Keep Your Head Above Water

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I keep thinking this is it. I do my sad little wave, a quick bow. Goodbye, au revoir. Then I turn in my flip-flops and start my brief walk home.

    
Of course the following day I return to the water’s edge. Since autumn has arrived it happens less, but this game isn’t over. I refuse to leave the sea alone; I refuse to commit to King Alfred’s chlorine depths: the stinky changing rooms; kids’ hair in the plughole. There it's all straight blue lines, rubber-capped old ladies and the flailing arms of front crawlers. There I'm a machine cutting up water, a chugging mechanism, hidden behind goggles and cap. Nameless, sexless, meant for movement and breath, there I am the number of seconds it takes for me to touch the concrete ledge of the deep end. I disappear, no longer weighed down by the burden of being somebody. It's for this reason that I tolerate that ugly pool. 

     
Seawater magnetises, hypnotises, pulling me in to where it’s deep and slightly treacherous. Buoyant and serene, it calms my thumping heart and floats me home. Often it’s hard work (the dragging current, those endless bloody waves) but the reward is in the crashing orgasmic flood of the senses. The serotonin kick. 

     
I like swimming far out. But these days I listen to friends who say For fuck’s sake, Clare, be careful.  I chit chat with lifeguards. Check wind speeds on the Web. Never go in if waves break violently on the shingle. This summer I even surrendered my solitude and swam with others - we sped past buoys, circled the West Pier and sank back onto hard pebbles, thighs trembling.

     
The sea has a character and a culture of its own, a world apart from the hectic town I live in. This town doesn’t feel like mine, but down here is – amidst this silent, sturdy society of swimmers, surfers and fishermen. The sea’s an addiction, I know; I'm aware of the risks I run for the high I experience, for that joy peculiar only to open water – the vast expanse, the arctic chill on the toes, sun on face, an unhindered smile. I wonder who, or what, I'd be without it, what shape my life would take. No coincidence, of course, that I started sea-swimming when mum had her last stroke, the one that finally silenced her, that condemned her to unseeable depths somewhere between sky and land. Back then, swimming far out I escaped the world, escaped people, the tick tock of life; I entered her world for a while - fluid, formless and all that quiet. 

     
Sun's out. Sitting here writing I keep one ear out for the waves, and my nostrils still sniff seaweed. This could be the day. Last week the buoys disappeared – no markers now, no edges to swim out to. No yellow globe, slimy with seaweed. Just a cold abyss, a charcoal smudge beneath a cloudy skyline.
     
But I wade into a new experience every day; keep my head above water. Chance it one more time. Before friendly waves turn frosty. Before the last farewell of the season. 

The Chaise Longue

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The golden chaise longue wouldn’t fit through my door. It didn’t matter how often I uncoiled my tape measure or how many fags Hev smoked on the front step, it was too big - or my doorway was too small. I was stuck with an already paid for sofa in the hallway of my block of flats. Fellow tenants circled the chaise longue,  prodding it with fingers, offering up solutions, but we all knew the real answer: I had to get rid of it. 

     
Hev and I had driven it over that morning; it stuck out like a giant banana from the back of Jo’s Grandma’s Estate car. This was meant to be my new start, the opening credits to my freshly arranged life. If I am not to move from my flat in the near future, I'd vowed, I shall beautify, brighten and spruce up what I already have – a tiny attic flat, and rudimentary, with blue office carpets and a kitchen the size of a shower cubicle. But my tiny flat has an extra-special bonus – it’s thirty seconds from the sea, from swimming that sends me shivering back through my flat’s doorway. And that’s enough to keep me here.      
     
But the chaise longue wouldn’t fit. We propped it up in the hallway, and pushed the old one back up the three flights to my flat. It was like some poor old grandmother who refused to go back into the nursing home. Back inside my flat resembled a crime scene - furniture, cushions and rugs roughly thrown into various corners of my living room, my bedroom entrance blocked by an empty bookcase. Days earlier, I'd carefully arranged my books into sub-genres - now they trailed, sad, across the bathroom carpet. I sank down onto my living room floor with a cup of black tea (no milk; my fridge broke yesterday). Rain battered my windows. The chaise longue felt like a symbol for my life: a beautiful bright idea, but frankly, impossible.      
     
A friend dragged me out for chocolate cake. When I returned, rain lashing at my legs, hands and face, the chaise longue was still standing in the hallway, gorgeous and golden and looking bigger than ever. I squelched past it up the stairs (Converse trainers soak up puddles like Kleenex) and upon entering my flat, saw I’d left my bedroom window open. Rain had gushed in all over my laptop and the precious items of Mum’s that I’d gathered in Wales and placed by my shrine. Notebooks, a lacquered box, her hand support brace, trinkets, letters, all sodden.     
     
I'd like to think joy's around the corner. And that when it comes I will capture it in my palms and, after a while, set it free above the waves and pebbles. But the rains keep coming and little feels sacred anymore.     
    
I have this memory. I’m on a hillside smothered in buttercups; the sky is cloudless and blue. Buttercups stretch as far as I can see. They merge with the sunlight that’s half-blinding me, that drops golden over distant treetops. I am dancing down this hillside. With each step I take I shed a year of my life. With each thrust of my hand I shed another. Years drop from me like dead skin. Under soft sunlight and between two fences and the horizon, all pain disappears. There’s no cancer. No lupus. No epilepsy. No Alzheimer’s. No stroke, coma, pneumonia. No death. No struggle. No loss. Only golden light and a sheep staring at me from over a wooden fence. Only me, dancing, momentarily a girl again, sweet, silly, captivated by a perfect moment.    
     
There’s no way back to that hillside. So I move forward. Push chaise longues up steep flights of stairs. I work; write. I make absurd birthday presents out of ping pong balls for my friends. I put my flat back together again. I chase waves when they are big. I watch the clouds moving above my house. Wait for something golden to enter my life once again.   

Occidental Park

I'm sitting in Occidental Park eating a grilled tuna and provolone sandwich. Most people here, except for a few tourists like me, appear homeless, mentally ill, or both. Two police officers slowly cycle the perimeter. This small square in Seattle's Downtown looks pretty with its Native American sculptures, its seagulls flying overhead.
    
To my left, a black teenager with crinkled hair drags her anorak collar across her mouth as she stares into space. Next to her sits a man in a t-shirt with multi-coloured circles on it and, beside him, an old guy in a battered straw hat who is smoking a roll-up.
  
As I look over at these three people, a woman comes over. She's dressed in a long black plastic coat and a black baseball cap turned backwards. She's walking onto the square from between a tall carved monkey and some other Totem animal that I don’t recognise. She is barefoot and has a large toilet roll under one arm. In the other, she holds a branch. She stabs at the pavement with it as she walks.

On top of her baseball cap, a black pigeon cleans its feathers. The woman's face is dark as peat. She yells out to the man in the t-shirt with the circles on.
  
He hollers back, his gold-rimmed specs glinting in the mid-afternoon sun. "I got something for ya!"
  
A Chinese lady next to me on the bench looks disturbed by this sight and stares, mute, at the pigeon that is still preening itself. She is well dressed - expensive shoes, neat hair. I want to share a conspiratorial smile with her, but she won't look at me. A few other tourists dot the benches. The pigeon woman sits down beside the man.
  
That pigeon looks as though it's always lived on her baseball cap. She stares at me with her black crack eyes. I look down at my notebook.
  
The Chinese lady lets out a crazy high-pitched squeal. I notice that the other tourists have left.

A cop approaches our bench. "JinSu?" he says to the Chinese lady.

She nods.

"Is anyone bothering or hurting you?" He adjusts his sunglasses. "Come see me if..."
  
He cycles off. A seagull flaps its wings. Fairy lights sparkle above an ivy-covered hotel doorway opposite. It looks out of place here, with its pastel umbrellas out front, its matching cloth napkins.
  
Everyone else is dozing. I should leave.

A man approaches the Chinese lady. "I've seen you before!" he says with a sneaky cat smile, "Did you get a shelter?"

She giggles.
  
I should go. I should leave.
  
 "I t-aught I taw a puddy cat!" shouts gold-rimed specs man. "I'm having flashbacks!"
  
Everyone else is silent, except for pigeon woman, who eagerly munches her sandwich. Three policemen now circle on push-bikes.
  
I get up and say goodbye to the Chinese lady. She looks at me for a second, and then smiles.

I want to be looking up at cranes, staring out at departing ferries. I start walking down towards the waterfront. I glance back and see the Chinese lady now leaning forward, her long black hair hung in strips, her anorexic hands clutching the air.

Hello

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Today in my bathroom, after I'd arranged shampoos and beauty products according to their  exact colour shade, after I'd scoured and sluiced my bathtub, sink, and toilet, after I'd painted the walls in Morning Mist and ummed and ahhed about what pictures to  hang, after I'd scrubbed the grouting with a toothbrush, I realised I might be avoiding a few things. What I felt most sad about avoiding was writing this blog. 

      
This blog used to be a place I turned to when the writing bug bit. It fulfilled a need to express powerful and not so powerful events in my life. It provided sanctuary for my soul. Then I started writing a book, completed an MA in Creative Writing and what-dya-know, I'm lucky if I write here a few times a year. Though I do blame lack of time (most of my energies are poured into agonising over where to place my next semi-colon), that's not the sole excuse. It's fear. I want to be taken seriously as a writer and so whatever I write and whatever medium I write it in I feel must be worthy of that. Yet when I wrote most on this blog, and best, I think, was when I wasn't worried about being taken seriously. I wrote because I wanted to. 

     
Writing a blog is exposing. Especially when writing about the kinds of things I tend to write about. I always tried to fight the desire to hide behind words - clever words, beautiful words, original language. My blog was rough and tender. It had strange poetry splattered across it. Posts about innocence and galaxies and stalking Bearded Collies along Hove seafront. About sea swimming and dinghies and falling off my bicycle and being rescued by old ladies with purple rinses. About my mother's stroke. My Dad's absence. About toppling into love and crawling back out again. Oh, and I wrote one post whilst on E.

     
My day-to-day life has never been that usual. Which is why I'm bothered to write in the first place.  I don't want to fall into that trap of seeking to please or of trying to be like other writers. Because we are all different breeds of creature. The animal I am can only walk, climb, kill and give birth my way. 
     
I've got a little hidden lately, down in my burrow. Dark eyes to the ground, incubating my babies.

     
So it's time to show myself again.

     
Hello.

Northern Lights

I read an interview with Bill Drummond the other day, in which he talks about nostalgia. He describes it as a sickness to be cut out because it tells us lies about things being once better than they are now. Forget the past; think about today. As someone who spends a lot of time writing about the past and trying to make sense of it, I’m not sure how much I agree. I certainly can romanticise it, but not because I see it as better than the present, but largely because I view it as infinitely worse. Oh, the terrible times I lived through!

There are many things I don’t want to remember. The past tugs on my arm, demanding to be recognised. I turn the other way. “Oh no, we’ve never met before”. I shrug it off. How many of us do this – hiding in the present, scared of who we once were? The past would haunt us if we let it. But we won’t. We cut out nostalgia, and with it, remembering.

I think that’s why places from my past fascinate me, and why I can’t ever quite leave them alone. Because no matter how much I may think my life has changed, there’s always a little bit of myself I leave behind, like a photo, tucked inside some old jeans pocket. I never quite know when I’m going to accidentally pull it out, and feel surprised.

The other day I posted pictures on Facebook of my recent trip up North to Yorkshire and Snowdonia. They reflected back the dark, brooding mists of my homeland, those places I love so much. I can so easily romanticise the North from my flat in young, happening Brighton, with its candy-rock Palace Pier, it's everlasting stream of clear sky. I forget the days when I couldn’t wait to get the hell away from there.





Though I studied in Manchester for five years, it’s not fun college times I largely remember. It's days spent wandering the collapsed city centre immediately following the IRA bomb explosion in 1996. Ooh, what a laugh I am. As someone standing right near where it went off, it would have killed me and probably a thousand others had the IRA not issued a warning and the police been so quick to react. I’d stare at the blackened hole, leaning into the mesh that separated me from it, wishing I could wriggle underneath and walk unfettered through the dark heart of Manchester, through the ripped out concrete shells I’d once shopped in. Royal Exchange, Corn Exchange, Arndale Centre – all Manchester landmarks and great seats of consumerism, reduced to rubble. Just as vulnerable and fragile as me. In a strange way, it made me want to laugh.

I was upset when they began to rebuild it. I wanted something of that charred, empty space to remain, to remind everyone of the terrible thing that had happened. Now, I hardly recognise Manchester anymore. The shops are bigger and better and the Corn Exchange where I used to work - a crappy flea market filled with dodgy watch-dealers and astrologers - is now a Harvey Nichols. People don’t want to walk past a reminder of a city’s grief. They want the future. They want tomorrow.

Who can blame them? The last time I was in Manchester, I looked up at the sign on the wall of The Hacienda Apartments and thought ‘I could be sad about this, but the irony is too great.’ Perhaps those who, twenty years ago waved their arms up and down on The Hacienda stage off their nuts, were the same people who now drove their BMWs into the electronically controlled Private Parking spaces under the building and, kicking off their shoes, looked out over Whitworth Street and smiled.

Is this nostalgia? Wondering what I’d have done without that nightclub, the drugs and the dungarees, the Frankie Knuckles mixtapes and the dream Ecstasy gives you at that age? Standing on the corner of my road, aged fifteen, with my sister and some lads from Blacon who made acid house music on computers, shouting “In the beginning, there was House!” at old ladies in Mini Metros. Done my homework? Actually listened in Geography class?

Dashing in from school every Friday, I’d throw off my uniform, pull on my Kickers and wait for the car that would drive my sister and I up the M56, past Helsby Hill, past Runcorn chemical plant into Manchester. As we drove into the city centre, I’d catch sight of the queue that snaked half a mile down the street, my fake ID trembling in my hand. The doors would open and that familiar thud of bass-line and dry ice would hit me. I'd sip my coke, a pill sliding down my throat. Then half an hour later I’d push my way into the thick of it; sweat, bodies, faces, smiling, a crazy rush of communion, screaming up at the DJ box, “come on!” chanting like a tribe to its leader. I was home.

Bittersweet times. Isn't that youth at it's best? At its height, I fell in love with a boy in a pink NafNaf sweatshirt, who had black hair that curled over his ears and a dog called Blackie who bit my ankle. Pretty soon, I’d left the Blacon boys to their drum machines and started instead driving to Manchester with my new dark-haired boyfriend and his mate. We’d tear up the highway in his friend’s Rhosddhu Carpets van.

One morning, after a night at the Hacienda, my new boyfriend and I wound our way through grey tenement blocks and chip papers, to where the thudding bass continued all through the night. Hulme was beautiful to me then. We pushed open the door of a squatted flat, filthy with three-week old leftovers, swarming with flies in the July heat, trying not to touch anything. Then he and I lay down on a dirty mattress and held each other and looked into each other’s eyes, sunshine already breaking through the torn sheet across the window. It was the first time I’d been touched where my desire felt like something real, not something expected. I almost lost my virginity that morning, but we stopped last minute because we didn’t have any protection. I didn’t want to end up some girl pushing a pram at fifteen. I wanted to write, be in a band; get a degree. So I cried out, his hand between my thighs “Not now! I don't want to end up like bloody Michelle Fowler off Eastenders!”

On the way back from Snowdonia last week, we drove by the village where I grew up, so I decided to pop in on my sister. A familiar feeling of love and panic hit me. Beforehand, we drove to the cemetery where Mum is buried. However, when I arrived, there was no marking post, nothing to tell me where she was. Poor Mum. I rang Flintshire County Council and wandered through the graveyard clutching my mobile until they eventually found me her plot number. I sat down, feeling angry and sad. “Sorry Mum”, I said.

The last time I went to her grave, I lay down on the grass beside her, just as I’d lain the last time I saw her alive, struggling for air through a face mask in Wrexham hospital. I’d talked and cried, rubbing my fingers in the newly turned soil. But this time, my words evaporated in the silence, until, cold and hungry, I eventually got up and left.

The Scarf

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I thought all I had left of him was a beige cashmere M&S scarf. This scarf is soft as cat fur. It goes everywhere with me.  A gift, one Christmas, he’d left it in a flat box, slipped between two others, on my Mum’s front step. He’d left gifts for several years after I stopped seeing him. We threw all the others away – on principle, you know? But I couldn’t bring myself to part with the scarf. Then one Christmas, all through Christmas Eve and the next day, I opened and shut Mum’s front door, snagging the holly wreath, letting in a chill. But the step remained empty.

     
That was the end of 2000. Tonight, as I returned home across town through a windy drizzle, I knotted that scarf around my throat; pulled it up over my mouth. I remembered our phone conversation, a week ago.

     
It was as though no time had passed at all. The first thing he said to me, after ‘Hiya love,’ was ‘There’s a fella here I’d like you to meet. History Professor. I’ve told him all about you. He's two beds down from me.’ That’s so Dad. Twelve years of painful nothingness between us and now he wants to show off his ‘clever daughter’ to the man in the other hospital bed. It was sad hearing him in the ward. The nurse talked about him being up and about on his Zimmer frame as though that was a good thing.

     
Zimmer frame?

     
The second time we talk, he tells me ‘You always were your mother’s daughter.’ Asks me what we are doing about Mum's house. ‘We’ve got to go for probate,’ I say, not mentioning the protracted grief, trauma and health problems my sisters and I have endured since our mother's death. 'But then I think it’s best that we sell it as soon as’. ‘Very sensible,’ says Dad. ‘You want shot of that millstone.'

     
 I’m stunned by the mysteriousness of my Dad’s life: it lies behind a door I’ve never opened - I never even so much as curled my fingers around the handle. Dad gave himself another family, another wife and stepchildren, even grandchildren. How did he do all that... without me? I know virtually nothing about the last twenty years of his life or the people in it – just a few names. In my mind, my father has stayed the same man as the one he walked out as in 1991, wearing the same clothes, holding the same attitudes, and with the same mistress. He's occupied some ethereal space in the back of my mind. I've had vague images of a hump-back bridge, a quiet leafy lane and a bungalow, paintings of landscapes from our old house hanging on its salmon-coloured walls. 
     
But for my Dad, of course, life moved on. For over half my own life-span, he’s lived another life – full, not empty and containing something approximating love. The mistress became his wife, the blonde bit of stuff became his step-daughter. Then what? Holidays to the South of France? Afternoons out to stately homes, with a cream tea for afters? Cosy nights on the settee front of the box? The question mark he left for us, his three children.

     
I’m not angry with Dad. Not now. Not today. Too much time has passed, and there is so little time left. It’s funny, he sounded like my Mum on the phone – that same softening of the palette, that child-like laugh. Is that how all people sound when they’ve reached a certain age or degree of illness? And a Zimmer frame. Bloody hell! That’s a far cry from his purple Porsche blasting 120 down the motorway. Dad shouts at the doctors, and argues with the nurses about his medication. That man could argue his way out of any situation. Any parking ticket. Any hotel bill. Any extra-marital affair. My Dad, the self-made man, unmade. He falls over on the living room carpet. Is at the mercy of medication and heart monitors, bad hospital food. He loves his food, my Dad. Butter spread thick as cheese.

     
I want my Dad to be happy. Not lonely under thin white sheets. Scared. Still I wonder how he lived all that life without me. How it became normal, to make me into a memory. It’s not nice feeling erased. So of course, I erased him, or tried to. I know when I’m not wanted.

     
When something has gone, it’s gone. And if it was never there, nothing will ever, ever, make up for it. Some people understand this more than others; they’ve learned it by experience. Yet so far, a couple of phone calls to my Dad have made a difference. Everyone has such a different relationship with their parents - and some people are better at being parents than others. Some are just plain rotten. But good or bad, the relationship simple or complicated, your mother, your father – they made you what you are today. Call it biology. Call it blood. They bloody know you.