Robin

I've been reading about him all day. Reading quotes and interviews. So many things that in the light (the darkness I suppose) of everything have become something else. Something entirely new. Saturated suddenly with all this aching meaning. An opened door. A closed door.

I tried to ignore the porridge oaty lump in my throat as I read a Twitter conversation he had had once.
"Thank you Robin Williams for making me laugh so fucking hard. I needed that." the man had said.
"I needed your tweet. Thank you!" he had replied.
Cried a quiet cry at my work desk.
Wiped tears from my face.
Ate an apple.

Thought about seeing Aladdin for the first time. Watching Mrs Doubtfire, Patch Adams. Jumanji.
I smiled for a second.
I remembered again.

He lived with a camera between him and the world, I thought. A world that was too much of everything (too little of everything? Constantly bubbling over. Boiling dry. Repeat.)

I tried not to think about the hours before but imagined him there in his home. Drinking a glass of water. Walking up the stairs. Being still. I thought about his eyes, his downwards mouth, his fingers scratching through his hair. I thought about his heart, a clenched fist punching red in his chest.
I thought about his insides. The loud, unending shout in his head.
I thought about his life before, by then just a distant echo, a quiet, low hum he could no longer hear above the scrambling noise.

Jan and the moon

How silly she felt for resenting the sky. And how little it mattered, she supposed.
She doubted even that she ever really did; it’d just been an idea after all. Another morning rushing out the door with Ricky and Little Marky and a flash all at once that perhaps it was resentment that she felt in the pit of her stomach, the pine cone that somersaulted endlessly in her gut when he was off, speeding ever further from their life together.

But now the television and the grainy darkness of another world and the miles between them disappearing when she heard his voice again and his feet and the murky footage and the cigarette in her fingers that seemed to burn down to the nub and then reappear brand new without her knowingly taking another from the packet and the small brittle sentences handed back and forth between each wife and the how are you doings and the I’m fine how are yous and the I’m fine no honestly I am I’m fine I promise I ams and the how did we get heres swirling hazy in the cloud of smoke above them  blowing from one corner of the room to the next casting shadows across their faces that illuminated the doubt instead of hiding it from view.

Outside, the moon was a shining coin in the blackness of everything.  And he was there somewhere, a promise in the sky, a held breath, a beacon.

Her and him, Ricky, Marky and dear, dear Karen, (for all too brief a moment) had once looked up towards the sky, imagining him there amongst the stars, a stone’s throw away from the heavens.  And now there he was, above them all, making his way back home again.

It coughed dust

I was sat waiting, as the Lollipop man ushered children and parents across the street, by chance 'I see God in you' playing out through the open windows, filling the air with its heady perfume.

There is a plant behind my desk. It is dying because I don't know how to keep it alive. I drowned it for a while. It gurgled up the water and then languished in a puddle a whole week before I knew. So I left it, let the soil turn dreary and California dry. It coughed dust. I didn't notice. 

Us is an unformed egg. It exists unruined by my hot and my cold, in-between two places I've not been. It is bare feet on warm pavement, a smooth stone in my hand.
Us is not watered dead or burning in the red wild.

I am a yawn, a solar system,
the final flash of yolk orange light as the sun sets.

You are an always maybe on the tip of my tongue.
An idea forever around a corner.

Gwyneth

All of the furniture is white. She pushed for that when they bought the house. White walls, white armchairs, white candles lined up like soldiers above a white fire place, the red-yellow flames billowing in the reflection of the white mirror. She stares at them wide eyed and unblinking until the tiny fires merge into one undulating mass. It is dancing. She wonders if she ever will again.
She is folded in half on the sofa, the curtains pulled shut across the windows. London will mind its business and stay outside today, no matter how hard it knocks on the glass.
For the first time since moving here she feels like a foreigner. The city is an alien and she is an alien. She thinks about home but doesn’t know where it is. She doesn’t belong anywhere anymore. All that existed is disappearing, a distant echo of a song slowly fading into the ether. She tries to hum the tune but can’t; even memories grow hazy.  
She dips an apple slice into a jar of peanut butter and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. There are lines there that weren’t there yesterday. Goodbye already drawn across her face, a diary entry that can’t be expunged. She rubs at them anyway, for a second or two. She has never taken no for an answer.
Until now that is.
Until him.   

There is a plate of spaghetti in the fridge, she has just remembered, and she is silly-hungry all of a sudden. But the kitchen is down the hall and down the hall is another country. She unfurls her legs and lets the blood rush down into her feet. Her head is a little thick from the sudden moving and it dawns on her that she has been here, in this white room that was painted once with all the colours of a happy marriage, since last night. Upstairs felt holy, she supposed. A mausoleum of their happiness that had been sealed shut, and she didn’t have the strength or the faith for any of it. She grew more and more languid as the March sun dipped out of the sky, more listless, more alone.

And then it was night, and now all of sudden it was day. The world kept turning despite her own coming to a crashing halt.
Things begin and things end, she tells herself. She has been here before. She would be sad. It would hurt. And then it would be fine. She would pick herself up, brush through her hair, face them all once again and it would be fine. Really.
He would fade like everything else. Become somebody she knew once. Somebody that she poured herself inside until everything had gone. Simply a man she had shared her life with, until that life was nothing but a memory, a song she couldn’t quite remember the words to.

Jared Leto

I have crawled in my sleep somehow so that now half of my body is on his, my left side draped over his left side and my head and hand on his chest. There is a light from somewhere that paints the outline of his face onto the pillow, his hair like reeds in white water, our bed the ocean.
The sheets have tangled between us both and we have become tied together in a human knot that strangles us. I can feel the push and pull from him, his wanting to be here and then his wanting to be anywhere else.  
The tide comes in and the tide goes out.
In the blackness of our room I feel his tears pool in the palm of my hand.
He is drowning.
I pretend I don’t know.

It is tomorrow and outdoors has bled through the window and our room is sticky and golden and it is spring and it feels like winter. He is at the end of our bed in a chair covered in orange flowers that I think are daisies. I want to tell him how to be here but I don’t know. Sometimes you just are and the love is enough.
Sometimes it is everything.  

I climb out of our bed and my body is heavy as wet sand and I feel his eyes on my neck as I make my way to the door. The light shivers and I turn back towards the window.
There is a moment when I look at him and he looks at me and the tide comes rushing in and we are wading again through water that is all at once both familiar and startlingly new.
And then it is still. And he is still. And so is the light. And I am all that is moving; moving towards the chair covered in orange flowers that I think are daisies. Every step I take is a step to be closer to where he is. Always.
I sit across his lap and rest my forehead on his and my hands are half circles over his ears.
He is here and I am here, weary together in a room that is sometimes filled with water.
He cries into my mouth and I eat his grief until it is gone.
It is all either of us can do.

I am a rock

I want to come to dinner and am too aware that I cannot climb over from where I sit, in the middle of it all, and climb into a car and change my plans and turn up with wine and hello's and I didn't plan on coming but here I am's.

I am too aware that I am not the person I thought adults were when I wasn't one.

All that I am is bone deep and carved into cartilage like cave drawings. I am meticulous and ordered. I am a train schedule that runs ten minutes behind but runs and stops anyway. First there and then to there and then some other place on a track scrawled in pencil onto a clock that is ticking and is always ticking.

I am a clock and my feet are the seconds and I am responsible for the world not falling from where it is.

I am a fool that knows better.

I am an idiot that knows no better at all, wide eyed and waiting.
Almost always waiting, steady and still as a lake somewhere on the outskirts of a past that is already too far away.
You are a boat. Onwards and out, out you go, frothing foam white tracks into the water and clapping like an engine.

You are a plane.

You will be there, sighing your yesterdays into your past, and holding tight around everybody's wrists as they float about you in the air; making sure they don't disappear altogether, into the sky. 

Murder, she wrote's Jessica Fletcher

I finally faced my fear and painted my television icon, Jessica Fletcher.
What a glorious woman she is. All power suits and shoulder pads and small town moxie; rah rah rah and "I've got an idea, but I'm going to need your help to prove it."
Without her, I am half as much as I am.
Jessica, dear girl, forever be mine.

Now available here in my shop.

Boy

His tie was always tucked into his shirt, between his second and third buttons, and was the colour of his school house. The one that didn't care about scoreboards and competitions. The one that was loud during morning assembly. He was a sloppy teenage boy with undone floppy hair that would get swept from his face in the wind and then stay there all day. His shirt was never tucked into his trousers. It billowed and creased and was smeared with grass stains and mud. He chewed on a biro once and it exploded in his mouth. Black ink pooled down his front like the cards in a psychiatrist office. His face didn't change and his eyes didn't move. He looked straight ahead as if he was waiting for a phone call that never came. He kept looking and looking. The class erupted into a laughter that didn't stop until our teacher told us all to settle down, trying hard to stifle his own snigger. I could tell he liked the attention.
I don't remember when he first held my hand. I can't recall the first time his fingers felt for mine beneath our desk. I don't know when he first said my name under his breath or beckoned for me from behind his hand. Once during class he spelt I love you on the table with his trigonometry set and then mussed his fingers through his inky hair and covered over his eyes until I looked away. It was the first time somebody had told me they loved me and after at lunch break I ate a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and imagined what our children would look like. They would have his eyes and his shoulders and I would teach them to be kind.
When he wasn't saying my name he was calling me them. He would shout across the playground and with his friends would laugh and kick footballs at my chest. He was hiding and all of us were trying to get through something and it was complicated and he was completely and hopelessly lost. I knew that if he looked for long enough he could find himself in me. I would hold him in my arms and wait there and he would realise that the two of us were the lucky ones. Him and me. Us. I was sure the answers to his questions were in my mouth and all he needed to do was search for them with his tongue and then piece it together in his own time. I was fifteen and it didn't seem that complicated; we could be happy if we wanted to be.
I would sneak out to meet him sometimes during class. Pressed up against a toilet cubicle door with inscriptions to teachers in pencil and pen scrawled across them he would hold onto my face and kiss me on the lips. Our bodies would knot together like bark. He bit on my ear one time and I could feel his smile on the side of my cheek and I smiled too. Another time he pulled my hair and said I had been bad. He smelled of tobacco. It was the smell of secrets.
He took me to a field near our school during a Science class and laid our blazers on the grass. There were cows somewhere hidden in the trees and I heard their calls like echoes in a canyon. After, with our shirts undone to our bellies and our feet piled on top of one another, he said my name and it flew into the air and then blew away. It sounded funny coming from his mouth now, in this field that wrote part of our story into its grass. As if it didn't belong to me anymore; as if it described somebody I hadn't yet met. Somebody foreign. We stayed there for an hour or so, talking occasionally and closing our eyes, until his arm became numb under my neck and the sun started to drop lower in the sky. That afternoon I drew hearts onto his palm with the top of my finger, each one getting bigger than the one before, until his hand was full of what I felt for him. He squeezed my finger with his own and rubbed over my skin with his thumb. I was his. All of me.

Anyway, three years later I bumped into him in a bar and he introduced me to his girlfriend. She had dark eyes and patterns on her finger nails and her hair was in plaits down her back.
"Thom, isn't it?" He asked, shouting above the music and stroking on my shoulder.
I nodded and took a sip of my drink, suddenly aware of my arms.
"I never forget a name." He said.

New Year

The wind was loud and sweeping, hoovering up everything from last year and piling it into neat bundles somewhere nobody could see. Yesterday still hovered above us like a cape. The walls shook. My toes curled inside my socks. I had never been less of a child. Each part of me felt older. I thought about us both sitting in chairs but I don’t know why. I saw you sitting on a chair with a wooden back. I imagined the edges of your shoulders against the wood. I imagined the yellowing bone, how it would feel in my mouth; the edge of your shoulder between my top lip and my tongue. Your hands were flat on your thighs like two coasters and your legs and your bare feet made L’s against the floor. I would search your body for every mark that was made before now and by something else. I would forget myself in you. I would disappear behind your skin. I would stop fighting and fall forward. I would be weak but I would be yours and the New Year would belong to us.

I thought I heard the sound of house keys but it was the loud, sweeping wind beginning to whistle, and I followed the noise until I was back beneath a grey, hovering cape, and you were somewhere else, in a chair that grazed your shoulders, getting ready to start again.

Jackie, after: a story for the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy

 

She had already put the clock into her bedside drawer and the ticking she heard now must be imaginary. She wasn’t even sure she could hear it anymore, each tick and tock like the sawing of a knife in her side.

Tick. In.

Tock. Out.

She grabbed at her stomach and with a flat hand pushed against her ribs. The pain seeped up through her chest and into her throat. She coughed and swallowed forcing the lump back down towards her middle and it grew and spread until her whole body was filled with a hurt as heavy as granite. Each breath she took was laboured, her lungs grabbing gravely at the air, heady with grief.

Tick. In.

Tock. Out.

Her mind crept over to him. To the way his voice said her name on their wedding day and to how he drank his coffee in the morning (with his buttered toast and one boiled egg), and to their children and to their faces when they knew; their small, round faces.  

“Now I have no one to play with” Little John had said, a sadness in his voice that didn’t correspond to the news.

She looked at the pillow next to her and tried to picture him there; tried to imagine his weight on their mattress, the smell of the day on his skin. And then she saw Lyndon at her side, his right hand in the air, his left on the bible. She heard his promise of allegiance as an echo in her ear, as an echo in her ear, as an echo. She was floating. She was swimming. She was perfectly still. He was lost. It was over. Jack had gone.

She rubbed the spot where her wedding ring had been and imagined the friction scorching a ruby red circle on Jacks little finger.  She fixed her eyes on the gold lampshade above her bed and forced herself not to blink until the stinging became one long buzz in her eyelids. She wanted to stay here, to stay disappeared in this room which they had shared. She was in love and she had been in love and with her eyes still open she willed the night to stop where it was. The silver grey of the sky lit up the corner of her dressing table and her pink hat lie upon it like a sleeping dog next to a tube of lipstick and a hairbrush. The country had needed a hero, her grief had been their grief; her lose, the world’s. But she was alone. She made a noise that sounded like crying and which filled the room as though a pipe had burst, then closed her eyes and let her head fall sideways onto her pillow. She must sleep. She must get up tomorrow and run a bath and brush her teeth. She must choose a dress and strings of pearls and wear stockings and shoes with buckles across her toes. She must continue.

Tonight, inside a half empty bed, under a night blacker than most others, beneath crumpled blue sheets she had chosen for them both, she found it difficult to remember entirely the reason why.  

The tick-tocking began again.

Everything was starting over.