Under The Influence

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I was in the upstairs spare bedroom singing along to Mary Coughlan's Under The Influence - Fifteen or Ice Cream Man, I don't remember which. It was my sister's LP, dragged from a dusty blue case beneath the dresser; slipped from its case and onto my old Rotel turntable. After twenty years, it still had hardly a scratch on it. I've been sneaking Under The Influence in and out of my sister's room since I was thirteen, back when it was a guilty pleasure - sleazy Irish ballads ill-fitting with the rest of my record collection. Coughlan's voice, to me, sounded like burnt treacle. The album must have reached a rousing chorus because when the phone rang I didn't hear it. Emma was shouting up the stairs. When I finally turned it down, walked out onto the landing, and saw her face, I knew that Mum was dead. 

     
A week after the funeral, I was back in Brighton and at work, decorating the house of an eight-and-a-half month pregnant financial adviser who, after we’d finished, stood on a chair checking each doorframe to ensure it was painted correctly. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone back so soon. But the alternative felt worse: sitting around my flat, staring at my computer screen, listening to gulls rip up bin bags outside my living room window.

     
So I drove myself crazy at work instead. I sweated at the top of a stepladder until ten-thirty at night, listening to bad Experimental Jazz on Radio 3 or crouched in low-ceilinged bedrooms, cutting in skirting boards. I didn’t particularly want to think about Mum. I certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone else about her. I wasn’t particularly sad; in many ways I felt relieved – joyful, even. But friends told me I was vulnerable. That I needed to take care of myself. Stay grounded.
     
Staying grounded was the last thing on my mind.
     
That week, someone new came to work with us. Within a day I’d fallen in love with him. A man already in a relationship, a man with a disastrous psyche. Click-clop-thump— I ran into mess as fast as my Converse pumps could carry me.

But that’s another story. Eighteen months later that same man and I are decorating together again. Things have moved on; the affair long ended, the emotional entanglements of the previous year smoothed out into clear separate strands. It’s autumn and we’re painting a mansion in West Sussex. It’s a country idyll. During tea breaks I stroll down the path towards lush gardens and an orchard with trees hanging with apples and pears. Every so often white horses in the neighbouring field break into a gallop, tearing across damp grass under Wolstonbury Hill. We are painting the windows of a once internationally famous actress – the kind who always seemed to be semi-nude in films, and who was once declared to be ‘one of the most beautiful women in the world’. She smiles at me from her doorway, her un-manicured fingers on her hips, her heavy-lidded eyes free from make-up. Cats curl their tails about her ankles. I take heart in her crumbling beauty and in the wild lawns that surround us. There is now friendship with this man, and the pain of what happened to Mum – those salmon-coloured hospital walls, canteen tea in its polystyrene cup, the hum and beep of life support machines – has faded. I can almost forget how, before Mum died, each time I’d looked from the nursing home window a bird would be hopping about on the frozen earth, or in sunshine, as if to show me my mother’s own soul – how it could be if only it was free to go, leave; exit the building.

Two weeks later, the weather turns, the job ends and the orchard, the summerhouse, the galloping horses all get washed away by a black, pounding rain. My friendship with the man dissolves into mud, accusations hurtling through mean damp air. Again I sit alone in my flat, a little more worn and once more with time to write. I’ve heard it said that grief and sex are inextricably linked: two sides of the same sharp knife. It’s true, the summer after Mum died, I was a bird flying into a shut glass window. But after such a cruel three year period of glacial stasis, I felt finally free. And that meant I was free to fuck up my life however I chose. Because of that, I couldn’t regret a thing.
    
Soon I’ll put on my parka, step out into the shuddering rain and head up to the Post Office to collect my recent purchase: Mary Coughlan’s Under The Influence. We can’t recapture what was beautiful about the past, but we can let it call out to us again.
      
I am glad that when the phone call came, I was singing.

Buddhafield Festival

It's been sweltering all day today. Now, the sun's finally gone down, but a heat remains, sinking into the walls of my building, blowing warm through my open windows, caressing my back.
   
I'm home after almost a week away at Buddhafield Festival. I've returned to the computer several times today trying to begin to describe my time there, and each time I've gone away silent, empty-handed, a Zen stick pounding on my brain.
   
Perhaps there's just too much to say, or maybe it won't let itself be verbalised, this shift in myself that's turned me inside out. All I know is that my soul, my heart, has returned, and I see quite clearly things that before stood submerged in damp fog.
   
The heat from my body is rising like an aura. Outside, I hear male voices. There's a gentle breeze on my skin. I wonder where I'm heading with all this life inside me - rustling this way, snuffling that. I can only follow my nose.
   
 And right now, I find that I am glimmering with the waves, I'm out with the fishing-nets and seaweed. I'm lost, but this time, I don't mind. I welcome the tangles of my life that wrap like balls of wool inside Grandma's knitting bag. Summer finally has arrived.

Friday night

My street's ablaze with colour at the moment. The hydrangeas two doors up have sat, crisp and mottled for months, like old maids perched by the side of the road. Now, suddenly they've erupted into pink, purple and blue life, turning into something resembling a mild acid trip.

Seeing hydrangeas seems to short circuit something in my brain, sending me into a peculiar kind of rapture. They remind me of my Grandma more than any other flower. One glimpse of them takes me back to her garden again, and to her, brown skirt to her knees, hair firmly in place, picking a handful of peas or mint. There she appears, sturdy and loving, in her small, perfectly kept patch of green at Southview.

I'm not great at understanding the anatomy of things, at labels and the naming of parts, at decipherable wholes and the bits that make them up. I generally have a much more impressionistic experience of life. So it took me almost 34 years to learn that the flower I felt so ardently about was even called a hydrangea.

But I knew how those flowers made me feel; I knew the quality of the air in those summer days when I played on the wall. Every single day for the last two years I've touched the hydrangeas growing on my street, lightly, with my fingertips, as I've passed. And been immediately back there again.

Tonight, I walked home on the other side of the street, feeling like the wind was blowing me down towards the sea, pushing me out into a night where seagulls gather in a sky lit by boats and stars. And I wondered about all the flowers on my street; I wondered how come they are not made of blood, as we are, but of something different. Because our lives are not so dissimilar, and our beginning and our end all converge at the same place.

A rose feels the force of nature in its petals, trembles with the weight of the rain. It stretches its stalk away from the muddy earth, towards the sunlight. Tonight, I imagined every flower, every leaf trickling sap. I imagined salt water falling down from each one, red blood spotting the pavement, and a curious wet emerging from in between each petal. I imagined mucus-streaked stalks. The liquid of life washing across flowerbeds, over walls, out onto the empty grey pavement.

On a night like tonight, how I wished they would, how I wished the flowers would do their blood-letting and their weeping, their loving and mating, and I could walk through their rivers of their living and growth and disintegration.

Perhaps then I could finally see manifested the desire that's pumping through the veins of this world, through me, seeping out through my pores, winding through the channels of my mind, enveloping my tendons.

Otherwise, that which fuels everything that we do, the very axis on which this planet turns, remains as invisible as the air we suck on. We can almost pretend it doesn't exist, and that the world can be containable, reasonable somehow.

But I can feel it in the wind that's rattling my windows, in the heat of this evening, in the hum of night-time. It's everywhere I look. And it's in my heart, tinkling like that empty beer can rolling past my window. I am trembling with the force of what makes me, and will break me every time.

New petals generate, old ones die, and I proliferate. And if you think I'm being over the top, if you doubt it, look out of the corner of your eye and you'll spot it, always, sitting there in your living-room, drinking your coffee, planning your next move.

I don't know what to do with all this desire inside. It's as strong as that sea out there and as fragile as those petals. Me. Silly me. Messy, bloody, somehow growing. The world never did come to terms with itself, did it? And nor, yet, have I.

Bank Holiday

Twenty to midnight. This is the last thing I should be doing. But I'm here, at this screen, fingers fumbling over buttons.

So this is the crux - I find myself at that place, the place of no return, where I am scattered to the wind a thousand times over, waiting for the pieces to blow back into a self again. I tried to hold it, and I couldn't. I tried to keep it in a shape that still looked pleasing to the eye, that could bathe my ears in a comforting sound. But it broke out, and now we're all running.

Looking at it another way - it's a late night, after a hard weekend, following a tough break-up and too much alcohol. Hardly surprising if my heart's on the floor (better sweep it up with tomorrow's litter). Another day blinks at me, and we all find a way through.

In a week it'll be two years since Mum's final stroke, two years that she's been lying staring out of that goddamn window, without a thing we can do about it. Two years since I last heard her utter a word, or since she looked at me and I could say "Mum, I love you" and know that she hears me. Two fucking years. So I'm parentless, childless, a plastic duck bobbing on top of the bathwater.

It's also, unbelievably, almost six months since David died. I can't really think about him, but the loss works on me in inexplicable ways, twisting my life in its hands.

Today I walked with friends through caverns of green, emerging into sunlight, down lanes, unwinding, winding. A sip of pale ale, a search for cream tea, heat and damp, rain and warm. England at its most omniscient, its most lordly; giving of itself; springing into skylarks, whooping over hedgerows. Breaking out the wheat fields into dappled joy.

I know the grace that surrounds me, the friends who love me, friends I could not do without. So I sit and I listen, watch summer run its course, feel it lean in and whisper. And everywhere buttercups offer themselves up to us, as they tear across Sussex meadows.

And I remember, how two years ago, I stood on the bank of a Hawarden stream, gathering posies under the hazy blue sky. I made buttercups into a shiny yellow fist, took them to the hospital. Behind white curtains, under the rhythmic pulse of the ventilator tube, I placed them in a vase for my mother. They were the yellowest things I had ever seen.

My sisters and I gathered around, clucking and fussing. And if she ever opened her eyes and looked our way, we smiled. I might have shown the buttercups to her, placed them under her chin till they glowed. But she was a closed, quiet flower, petals sleeping - a perfect stalk, returning underground.

Sunday Best

Well, the afternoon Tea Party went down a storm on Sunday, with cakes, Assam and ginger cake galore. It was a magnificent afternoon, the weather holding out, and the sun daring to shine. We all wore our Sunday best and I even put on a bit of Edith Piaf and Django Reinhardt to add to the atmosphere. An eccentric affair, the kind that always bring the biggest smile to my lips. More afternoons should be spent like this - there is something poignantly beautiful about such a spread on the beach, with all your friends, watching as the sun sinks behind the horizon and Summer ebbs its way from the tides of the shore.

I finally have some more time off, so today I am working on a song at my keyboard. Oh, the joy of solitude.

The Leaves Are Starting To Fall..

Autumn is coming. Walking up Ditching Road this morning, I felt it in the breeze, saw it in the cracked orange leaves that circled round my knees and bag.

This morning I am a girl of the sea. Sweet and strong with a head full of wonder, an eye for light: I sparkle on water. Tomorrow I may be Andalucia, with a body of blood like aged red wine from the cellar, a heart of ardent rapture, sitting by a ring of sand, watching the bull toss his head with bleeding pride.

Yesterday was a bad day. Today, so far, my heart is alive and breathing once again, remembering it can take care of itself, and that, in the midst of pain, there is still love, if you can persist to find it. This can take some looking.

But as there is a season about to end, there is another beginning. I will make it a new beginning. And to mark it, this Sunday I hold A Tea Party on the beach, with fancy frocks and friends to say goodbye to what has, in many ways, been a memorable and beautiful season.

And I am not quite ready for snow, but the thought of chocolate coloured days and walks by the green cooling river fill me with a new joys. Trips to London to see the new Rodin collection, Tate Modern, my sister and the Thames. Kittywakes calling from Seaford cliffs, quiet afternoons writing, berries and hot tea late at night.

And the beach will change its flavour, but will still be there, chugging and churning, my solace in this greedy busy town, peace in the burning car headlights.

Who knows what will actually become of this Autumn, but perhaps I don't have to opt for complete hibernation just yet, or can do so in another way. I think they call it Recuperation. I call on all my animals of the forest, of the ice, of the road. Let them take care of this little soul when it grows littler, when the rocks start falling and I need a place to hide, some fur and strong paws to bury my face in.

And all being well, it won't break my heart to see Mum in the new nursing home where she'll soon be residing, with her child-like vision, the flower pots on the patio. I am so glad there will be flowers for her there. And though it feels a devastation to think we all might be in for another long haul, because we know she will not get better, but could stay in some twilight world for years to come, I am glad she will be settled somewhere where there are no nurses, too busy to give my mother a second glance, to really look after her, where I can leave behind wards, the clinical smell, the dreadful taste of death and withering in my mouth. At least there are hills there.

And I have joined a Writing Circle. And I soon begin a little writing course. And life moves onward. I never stay the same. And even in one day, who I am shifts and changes. I am Clare, and I am reborn with every tear, every pain.