Time is manifold

Do you ever have memories that surface up from the depths? 

I woke up quietly, naturally to sunlight peeking in through the blinds. I went downstairs and could tell that the world hadn’t woken up yet, no noise of traffic filtering in through my front window. In a daze I went and lay down on some cushions, then my scruffy brown dog came padding over to lie beside me. The sky was a perfect pale blue. The temperature was mild like an un-buttoned shirt shrug, though I could sense outside was blustery, as if we were on the shores of a beach.

A memory of Orkney welled up from somewhere within; of when I was a child before anyone had mobile telephones. Isn’t it strange that I would remember the detail of something absent? Nowadays, on a workday, in fact every day, the moment I wake up I check my phone. It’s a source of truth for me now. Who’s been in touch while I’ve been sleeping? What’s the weather going to be like this afternoon? What’s the time right now?

Back in Orkney aged seven I would wake up on my summer holidays with no knowledge of what time it was or what was going to happen that day. I’d go into the kitchen first in case Granny was up listening to Radio Orkney, or Grancha was slicing bananas for his muesli. He always did it above his bowl working a knife in one hand like he was carving wood, no need for a chopping board. I’ve remembered on this particular day I was alone in the kitchen; the first one up. 

The light through the kitchen window was twofold, it was like a luminescent blanket thrown down from the sky which brightly shimmered off the surface of the sea. Light was mixed with water and air and that was how it filtered in through my corneas. 

I looked out and everything was so present.

Every atom of the island was alive with light and although we were in 1996 it felt timeless.

Not saying that I thought these things as a child, I wasn’t aware that the Orcadian light would infiltrate my deepest memories and spill out from my pores one day in my thirties to take me back to Burray, but it did. 

This is why time is creased – not always smooth and straight going headlong in one direction, like a fine line drawn with a metallic ruler. Time like Life is as messy as The Real World. Things can remind you of things, wires can get crossed and make like a diversion on the tracks. Our consciousness can take a wrong turning and we’ll find ourself wide awake in a long-forgotten memory today. Time is manifold. 

All My Relations

Photographs of my great-grandmother Ito-san (top) and my grandmother Obaachan (bottom) when she was young

I have a piece about my Japanese grandmother Obaachan published in a zine in America called All My Relations. It's a new publication about ancestry, memory and the meaning of family.

My piece is called Where have the waterways gone? on p.79-83. You can read and download the full issue here.

If you like the writing and artwork in the zine then kindly send a donation via Ko-fi saying in the message that it's for All My Relations. The donations get paid out to BIPOC, gender diverse, and disabled creatives.

Keropee

I went up to the attic and brought down a stuffed toy from when I was a baby. It is Kero-Kero-Keropee, a lime green frog with bulging white eyes and a red thread mouth. I thought it would be appropriate for my puppy to play with because I remembered Keropee’s material being plush and silky, like the outer lining of my sleeping bag, which ROLO loves. 

Kero-Kero-Keropee was an instant hit. ROLO ran off with him clenched firmly in her jaws. Even though the toy is about the same size as her, her strong neck muscles and little legs can carry it over stacked up cushions and small mountains. 

A said, ‘Are you prepared for it to be destroyed?’

‘Yeah.’ She had already ripped apart the fabric of the eye.

‘Soon that fluff’s going to be everywhere and you’re going to have to pick it all up.’ The stuffing from the toy had been pulled out in cloudbursts, and I was trailing behind ROLO picking them up quickly before she swallowed any of it. It was a fun game.

When ROLO had calmed down and was licking herself on her (cardboard) dais, I got my sewing kit out and stitched back together Keropee’s erupted eyeball. So now the frog only has one eye and looks like a monster, but a happy one as the asymmetry really brings out his smile.

Some friends told me I was lucky to have a partner who’d allow me to keep hold of my soft toys from childhood. I agree. My mum carried these soft toys all the way from Japan when we emigrated to England, probably hundreds of them were boxed up and sent via shipping freight. By the time they reached the UK, I am not even sure I played with them anymore. But still she kept hold of them, through house moves and divorce, through my university days and as I started work. Now I have a house to call my own and what’s rightfully mine is bestowed upon me. My bagfuls of soft toys.

I gave away two full bin liners to local families on the app OLIO. I crammed a dozen of my favourites into an oversized blue leather bag, which looks like a magician’s prop. I still couldn’t part with another dozen more, so I wrapped them in plastic and put them all up in the loft. In the hidden area of the house, where I wouldn’t be able to see them or play with them, acting as a safety net in case I ever regress and need them again. 

Thank god for this puppy. I can breathe life back into these old toys and see them out there – being torn up and loved anew. Finally, being played with after decades of being forgotten. 

Stars over Porlock // Bold Types 2020 Finalist // Glasgow Women's Library

An essay inspired by a holiday with friends was shortlisted for the Bold Types 2020 competition held by the Glasgow Women's Library. It is called Stars over Porlock and you can read it here, or in full below:

Stars over Porlock

The night sky in Porlock was one of the best skies I have ever seen. I can’t tell you what constellations we were under, except for the Plough, with its axial handle jutting out across many light-years. Everybody was in good spirits, some were sat on the lawn with their coats spread beneath them, others were standing barefoot on the soft green grass. We were all looking up, my mouth was hanging open and I held my boyfriend’s arm wrapped around my waist. A bleat from a sheep travelled across swathes of farmland to us. 

    Perhaps this was the happiest holiday of my life. We were all about thirty years old, escaping to the country from grimy city life. It took three days for my snot to not be grey or flecked with pollution. My pores sang in the water! The water in Porlock was delicious and my first cup of tea there was like a beatification. I thought, how can this tea be so delicious (it’s unbranded?) then I found out it couldn’t – but the water could. Coming straight off the granite rocks; clear and mellow like drinking crystal liquid and my hair became softer and fuller too, like a well-groomed poodle’s.

    The stars were phenomenal. It was dark in Porlock and our house was cut deep into the valleys of Somerset. You could hear the distant roar of the sea rolling back and forth over the shingle beaches. In daylight, you could gaze across the garden down to the agricultural lands and then to the salt marshes, then onwards to sea. A flutter of sparrows rose into the air chattering in a frenzy. On the lawn we played Mölkky, a leisurely game where you throw a stick at a clump of other sticks (the Finn’s know how to have fun); Genny made us a tray of gin and tonics and towards the end of the holiday, a jug of sangria to ingeniously use up the surplus saccharine wine.

    The house held up very well. Full at the seams from the beginning with food, booze and friends spilling over into bedrooms assigned for couples, we eased into it, like a cat stretching out after a yawn. We gave each other pet-names like “Grandma Georgia” and the “Chaos Queen”. People took up their well-beloved roles, like Aidan who became the group’s map-bearer on our long country walks. Gee was the charming one, with all the quick-wit and haughtiness of a lifelong tenured butler. Everybody played a part and yet, we were not pigeon-holed. Caring, stubborn, excitable, cynical – all mad – highly entertaining and filled with a mutual respect for one another. How we managed this I’m not quite sure, but Georgia said to me at the end of the holiday aghast, ‘I thought at least someone would have a barney!’ No one particularly talked about work or politics and when they did someone would be good enough to shuffle the conversation along, to avoid any sparks turning into forest fires. Or maybe because there was a pandemic going on, there was less scrutiny or assurance given to such matters, they just didn’t seem important enough. We all felt grateful to be able to go away together with “more than friends” but “less complicated than family”.

    After the trip was over, I was telling my boyfriend’s father about it. He is a good listener, always nodding at the right tempo and reacting to titbits of my story. He has grey hair, a tall frame, and emanates those leadership qualities people long for in boardrooms. Halfway through my retelling of Porlock, something must have clicked in his brain and he began to delve into a memory of a good friend whom he had known since the Seventies. This friend is handsome, intelligent, a delight and on his fortieth birthday he hosted a big bash announcing to the world that this was his wedding day – because he would never marry! Champagne and confetti. The father chuckled, regretting not having more reunions like that when they had had the chance. He told me more about his friend who in the end did get married (a surprise to everyone who was at his birthday party), he had a daughter with his wife, but soon after they divorced… 

    While he told me this I was thinking in the back of my mind, ‘The 1970s is when Tarantino’s film was set; that’s when Patti Smith was getting famous; Joan Didion’s essays are about then.’ It struck me that when the father recounted things from his past, I conjured up a pastiche of different forms of media I had consumed. Famous photographs, movies and music, the nostalgia effect; and in turn, when one day I tell a younger person in the future about my holiday to Porlock, they will be reminded of something they saw once about a pandemic and a referendum; some protests and art.

    I felt then the future was slightly out of reach, my finger’s grasping at floating fresh threads. Everything was becoming and everything was remaining, all at the same time, the world was still and changing. When I am old my memories will be films to the young and their future, relics to someone else after them. I felt the world in a state of continuous flux, like the vivid landscape shimmering and the rolling waves pulsing – but the stars cut into the veil of eternity will outshine us. I let go of my breath and thanked the heavens because it made me feel at peace.

November surprises

November is one of the hardest months to deal with. Shadows get longer, the commute becomes steamier, the night dominates. Trees are lovely and orange, but then slowly their foliage disintegrates, and the roads are covered in moisture, so you can’t wear Converse anymore. You need hoods and umbrellas; waterproof coverings that help you have more extraneous belongings to leave behind at bars and on train carriages. One frosty faff after another, with the added runny nose.

A colleague of mine suggested I try a store on Rivington Street, which sells bits of fashionable wood to find a going-away gift for my flatmate. He is basically a zine, so I trust his recommendations and it took the pressure off me having to find the “right” shop. I walked in wearing my raspberry beret and mohair coat. The doorman gazed past me through the glass pane at the street tinted blue.

In the store were mobiles hanging from the ceiling that looked like Alexander Calder, and I thought, ‘When I own an apartment, I’d like to fill the void with abstract art that twirls around on a wire.’ I sat in a smooth wooden chair made for Eames enthusiasts, beneath bare low-wattage bulbs that flared above my head. There were books and binders, aprons made from bark, terrarium, cacti, succulents. Small vest for a dog.

The run-up to Christmas is tiring with Santa schemes and end of year drinks, industrial-sized fairy lights flashing on all over town. It’s easy to go along with when it’s happening, but in November when you know that mountain of merry is looming, I get tired. I get that premature feeling I’ve frittered away another year when really, I haven’t, this is called life; where like walking, every day follows another, like your left foot follows right.

Over there on a shelf I spot something.

In a flimsy, square, see-through casing – no it can’t be?

Few objects are seared into your memory like they are from childhood. The avid collectors and hobbyists we are at age ten. You remember your favourite yoyo that lit up when you performed “walk the dog”, or your special eraser that smelt of something sickly-sweet kept in your smudgy pencil case. There it was. My plastic, carrot-scissors. (Tiny with a magnet on the underside – the blades hidden in an orange sheath that looks like a carrot stick – the handles lurid green - moulded into the shape of leaves - like a cavolo nero.) I loved this pair of carrot scissors and I stuck them to my table-leg in Year Four. I can’t remember why I liked them, they may have been the perfect size for a ten year old’s hands, or the cuteness of them was fun to contemplate, who knows.

One day after sports, I came back to find that they were gone. I checked all the other tables, disbelieving how they were gone. I looked on the whiteboard, which was also magnetic in blind hope. I began to panic and asked the form teacher what had happened to them? Did she know about my important scissors, or did teachers try not to pry into the lives of little children, with all their hideous collections of soft toys and stickers?

‘Don’t worry.’ She said. I couldn’t convey to her the gravitas of the situation. Quietly, I hoped. And she was a good teacher, so she wrote up on the board, ‘Has anyone seen a pair of carrot-shaped scissors? If you borrowed them, please return them by the end of the day.’ Weeks went passed and I got used to it. Someone stole my carrot scissors and they were going to get away with it: what a world!

Now I turn its flimsy packaging over in my hands. I can’t believe it. To be re-united with these feelings after twenty years. What I would give, to be able to go back in time, to present this to myself. And I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at whoever gave me the scissors (a la Back to the Future) because they mattered so much to my formative sense of justice.

Thank god the shop didn’t have any reindeer food or eco-friendly candy canes, otherwise I might have been put off the whole idea. With Christmas coming around the corner, why not? It’s the price of a pint and I could forget about the whole thing, making the surprise even sweeter on Christmas Day. (I felt silly, but I shouldn’t have because I owed it to myself.) The man in the fisherman’s jumper behind the counter, folded down the edges of a brown paper bag over my plastic purchase. I plopped it into my tote to forget about it, then browsed the shelves for gifts. There was nothing here for her.

Old stuff old me

I have recently been sifting through a lot of old stuff. My mum is moving house and by way of being her daughter, a lot of my old things I don’t use or think about anymore have ended up there. I emptied a cardboard box with frayed edges, scraps of old tape hanging off its corners. Squished in there amidst crumpled uniforms and a Brownies sash, was a small pencil case that had been zipped up to bursting, stuffed with what I objectively define as “bits and bobs”. A badge pin, small bit of broken wood scribbled with pencil marks, dead yellow feather, lifeless endearing lizard charms made up of microscopic beads, smelly gel pens, a ladybird pendant that doubles up as a watch. Trinkets and Talisman. 

I am supposed to be lessening the load. Of things that my mum will have to take with her to the new place, so I have to make sacrifices, I realise, but I look at these little pieces of me from when I was eleven and I can’t. I remember the feather and that bit of wood. I couldn't explain to you why they mattered or what I remember about them. But I do know them. A certain recognition you feel as with the sensation of seasons. So I keep the pencil case in tact and leave it to the side.

Then there are these textbooks. My school workbooks from Year 3 until Year 8. What am I going to do with these? Will I ever read them - no. Will anyone else ever want to read them - no. But I can’t lightly put them in the bin bag with the the old envelopes and school year planner. I am stuck. I want to get rid of things but they won’t let me! Instead, they draw me closer until I am sat in a pool of light from a cheap lamp staring down at my old work. 

MOVIES (written twice in bubble writing, twice in normal writing)

1. Space Jam

2. BFG

3. Jurassic Park

...

I list ten “movies” in total but I get the gist. My past self is listing my favourite films in order. And let me tell you, my description of Jurassic Park is nothing like Jurassic Park. I manage to list all the main characters and I am glad to say that Jeff Goldblum then, made as much of an impression on me, as he still does today. And Space Jam? That was a pretty good movie. I can still remember all the words to I Believe I Can Fly. I believe I could touch the sky. I think about it every night and day. Spread my wings and fly away. I believe I can SSSSSOAR

So. What makes me me now and me then? Am I really the same person when I have no recollection of watching the BFG, yet I still love Jurassic Park and remember Michael Jordan playing basketball against aliens? If I throw this stuff away and I forget it all, do I stop being the old me because nothing reminds me of her?

I have a job now. And in that job I get given a quarterly review, which is an assessment of your character in a professional light. I guess that’s a little bit like a school report. I have a school report open in front of me from when I was eight and it says under Listening Skills that ‘Rimika is a good pupil at listening. She always asks questions in class but in some cases, she asks too many questions about things she already knows the answers to...’ The teacher continues. And it strikes me that my line manager gave me exactly the same criticism last week; I ask too many questions to things I already know the answers to. I’m twenty-nine! How have I never taken this criticism on board?

I imagined an eight year old would be different to their thirty year old self, and seventy year old self. For one: different priorities. I am eight and I worry that my tamagotchi is dying and Olivia doesn't like me. I am twenty-nine and I worry about a flat leak and the cost of commuting. But I guess immediate thoughts play no outcome in the way you are. Because clearly I still am - very much like I was - when I was at eight. Just bigger with more money. I don’t know if this is worrying or the facts of life.

So I gather my things and place them in to piles, I throw some away and leave others to ponder over. I have a week left before they all get judged. To keep or not to keep. What about all those kids who's parents never kept anything, maybe they couldn’t, simply lack of space and time. I’m sort of lucky to have these things that remind me of a person I don’t know anymore because they morphed in to me. I’m pretty happy with things as they are so I don’t feel too bad about it. Thankfully. And that pencil case. When did I make the decision to put all my worldly treasures in to that khaki zipped sack, like Noah’s Ark adrift on a voyage until the time was right.

I remember something from my archaeology degree.

Burials and shipwrecks are what we call “closed contexts”. They remain untouched for years and years until their own civilisation forgets, and when we find them, they give us precious insight. A snapshot in time otherwise lost forever to the noise of history.

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.

Childhood memories of transport links

I have always lived near transport links. My earliest memory is of the kalang kalang of a railway barrier, slowly but surely reclining its black and yellow arms to come down across the road so that the people on bicycles and feet would stop. Trains tore passed – kalang kalang whoosh judder kalang ROAR.

I think I thought, in my tiny confused state that we were on the move. Or about to move. I mean to be fair, we did move quite a lot. 13 times in my lifetime so far, and I think I stopped counting at 16.

But as a baby on my bed I could hear the trains on the tracks. That faraway kalang kalang was like birdsong to me but more regular and constant, like a woodpecker maybe. I liked hearing it in the distance burgeoning as I got closer (this is when I had grown older and larger) taking it as given that I could walk to the shops alone, head thrust skyward.

Strolling.

Stations I feel comfortable in are in the middle of nowhere. Like that two-storey flat we lived in overlooking a dank railway bridge made of muddy coloured brick with all the vines and weeds sprouting from the top of it. Placed between deep countryside and a Green Belt that station was a lone platform. Tickets £2 in to town, return.

In the autumnal red and golden brown, I’d cross the bridge with keys jangling in frost-bitten hands to fumble with the lock. Sunset. Bedroom under heaped-on covers I could feel the tremors from the cargo trains as they passed under through the dead of night. I liked vampires back then so maybe there were bats under there or a gothic station master waiting for the red signal that never came.

Screeching.

Imagination never stopped with train stations and all that waiting. The trains went past with regularity and that gave me hope because I knew people were travelling places and I could sit still and be there to listen. Is that strange? I never felt tempted to board one or to escape because that noise of transience made me feel at home.

Amazing stillness, forethought and possibility at stations when everyone else is moving rushing on ahead. I think I’ll wait for the next train. There’ll probably be another one.

Soon.