Margaret, illustrated

T.K

I am in a coffee shop.

It is a coffee shop that plays the news on one of those twenty four hour news channels. I don’t like that very much, feels like the world is trying to get in my way when I all I want is to get away from it. I walked here this morning from my house, headphones plugged in playing music loud into my ears so I couldn’t hear the traffic. I didn’t always look when I crossed the roads down towards the sea either. I don’t know why. I was feeling sort of lucky I guess.

I order eggs, over easy, and a pot of peppermint tea which both come pretty quickly. I am the only one here save for the coffee barista and a guy in a beige t-shirt who I take to be the chef. They’re talking about hog roasts and the tenderest meat on the hog. They say it’s the cheek. It is 8.45am and it seems a little early for all of that. I find myself wondering about the tongue. Is that even a meat? I take a small book from my bag, one about a love that spans a lifetime and a continent, and stir the tea.

An hour passes.

A boy walks in. Twenty seven maybe. He has on a rucksack and a denim shirt that looks bleached by the sun but was probably bought that way, his hair swept backwards by the wind outside. It is cold and I think to myself that he should have worn a coat, a vestige leftover from my childhood being told the same thing once, twice, a thousand times.

I watch as he sits at the table just inside the window and beneath his denim shirt, rolled up to his elbow, I see two letters, etched onto his skin, black, architectural in their accuracy.

“T.K”

I take a sip of the second pot of peppermint tea I have ordered, concerned as I was that the barista would ask me to leave. The café has started to fill up with families, children in hats that cover their ears and the tops of their eyes.

The boy notices my gaze at his arm and, with what I suppose is at least a little self consciousness, strokes it with his left hand.

I put my cup of peppermint tea back on the table, wipe my mouth with the tips of my fingers, cough a cough I don’t really need to cough and look out of the window beyond his face to the young family outside. He in a coat that reminds me of my father, she saying something to the young girl, the young girl dressed in a Princess dress, all purple sequins and glitter; she is laughing back, pink hearts painted at the corners of her eyes. For a second I swear I hear it through the door but the barista starts grinding coffee beans behind me, the sound chasing away her laugh like birds.

I remember the boy now, eyes deep inside a book whose title I can’t read, and I think again of those initials on his arm and just for a minute allow myself to believe it’s a sign of something; because those initials are my initials. The ones drawn on the outside of his bicep belong to me.  Me, a man now, carving out a somewhere to be, gathering sticks, making a nest, and those initials are at my beginning. They are the start of all that has come since. They are mine.

 And then, with a confidence that surprises me, I lean forward in my chair towards his and I say

“Excuse me,” my voice like a stranger.

He looks up from his book.

“Your arm.” I say, “The tattoo on your arm.”

I point to the tattoo on his arm.

My name.

The beginning.  

He hardly reacts, turning slightly in my direction.

And as clear as I know I shouldn’t ask what I am about to ask I know too that I must, the question already bubbling up inside of me, a volcano no longer dormant. Waiting.

“Why do you have it?” I say.

He looks at his arm again and then at me, the black letters are whispering my name. The barista grinds more coffee beans and the whisper is silenced.

The boy puts his book down cover side up onto the table. The guy I took to be the chef comes over and puts a tall cup of coffee on the boys table next to his book. The boy smiles a thank you. The chef smiles back.

“They use it in copywriting.” he says in an easy sort of way that implies we’ve grown up together, that we’ve shared some sort of history. I even question the possibility of it for a second but am sure I would remember something like that.

“It is for when there’s more to come” he continues.

“It means that there are words yet to be written.”

And then “I’m a writer. It seemed to make sense.”

I say “I thought there would be a story behind it” and then I thank him and say I hope he enjoys his coffee. I don’t say anything else and he picks up his book and starts reading again.

Then I remember something I said once to my friend Marissa.

“I’ve always been tied to something, Marissa.” I said and she laughed and then I listed them until her laughter stopped. I didn’t need to think, I had carried them all like rocks in my pockets since I could walk, each getting heavier as the years added up. Dense as asteroids by the time adult life started happening around me to the kids I was a kid with too.

“I’m too frightened to run.” I said.

Marissa looked at me with eyes that said she understood. She took my face in her hands.

“There will always be something,” she said.

She smoothed my beard and smiled.

“And then there will be something worth running to. You just don’t know it yet.”  

The Electric Palace Film Quiz

A friend and I run a film quiz at the Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings. Here is the poster I designed for the upcoming Film Adaptations Quiz in May. Book your tickets here NOW. The website also has some taster clips from our previous quizzes-guess the film we're re-enacting and I'll give you a big fat pound.

I don't mean to brag, but it sells out pretty quickly; it's that good.

Margaret

Margaret Thatcher died when you were sleeping.
Thats what the note said; the one scrawled on the back of a brown envelope and propped up against the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen counter. Lois picked the envelope up, held it close to her face and read the words again, slower this time and out loud. The dog twisted in her basket, smacked her lips with her tongue and sighed. Lois took the envelope, opened the knife and fork draw and slid it into one of the recesses made for the knife edges to sit inside. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair but otherwise stood still, her pink house coat tied loosely around her waist.
She remembered then, a time long ago, her mum and her dad, her, small in her pyjamas, sitting around a television as the country buckled under its own weight outside. She remembered the look on her mothers face, the quiet concern behind her eyes, hands filled with knitting and yarn. She remembered her father yelling campaign slogans at images of angry and outspoken workers fighting for rights she didn't fully understand on the TV set, the wind howling through winter-empty streets.
And then she thought of Margaret, swollen with age, her skin draping heavy like curtains over her shoulders.
The world kept turning.
It somehow grew bigger in the shadow.
Lois took a carton of fruit juice from the fridge, walked back upstairs and sat on the edge of her bed; her feet cold from walking barefoot on the kitchen tiles. She took a pair of striped socks from the chest of drawers underneath the window and put them on.
Later, Lois fell back into sleep again until the sun, a teardrop in the sky, was replaced by night time.

Margot and her hat, illustrated

Gym

I caught myself in the middle of a lie yesterday as I stretched at the gym, a top knot on my head tied in a heap with strands of my own unwashed hair. The clarity with which I saw myself was so startling, and a wave of realisation washed over me so quickly that I stood there still, feeling foolish. A nakedness I had forgotten I had felt before.
I realised all of a sudden that I was trying to convince the girl by my side of something. The girl paying no attention to me, who hadn't noticed I was even there, mid work out and sweaty, headphones blasting music I couldn't hear. In that moment, as the sun had begun to disappear into the sea outside, more than anything else, I wanted her to believe I was a ballet dancer.
I was stretching stretches from a life long ago when I was a tiny somebody else trying to be somebody bigger than I was, pointing my toes and arching my back, small arabesques, fifth position.
How desperate I was for her to imagine me on the stage, dancing Romeo and Juliet; masculine and soft, a Rudolf Nureyev type with arms that women felt safe in; arms that could lift them up towards heaven, arms that said I was guiding us to a magnificence so shiny and astounding in its newness.
I wanted her to think I was somebody else and let myself get lost in the identity I had created, her still none the wiser; everybody has to be somewhere. And so I continued until the lie grew so whole, so complete I barely recognised myself inside of it.
And then, with an urgency that scared me, I wanted to run to her and put my hands on her shoulders and make it clear, make it crystal clear, that I probably wouldn't always be lost. That I wouldn't spend forever sifting through the leftovers of lives that never were, that I wouldn't live inside the dreams that hadn't been weaved into the reality of my actual life, that it wouldn't always be an endless list of tasks that I'm better than or worse than or so deep in the middle of that I forget that I am still able to take my days in my hands and mould them into something else.
That I wouldn't always be that guy at the gym, imagining himself somewhere other than there.
That I would one day be enough.