Consuming and crying

I have been crying a lot lately. Like untowardly crying. At things that don’t usually make me (or anyone stable) cry. I was reading a free magazine. Picked up unthinkingly from the vendor who shoves them in to our underarms, never making eye contact, continuously thrusting bundles until someone takes it. I take it. On the morning train - I am reading about a photography exhibition at a gallery on the Southbank, I could do that during a lunch break? A black and white portrait of a front living room, mantel shelf heavy with trophies and mascots and wallpaper peeling under colourful frames of loved ones, deceased, young, alive. An upward angle shot captures an ageing woman walking laboured to the front steps of her local church. It’s like her religious commute. Going to church religiously every Sunday for a sermon and now I am crying. Not floods. Never gushing: I cry like the robots who think they’re human in Blade Runner 2. Silently crying for no real reason standing in a packed train carriage at 8:54am.

Then the Royal Wedding took me by surprise. I was sat cross legged on the living room floor, sorting boxes of old belongings in to piles for the charity shop and then, the bin. The wedding was on in the background but my mind was engrossed in some old Adidas tracksuit bottoms, sporting stripes the colour of fire. Until this rude trumpet chorus made me look up. On the screen flared a white robed queen and the church doors were flung open, light broke out over her smile and I was crying. Again like a robot. One tear that rolls off in to the shadow cast by my right eyelid. Always the right tear-duct.

I am slowly realising that my twenties were an age of anger. I could be angry at everything! It was like a hobby that became part of my personality. I loved being vocal about stuff that didn’t matter, for example, my hatred of glass modern buildings*. Recently though, I can't muster up the vitriol and instead I am overcome by emotion. Here are inexplicable things that have made me cry in the past weeks. 

Hearing a nature podcast about the decline of moths in Britain

Catching a glimpse on ITV of the NHS Heroes Awards

Seeing a music video where an old woman with push-permed hair dances with an invisible hula-hoop

And all of these things caught me completely off-guard. I had no control over my weepy eye but I just let it happen. All Hang Out. Whatever, I don't pretend to understand why. But I cry. It has something to do with nature and the passage of time. It has something to do with feeling older and how the world carries on without you and that's fine. It doesn't matter. It has something to do with memories that don't seem to go backwards but are laid out before you, as if you have a million memories to be had but are not sure when or how it's going to happen. Uncertainty in certainty, that's likely what it is.

*I still stand by this

Spirit level

I had to spend the hot sunlit days caged inside an office. Outside there was the repetitive pounding of a crane, breaking up the hard ground beneath the silt under the Thames. I imagined it giving migraines to those walking by, but filtered through my thick walls it was like the quickened strikes of a clock tower, madness. 

I ride the train every morning and some days I can concentrate on reading, other days I cannot and stare past people. There has been a lot of that lately and the views are not great. The backs of buildings and concrete. Scaffolding. As we approach the city there is too much glass. The whole train carriage overhears something that sounds salacious to the speaker - sleeping with a middle manager - but for the rest of us it as a nuisance disaffecting the daily commute.

Amongst one of these days I am leaning against a luggage compartment, blockaded by a rucksack and some shoulders, then holding on to the railing before me I see the back of a hand close-up. In biro it is written SPIRIT LEVEL. I think hard about what this could mean, until I follow the hand up the arms to see it is connected to a man dressed in overalls, with dust and paint all over his shirt. I turn back to stare at the grey everything with an extinguished sense of wonder. 

But for the last weeks I have been thinking about what it could have meant before I realised what it actually meant. ‘How’s your spirit level?’ Is a good question. If I asked myself that recently it would be, ‘Particularly low today. And your’s?’ There have been invites sent in the post sealed with happiness about weddings for me to receive in my pyjamas to feel slightly saddened about. My twenties are over. I have managed to accumulate things, which remind me that I once got that with the hopes of... then I feel a twinge of disappointment in myself or the thing for not following through with it. 

An ex-boyfriend sends me an e-mail about turning thirty and living in Honolulu or ‘Wherever the wind takes me’. The billboards on the side of buses carry slogans that don’t make sense with the aim to make me linger on their messages; I fall for it. The possibility of getting a dog seems distant, while I get invited to flat-warmings and take in the nice scenery and accept that people are moving on.

Though spirit levels are about balance and some days I am high. Like when sitting in the sunshine in a park I have only just discovered and fallen in love with, for it’s the site of a Victorian ruin. Resting a sleepy head on my lap, stretching apart my toes and watching a grandmother fanning herself, as her grandson shows off tricks on his new scooter. Spirit level rising. Later I had a bubblegum flavoured ice cream from a van, which was bright blue and had a similar chewy consistency to gum. Proving that childhood memories can be bettered by current ice cream flavours. 

So things are not all that bad and not all that good. But I do feel slightly off-balance.

Moomin the dog

I’ll miss having the dog around. This black, beady-eyed, curly-tailed thing. Moomin. She is a true companion and as I walk with her across Wormwood Scrubs, a large expanse of playing field, with one of the only unbroken horizon lines I’ve ever seen in London, I remember how much she’s aged since the first time I walked here with her. How much I’ve aged too. The same amount technically, but not in dog years. She’s a grandma now (an obaachan) and that would make me a fully-grown woman. I am technically, but not in mental years. But then perhaps I’ll always stay this age in my brain, just my bones and body will begin to wear thin, and my memory will lapse but I’ll still think the same. Feel the same in any case, probably about the same issues, sticking even more stubbornly to my guns as I age with everybody else. Moomin’s back legs wobble, when she jumps over tufts of grass her belly scrapes the underside in a way it didn’t use to, when her skin was more tort and she had a stronger abdomen. She tires more easily and sleeps for longer. I bet I'll age without realising it and then one day I won’t be able to get my leg over a stile without incurring some pain, and then I’ll notice that I’ve grown old, a bit too late to do anything about it.

Now as she lies here, sprawled as I write I am thinking deeply about mortality. What will happen when she’s gone? I’ll probably still be here and then I will be left sad. I’ll probably get my own dog and name it after a Moomins character in honour of this dog and also to pay homage to Tove Jansson, an absolute genius in my eyes. It’s easier to say for a dog that they have had a good life. Easier to judge, if they live until they are thirteen (human years) and they can still bound with abandon, ears flopping excitedly down by their snout, can still sleep and eat healthily and dream. That’s a good life. But for humans… more difficult to judge and who are you to judge anyways? If I’m healthy and can still run, eat, sleep and dream am I having a good life? Yes, most likely. When I die will everyone be able to say, with hand on heart, that she had a good life because of these things?

On the way home from something I noticed on the path infront of her house a black figure lying there. A small furry black thing with limbs outstretched as if it were sleeping, the way Moomin does on her blue cushion upstairs. My heart stopped. I edged closer as if walking over a frozen lake about to crack and splinter in to shards, any minute, when I saw it was a black cat. Dead cat. Black-fluffy-big-dead-expensive-looking creature, just lying there, not moving a whisker. I couldn’t be sure if it was dead but I really couldn’t touch it either. I was afraid I’d wake it up and then it’d be angry. I said out loud to a passing stranger, ‘Dead Cat.’ They turned around, confused possibly, so I said it again louder and more clearly pointing at the laid out cat on the pavement. Thank god the stranger came back to check, he bent down and checked the cat’s pulse (is that normal for things that aren’t human?) and I asked, ‘Is it cold?’ The man said ‘Yes. Dead.’

There was a pause that may have been a long a silence. ‘I’ll go and get a bin bag.’ He said and sauntered off. I tread carefully around the cat and wondered what had happened, no markings or wounds, no seeming violence or blood, it looked like it had been placed there. Probably chucked out of a car window or off the curb-side after a hit and run. I worried about the human owner of it. How sad they would be to see their cat in that state, distraught. Something still bothers me about that cat. I went upstairs and patted Moomin down, brushed her a bit and read a book, turned the lights off and went to sleep. I dreamt about a black furry creature that night, whether it was a dog or a cat was unclear, it was just a nice animal that I liked a lot.

Now I’ve been thinking about that dead cat again, and seeing it lying there was so unusual because I have always believed strongly that cats land on their feet. Even out of four-storey buildings when they leap, they still land on their feet. That cat looked like a suicide and that’s what been nagging me, a little.

Keiko

You would know by her languid airs that she had all the time and money in the world, well. Not so much of either, anymore.

Grown up in Tokyo, daughter to a wealthy merchant father and an heiress mother, Keiko had never know hunger, nor desire, nor anything that moved her to want. Living a perfect sheltered existence through childhood, attending an exclusive playschool at the age of six and graduating from a ladies’ university at nineteen, the world awaited her with cradling arms. Beckoning her so close to their hearts to become human.

Her looks couldn't be bought, only cultivated like a true pearl, through the harsh revolving grit and grind of a careful, possessive shell.

In her formative years she felt no stress, hands flocked around her to take care of that. Keiko knew how to dress with understated glamour, not an eyelash out of place, lips the shade of roses that flowered and whithered with each season.

Men would tap her on the shoulder as she swanked down Ginza Bouleavrd, as she kept friends in lockets who’d grab any hot-blooded male’s attention: Miss Arashi being one, a JAL air stewardess being another. The 1960’s. Her hair, her make-up, her wider than usual almond eyes that sloped off in to a distinguished smile.

‘Are you free to have tea with me?’

‘May I take you for a dance?’

‘Would you and your friend escort us to a private member’s club?’

She never had to cook a meal for herself, never. Always a new man vying for her attentions. Youth, money, beauty, song, gourmet, dance, evokes the memories of an old lady.

Seventy-six is old by any standard, and yet, as if it were yesterday the melody of the American band and the sequined nightgown of the maitre’d float by, leading you coaxingly, deferentially away to a table.

Handsome face, aquiline bridge, light green eyes, a pilot from Egypt with the manners of a prince. ‘I thought, I would never be so happy again.’

Married at twenty-one to a man, a nuclear scientist of all things, who had won her heart with sweet devil talk. Her simple softness seduced by his slick tongue, it was all a complicated dance and she felt lied to. He died at forty-six leaving her a home that only accrued escalating taxes with age.

But by the sea, everything so green and turquoise blue, it never got cold so the fruit always grew so plump. The spiders were hideous and hairy beasts, butterflies with wingspans she’d never believe. Fruit flies the size of horse flies.

The very tanned surfers, with sculpted bodies would ride the waves each morning, forgetting the storms and Keiko liked to imagine mustering that kind of resolve one day. To approach relentless crashing with forethought and courage, mixed with a thrill of the fun.

Those two years of freedom, working as an elevator girl at the Department Store had finished her. She had been too attractive to not be taken off the shelf, wrapped in one of those sharp-cornered bags strangled in frilly ribbon.

She had never bought a cigarette in her life, yet had always been offered foreign silk cuts out of silk pockets, handkerchief, necktie, studs.

Wondering whether the fish danced with the surge of the wave or got swallowed whole in to a vortex –

Keiko alone liked to watch the setting sun, rise, then set again.

It was called the Land of the Rising Sun, perhaps this was the reason why, purely for her to amount to being at this windowsill.

That was her routine, never lonely looking out to shore.

She would never be sure of herself again in her life.

79

22:03. Oh, bollocks it’s too late to call now. It’s past ten.

Punch the numbers in to the phone screen (telephone receivers are of a bygone age), tap tap tap and then ring ring - I hope it’s not too late. I don’t want to wake them up on a Monday night…

Granny: Hello Burray 236?

Rimi: Happy Birthday Granny! Sorry it’s so late, I just forgot but I knew it was today, I meant to call earlier and I wanted to send you a card but I forgot - and I know I called yesterday, on Sunday, but I completely forgot it was your birthday today and I really I just wanted to really say happy birthday.

Granny: Oh thank you darling.

Rimi: Happy Birthday. Have you had a nice day - what did you do?

Granny: We went out for dinner

Rimi: Ooh that’s nice. Where did you go?

Granny: To the Sands Hotel.

Rimi: Lovely. What did you eat?

Granny: Well, for my main course I had lamb

Rimi: Lamb! That’s different.

Granny: I like lamb, but your Grancha doesn’t like lamb.

From off-side

Grancha: I do like lamb… (mumble mumble muffled words)

Chuckling

Granny: Did you hear that?

Rimi: No, not quite.

Granny: Grancha says he does like lambs but only when they’re in a field.

Rimi: That’s sweet

Granny: Not to eat.

Rimi: Yes, I got that.

Chuckles again (she has a nice chuckle, like a clucking hen)

Rimi: So how old are you?

Granny: Do you really want to know?

Rimi: Yes

Granny: Seventy-nine.

Rimi: Wow. That’s not a number you hear too often is it.

Granny: That’s right. I’m old old old!

Rimi: But you’ve still got the spirit!

Chuckling

Granny: Yes, I suppose I do.

Rimi: What did Grancha have for dinner?

Granny: What did Grancha have for dinner? What did you have for dinner…

From off-side

Grancha: I had… (mumble mumble muffled words)

Granny: Oh I remember! Grancha had scallops and some Orkney cheese.

Rimi: Yum

Granny: And for pudding he had... what did you have?

Long pause

Rimi: Granny?

Granny: My brain’s a bit tired so I’m trying to think

Rimi: Take your time

Silence

Granny: A white chocolate tear-drop!

Rimi: A white chocolate tear-drop?

Granny: Yes a white chocolate tear-drop. I’ll get him on the phone so he can tell you about it. He’s dozing off but I know he’d like to tell you himself.

Rimi: Ok

Granny: Bye for now –

Switched receivers (they still have receivers in Orkney)

Grancha: Hullo sweetie-pie

Rimi: Hello Grancha!

Grancha: Are you well?

Rimi: Yes thanks. Tell me about your truffle.

Grancha: My what?

Rimi: Your truffle; the pudding you had at the Sands.

Grancha: Well it wasn’t a truffle

From off-side

Granny: It was like a… (mumble mumble higher pitched muffled sounds)

Grancha: Ooh, my white chocolate tear-drop.

Rimi: Yes, tell me about that.

Grancha: Well it was quite difficult to eat actually.

Rimi: How so?

Grancha: Couldn’t break easily through the shell. Was like trying to eat an egg with a small spoon – a hard boiled egg. I’ll pass you back to Granny now.

Rmi: Ok.

Grancha: Love you lots

Rimi: Love you too Grancha, sleep well.

Switched receivers

Granny: Well thank you for calling my dear, it’s really rounded off the day splendid.

Rimi: I love you Granny.

Granny: I love you too. Now good luck moving off the boat, I think you’ve probably stayed on the boat long enough now. It must be getting cold on the river?

Rimi: It is. Autumn’s setting in.

Granny: Time to find a new home but you know you can always come back here whenever you want. We’ll be waiting for you.

Rimi: I know. Love you. Good night. And happy birthday.

Click goes the sound of their receiver and I can hear the ducks quacking up at the moon outside. It’s probably time to go ashore.