Peacock butterfly

Trapped inside Gilbert White’s house, Selborne, Hampshire, February 2009.

Kerplunk! – [The scooterist]

Without having mentioned your list of household wants, Monsieur Drouet’s son, the scooterist, comes over with a table, a chair and a radio.  You don’t remember sending up a prayer for these items, so you make a note to get down on your mental knees later.  He also brings radishes from the family garden.  And lettuce, onions and parsley.  These are almost more pleasurably received than the unexpected loan of the radio.  You take the chance to ask him for a saucepan, and he invites you back to his home for an apéritif – it is a little after twelve.  In the simple dining room, the first room arrived at via the front door, Damian produces a bottle of Canadian whisky to which you give an assenting nod, and pours himself a Ricard.

He sits with one arm resting on the table tightly clutching his glass.  The whisky loosens the rudimentary French lodged precariously in your memory.  Between dark brown hair and moustache, he has a sharp pair of eyes as yet unglazed by too much of the liquid in front of him.  His head appears older than is suggested by the rather teenage clothes he wears about his slight but wiry frame.  He would drive a burgundy four-door Renault but, he confides, he lost his license for drink-driving; apparently he is still entitled to scooter about.  He has no fixed occupation, plays football for the team in the next village, used to compete at clay pigeon shooting, and dreams only of having his own sleepy village bar.  To this end he spends much of his time where you first found him, slowly knocking back the Ricard, occasionally serving behind the bar when either the woman with the cash-till eyes or her droopy-faced husband are out.  The couple are childless, and Damian is their spiritual, if not legal, heir.  Certainly his moustache is well on the way to looking like Droopy’s.  Madame Drouet, coming through from the kitchen, is unflustered by her son’s account of his essential inactivity.  You suspect his father is more than occasionally inflamed by it.  But despite his devilish name and idle hands, Damian is for some reason disposed to be friendly to you, and you are grateful.

Madame Drouet, built on as small a scale as her husband, is spry and playful, her joy inextinguishable.  You will never see her pensive, or too far from a smile, although sometimes she will appear tired.  So far, she is the only villager who speaks slowly for you.  How to explain to her, when she asks what you do at home, that you are a photographer, but you haven’t brought a camera with you.  So you tell her that you are on holiday from two jobs – photography and an office.  She asks you what then will you do with all your time, and you cannot say, because you don’t know yourself.

It was getting repetitive, taking shots of repetitively similar-looking quartets, quintets and sextets playing repetitively similar three and three-quarter minute pop songs based on the repetitive premise of repeated verse-chorus sequences with inevitable middle-eight guitar forays and slogan poetics.  With reasoning so slow-dawning that it could hardly be described as logical, you arrived at the idea of six months of photographic celibacy.  And when you ask yourself why others give up drink, or sex, or chocolate, or love, or writing, it’s no easier to put together a chain of thought that reaches back to first causes.  The simple answer is because you’ve had too much of all that you’d been pointing your camera at, and the shutter release no longer does for you what it used to.  But the simplest answer is no answer at all.

Ampersand

Barge House Street, London, SE1, 2005

Halladay’s Mortgage Lifter

West Dean, West Sussex, 2008.

Kerplunk! – [Monument]

You cycle down to the shop and spend a hundred francs on wine and food and water.  Your first bottle of red, a litre for eight francs, and a second more expensive treat, prompt a swift invite to the bar next door from the shop owner, cash tills ringing up in her eyes.  But you will spend tonight alone, not thinking that such enforced contemplation might unwittingly be setting the tenor of your stay.  Returning to the cottage, you move the cooker into the most habitable room, having swept and scrubbed the floor.  As you move from backpack to panniers to crates, a flavour of all the tents you ever slept in comes haunting.  You draw fresh air at the door and watch how the dying light of the day falls across this new scenery.  Avenues of trees frame the foreground and protect you from a view of too much sky that might become too harsh a reminder of the Suffolk landscape which was the background to your formative years.  – Bonne nuit m’sieu, Monsieur Drouet says, appearing out of nowhere to pass across property that was once his, and across the dusk, short as a stable lad, a pitchfork resting against his shoulder as you rest against the door jamb.

Taking refuge in the warmth of the sleeping bag, never before slept in, you cannot bear to listen to music; it would sing too much of home, of everything before four days ago.  Music will require the distracting warmth of daylight.  You make a list, though the pen feels anything but comfortable in your hand.  You need – you would like – a radio, else the hours of silence, or thoughts that you cannot silence, will surely drive you mad; a bowl for washing up and washing in; a mirror; a saucepan; a table and chair; envelopes and paper.  You were wise enough to pack a corkscrew.

What you really need, and sooner than you thought, is Louise.  Though you have left your cameras at home, you have brought some photos with you.  Three are of her.  Your favourite shows her standing by the Grand Union Canal, the shape of her face outlined by the light on the water, towards which she is leaning, wisps of hair in her eyes and a shout of laughter bursting from her mouth as a coot disappears beneath the surface, leaving its bum in the air.  Catching her unawares and natural was easy, because your camera was such an everyday and every moment object, like spectacles for the short-sighted, or jackets in winter and sunglasses in summer.  Like camcorders and nineties children.  Even when the surroundings were deliberate – here is the shot of her looking abstractedly into the distance from the top of the Monument – Louise retained a disregard for the viewfinder that helped keep her from weariness or irritation.  It was only when there was no lens to filter the tension that she shrank from view.

With only the wine for company, you can’t help but sing to yourself the songs you cannot listen to, until you lose heart and the feeble melodies dwindle against the imposing background of silence.  Fixed in time and space, movement seems a lifeline.  You don’t have to stay here.  You can move around.  It doesn’t have to be six months – you could honourably get away with five.  You concentrate on the visits you have promised yourself, to the sea and to the Seine, to the cities and the mountains.  You will not let yourself rot here, when escape is possible.

Mind you hold tight

Liphook, Hampshire, 2009.

Try your sea legs

Liphook, Hampshire, 2009.

Skeemin enchantress

Sunderland, 2004.

We found a plane together

From that day forwards the wild slim alien would not voluntarily talk about his origins, and became extremely discomfited if I tried to persuade him to do so.  I learned not to ask: ‘What are you thinking?’  To a troubled mind, there is no escape from such a question except through deceit, and I did not want the awareness of a lie infecting with its toxins the calmness of the atmosphere in which we once again began to co-exist.  It was as if, having reached a crisis point, and finding himself standing at the crossroads with full-blown insanity signposted in one direction and the chance of recovery in another, Bill had chosen to set himself against the uphill gradient of the latter; had chosen to contain what was wild and alien in him within the framework of my protection – and whatever protection his own damaged mind afforded.

I thought again about going to the police, before it became clear in those next few days that he was fighting hard to regain permanent control of his mind.  I couldn’t think how I might approach them without suspicions arising that I knew more about the person after whom I was enquiring than I was letting on.  I even went as far as looking up contact details for missing persons in Australia and New Zealand, but I could not bring myself to ring or email.  I did not want to lose him; and it was my considered opinion that he was already lost to anyone that loved him from before, because he remembered no-one.  No-one born on this planet, at least.

As yet unaware of the life growing within me – for it did not seem a lie not yet to tell him in his state that he was to be a father – we found a plane together, and lived happily upon it for those weeks before the baby showed.  The plane was a bed, in which we made love, with less abandon than before, but greater consideration, giving ourselves pleasure which had depth if not height; but the plane was also the land outside our door – the tortured circuitous paths which followed the ceaseless three-dimensional wriggles of the Cornish coast.  In the embracing arms of out-of-season coves that we had to ourselves, we would cool off from the up and down efforts of our rambles in sun-warmed rock pools or – once Bill had overcome his fear of returning to the element from which he had apparently emerged free of memory – the sea itself.

After swimming we would lie in the sun and dry off, listening to the waves rush or lap, slowly allowing ourselves to move towards a state in which, invisible from the coastal path above, we would lick the salt from each other.

Afterwards we would eat the fresh rolls and the fruit we had brought along, and drink sparkling water, warmed from the sun on the black bag in which we carried it.  Soon we would set off again, either for home or further along the path.  On one such an occasion, I determined to spoil our usual peaceable silence.

‘This can’t go on forever, you know.  I’ve got to get back to work.  So we can eat.  You know, that thing you like doing so much.  And you need to find something to do too.  To keep yourself busy while I’m busy.  I don’t care whether you earn any money or not but you need to start filling that mind of yours with the day-to-day so that at least for a time you can stop dwelling on whatever or whoever it was that you were in the past.’

He thought about that for a while, then said, ‘That’s the problem though – I don’t know what I’m good for.  Couldn’t I help you?’

‘We could try – but you’re a touch on the clumsy side and I have my doubts that those will ever be potter’s hands.’

‘Sandy might let me work at the bar.’

This was, at least from Bill’s perspective, rational; plausible even.  But I was reasonably sure that while Sandy might be happy to engage with Bill’s weirdness himself, he would be a shade less keen for his customers to encounter it.  Plus I didn’t want him that close to alcohol on a regular basis.

‘I think you’d probably drop too many glasses for Sandy’s liking.  But we could ask him,’ I added, seeing something like a flicker of disappointment register on what had become a habitually impassive face.

He thought some more, gazing out at the swell of the sea.

‘I want to hang-glide.’

This was dangerous territory.  Not because hang-gliding seemed to me an insanely risky pursuit, but because Bill was evidently searching for ways to bring himself closer to the winged alien he imagined he used to be.  I cursed myself for ever crediting his story once he had discovered lodged in the previously inaccessible vaults of his mind.  I cursed myself for wanting to believe, for letting myself be subsumed in the powerful romance of becoming one with an extraterrestrial.  I cursed myself for playing along with the notion that the stories he told about flying over Badezon must be true because the detail of his narrative was so exacting.  We had seen the hang-gliders one afternoon, rising from a headland on the westerlies, steering once airborne for the flat land set back from the beach.  I knew he had been struck by the sight at the time, asking me who they were and what they were doing, but he had not mentioned them again until now.

I laughed, nervously.  ‘I’m not sure you can make a living out of hang-gliding.’

‘You said that didn’t matter.’

‘It would cost a lot of money – for the equipment, for lessons.’

‘If I work for Sandy, I can pay for it.’

Having opened up the subject, I couldn’t think of a reasonable way of closing it down.  Once we reached the next cove, and the old fishing port that crowded its steep sides, I rang for a taxi home.  Bill sat in the back while I sat next to the driver in order to soak up the majority of the conversation.  His interactions were still unpredictable.  Soon I would have to step away, and let the wild slim alien explain himself to the people he met without a minder by his side.

Somewhere in England

Somewhere in England, 2009.

Touchdown

St. Ives, Cornwall, 2009.

Water and ground in their extremity

Sheep’s Head peninsula, Ireland, date unknown.

When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog,

And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.

- The peninsula by Seamus Heaney

No art inside

Venice, Italy, 2008.

Please, read this post

Southwark, London, SE1, 2004.

Thank you for reading this post.

Kerplunk! – [Room]

He has shown you what little there is to show and has left you, unfussily going about his business.  You face up to the room in which you have condemned yourself to spend six months.  The earlier presentiment returns, that you are jumping voluntarily into an abyss of space and time.  The newly locked-up prisoner, or the mutineer ordered to walk the plank, could feel no worse than you do now.  You open out the folds of a sun bed and sit on it as if it were a bench at a country bus stop where buses halt infrequently.  The latest in a long line of struggles to make a room familiar and friendly.  You have to think back to the first time for one as desolate as this.  Leaving home for a ground floor off Green Lanes, not far above the rumble of Piccadilly line trains every three minutes for four-fifths of the day.  Cream wallpaper discoloured by patches of brown fluid, a mixture of damp and paste.  An outside toilet, looked down upon by tower blocks, with a freakish cat painted on its wall.  Once you had been left alone, you cried for a long while before moving to unpack.  And ever since you have found it hard not to baptise a new room with tears.

Gradually your inward gaze turns out.  The room is the odd one out of the three, the thatch directly above it being intact.  It is empty but for a couple of old fruit crates stacked with kitchenware; plates, bowls and two sets of unused glasses.  You turn over each object, making it yours by mentally noting its possible use.  The floor is tiled in a pattern of beige and brown, veiled with the dust of seasons, and here and there a white mould, like flour.  Across the ceiling run beams of ginger-coloured wood, the spaces between insulated with white polystyrene.  There is a circular hole set in a rectangle of stone towards one edge of the ceiling, but no fireplace or hearth beneath it, only a thicker layer of dirt.  A bare bulb hangs in the centre of the room.  The walls are skirted with a couple of feet of stone, above which there are shreds of unmemorable wallpaper, torn away completely in places to reveal a sandy wall.  There are two windows, the larger giving out onto the garden grass and apple trees, and beyond the fence, more often than not patrolled by a German shepherd, an ordinary looking house, a blue van.  In the opposite wall, a single oblong pane frames the green palmy plastic leaves of a hedge that screens your cottage from another, like a sombre painting hung low on the wall.

The door is in farmhouse style, heavy wooden verticals held together by diagonal planks and split into two portions.  You rise to unlatch the upper half, filling the emptiness of the room with the heat and light of the day.  You pass back through the other rooms to see what they offer.  Nothing in the middle room except colonies of mould on baked red floor tiles and mossy green on the walls.  In the kitchen, the front door room, there is a gas cooker and canister, an unused red and black barbeque, firelighters, a bucket, and two brooms, one stiff, one soft.  Next to the chimney which juts into the room, a shallow slab of sink webbed with fine cracks.  The tap does not work, as Monsieur Drouet demonstrated, and would require more plumbing to fix than he thought himself capable of.  There is an outside tap which stands at one corner of the cottage.  In the shed beyond the three rooms, you find a soil floor littered with ageing beer bottles, presumably left by your uncle.  There is no toilet.