Oh the boy's a slag...

... the best you ever had, the best you ever had is just a memory. And those dreams - not as daft as they seem, not as daft as they seem, my love, when you dream them up...

I did my life back to front. I’m convinced of this. If my theory is right, then I am steadily regressing towards old age. By the time I’m eighty, I shall be happily hot-wiring disability carts and mixing crystal meth in with my Birds’ Instant Trifle.

     
Luckily for me I live in a city where such a regression goes by unnoticed. I’m camouflaged in the place that defines itself by its bohemian and hedonistic status. I can stay as young as I like, for as long as I like. I can work in my unstable, irregular job, have my increasingly peculiar writing habits, inhabit my strange social life and incestuous relationships and no one bats an eyelid.

     
Brighton is the Dorian Gray of the South-East. And I might think that because I now live in Hove, sandwiched between The Willows nursing home and Otello's, the organic free-range, local shop where they charge four pounds for a tin of Polish soup made from lard, that this might alter things. But it doesn’t. My anonymity here makes it even easier to disappear into my life, into my small attic flat where I can hear the waves at night if I concentrate really hard and no permanent lover enters.

     
Which is of course what I’m really getting to here. Stable relationships. Don’t you just love ‘em? Cosying-up of a Friday night with your fifth DVD from LoveFilm because, in a fit of Let’s watch all of Herzog’s masterpieces, even though we turned them all off half-way last time, you ticked the box “Unlimited’. And now you’re sitting there, wishing you’d gone for 40-Year-Old-Virgin instead of watching Klaus Kinski lose his mind on a festering boat with some monkeys.

     
I digress. So you’re sat on the couch, with your 2-for-1 pizza and your Ben & Jerry's, unable to move because of the twelve thousand calories in your stomach. And then, out of the blue, there’s one those inexplicable moments of deep affection. Perhaps one of you casually brushes the other’s ear with your mouth as you whisper into it, or one of you flashes a smile that says you doesn’t really care about Klaus, or the monkeys, or even that great story about Herzog getting shot during a live interview. No. You both know it. Because for tonight, and for the foreseeable future, you are each other’s and will be sleeping in each other’s arms (or at least within shoving distance) until dawn breaks.

     
Awww. I remember that. The days of long-term relationships. Now I know at least one person who might read this and proclaim “But you had a bloody relationship of two years up until just over a year ago!” I agree, and maybe I shouldn’t be talking as though I’ve not known that kind of intimacy for a decade. It’s kind of insulting to those who haven’t. And a lot of long-term relationships are far from happy. But it’s more that I’m interested in how, aged fifteen, I embarked upon a relationship that was to last nine years and then followed it up with one that went on for five years. And how, after they finished, aged thirty, my ability to sustain a relationship has been patchy at best. At the age when everyone else is either getting married, popping out babies or, in the least, mooning over them in Costa, I’ve been having ‘scenes’, ‘flings’, ‘things’, ‘goings-on’, ‘special friendships’ and the worst, ‘connections’. This is the kind of thing that should have disappeared in my mid-twenties along with living in communities, sharing boyfriends and thinking I could get Enlightened by having a nervous breakdown in India.

     
But I'm looking on the bright side. In fact I'm reclaiming my ever-increasing inability to move towards any kind of romantic stability, (as well as dignified job status, secure financial standing etc). After all, as numerous people have said to me recently, a slight twang of pity in their voices “Hey, it’s all good writing material!” Oh indeed it is. And not only that, I’m realising what my greatest fear in life is (apart from obvious things like tidal waves, climate change, choking to death on cupcakes, and all those other things I don’t want to tempt fate with by mentioning). It’s ending up stuck. Bored. Trapped. Claustrophobic. No way out, even if you know where the exit is. Like in Batman, when he's locked in a room and the baddie presses a button and the ceiling starts slowly coming down. I've been there and I don't want to end up like that again. Like the subject of this Arctic Monkeys song I quoted at the start of this post.

     
We all walk a wobbly line between sharing and loneliness, and we walk it whether we're in a relationship or not. And when does closeness turn to settling down turn to dependence turn to choking with indifference on your pork chop every Sunday? And at what point do we solitary commitment-phobes stop running?

You used to get it in your fishnets/Now you only get it in your night dress/Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness/Landed in a very common crisis/Everything's in order in a black hole/Nothing seems as pretty as the past though/That Bloody Mary's lacking a Tabasco/Remember when you used to be a rascal? …

Fluorescent Adolescent

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Woodvale Cemetery

There are still some secrets about Brighton I'm only just being let into. After ten years since my arrival into this strange and eccentric city by the sea, this greatly excites me.

     
Today, I learned about Count Eric Von Stenbock, "Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men," as WB Yeats called him. He was also remembered with affection by Aubrey Beardsley, Symons and Lionel Johnson (although they thought his poetry was drivel). Many of his verses concerned his doomed love for a Berkshire youth, Charles Bertram Fowler, who died of consumption at the age of 16.

     
He was alcoholic, Catholic, Buddhist, homosexual and overall degenerate, and most interestingly of all, he lived in Withdean. Mental illness dogged him throughout his Thirties, but, since he was a Count, when escorted (as he was at all times) by a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll, everybody had to greet them with according courtesy.

In Eric's mind, the doll was his son, and he referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it was brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health.

On April 26th 1895, on the same day that Oscar Wilde faced the first day of his trial, Eric died. Drunk and furious, he'd tried to strike someone with a poker and toppled into the grate. He was buried in Woodvale Cemetery in Brighton on May 1st (the day Wilde's jury disagreed and was discharged), his heart removed and sent to Estonia, where it resides in a church at Kusal.

     
At the time of his death, his uncle and heir, far away in Esbia, saw an apparition of his tear-stained face at his study window.

     
Oh Eric, I applaud you. There's nothing quite like being a rotten poet with a taste for life-size dolls and the Divine.

     
I love Brighton cemetery. It's been far too long since I was last amongst the tangled ivy, my trainers squishing in the mud. Angels rear up at every turn, the lettering on headstones turning to rust in the dew.

Today, I peered into the small, simple plot where the Sisters of Mercy (nuns, not goth band) lay crammed in, heads to tiny feet. I also saw (thanks again to my knowledgeable friend) the resting place of the first man ever to spot Antarctica.

      
Tonight, I am very happy in my polka dot dressing gown and leopard skin slippers, listening to Debussy and generally avoiding starting my new story about a man who is perpetually late for everything. Mmm.

     
There's nothing like the dead to raise the spirits!

Monday: train to Brighton

I'm on the train, having just left Birmingham Moor Street, heading for London Marlebone. After several days of balmy Indian summer, I pass through a rain soaked Birmingham, drizzle sketching out its streets, a familiar greyness suspended in the ether.

I can feel my mood shifting as I edge nearer to Brighton; a heavy feeling in my arms and legs, a sinking inside my stomach. I look in my rucksack for the armour I need to face my life back home. I find hoodies and a hard-backed book about a complicated love affair.

I left my sisters on the tiny village platform, and watched them shrinking as the train drew away, their plump arms raised, faces smiling and sad. My lungs surged with feeling as I sped past houses, yellow coloured fields, more houses. This is territory I have known so well. I have chartered this journey for the last twenty years.

I'm uneasy. As I made the journey back home to Wales last week, my speech was still blurry, my experience filtered through a tin can. The preceding weeks had taken their toll. But having seen Mum for myself, stable and much as she was before this latest emergency stay in hospital, and having been home with my family, a little bit of myself has returned. There is a little bit of Clare back in place.

Uneasiness lurches up through my throat, determined as I am to not go back to where I was when I left Brighton last week - sucked in, spat out.

So I sip my tea, plan my strategies; write here. I even have biscuits in my bag. Life isn't so bad. Mum is still alive, I have sisters who are loving and brave, who fight their demons and cut my hair, make me cheese sandwiches. Who always tell me the truth about myself.

They sit chatting in the fading evening light out on our back yard, staring at the apple tree and the flowerbeds, flicking ash from their cigarettes into the cooling autumn breeze. They never sit for very long. In a flash, one of them will be up, dragging something around the garden, pulling out a hose, raising some clippers, re-arranging the shed. They like to keep busy.
It’s then that I feel most like the baby of the family that I am, with my writing, my hula hoop, my desperate need for a new haircut. Watching and feeling and thinking and turning it over, all of it, again and again.

I got my haircut. I watched the dark pieces fall to the ground and with every snip felt a little bit of myself coming back to life. I am still arriving, in whatever this new place is. I watch dead wood fall, hear the doors closing.

So I want to get my head down, start my course, let those who really care, come to me, and the rest, I'll watch them take off like birds into a cloudy sunset. Throw a stick and see what comes back to me.
Despite the Twinings label, the tea is disgusting. No amount of sugar can mask it. Drizzle hits the windowpane and I'm returning to Brighton stronger, but more wary than ever, to a town cursed by too much sunlight, by too many options.

I might feel alone, but I'm not alone; I feel scared, but I'm not weak. I have lost, but then... life culls what it needs to; it does some of our dirty work for us.

I watch crows taking off over cow fields, and feel the love of my family, the ones still there. I feel the greenness of the passing fields, my hair against my neck, a brightness still behind my eyes, and for now, that's more than enough.

Friday morning: back home

I sit up in bed on a cold autumn morning, and I can see that the sun is shining, the clouds are moving. This is the first morning in a couple of weeks that I've woken up feeling even vaguely like a human being, with a still beating heart, and perhaps even a future and a purpose. It's a feeble flicker of it, but it's there.

Mum has stabilised, at least for now. The doctors still aren't sure that it was definitely another stroke or whether it was a fit that made her lose consciousness like that and her breathing so laboured. As usual, it's a deathly mystery. And I guess that means, after preparing for the end, once again, after going through all that trauma, we're back to where we've been for the last two years. Waiting.

So when next week comes, I'll be winging my way back to Brighton. Sunny, happy Brighton. Home of the creative and free-spirited. It sticks in my throat like too-sweet candy.

I'd like to run away from Brighton, up sticks and sod off to London, where my course begins next week. But I know that won't happen, and that instead, it's the swallowing of reality of life in Brighton for now, of waiting for things to change.

I stare into my crystal ball and don't like what stares back. I remember the forces around me that are good, the ones who care. I see the tree outside my window is still standing, waving its branches at me. It is solid and still growing.

Friday

I went up to London last weekend. The trip left me simultaneously drained and exhilerated at the same time, as it usually does. There's something inherently exhausting about London; even whilst I am still on the train I can feel a certain kind of tiredness descend as soon as I see the rooftops peeping back at me, the Thames blinking into view.

I feel a wonderful adrenalin comedown just at the thought of all those bodies rushing about in their own personal bubbles, trying so hard not to knock against each other in case they might pop. This small act of vulnerability, this knee-jerk response to the giant mass of human life thudding in all directions, a million beings swarming in their own dreams and poverty, riches and frustrations, I find myself falling inline with almost as soon as I've stepped out of the station.

A slippery ambition coats London streets, and Brighton can feel like a lurching lost soul in comparison, steeped in an opium haze, watching the sea roll in, roll out, roll by. It holds a drink to its lips, lazy ardor running through its veins. Brighton sleeps for days.

On the other hand, London has speed and cocaine running like shuttles through it's blood, and it never sleeps. It naps between the noisy car horns and the fumes, the terrorist threats and the boats going up and down the river taking Japanese tourists to Greenwich. Between the housing estates and the delis with their £4 loaves of bread, indifferent shop assistants with concrete faces and eyes like treacle, Tower Bridge sits, luminous and ever watchful over the skyline.

In fact, I did very little whilst I was there, my reason for going, as usual, to see the people I most love, and to remember who I am again, remember the parts of me that come alive when I am with them on some busy dirty London street. A slightly different Clare. And I never leave without some pang of longing for the busy streets and the caffeinated conversations, the deep bonds with people, and the buildings that rear up, jagged, around the Thames, like a shock, like a broken jigsaw, pieces oddly fitting together, but somehow forming perfect symmetry. London is so beautiful I could weep. And it's a beauty that can't be owned. It is its own mistress; rude, loud, manipulative and slutty, but utterly honest in it's unquenchable, ravaged thirst.

If Brighton didn't have the seafront, I'm not sure I'd still be here. Maybe that's a hasty thing to say, but really, without wanting to sound arty and pretentious, (and no doubt sounding so anyway), of all Brighton & Hove's creative life, the seafront is my real Muse. Whereas London surrounds you like a loud, heaving crowd, this part of Brighton stretches out flat like elastic. It feels like it will go on forever, and you can fade into the blues and greys of the horizon, be swallowed up behind the piers and cast into a cloud of black wings, as the starlings swirl like a lava lamp, taking you with them up into the marbled sky above. It is whirling life, breathless poetry speaking in tongues, it is a windy squawking silence that makes me sigh over and over again until my lungs are entirely emptied.

I wonder where my place is. I think about Syliva Plath, buried up North in Heptonstall. I think about the Moors that surround Yorkshire and Lancashire, and allow myself to be swept up in Emily Bronte and the harsh murderous truths that shout across Saddleworth Moor. I think about Manchester (oh yes, still so much to answer for) and North Wales, my home, that took so much to get away from, that has such a pull, like a magnet that both draws and repels.

How long I'll be in Brighton I don't know, if I will stay South of the border or if I'll return to the place of roots and shadows, love and that pain of growing up somewhere I longed to escape from. The truth is, wherever we are, we always want, at some point, to escape the very things that drew us there in the first place. Like a long-term lover who shows you, because they know you so well, too much of who you are underneath the facade, and so you long to be someone else again, reinvent who you are and what you might become. To cast off the cloaks of habit, come hurtling through the tunnel into a new world, a new self, a baby in a fresh universe full of possibility.

I know enough now to know that whatever you run away from, comes back to you at some point, that we take all our selves with us, wherever we go. But change must happen if we are to be still alive, for the blood to not coagulate in our veins until we become stiff and unyielding, rigor mortis in our brains, hearts like vapour, ever drifting off over tree-tops to somewhere where the grass is greener, then returning with a bump of resentment when we find ourselves still here, in our stilted, safe reality. So I'm thinking of moving; whether or not that involves me packing a suitcase, I still can't say.

It certainly wasn't the road signs or the thought of love or money littering the streets or what the paper said.

Only the half caught things that make my day. Like the end of a T.V. show. Like reflections in car windows. I don't understand why I was meant for a treacherous life. Never known any different. The clouds speed at two o' clock along with the rain and my head falls forward on your chest. Your room is white as air, Death Cab For Cutie on the stereo. I feel your tears rolling into my hair as mine spread down my chin. I say "I'm tired, I'm tired". And the way you looked at me then, well, it made my day.

And I am out into the wet again, boots soaked through to skin, waves up high against the balustrade. Paper blowing to the West, a magic lantern swings on the peeling wooden railing. I am no ornate fixture, despite the tunes trickling through my head. I am blown to pieces. But how he took my hand, he didn't have to. Led me up the wobbling road. He bought me yellow roses and carnations just to cheer me up. And a washing up bowl, one without a hole in.

I had an orgasm tonight. When I came it was no man, no woman, no fumbling graphic scene, it was only the kindness in a stranger's eyes which made the world explode. Kindness, almost blue in colour. I remember then the page after page I read yesterday from a guy in Pennsylvania writing about his girlfriend, a local stripper, who danced for him the first time as she danced for all the others and how he fell for her and how she had left him, and I cry too.

In a small room, a woman whose hair is long, the rest I don't remember, brusquely gets up from her chair, rustles through folders, tells me as I'm leaving "I can help you, do not worry". Then I am on the bus home, front seat, rain all over the windscreen, smudging the outside world into blurry charcoal. I sense the lazy orange lights of the Palace Pier, seeping through wet and black. I see beauty in oblivion.

I'm flailing like a good one. A nine to five seems like bliss right now. A strip lit room with pens, wrinkled shirts and routines, a pay packet on a Friday. That would keep me warm. All this writing reduced to zero. What does it count for? All that I love most is like the fucking wind. Can never get my hands on it. Get into media. Get onto the Ladders of the World and Climb. I never bothered much with what I'm meant to, it never aroused a thing in me. But I pretend. I don't let on that I know you, every last one of you, and every piece. It gets me out of tight spots to be this way. Like having a pretty face. It can pacify bus drivers when you've forgotten your change.

Stagger into the Light

I am so fed up at the moment. As my Mum would say, fed up "to the back teeth". I feel at the moment like my life is being lived on a high wire, and I am some untrained circus performer who was just minding her own business taking money for the show before being dragged up there by a couple of brutish clowns without a safety net. This isn't what I signed up for. Though one gets to experience a certain existential wisdom and inner knowledge at such times as these, I have to say, as a compensation for how bollocks everything can feel, that is not the greatest source of comfort to me.

And yet, it has its moments. After working out my finances and discovering that I have a total of 27p to live off for the whole month of February, hearing that my Mum's health had taken another turn for the worse and realising that I do not know what the fuck I am doing with my life at the moment, on any single level, today I prised myself out of my hidey hole and took to the sea-front in what felt like my very last attempt at bothering with life and its doings at all.

And I was startled by beauty. All along the prom, out far from the shore, in each direction, East and West, from Shoreham harbour up past Palmeira Square, Sussex Heights to the Palace Pier and beyond, the afternoon light fell like strands of golden hair over the coastline, over and around the enormous mass of human beings enjoying the first clear blue sky day in Brighton for weeks. The tall cream buildings lining the road past Hove Lawns stood quietly luminous and everything I saw was softening in the glow of the afternoon. I tilted my head back and felt the skin on my face lit up by the gleam of the sky.

It is a wonder to walk the prom on a day like today. To witness life, to smell the sunlight, to feel the blueness of the air all around. It all becomes part of one single movement - the puppy in a green coat chasing its tail, the flat bodies of surfers, faces pressed to their boards, bodies black and shiny, waiting for a wave to break. The bare curved torso of a teenage boy as he skateboards down the pavement disappearing into a crowd of parents and prams, women selling trilby hats, a man selling hippy clothes, and thirty something media professionals recovering from the night before. The white lips of the waves coming in, the dark of the West Pier, the pinks, yellows and blues of the beach huts, the arc of a seagull wing, the smell of chips from the sea front cafe, the glittering row of hotels shrinking into the distance.

I pass huge dogs, tiny dogs, silly dogs, magnificent dogs, swimming dogs, sniffing dogs, dogs whose eyes look like they hold the key to every soul within them and I want to take every single one home with me. I decide: I will open a dog sanctuary, no, I will live in the country with twenty working dogs for company, no, I will ask one of the owners politely if it is hard work looking after their dog, and then gently offer to take it of their hands as an act of compassion.

I wasn't expecting this. I wasn't expecting to be lifted, or to feel joy for no other reason at all than being here, now, in this perfect sunlit scene. On the way home I took the last money from my purse and detoured up to Tesco's, threw caution to the wind and bought a chocolate cake, from their 'finest' range. I took my £1.65's worth of joy home with me, made a cup of tea, and ate a slice in silence. It has been many weeks since I have enjoyed the glory of a piece of chocolate cake, and it tasted good. Sitting in the fading sun of my front room, it tasted perfect.

Next to the Angel Peace Statue at the point where Brighton turns into Hove, there was a huge crane towering over the seafront, looming tall next to Embassy Court. I wondered what it was for, with a metal grill box hanging from it, and I could just about make out the outline of two men. Suddenly a figure of a man jumped from the box and was dangling before my eyes attached by a white rope around his ankle.

I stood and watched as he was lowered back down and another man took his place in the metal grill box, and was lifted back high in the air.

Today the sea front is so alive with such sights, I feel almost airborne. Huge swathes of starlings line every inch of the West Pier, and seagulls float above me, immobile in the wind. Black silhouettes of men in wetsuits bob up and down in the waves around the West Pier, and occasionally, one struggles to his feet on a board momentarily before being swept under the foam and waves once again. In the distance, seven kites curve in the air, dragging more men and perhaps women above and across the surface of the choppy sea.

Even the clouds seem buoyant and adrift, turned orange by the fading sunlight, which casts a sheen over the sea like copper, which mixes with the turquoise of the five o clock sky and makes the rain on the pavement shine.

It feels good to take steps in such a swirl of brightness, like a lifting bird who does not mind if her feathers are ruffled or if it looks like there might be a storm over Shoreham harbour tonight.

Light, light, light. I pass the lawns I have passed so many times, the toes of my shoes turning darker with the wet from underfoot. I have a wind in my soul, clearing through cobwebs and the blackest dust, loosening the stiffened grey cogs of my machinery so that I can move again. I am surfing this moment, my hair, aflap with gulls and a single aeroplane trail. Air is billowing my dress and senses, the wind is sailing me home.

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.