Bring Out Your Dead!

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For weeks now I’ve had hulking great ‘writer’s block’. Each morning has been the same: my fingers hover over my keyboard, sentences in my head unraveling themselves, the passion in my belly shrinking to nothing. No metaphors spring from the black pit of my brain. No imagery dances across my tired eyes. I am null and void. Kaput. Bring out your dead! I want to shout from my living room window. I find it hard to believe I’ll ever write another good sentence again, or that I ever did. Words clunk into each other, and so I press DELETE over and again, unpicking all I thought I wanted to say. I'm presented with a blank page, an unscratchable itch. A life without writing.

     
Where once was bustle, voices, movement, now is shadow and an eerie quiet. It’s been great for getting on with the rest of life – I’ve mended two record players, been prompt with my recycling and even caught up on hula hooping. I’ve earned money. But the silence is disturbing. I think of those Chilean miners after the tunnel had collapsed, seven hundred metres under solid ground; I imagine them staring through torchlight at impenetrable walls. They survived on so little sustenance, but more, they survived that deathly quiet. They kept themselves going by making enough noise to drown it out - the silence that encircled them like a noose. They sang, prayed, talked; they planned, and laughed.

     
Oh, to have such guts. Today the sky outside my window is heavy, as though it’s propped up by the two TV aerials on the roof of the house opposite. Someone told me the other day that in dreams we cast no shadow, that the unconscious is self-illuminating. So I slap my hand to see if I’m really awake. Or if I’m merely sleepwalking through my days: mornings spent in a cheap dressing gown, pressing fingers against a hot, stained teacup hoping it will stir my unconscious voice into life. A world without words is an easier place, but also a colder one. I take a sip of tea, stare down into the white hole of my computer screen - and freeze.

Small Mercies

Get up, walk about, sit back down, sit back down. Get up. Sit back down. Sip rum. Rub the soreness in my temple. Get up. Walk over to the window. Watch the street running like treacle below. Don't feel regret. Don't feel anything. Not yet.

I dreamt of chasing Noel Fielding up dead-ends and through back-streets because he said he'd sell me a T-shirt. Ended up in a cellar with a fat man. I watch videos, and more videos. Re-fire ambition. Remember the dream. The one that always returns. Sit down, make myself remember. Think. That dream was always what got me worst. On a bleak winter's day, coming round the corner, in a grey duffel coat and a scarf. He didn't look at me. Always was me. I edge the mirror out of the window. Smash. Hear it splinter.

Put on I-Tunes. I only want to hear sad tunes. Listen to the Specials, remember the Eighties, how I grew up too fast. Thank god for small mercies. Where'd I have been if I'd actually got what I wanted.

I'm as good for it now as I was then. Clueless, torn, gluing words onto an A4 ring binder, hoping for it to make some sense. Pretending I know what I'm meant to know by now.

Outside someone is shouting. Fuck off, you cunt. Fuck off. YOU CUNT.

Thank god for small mercies.

Monday

There are days that begin with a strange hue, that open their curtains to a light never seen before. Today began in smoky greys that crept under my eyelids like ghosts from the sea. I'd been dreaming about a ship off the coast of Morocco. I was staying on it, taking breaks from it to visit this little village on the Moroccan coast. It was always tricky getting back out to the ship, so sometimes I would stay overnight in the village.

However, one time I had to get back to the ship. The only way to do so was to sail out to it by dinghy. This was a risky thing to do. Lots of people did it, but many got lost on the way. I had a friend who had been blown all the way to Nigeria by harsh wind currents. The golden rule was this – no matter what, you had to reach the ship before nightfall, else you would be adrift without any sense of direction, heading out into the empty ocean.

It was a strange dream, full of unhelpful people and cool characters. I undertook the journey back to the ship with a friend of mine. She turned out to be rather immature and annoying, and insisted in stopping off for food in this town we had come across, even though time was precious and night wasn’t far away. I began panicking. As we left the café, I saw that our dinghy had been stolen. My friend and I walked up this road in search of a boat to borrow. As we did so, a Christian woman preaching the word of God came up to me. I waved her away, pre-occupied as I was by my dilemma. I didn't need her preaching; I didn’t need her agenda. My friend however, stopped and gave her a broken string of beads. She smiled.

Halfway up the road, I collapsed in despair, knowing we'd never get to the ship before nightfall. As I slumped against a wall, the woman caught up with us, a man joining her. They were talking about God. His legs were crippled. He said, to no one in particular "People ask how God could do such a thing as to make me lame. But look at these legs of mine - they are simply just different from yours. They have their own shape. They have their own beauty. I am grateful for legs like these."

As I felt myself waking up, I decided to stay in that village for the night, and set off for the ship again in the morning.

So this smoky morning is filled with that dream, and my own sadness. On a daily basis I convince myself that I am over things, I am on top of these losses that drift in and out of my life. But they weave their own spell; they inhabit my dreams, and are there when I wake up.

I think about Mum, weaving in and out of her own dreams. It is a peculiar kind of loss, I think, to mourn those still alive. But every loss has its own sad flavour and each bleeds into the other. I am missing my friend, David, and his death has its own mystery and shock. I am also missing what I could have had, had my life been different and I'd made different choices. I don't regret, but I do mourn.

Today isn't a heavy, foreboding kind of grey. It is light and wispy as a mouse’s fur. It fills the streets outside and the air in the sky over Brighton. It curls around the pier like a tail and disperses with the seagulls taking flight. I breathe it in and swallow, feel it welling up in my eyes. I realise that my heart is a slate, and I write my longings on it with a soft piece of chalk. I don't know how to say goodbye. If I could write that; that is what I would say.

I've got a new teapot, a lovely green and glassy Christmas present. It is sitting on my table under the window and, magically, looks like it has always been there. I have a not-so-secret belief that tea cures everything. So I dry my eyes and put the kettle on, warm the pot. This magic ritual is a supreme comfort; it is an act of love. I don't want to open my doors to anyone today. I want to hide with my teapot and my chalky heart until day passes into night. But life isn't made like that. Things press on. I must open my curtains and move.

...

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.

The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of The Moon ..

We made a routine out of sitting by that cliff edge. We nipped back and forth from our tent as though the cliff, the seamless sky and the sea below it were simply the corner shop or the loo.

I lay back and looked. He was constantly naming stars and constellations, happiest to sit and gaze up. I was constantly discovering all the things I still feel I need to do in my life, things that I probably never will, but somewhere still hold a light to, hoping that one day ... when I'm rich, when my life is different, when I've completed the training, when I'm older and more settled, when I win 35 million on the Lottery.

And we would scuttle back to the tent and sleep or wake or giggle, and then we would be back there again, lying back, gazing upwards, him naming constellations, me discovering yet more things that I still want to do in my life and possibly never will. The list became endless ...

I must go up in a space shuttle and orbit the Earth. I have to fly to the Moon. I want to go to Mars as well. I want to be a rockclimber. A mountaineer. Go paragliding. Own and fly my own bi plane. Do formation dancing whilst strapped to its wing. I've got to climb Everest before I die. I will one day go to Antarctica. Can I live without having stood at least once amongst penguins and ice? I must understand all religions. I want to be wealthy. I must become Enlightened. I want to know Christ; journey to France to live alone with nothing but the clothes on my back. I want to be a mother. I will be a writer. How far off is that journey in a tour bus? What about the record deal? Can I build that home in the desert with my own hands? Will I ever really know what it is like to live as a drunken poet, willing to sacrifice all decency? Where is that great movie script inside me? How can I live to the end of my days without knowing what it's like to be a man? Is there any bird that could bear my weight on its back as it flies across whole continents? Why can't I write a PHD on Quantum Physics? Why do I still think stars are little candles in the sky? Why does my head explode when he tells me that the star I'm looking at isn't a star, but is actually a whole galaxy which itself contains millions upon millions of suns just like our own sun in it, and it is 2.5 million million light years away, with each light year itself being the equivalent of 6 million million miles away?

This cliff edge is strong. It's pulling me out towards the fulmars and the black-backs. Then it's taking me further, out into the inky mass of blackened planets, to where my craving meets my soul and both explode in starlight. These dreams are not the work of idle moments. They live in me like a constant heart beat; most of them since I was a child. Back in those days, so much was fantasy, an unattainable goal. These days it is not always easy to know what is far fetched and what's real. The moon landing or the record deal. The bi plane or the novel. The Big Bang or the Holy Spirit. However, craving, and the vision it brings does not usually possess me as much as it has on this cliff top; on this strange and beautiful cliff of longing.

I look at him. He has some secret I cannot yet discover. He simply watches and looks, his nose edging upwards towards the wings that pass above him. If I could be so content. If I could sit and remember it is all here now - the moon, the stars, the space shuttles and the backs of birds. My dreams are always of travelling, of flying, of taking off, or else they are of being struck down, struck by a lightning bolt that illluminates everything. Do I dream of angels? Yes, sometimes; as much as I dream of dirty bars. Is it here, now? Of course it is.

I like it here. There are no signs of a normal life lived here in these parts. We are happy. Him and me. At the edge. Both of us dreaming, in our own ways.

Dans Le Noir

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was watching a white bunny rabbit in the garden from my old back window, and it turned into the Virgin Mary before my eyes, filling with rainbow light. She then started glowing a deep red, which emanated out towards the trees as she hovered above the flower beds.

Last night I dreamt that someone gave me a load of old Mr Men books, and I was looking through them and the only one I recognised was Mr Forgetful, and I was thinking "but I've already got Mr Forgetful, should I tell them this or keep it to myself?" Then I was at sea, with several faceless companions, all in dinghies, waiting for the best wave to take us off over the horizon into oblivion.

Somehow, all these dreams seem to aptly sum up my weekend, from which my senses haven't quite recovered. My psyche is still re-arranging itself back into something vaguely recognisable to me.

Friday was my birthday, a day I have loathed all my life. When I was thirteen, I decided that birthdays, at least for me, were unlucky - something always went terribly wrong on them. One year my Grandma died, the next, my dog got run over. Indeed, it was on that same thirteenth bithday that my sister went missing, my mother assumed a child-like position and I spent my passage into teenagehood as the only member of my family coherent enough to explain my sister's disappearence and details to the local policeman. When he finally asked me how old I was and I explained "I'm thirteen today!", I promptly burst into tears at the horrid injustice of my birthday always seeming to be the most fucked up day of the year. Years later, I discovered that same policeman, whose presence I felt a reassuring comfort from since he seemed the only person with any degree of sanity in our house that evening, had gone to prison for murdering his wife by driving her off the edge of Tinkersadle, a steep, winding dangerous road that goes up to our village, and trying to make it look like an accident. So much for my feeble sense of security.

So yes, I decided at that point that not only were birthdays crap, they were in fact unlucky. They were portents of doom. The only thing good about them at that age was that they meant I was getting older, and nearer to leaving school and home. Unfortunately, this plus point only lasted until somewhere in my twenties, where suddenly the reverse began to happen, each year becoming further evidence of some inevitable and cruel decline into frustration and regret.

ANYWAY. Ahem. This year I decided I wouldn't add to my stress by planning a big birthday event on the actual day of my birthday, instead, dragging it out for an entire weekend, and playing my first gig in the midst of it all. Mmm. The morning was spent with my usual neurotic "Oh God, I'm 30/1/2/3/4 .." wailings, but they quickly subsided once I arrived in London with Bob, had a strong coffee with my sisters, then disappeared of to Farringdon for a meal with a difference.

Now, only Bob would think to take me out for a meal in a restaurant like Dans Le Noir, and only I would find it the perfect, romantic birthday gift. Somehow it suited our slightly strange natures perfectly. Basically, as it's name suggests, Dans Le Noir is a restaurant which is completely, and I mean completely, in the dark. No candles, no little lights in the distance, it is pitch black. We were introduced in the lobby to our partially sighted French waiter, Cyril (pronounced See-reel), who instructed "the lay-dee of Ro-bear" to place her hand upon his right shoulder, which I dutifully did, and then called the following four women and five men to do the same, until we formed a nervous line, as though we were about to do some surreal conga through the lobby. He then began to move off, taking me and the rest of the befuddled chain with him through dark doors into decreasing light, until we finally reached the door of the room where we would be eating. At this point a woman screamed and shouted "I can't do it! Let me out!" and left. Then, like intrepid explorers we continued our adventure, and I was led to a table, and Cyril placed my hands on the back of a chair and said "E-yere ees youwr siet".

Ten of us to a table, we were handed water, wine, bottles of coke and lemonade, and course after course of perfectly cooked food by our flawless, partially-sighted host. The exact nature of the menu we were not told, but had to guess. Fumbling to pour the water into glasses was interesting. Trying to chase smoked salmon around my plate even more so. A little bit of footsie under the table was the most interesting. I was praying it was Bob's foot I was messing with. And then, like the voice of an angel, Cyril would appear, and softly say in my ear "'E-yer ees your men couwse" whilst I held out my hands hopefully into the blackness. Table manners weren't a problem at this meal. I gave up with the knife and fork halfway through my main after scooping up ten forkfuls of nothing and began using my fingers.

Finally, when we were finished, Cyril Bob and I, hand to shoulder, back out into the lobby. The light was dazzling. I just kept saying "Wow!". After finding out what our menu had in fact consisted of and realising that our guesses were pretty accurate (after all, panna cotta is just glorified blancmange isn't it?), we went upstairs to the swanky bar to recover, and to sip at a Black Martini in a funny glass.

After this brilliant evening, Saturday had a lot to live up to. After final rehearsals and our first ever sound-check ("erm, where do I plug the keyboard in?") guests piled into the Angel House, and by 8.30, the room was filled. It's funny, the process of nerves. I'd say that in some form or other I think Ive been nervous about this gig since I heard I was playing it three weeks ago. That slight sense of sickness in my gut never quite left me. However, with 15 minutes to go, all nerves simply left, and stayed away for the entire performance.

There is something about getting what you want in life which is so extraordinary, it makes me realise why so much of the time we are doomed to the opposite, to that feeling of things not quite hitting the mark, leaving a part of us empty, and still longing for fulfillment. In fact, I think the preciousness and beauty of getting what we want partly arises from all those times when we didn't. On Saturday evening I felt glad for all the days and nights I've spent poring over my keyboard, frustrated and lonely, banging out harmonies, trying, trying to get that perfect line realised, to manifest that ending, make the picture complete. For how wretched I felt at times. I felt glad for those childhood dreams which told me this is what I was meant for, and equally for all those years I refused to let myself believe them. I even felt glad for all the rotten things that have happened in my life, for the broken dreams, the lost belief, the inescapable heart-ache. On Saturday night they all went into the songs, they made themselves heard in the melodies, and I sang out all that I had lost, and refound it in a room full of people, with a bright light on me, feeling more myself than ever.

We can't escape that secret feeling if we haven't given it our best shot, if we haven't pushed ourselves beyond the limits of our fears, if we have stayed safe and warm and dulled in life's soporific dream-time. If we didn't step out into the wilderness and search for water. If we didn't take those reins and ride.

Sunday, followed a messy and curious post-gig party, where everyone I know who attended it, including myself, decided to drink whatever came their way, whether it came in glass or bottle, cafetiere or saucepan, or from the fingers of passing party goers. And so, when Sunday morning arrived, following only two and a half hours sleep, I lay like a broken doll in my bed, at once happy for the success of the gig, at the same time, a physical wreck. How I managed to go from feeling like a crawling insect on the toe of life to shopping for potatoes in Tesco for the upcoming birthday tea party I was hostessing on the beach that afternoon I do not know. God or the Devil must have been with me. Bob and I struggled to the beach at four o clock with birdcages, French Fancies, Battenburg and an inflatable parrot, to weather which would not have looked out of place on the set for Titanic. Wind howled and the waves rose like trees from the blustery sea as I lay out the pretty pink spread, feeling like the biggest freak that walked the earth. No one would come. I would be sat here on my own with my swiss roll like some weird old freaky bag lady. I was becoming accustomed to this idea when Jo arrived, and then Olivia, and then the people rolled up one after the other, virtually all with horrific hangovers, bearing cards and gifts and sausages for the fire, until there must have been twenty of us, freezing our little bums off, chatting into the wind, enjoying every minute of it.

Yesterday, Bank Holiday Monday, I ate chocolate fairy cakes for breakfast with scary purple icing and spidery red hearts. Then Bob and I drove to Seaford cliffs and I slept in the back of the car on the seafront while the rain hammered down. The sound of rain on a metal roof is so comforting. Then the rain stopped and we climbed to the cliff top, held each other tightly so that neither of us blew off, and watched the kittywakes rise and fall in the wind like paper planes, their wings so fragile, their black legs jutting out beneath them. They sailed through the air, frail beings in a vacuum of light, feathers against the sky, all lost, all swirling, heading outwards, flying home, seeking out the place where the current takes them up high, their singing lost into chalk and rock.