This week is a between-essays week. Here are two short fiction sketches, written in 2007 and 2015, and two recent photographs from near my home and from a very nourishing week in Suffolk. Greetings from sunset hour in York, where I am away working on the last edits for my next book. Back with a longer piece and ‘this week’s good thing’, next week. Go well, all, into the season’s change.
While she is driving she imagines him sleeping
Today, she tries to imagine what his face looks like while deeply asleep, but this is not easy as she does not yet know his face quite well enough to configure it completely from memory. She has most of the materials gathered. She has seen him at the edge of sleep but it is not the same. She has also seen him beginning to dissolve into sleep but he was still aware of the world, of her, at that point.
She wonders how she will feel when she does finally see him fully asleep, deciding that she does not think she will feel lonely, or if she does, then only briefly. She remembers that she can easily join him there because she herself has a very good relationship with sleep. They are old friends, comfortable in each other's company. They have been backpacking and hiking together all over the world, shared bare rooms in cockroach-infested east London squats as well as the grimiest only-just-post-Soviet Polish winter floors and they still happily bed down together each night. They have occasional blazing rows and do not touch all night, sleep sometimes retiring to another room completely but never for more than a few nights. She is always forgiven and he is generous, (after all, he visits child molester and saint without distinction). Sometimes she snuggles into him a little too deeply but he doesn't mind, he has seen it all before.
She knows, however, that the man she is imagining sleeping does not always sleep well. As she speeds by the old road that leads to the stone circle she wonders if he could lean into sleep in the way she leans into the corner. She hopes there is a way of approaching sleep loose-limbed and with abandon, the way she feels as she opens the throttle on her motorbike, because sometimes this is how it is for her late at night. Occasionally she can sense sleep coming and she slows down, just to see how long she can take to get there, noticing every nuance of the road, watching the landscape morph and change. At other times she accelerates into it, and drives hard into the wall of annihilation, relishing the sudden crash.
Then, realising she now has at least a fairly clear picture of him sleeping in her mind's eye and knowing that she will see him asleep very soon, she looks up from the road momentarily and sees the moon rise over The Mither Tap1, through the birches.
They came with gifts, like grebes
Him - palming a silver crescent, one of three identical pendants he’d bought from a jeweller, (one for her, one for his sister, one for his mum). She was clasping a small, mostly silver, penknife, one of a kind, handmade by a smith in Scotland, snug in the birchbark case she’d made for it from the offcuts of the basket she’d just finished. She knew right then he’d never cut a thing with it, that its fluid sharpness would not see use, that it would disappear down the sofa back in his studio, to be found by a nephew one day ten years hence. And when they would fish it out stickleback-like and ask whose it was he’d say some guest must have dropped it, and mean it. They ate their pies and drank their drinks and tried to look each other in the eye, eventually after two or three units of alcohol each it was possible. Everything was now possible: divulging a decade’s charming autofiction, sharing off-colour humour, the bafflement of their mutual attraction, sex.
She told herself there never was to be anything physical. She just wanted to spend time with someone who wanted to share space with her, hear what she had to say, then say, ‘That’s so interesting!’ The usual requirements of mid-life monogamy placed surprisingly on pause. She had brought appropriate substances and fine vodka. He’d brought two bottles of cava and a sketchbook. Dreadful weather accompanied them to the food store and they bought healthy snacks and breakfast food. Unable to shake off the sensible sides of themselves they were to be as well fed as they were well shod. Which was good because underneath it all she was giddy, fifteen again in a dingy bedsit with Kevin, wondering how long the fizzing feeling would last. An hour, a day? Until New Year?
What had she written on the website? ‘Wanted, someone well-hung and well-read’. That got a few rofls and laughing emojis. The unsolicited priapic pics stacking up in her inbox were punctuated nicely by his picture, a shot of antique oak bookcases, bursting with great titles, an occasional table in the foreground seemingly carelessly strewn with a glass of whisky, a leather belt, a battered copy of ‘Riddley Walker’ and a russet apple on top of an open sketchbook, showing a half-finished pen and ink sketch of the same apple.
So that was the spell.
It seems they did already sort-of know of each other, in the glancing way different art worlds intersect. They had form, so they could mutually dispense with the hiding of real names, being equally at risk and complicit. This suited them as their desire was to spill their stories to each other, to shudder through those months of inevitable coincidences and shocking parallels that every single pair of lovers thinks that no one else could possibly understand but which are, in fact, universal. ‘But you texted at exactly the time I woke from the dream of you!’ ‘No way!’ ‘But I met you in the glade of your paintings!’ ‘Ah, that’s our place my dear, my deer!’ There they could do all manner of things with each other before describing it in drawings and words in detail, long before they’d ever meet in person. They did all this to ward-off the meeting. They kept the streams of electrons as ambassadors, as referees. She wasn’t sure when the possibility of their meeting crystallised but she did remember the weight of the decision like a pebble on her tongue. Speaking truth at home became impossible, which was immediately noted, subliminally.
Into the decade-wide dry chasm that had been eroded in her heart, new rain fell. Delight swam in the fresh pools while conscience drowned in the rapids, a weak swimmer due to a lifetime’s lack of exercise. Meanwhile, patience and perspective left on extended leave.
Barely half of herself met how much of him that day?
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A high point of a beautiful hill, Bennachie, In Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where my Grandmother’s ashes are scattered.
Somehow you’ve managed to enter a place in me no one goes. I suppose unless accidentally as now. But the gate is closed and overgrown and hidden by my expected life. Somehow you found your way in and I’m glad.