

My brother lives with the best girl in the world. A few weeks ago, the best girl in the world decided to get a dog. Once procured, she buggered of to the states for a month or so, studying the architecture of Las Vegas, leaving a small and non-house-broken pup to the tender mercies of my brother. Who has never owned, nor yet liked, or associated closely, with an animal.

Alas, last night, the dog was with us. And though it did manage not to relieve itself indoors, it did also manage to dig up some uncomfortable truths. Namely, the slippers of my Fathers new lady-friend.

It was funny, really, almost Greek in its dramatic timing, holding up an increasingly torn dilapidated slipper at the most inopportune moments. It bit at it, it worried at it and tore the stuffing out of its sole. It growled at it and spit the remains of its embroidery out on the carpet.

Mysteriously, every time someone had managed to wrestle the slipper from the pup and put it somewhere safe, it was found, minutes later, back in the jaws of the tiny adorable beast. But whoever it was that thought to get its revenge of the New Woman by feeding her belongings to the dog, had made an awful strategic mistake. For on top of each slipper was a tiny pair of tiny bells. And the bells chimed and made clinking noises in time with the frantic chewing of the mutt. And the bells, they did toll, for the illusion of unbroken unity

For really, pretending that no water has passed under the bridge in ten years and lots of acrimonious dealing with lawyers is fine. But doing it to the jangling tunes of the footwear of the present being shredded is quite another.

Without bothering with any likenesses to cocks crowing thrice, or any more animal life, I shrugged my coat on and got on the bus. Going home, breaking the spell, looking for new bonds.

More Than Words

If I were to flick through ShopBob or Vogue, if I could point my finger at anything and it’d be mine, I’d never wear the stuff I do.

Similarly, if I were taller and thinner and had different colour skin I would be able to pull of the kind of stuff I find truly appealing.

Lastly, if I had the sort of starch and cab-ride life I want, I could so get away with wearing the soft caramels and vertiginous heels of which I dream.

Not to say I abhor all my real garments. They just aren’t what I’d choose to don in a perfect world.

The Better Man really fancies me. He shows it through word and deed – that is how he keeps his name, through night-time Sherezade exploits, I guess. But I am not his type: aesthetically.

Not that I am hideous or anything. It is just that I am rosy of cheek and medium brown of hair: healthy looking, with the kind of hips that can easily be imagined to surround something fruitful and eject something screaming into this world. There is nothing of the striking or theatrical about my looks, neither daggers nor coiling ropes: an apple, or maybe a nice piece of buttered toast – no exotics and no ice.

I suppose I am his live breathing version of a tried and true navy cardigan. Perhaps not full of the flair and panache you could wish for, but none the less, worn everyday for lack of snakeskin jackets.

Should this bother me? Does it bother me? Yes and no.

Of course I wish I had beauty. Who doesn’t. And of course I wish that, barring beauty, I could have gone for a guy who won’t necessarily prefer pallor where I blush, jet where I am brown, jagged edges where I softly give to pressure. But given the situation: would I rather not have known?

(Silencing the small insecure and very human part of me that is screaming: yeah, damn straight, I’d rather not have known) my answer is a cool and collected no, for intellectual reasons.

We went to a debate last night, listening to the cream of Swedish arts journalists gabbing about the values of education, erudition. All through their talking I was sitting on nails, driving my nails into my palms, trying not to get up and scream at the stage.

The problem: their complete unwillingness to face uncomfortable truths, not to mention, to pin those uncomfortable truths down in words that might injure, yes, but might also lead to productive confrontation.  

Again and again, they veered away from difficulties, never bothering to move boulders in their logical paths but instead, choosing to jump through the medium of language over said stumbling blocks. Again and again, they avoided confrontation, debate, the very reason for which they were ostensibly there, by loose definitions and fleeting concepts. Again and again, they chose not to give offence. Which is an offensive track if ever there was one.

No, I say, let’s all be brutally honest with each other. Let’s call spades and potatoes and canons and hot chicks and segregation by their rightful names, and then, let’s see where we are.

For after all: I do not want to dig for something that may or may not be a spud with what may or may not be a shovel. I do not want to be considered well-read when in fact, I have been spending two weeks with S Meyers. And I do not want a self-confidence so brittle that it hinges on an untrue valuation about the perfection of an arched brow or the misrepresentation of the objective superiority of bone china over crude clay.