Summer these days exists in memory only, like it is a facet of childhood which can never be reached again. It exists in the clean, bleached smell of a Portuguese villa, hot with the flesh of a supermarket peach and tingling with salt and lemon juice in iced water. It smells of sun cream; luscious and lascivious and thick cream; the kind of cream that makes you wish you were the type of family who used spray instead; the kind of cream that stains shorts, and shirts, and armpits with an unknown smear of pale almond yellow.
My rape alarm explodes in M&S. I am buying a Colin the Caterpillar cake for £9 (£9!) for our Headmaster’s birthday, and my rape alarm explodes so loudly, so irretrievably, that I feel I an under attack and enter into the kind of hypnotic state where nothing at all feels real. It is too loud. The trenches must have been quieter. I cannot breathe, think, move, the bloody thing is broken and I am being asked to leave and I am still waving my Colin the Caterpillar (£9!) around like a weapon against decibels, a defence against the fearful tinnitus of my vicinity. If people are watching I cannot see them. I am the centre of a universe that churns like Alice falling through the Looking Glass; I throw cash at the store manager, grip Colin for the sake of my (£10 - £10! All because I couldn’t’t wait for change) and run out of the shop, ringing, ringing, alarming, alarming everyone and myself and the police and the angels in heaven for all I know, and I lob the thing into a bin along the King’s Road, fleeing the scene with nothing but a Colin the Caterpillar to show for my crimes. I do not enter M&S again for two weeks exactly; nor do I eat any Colin.
I ride the top of the bus to Fulham Broadway, and take the front seat all to myself. Dominating. I hear Artichoke Street for Old Church Street and the little boy doesn’t want to go to school. Mummy I need the toilet. I fill out the survey on the train and pretend I wasn’t late. I look nonchalantly out of the window and pretend my ticket isn’t valid for another train, somewhere at another station, half an hour earlier than my current GWR service to: Newbury. I look at sheep and horses, and see a castle’s elf like ears through the trees. I feel English, in an orange dress a which looks embarrassing when running through Paddington, tripping up, lopsided from a weighted bag and obviously, obviously, going to miss the train. (It is not even there when I arrive, panting slightly, on Platform 9. Already gone, left without me. No orange dress; too late). I see elderberries outside the marquee, like blown-glass bubbles in the wind beneath the flaps of pale pastel bunting. Mirano in middle-England feels quaint.
There is a gulf of understanding between these women and me. I swallow it; the way it rises like bulging bubbles up a test tube in a biology lab, drenched in purple dye to make it visible. I feel thwarted in my earliest attempt at adulthood. I wipe on brown mascara, and smudge it carefully with the top of my smallest fingernail beneath each eye. My sister opens the door. She looks me in the eye, and speaks with some urgency: You can’t live like that. I can live exactly how I want to live: I choose to live this way. I catch myself thinking about this at 9 o’clock on a Saturday when I pull up the sheet covers in bed. A week earlier, when I sit down on the bus at 19:48 and sweep up my orange silk skirt, I know it is what I ought to be doing with my Saturday night, but it is exactly what I don’t want to be doing. I am dressed as a sweet potato in a jacket, and the Muslim woman next to me says “That a nice dress — I like” which makes me smile and reach for my phone to start writing. (She is watching cooking videos on Facebook, and swipes incessantly. She is around 60 years old. She comments on every post, leaving behind her an unlikely string of breadcrumbs leading like a witch’s trail her random route through the woods). I can see myself on the bus security camera, beamed to a TV screen which faces the passengers as though publicised for our entertainment. I suppose I find it entertaining. I look tiny, enshrouded in orange like a plump apricot.
He lights up in a doorway and crouches like a kitten in the dark.
There is a little old lady sitting hunched on a bench, red parka rain coat, black transparent tights. She dabs at her nose with a soggy white tissue. She looks like a nun, out of place. I peer at what she is reading as I walk past. The Economist: Anatomy of a Sex Toy (illustrated). The page is full of pink dildos. My eyes swell, widening in surprise like a spinning cartoon’s, then dart back to the path in front of me in a spike of fear that she may look up and catch my surprise. I wonder whether she would have been mortified. She is the National Trust meeting OnlyFans in a Chelsea park on Tuesday lunchtime.
You really never can tell.
I see the beggar who sits with his 3litre bottle of cider emerge from the Daylesford loos.
He drinks Kefir and smokes weed in one breath, Donner kebabs wrapped in pink general waste dustbin bags rotating slowly on a spit behind him.
I take a lime bike for the first time and wobble precariously in the direction of church. A Sunday morning seems the correct time for such a journey. Vicars on Lime biked make me smile. Is God protecting his head or should he be wearing a helmet? I take Lime Biking seriously, like an academic subject in which I am consistently scoring an A*. The difference between A* and dead is a person’s ankle, a pothole, a wing mirror or a blind van driver, but so far I am breezing through my twice-daily tests with all the ease of a carefree teenager, or a Head pupil (a School Councillor, perhaps; overachievers). I wear a pink helmet, with 60s flower power patterns swirling on its mettle. I am curious - maybe a nerd. I express myself in weird ways. I sing to the bike - scooters to the left of em, skateboards to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
An African man tells me he likes the colour of my hair as I walk down North End Road with my headphones in. I ignore him, look back, and smile. Thank you. He might have just made my day. It is Friday late afternoon, cusping on the earliest of evenings. The sky has turned darker, though the air is warm and saturated like air in the tube. I click Pay Now at the bottom of the Skyscanner website and feel a plane take off in a flurry of butterflies in the pit of my stomach. The destination reads LAX in a glaring, fine line tattoo.
I wrap my scarf around my neck on one loop tighter, and do up my second coat button. London hits October the way hot water hits frosted glass. My friends buy me sourdough and butter and leave by 9.15pm. The salt is grained and thick, like wood chips in sand. A drunk man tells me I’m beautiful and a girl in faux fur with a nose piercing tells me she loves my coat. I am wearing cowboy boots and yoga pants and carry a sourdough to give my friend for her birthday. I am waiting outside Bluebird on the King’s Road living a life I thought I wished I wanted. I do not know if I am happy doing it. I feel external to myself, involved in other people’s lives — point the man to a cash point (he mistakes me for a local), smile at the smart lady with a silk headscarf and the teddy bear dog attached to a fraying rope lead — and quite distant from my own. I am a pauper and a leper and a model and a scientist. I look at the world from above, behind a take away red cup filled with too milky coffee. I squint at him in the sun; Saturday morning, red wine fog, skirt and trousers and fawn shades in October with elbow length gloves tucked under my jumper. She wears baggy capris and has black bat wing bangs framing her eyelids. I want to be her. It feels urgent, necessary. It passes. I discuss his love life, the way he chooses girls, putting them on like pulling shirts off of coat hangers where they rotate in his walk-in wardrobe. Riddled with Catholic guilt, he begs at the altar where his Christ is invisible and his demons are all men.
I dream about minature hippos in paddling pools and laugh so hard my throat begins to restrict, growing coarse like sandpaper as I draw snuffling air into my rusting windpipe. The hippos are fat little cherubs, toddlers, naked babies with pale skin sitting on picnic mats in the sun of the walled garden of a yellow brick terraced house in the middle of an English city.
I feel I have been through the trenches. My whole body and soul would be blue and black, black and blue since I saw her last, a stretch of beaten flesh in foetal position, curled on the pavement floor. I dream of miniature hippos, for God’s sake, and wonder how we learn to hold our tongues in our mouths? I move mine: it feels sluggish. I taste it, which hurts. The turd twitches between my lips, but twitching is too quick. Rolls, heaves, great waves of motion or the sighing breaths of a dying dog on the vet’s table. I fall asleep.
I watch her as she reads, and choose to smell like a Burberry goddess, Amber vanilla and dark leather on the plane. The pilot makes an announcement: We typically have 250 to 300 roller boards on this service. If you see a roller board taking up space in the overhead cabinets, please tip it onto its side. Thank you.
Writing comes back to me like a kick. It kicks me with a poison-toed brogue in the base of my stomach: I am the man outside the pub kicked literally to the curb; I am the farrier feeling the weight of the horse’s hoof, the womb lining feeling the boom-boom curved heel of the baby’s foot lashing out at the world before its eyes have even opened upon it. I wiggle my toes, and feel the blood trickle cautiously through every limb. My face is pressed against the pavement, a swelling of cool against my pulsing cheek, through the thick redness of tissue, the blotch gravel pushing purple through the skin like mottled chestnuts. I flicker open my eyes: once, twice. Close. Open. Lick the inside of my cheek, feel the numbness. The pain is a cocktail of oblivion, somewhere in my head is ringing an angelus. Los. The tempo increases, urgent and insistent as a toddler who needs the loo. I raise my cheek, hover. A sideways Pilates move, strengthening neck mobility. My muscles flex against my wishes and I sink back to the pavement like it will hold me against clover. The acorn’s nest. The gravel in my cheek is cold, like bolts in Frankenstein’s monster’s neck. Something makes me sneeze, forcing air out of my beached body in an urgent, unstoppable exit. I am a rubbish cute in a New York high rise, straight to the dump. It is smell that caused this hot and tingling, smell returns with all the aromatics of a late night Chinese takeaway mingled with vinegar and the sourness of next day champagne. I sneeze again, expelling the scent like unwanted discharge, or rind from a cheese.
This is the return of writing to my body. My soul, it never left. My soul lies hidden, shuddering. She is risen from her quiet grave, her shadow. She splits: one stands, shaking off dust and remains and bodily fluid and disgust. Steps forward — lands.
I feel more real in the sky than I did on Earth. Everything coming out around me is blurred and I exist in .5 focus, the entire centre of a camera lens, or a universe. It is raining when I leave London. Palm trees do better in the sunshine.