Remembering Something

Vast spaces of freshwater are something you feel in your chest – the flat plate of silverblueblack, sun’s chilly gold paint. They’re like a concussion, like massive cannonfire, when you raise your head and look across them. They go off like fireworks in your chest.

Loch Lomond is drawn in watercolours and charcoal. Its long silver back stretches catlike between blunted mountains. The sky hanging over them is like a gentle touch.

Feeling Protective

He’s a big puppy of a boy, just eighteen. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word restraint, and he can’t lie. I want to mother all six foot, sixteen stone of him. I’d take on car crashes for him. I’d take bullets.

Driving

Long car rides down American highways in good company; grabbing greyskied miles and tossing them behind us. The radio played our favourite unpopular music and when dusk fell the four lanes of brake lights shone like rubies.

Sailing

I’ve been breathing cement for a week now. Everybody else’s helpless looks – the whites of their eyes as I’m trying to stare hard enough to semaphore mayday – and they leave the room. I’d close my mouth and sink; panic one second, resignation the next.

Five midnight hours in a hospital south of the river lifted the bell jar and I feel like I’m sailing again. Bouncing off blue waves, spray dancing rainbow in the sun.

Drinking

He dipped his fingers into his wineglass to fish a crumb. From below, the yellow surface of the world broke and inverted around his thick fingertips. A tiny skin-tensive dimension briefly here, gone in the next instant.

Reaching

The person I was back then feels like something I invented, a character out of my own head. That kid could never have existed, it’s too improbable, too fast and loose. Couch-surfing bar-worker, a whole country from home, cigarettes top pocket. Fell in with the funny, the popular, the high-profile. That kid’s like a faded photograph. Something I can’t touch.

Homing Pigeon

Ten hours from London and it’s already a dream I’ve woken from. Every half an hour or so I’ll remember it with that familiar sick jolt, like the one between consciousness and sleep when you feel like you’re falling. Every half an hour I get the feeling I’m forgetting it.

Some turgid feeling lingers about my throat, making it hard to breathe. I want to know how they are, everybody who breathes their hot, turbulent life into our home. Their precise, individual bodies, the crazies they have in their heads, every one of them. I miss the hugs, the headlocks, the hand-clasps.

Noticing

London and New York are sister cities. Minutes count. The newspaperers blaze headlines on the streets, hour by hour. The Times’ underground posters have oil-painted Churchill agaze over the shoulder of the new Tory incumbent, decades of hoary and beaten Britishness bent and staring down at us all. These wintry politics bite.

Cooking

I used to have quiet, private times in my parents’ kitchen. It was pale and clean and when it was cold outside the windows steamed and blurred the rest of the world into shades of green and grey. I would put on Radio 4 so that I could hear it over the boiling kettle, and listen to programmes about books: throaty received voices talking to me about words on pages. I’d cook, too. Sauces and vegetable dishes and things with tofu. The steam warm and wet on my face, the hot back-of-the-throat purr of turmeric and paprika. It could only be so perfect when alone.

Being At Peace

The earth is vaster than imagining. It’s an enormous flatness against my ribs where I lie, like a huge heart. My cheek is on my arms, soft. I’m looking across the park at a ninety degree angle, so the sky and the ground are sandwiching me straight up. The bank I’m lying on holds a dribble of other people in the crook of its curve; universally small fleshtangles made slow and happy by sun. The clouds drift along like titanic sheep in a blue field.