...

I wake up, stretch. I make tea, cross the room, I move back again. Turn on the computer, turn it off again, shut the door behind me, check it's closed tight. Down the stairs, out on the street, through the rain, passing windows with the lamps just coming on in them, past windows with sticky signs in them selling flights to New York, Paris and the Costa Brava. I am happy. I'm on the move. There is a safety in my step. I buy a scarf. I scour the wet streets for the reflection of shop lights. There's a warm fuzzy feeling inside me. I walk home.

But back inside, a familiar feeling, one which usually comes only during the night, when I and the world are fast asleep. It came last night; I awoke abruptly and stumbled, half-asleep to the bathroom. Night-time is when another me emerges from deep inside, a me I don't recognise. A time for blackness to come running, for a cold clammy fog to swallow up what is not yet left of the daylight. Blocking up my throat, swelling my chest, nothing to be seen. My eyelids droop to the pillow exhausted. I become an invisible ghost, meandering through this room, that room, finding every single one of them empty.

These night tremors, night terrors, which boil me in my own fear, disappear with the morning. I'm left with no memory but the feeling of death on my lips. But was it the man I spotted lurking outside my changing room today, unconvincing as he examined the ties, or the charity shop assistant who looked at me and said "A five pound note? For a 50p scarf?" that chased my heart back down that black road that goes from golden to ash; morning turning into an endless vacancy of stars? I am left quite alone then in the mechanics of my life, oiling the cogs, keeping it moving, mending and re-structuring, whilst the pit opening up in my stomach tells me that this destination is to nowhere, no place to finally rest except the grave, where loss is the only thing I can be certain will never leave. I see Mum's hand, inert on the white sheet. I see my father, turned away. I see three little girls, running.

I realised yesterday, as I discovered a tear welling up in my eye whilst I watched a James Blunt video, that I must be pre-mentstrual. There is no other reasonable explanation for such shocking behaviour. Even so, today I put down my pen, curled up on my bed and let myself fall into the absence, into all the things I wish I had in my life, that I will never have, that are gone, non-returnable, no deposit, finished, done with, ended, vanished. And always at the bottom of it, is my Mum's hand, the softest hand in the world. Once it stroked my hair. Now I stroke it in my mind, kiss it lightly and pray for its warmth to stay with me for just a little while longer.

My life is ok. I can't complain. But when a mood such as this takes hold, there's only a bullet or a hatchet that could feel more sharp and more deadly. Outside, it is raining again, as it has been for days, people strapped into their houses as the water pelts down the streets. I am glad for security. I do not feel guilty for wanting what's safe. No, actually, that's far from true. I am perhaps the greatest devotee of the God of Loss. A true believer. But blackness inevitably passes, leaving only a trace of its scent; a cool, musky, damp scent of freshly turned earth.

Mother's Day

They are selling cut-price flowers in Tesco's, for this special day, for all those last minute sons and daughters.

I came back from Wales yesterday, on a long Pendolino train which arrived at 11 o'clock in the evening, then I caught the last bus home. Today, I am shattered, and have been attempting to cultivate a pottering state of mind - one which concentrates only on the unpacking of tea cups, the re-aligning and colour-coding of books on shelves, and the playing of crap bubble-bursting logic games on my mobile phone.

I knew at some point today I would need to sit myself at my computer and attempt to recapture the last few days, and I knew it wouldn't be easy. My heart feels like it has been pumped with helium, so swollen with life, it is, so engorged with feeling, I fear it might just sail right out from under my tee-shirt, out of my living-room window and into the dark rainy night.

I arrived in Shotton at lunch time on Tuesday, tired from the train journey, the early start and the lack of sleep I've become used to in these recent weeks of late night music and writing sessions. I have been wanting to see my sister for some time, we met jubilantly on the station platform, caught the train together to our village and walked home.

As I sat in my Mum's old bedroom, which looks out over the playing fields, I could see, through the trees in the distance, the partly hidden walls of our old sprawling family home, the house I grew up in from the age of four until I moved out at eighteen. With its vast tangle of bushes, trees and flowerbeds, its large echoing rooms, the endless driveway, it is still very much a mythical place for me, a place I still dream about, I still think about. It is a house of so many memories, and I'm still trying to understand and come to terms with what went on within its four walls.

I've known for a while that I needed to go and have another look at the old house. I hadn't seen it close up in some years, I've avoided going up our old road. Right next to it stands the Poor Clares Convent, just on the other side of the wall. I hadn't been back to the Convent since I was a little girl. I have known for a while that I've needed to return here aswell. I've wanted to see what it was like on the inside, as I can't remember from all those years ago, and I've needed some answers in order to piece together the missing pieces of a puzzle that is my childhood. So I have needed for a long time to go and visit the Poor Clares. This week felt like the right time.

I can't locate much in my memories of childhood that, looking back, seem normal or ordinary, if there is such a thing. At the time, I thought that was just how things were in family life, it was all that I knew. But I so longed to be normal and ordinary, in an ordinary house, with an ordinary family, ordinary friends, ordinary wishes and an ordinary experience. The more I look at it, though I know that the idea of a normal family-life can only largely be myth, the more I think what an extraordinary existence in some ways my childhood and teenage years were.

However, when I remember, it is usually the bad that I remember, the darker parts, the shadowy overhangs of branches in our gardens, the crawling in the undergrowth. It is the creaking in the loft above my head, it is the white statue on the lawn that, in the night, always seemed to be moving. It is the death of the bumble bee in the spider's web next to our back steps, it is the crying in the night. We kept the back door locked tight and the front door gleaming with red gloss paint and a brass knocker.

This is what stays with me most, the feeling that someone was always hiding in those tall poplars that lined our long driveway, that there were forces out there, surrounding us that me and my family didn't want to know about. We were all haunted.

But then there was the Convent, with its clock that chimed on the half hour, with its Cross that stood tall above all our heads. I would hear the nuns singing in the morning at dawn, as my mother took me by the hand and gently led me down the front lawn when I was little and I couldn't sleep, and the sun was just beginning to shine and birds were just waking.

There was something about the Convent that I didn't understand, but which has affected me all my life. I am only just realising why. The nuns would come and visit my Mum and they would bring us hand-carved Crucifixes and tiny painted nuns made out of wooden clothes pegs. I would keep the prayers of St Francis on my head board, stuck with blutack, and I would pray every night and feel the kindness of those words trickling down my forehead.

..Lord .. grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life..

A thread has run through my veins and through my life from as far back as I can remember. I still don't quite understand it, and it is still unravelling. It runs all the way back to my childhood, to the old house and to those closed Convent walls.

honey off the razor's edge

It's hard to accept that what moves me in life isn't always what I like to think it is. Yes, the birds and the starlight and the stretches of riverbeds in Summer, the moon and the edges of hats worn by old ladies on the number 49 bus - these joys are all very acceptable to me.

     But what of all the things that go bump in the night, that step into my doorway with a stranger light? What of the things that aren't supposed to stir up joy in my soul, like the sight of blood, the edge of terror, the unfolding of betrayal, the foulest weather? I thought those days were done, but when I look in the mirror I see a desire which knows no bounds, and is uncomplicated by morals or reason or sense. Desire finds me at every turn, under every shade and nook it hides, waiting for its days to come. And so what move me are the strangest things, sometimes the very things which destroy me, that will cause me pain. And self-control will have the upper hand in practice, and kindness will play its part too. But I cannot forget the never-ending seeking of endless pleasure and torment that governs my heart, and not look all surprised when the great axe falls, not look shocked when the next bloody bull that they drag out of the ring has my name on it.

     I said I'd left Lorca behind, that I wasn't interested in duende anymore. I wasn't fussed about watching Pete Doherty on TV or reading about the lives of doomed poets. Instead, I open up to wilderness skylines and tall buildings. I walk the line. I tread in honest communication and self-respect. I behave like an adult. Most of the time. But appearances can be deceptive, and I was never a simple girl, life never was built upon solid ground but on rocks and water and broken glass and fire. I remember to howl. There is nothing else for it, if this world isn't to be one of endless adultery and murder. But I will not squash the devil in me. She's way too pretty. Lick the honey off the razor's edge (but there's no running home to Mummy). Taste the sweetness; wreck the car (it fell down the hillside before I could reach it). Worship those demons in my head. So tell me a story I've never heard before. Go on; tell it me. I know I'd die for a poetic sensibility, whether it's foolish or not, I know I'd spread my legs for the devil himself if he were to show me a glimpse of reality. Maybe I'm just some kind of cosmic slut, whoring myself out to the wind and the rain. Maybe I just never learnt any manners (though I was a well brought up girl). Maybe I was only meant to live in graveyards, or to sleep with the dead. Show me a knife mark, a naked ambition, tinkle cups at dawn, reveal a little perversion, wipe across continents with your muddy fingers. I'm so sweet inside I'm choking up on it, I'm so sweet inside, it's pure depravity.