The Prose Diaries

From a Room in Whitechapel

2010-05-02T05:30:00.000Z

Whitechapel rooves are an uneven palette of architecture. There's dirty 20th century tile and glass reinforced with wire. There is a tall brick chimney, isolated amidst the new buildings, the last soldier still at his post. There's the looming Victorian schoolhouse to the south, thuglike with its dusty spectre of dead schoolmasters and the cane. My favourite, though, is the newest: twin blue-shining blocks that stand foursquare against a sky full of the comet-trails of aeroplanes. It is a hospital.

Each block has big windows, and every night they are filled with watery light. I stare so hard I feel I can sense the inmates, small and hunched like wild animals that are caged in their sickness. The reassurance lies in the certainty of life. The hospital stands as a lighthouse shining solidarity through the lonely dark hours of the morning, those hours that seperate every human being from one another like ships sailing apart on a midnight ocean.

Love is Theft

2009-12-05T04:02:00.003Z

My boyfriend stole me a bracelet from Camden Market today. He took it from a Chinese woman's stall, lit up with handpainted mirrors and geisha dolls. One hand reveals, the other conceals: he pocketed it while asking the price.

The bracelet has three teeth hanging from a beaded string. I picture an unfortunate urban fox, its life of blood and adrenaline cut with more violence - its meat for the takeaways, its bones for the jewellery and medicine.

How much more authentic is this than the lucky Chinese symbols made of brass? The latter, the sum of human hope and greed; the former, what remains of a life lived into every inch, stained with the blood of a hundred rats.

Compass Rose

2009-11-13T02:26:00.001Z

A Februrary morning in 1989. Two decades measured out in the slow ordinary things: breaths, conversations, meals made and eaten. Nothing has come of it. The universe's investment in me, manifested by my hot, peculiar little space in it, remains unreturned upon. I have done nothing of note. I remain myself: self-conscious, angry, too apathetic even to feed myself anything more complicated than a Pot Noodle. I am the definition of ennui.

My heart is a spinning compass needle. I don't know if it will settle.

Autograph Hunting

2009-05-11T00:32:00.001Z

The setting: the world, a marble in glossy blue and matte green. The United Kingdom with its crenellated coastline. A grey growth that’s London; Camden Town a greasy fold in the north of the night-time city, coloured in as if by six year-olds with felt tips; alt-rock mecca, thronged night and day with the faithful.

Kentish Town Road runs behind the Electric Ballroom (loopy blue neon outside; inside, floorboards with decade-long punk rock memories), where the gates open from the tilted doors and windows. There’s band members with black markers and glam-rock hair, and their own crowded orbits: fan satellites, amateur photographers, old luckless friends.

We’re frozen and half-wet with drying sweat, aching at the joints with the capricious witch-fire energy of a gig seeping into the pavement with its cigarette butts and trodden flyers. His, his, his glossy black two-seconds’-worth of a signature, and then it’ll be the tube home, clinging to the bars like exhausted gibbons.

Tripping Down Recollection Street

2009-03-09T18:07:00.001Z

In London sometimes you walk amid the ghosts of past centuries, the grey and rain; in Edinburgh, the ghosts are alive and vital, and swarm among the Saturday crowds on the high street. In Edinburgh history isn’t like everywhere else, like used toilet paper; it’s the same room, lived in.

Getting Off For Home

2009-03-09T17:57:00.007Z

It's one of those sad little stations that lie grey and listless by the side of the tracks, skulked about by a couple of skeletal trees. Two or three straggle off the train and you wonder who would choose to live here. Dull sparrows on the bleached fence, hawthorn spiny with berries like clotting blood. There's always an old sign by British Rail, touched with the fingertips of rust. This one says: Cam & Dursley.

Looking Out Under Eaves

2009-03-09T17:55:00.002Z

On a level with long, kinked rooves that straggle away from me over idiosyncratic gardens. Apartment blocks squat oblongs, irregular under the clammy amber push of the sky. Lit and unlit windows semaphore untranslatable code, people wakeful and restless in the clutch of another dismal London night.

Saying 'Forever'

2008-12-15T02:19:00.000Z

We don’t say ‘I love you’, and it’s a hot twist of pleasure inside me, perverse. When those feelings press up inside, wet and close and urgent at my throat, what I fling out is a string of syllables that would have been nonsense to me six months ago, hard and soft, Celtic.

This divorce from my past is a healing amputation. It’s a tiny cut that might drop heartbreak’s deadweight. It means I might be able to believe.

Touch wood.

Always Being Okay (It Means This)

2008-12-15T00:54:00.000Z

The walls were the colour of the arctic, the paper curtain turquoise and not fully closed, so beyond we saw people in mint coloured scrubs come and go. The bed was a plinth in the middle of the room, and under its cold blanket Leigh was like a doll somebody’d put down and forgotten. I drew up two chairs beside him and put my feet up in defiance of the nurse (she’d already caught me while hamming up his ECG). He held out a hand, palm up, and I threaded my fingers through his (his knuckles callused, fingers thick).

“We should get some sleep, babe,” he said, eyes on me to the side, having to press his cheek to the pillow just to look. “We won’t be out of here soon.”

When we settled down, I curled awkward across my chairs. For a blanket, his jacket on top of me leather and scuffed, heavy as a living thing. A woman down the corridor crying out: a rhythmic kind of moan, half words, almost like sex noises – it would rise unpredictably to a wail then shimmer down again, whimpery. When Leigh mentioned it, I said to try to imagine it as a lullaby.

Finding Out What They Knew Already

2008-12-15T00:53:00.000Z

I’m learning, at last, not to like hospitals. This one’s proprietory grip is sick: comforting and suffocating. Even smoking outside in London’s winter’s freeze I stand under its glass eaves.

Every nurse passing the cubicles is a threat. They could tell me anything – get out, get away, he’s hurt, he’s dead, he’s not coming back.

Studying Old Photographs

2008-12-15T00:52:00.001Z

There’s a photo on my wall, whitetacked there. The grass is golden green and touched by gentle treeshadows that darken it to oilpaint vert. Downy soft, short. The trees offer stippled heads and arms of frothy foliage. Glossy dark leaves like hands climb the odd trunk, here, there. Even now I remember when I took the picture I could hardly breathe; looking on it was like an icepick to the sternum.

Staring Across The Pond

2008-12-15T00:51:00.001Z

November, and the world’s made anew. At the heart of it all, disbelief. We keep his title in our mouths, hefting the weight of it on the tips of our tongues like stones to throw should they try to take it from us: President-elect Barack Obama, every unfamiliar syllable spelling the advent of change.

Passing Cities on Bonfire Night

2008-12-15T00:45:00.000Z

From the alleys and the gardens, from the fields and the gunneys, and from countless points on the horizon – shooting lights, red green gold, falling sparkles and soaring rockets; each with their own unique point of conception, each with their own hand that lit the fuse.

Being Comforted

2008-11-03T22:58:00.001Z

Perfect Edinburgh monings, when the sky was the same colour as the inside of an eggshell (and as wet). Where I slept on the floor, it was more like a nest than a bed. When I woke from bad dreams (of wandering ghosts, monstrous spiders) and turn over, snuffling in floor dust, I could sleep again as long as you’re snoring in the bed above me. I’ve never slept so safe as when you’re there.

Remembering the Fifth of November

2008-11-02T03:58:00.000Z

It’s nighttime in the minus temperatures, biblical rain falling. My intimation of wetness is a seeping cold through my clothes, their heaviness. The sky’s an ugly haze. They lit the bonfire early to keep us from freezing. The flame’s pure demonic revelry, a spectacular of destruction. It’s a long orange plume as the wind blows it, twisting and revealing half shadows on itself, swirling up and tossing embers like confetti into the air (which dance up and drift down).

The Guy sits on high above the newborn flames. His hands are on his knees and he’s peering down. Football head, stuffed sweater. In his last minutes of life he can look out and see a dismal turn-out, scarfed, anoraked and studded here and there with umbrellas. Children in harnesses totter and squeal, kneeheight. The adults, for the most part, don’t even know the Guy is there.

The first of the fireworks whistle up and burst in the sky like neon spiders, and the flames catch the branches behind the Guy’s head; his painted face seems to be screaming.

Remembering Something

2008-10-27T19:35:00.000Z

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

2008-10-25T20:50:00.001Z

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

2008-10-25T20:48:00.000Z

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

2008-10-25T20:06:00.001Z

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

2008-10-20T13:53:00.001Z

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

2008-10-13T15:46:00.001Z

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

2008-10-10T22:41:00.000Z

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

2008-10-06T15:11:00.001Z

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

2008-10-06T14:48:00.001Z

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

2008-10-06T14:45:00.000Z

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.

Wishing

2008-09-12T04:46:00.000Z

Glasgow. Knowing its topography was another fragment of home flaking and falling away. A flinty piece of Edinburgh sat in my pocket, too: the lighter one of the comedians gave me in the courtyard of Lord Bodo’s, the only one I hadn’t lost or left behind. Green plastic. I took it out now, stepping off the bus for a smoke break, the wind throwing the tails of my coat about and biting my skin. A headache squatted behind my eyes like a toad.

Yielding

2008-09-11T06:22:00.001Z

I resisted as long as I could, but I’ve never been good at resisting. I could feel the press of her intent months back, before I left (before I came back), like an overwarm hand on the back of my neck. I kicked off my shoes in her bedroom that night resolving, ‘I will not have sex with her tonight, I will not’ –

That came back to me, hours later, when I left her flat in the early morning laughing, aching, loose-limbed. I waited for regret to come, prickling my heart, but it never did. I began to wonder instead why I’d wasted so much time refusing.

Kissing

2008-09-11T06:12:00.001Z

Lean close. Flesh and flesh draw together. Hot. Tense. The air between lips is pregnant with something heavy, instinctual. Collision of breath. Moving towards. And then.

Touch, kiss, part, press, communion of warm soft skin. A sudden snarl and flame of want burns through like a match, lit. Control slips away and you never even feel it go.

Espying

2008-08-30T05:04:00.000Z

I was visited by a mouse tonight.

It whispered out from behind a bin bag by the living room door on tiny feet (each little toe pink, translucent, perfect), a little sharp brown thing the size of my thumb. Quivery all over, graceful whiskers, intelligent face. A rush a few steps into the room, half turn, long pause. I was poised on the sofa, laptop in hands, Vaughan Williams romantic and wistful in strings from the speakers. I couldn’t read the expression on the mouse’s face.

It whirled and disappeared the way it came. Now I sit and turn my head at every movement in the corner of my eye, hoping for a new friend.

Eating In

2008-08-24T23:44:00.001Z

In my world, food is an event. It is simple. It is visceral. It is an experience preserved intact from childhood, a lifebuoy in the fragmentary and bruising grown-up world. Tomato soup, macaroni cheese, boiled egg and toast soldiers. I use it to beat away the encroaching greyness.

Concluding

2008-08-24T23:40:00.000Z

The fag-end of the Edinburgh festival is weary and rained upon. Acts worn out and close to breaking, bright-eyed with exhaustion. The elation’s gone. The first mad rush of it (like the madness of new love) is forgotten and left in its place the end of a party, deflated balloons wrinkly and pathetic and the happy chaos of the full swing now just a mess to be tidied up.

(I first came to the city just after the last of the festival crowds had been exhaled, and it was slipping into a dark cold winter. Everywhere, the shredded remains of pasted flyers, soggy, dismantled venues. The year-in, year-out burghers drifted about like, having no one to mug and abuse, they’d come a bit unstuck.)

Intuiting

2008-08-15T02:17:00.001Z

Working with him keeps me internally on tenterhooks, a edgy feeling like the scrape of ceramic grinding against ceramic. He has hard grey eyes that I can’t read, a lean face that doesn’t change. People whisper when he leaves the room: poor guy, he must practically live here to keep the place running like it does.

When I tell him about my latest catastrophe, he seems for the first time since I met him at a loss for something to say. His gaze lingers on me for a second, two, longer than necessary. A little waver at the back of my mind, doubt trembling there, and the suspicion that grows into a certainty that shit, he’s concerned for me.

Now, a little fierce quick blaze along some angle inside me that wants to do him proud: my boss.

Trading Favours

2008-08-15T01:19:00.001Z

Is this, I wonder, what I dreamed of, what I read of, when I was wet-faced and fresh behind the ears (and all that twaddle)? I never had any inkling that being a VIP, a mover and shaker, might have been just a façade behind which the pale-faced whelp struggled against a tide of insecurity and incomprehension. In my imagination, they shmoozed at the bar drinking Long Island Iced Teas and waved celebrities (about whom they knew filthy secrets) across the room to say hello.

I met the man at the bar after I finished work, relaxing in a haze of alcohol and acquaintances. We shared mutual recognition (seen you around, yeah, I know your face), and struck up a conversation that lasted longer than I wanted it to. He was another struggling comedian; wrote for big television names. We shared a taxi, as we were going in the same direction.

It pulled up in the damp enclave of my street, and I turned to look at him in the over-warm, breathy eggshell of the cab. “How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing, if you can get me on the guestlist for the Late Show on Friday.”

“Done.” Handshake. I opened the door, and skipped away, with mixed feelings.

Raining

2008-08-13T00:46:00.001Z

Walking through my own lonely corner of 1am Edinburgh, I’m coming up on the brain-bashing, lazy nicotine dizziness of the last cigarette I smoked fast, holding out my palms face up into the rain. The sodium orange of the streetlights makes the slick cobbles bright. The brim of my hat drips. The raindrops hit cold and hard and die wet on my skin. My mind’s a weak muscle – I can’t empty it of his face.

Stuttering

2008-08-12T00:56:00.000Z

Stutter.

Like my tongue’s tangled, like the words are too thick in my mouth, like my brain skipped (like it was a record). I make a running leap for a word and fail, come unstuck amidst these sticky consonants. Trying like an engine to turn over the syllable.

Wait. Stop. Take a breath, close my eyes a second, half a second.

Try again.

Watching

2008-08-12T00:49:00.000Z

My heart’s thrilling with all this backstagery, like I’m in with the cool crowd at long last. The ace up my sleeve, my bona fide cred card: I work here. Yeah, baby. You don’t impress me like you do everyone else.

But he does. His solid, sure-stepped presence pacing lazy ovals along one side of the room. Eyes behind glasses (the audience never sees) on his notebook, and always his lips moving around that languid smile, the night’s jokes. I’ve never seen him straight-faced. God, he does impress me.

Having Been Taught

2008-08-05T04:08:00.001Z

He makes me think of milk. That’s the essence of it, the quality of his soul (the spiritual world that he believes in as faithfully as in the laws of physics) that I perceive. Happily, heterosexually married, two sons. Middlingly English churchgoer. Pale button shirts to work, no tie. T-shirt and corduroy at the weekend. A whiter shade of pale.

His faith, remarkable faith, is his quintessence, though: he’s made of it, not of everyday clay like the rest of us – or if not the faith is what glues him all together, to the humdrum workaday world. He leaks his fiery belief (in goodness, in meaning, in everyone he meets) all over the rest of us, and it’s like we’ve been touched with grace.

Egressing

2008-08-05T03:58:00.000Z

When I leave, what can I do? Train, coach, slides past giant knuckled mountainhills, deep pine woodland, Scottish wilds like a proud, scornful belledame. Can I tranq myself into another world? Can I put out my eyes so as not to see what I’m losing? Can I bring myself to run from my goodbye though it will break my heart?

Previewing

2008-08-01T01:24:00.000Z

Tonight we tramped through the sodden, frazzled night for the sake of a puffy-haired comedian and his grand piano at the Pleasance. Edinburgh had an atmosphere of getting on with things under the turn-off of drizzle: the spotlights from the Spiegel Garden and the Udderbelly smashed into the night’s vague mist, white, green and blue. Odd jazz notes burbled into the night and mingled with the crowd’s clamour. Everywhere people, strolling, laughing, shrugging, hands-in-pockets-ing, their shoes flinging out little spits of puddle-water with every step.

The Pleasance Courtyard was its usual mad bustle, strung about with lights and strewn with stalls, wet and packed. The cobbles shone the night’s human yellow back from the rainwater. Everyone wore dark, soaked trouser-bottoms halfway up their calves. Flyerers dashed in and out, steaming; I caught the under-the-eyebrows, end-of-his-tether look of one, hands hard and disgusted around his bundle of leaflets now a soggy pulp.

After the show, we danced home, sucking up the life that sang in the air. Behind us, the castle stuttered out its colossal thunder of fireworks, lighting up the clouds with magic colours.

Reaching Out

2008-07-29T18:12:00.001Z

Somebody in the flat below ours has taken up the didgeridoo. Their gutteral rumbles and wails come up through the floor, resonate in the weary flesh and bone of our feet. It signals you are not alone.

Switching

2008-07-29T18:09:00.000Z

Weeknight, quiet city. It’s a balmy eleven o’clock in San Diego, which lies sleepy and tolerant under a deep blue sky. It doesn’t think much of night-time: the streets glow electric gold and the palm trees, tall slender personalities, nod and doze. The homeless sleep ragged humps in the shadows. We pitter-patter through the gentle streets peering in at the drinkers and diners, on our way to the supermarket.

In the sterile fluorescent aisles (American abundance multicoloured on the shelves) the only thing I want to buy is a pack of St. Paddy’s Day themed cupcakes, fifteen of them held in stiff transparent plastic, as delicate as eggs.

Another night I’m on my own, it’s nearly midnight and I’m far to the west of where I want to be. I’m crossing a dark parking lot by the harbour, breeze beating warm like feathered wings against my face, one eye on the faceless clusters of quiet-talking men around their cars. That’s why the woman surprises me – sagging face, layered clothes, hair short and wispy and too sparse, suddenly in front of me. She asks me for a quarter.

I’ve got one loose in my pocket. I saw it glint on the concrete by the sea this afternoon, picked it up with thoughts of what I could buy with it flitting through my head. Money’s tight here. I give it to her now, thinking fate and easy come, easy go.

When she hears my accent, she tells me I need to get out of town. “It’s a bad place here,” she says, “there are evil men that do evil things. Go anywhere, just get out of San Dio.” The night is close and hot around us as we hug and move on on our seperate trajectories.

Two days later found me paying attention to fate again, at the Greyhound station downtown: bag at my feet, 99-cent sunglasses glaring the last of San Diego back at itself.

Screaming

2008-07-29T18:06:00.000Z

The seagulls cry outside our window, and they sound like nothing so much as the voices of children yelling and wailing. When they wake me in the morning, dragged up through the cobwebs of dreams to kick out of sleep in my too-warm sleeping bag, I always think there’s something going on.

Brain cycles through possibilities: apocalypse? car accident? paedophile? before I clutch my senses together and realise the voices are screaming in an alien, avian tongue.

Their troubles aren’t people troubles, so I roll over and go back to sleep.

Hitting It Big

2008-07-28T20:51:00.000Z

He has a classically handsome face – a Hollywood cowboy face, strong and sensual and stubbled, with weathered blue eyes like coloured glass in his head and always so cynically amused – on a flawless frame and the way he slumps in the armchair in front of us, sinewy, is just right.

He’s melancholically in love with this life – post-show parties, globetrotting, stoned, ripped, twisted – and he suits it well, hitched, drawling Canadian delivery and rockstar attitude.

I sit across from him, wondering where he learned that trademark penetrative stare, the one that says I see you and you make me wonder about the possibilities but honestly I could take it or leave it; the filthy, deep-plunging eye contact that lingers on your skin.

In love maybe, but he puts me in mind of falling. What he pushes onstage isn’t confidence, its disinterest. He flings out wit like a billionaire spending money. Offstage – here, his Edinburgh flat, oft-mentioned wife and kids conspicuously absent – everything he says carries the aftertaste of despair.

Still, impressions change. When we finally say goodbye at three AM – “Okay, that’s it, I’m kicking you out.” – and he puts his arms around me and squeezes – “I’ll see you again.” – the solace of hot human flesh tells me everything will be okay.

Mulling

2008-07-26T04:03:00.000Z

Softly rained upon night-time, air moving cool on my skin: face, hands, neck. The coquettish sky promises glimpses of star-pricked stratosphere in between the cloud. To anyone inside, the garden behind the hostel is invisible in the darkness. To me, the grass – and the single, monstrous tree – breathes relieved wetness. Because I can, and because, despite loose acquaintances, I haven’t made friends here, I’m standing alone on a lichened wooden picnic table at midnight, smoking a cigarette and idly browsing the yellow-lit windows.

New York lends itself to these contemplative fugues. The city’s an immense entity, and it pretends to not care a jot if you wander about it thinking deep thoughts at night. I think I can feel it paying attention, though; the gentle weight of it is just at my back.

I play along and ignore it. I watch the people indoors do what people indoors do; and I watch the rats, and I watch the roaches, and I chain-smoke and talk to the lonely tree.

Working It

2008-07-26T03:11:00.000Z

New York City. I was told by an old hippy guitarist (relic of the expressive sixties, neither burnt out nor faded but weathered and hardened and diminished to his altruistic essentials) that it was the new Florence (renaissant), the only place to be in the twenty-first century. The city’s a bundle of sensation to me: it’s the smell of cigarette smoke on my fingers, in the folds of my clothes. It’s the pale strip of sky far up above the street. It’s the rattle-crash of subway trains in the filthy subterranean bowels. News-stands and their grubby owners; express and local on opposite sides of the platform; taking your chances crossing when the sign says ‘don’t walk’.

Just smile and let them hear your darling British accent and they’ll do anything for you, Robyina said. I let my personal mash-up of ragged-jeansed, roach-flicking bum and sweet English rose do its work. The city never denied me anything.