Notes from a room

What else can we say? I say we, I mean to say, What else can you tell me? Is that what I mean? Or do I mean, What can I say to you, through you? What can I record, that is, that won’t be a failure to record? Let’s say, for instance, that I have to pass water several times a day, sometimes more, sometimes as much as ten times, even more when I drink beer. This is fact on one level and drivel on another. I record, testing the event for truth, and fail. And my record becomes a record of itself, its own test. I fail to record what happens, though I only write to record. I turn to look at you and you’re gone. What remains is the lack of a record, which I record again, for you. Several times a day, then, at a minimum. Sometimes as much as ten times. Everything I drink flows right through me. This may be due to a small bladder, or maybe a large prostate gland, how should I know, I can’t know everything. That does limit it to two possibilities, though of course there may be many others. At any rate it interferes with my sleep. I have to get up at least three times a night to dribble into the bowl. Sometimes I have to tickle the tip of my foreskin with my index finger, either the left or the right, to make it happen, sometimes I even turn on the tap while I tickle myself. I put it down to sleepiness when I stand there swaying before the bowl waiting for the droplets, to reassure myself, but it’s not much different during the day if the truth be told, and I suppose it must. When they’re out, the droplets I mean, it’s hard to get back to sleep, knowing the next little stabs in the bladder will start soon, since the bother of getting up means I had to take a drink of water. I shit more than I should think was normal too, up to five times a day. It all runs through me rushing and gurgling as if it won’t stand for being inside me. They say the intestines function like a second brain, perhaps they are trying to tell me something. Not to mention the sperm, rivers of it, not always wilfully choked out but always willing, and the snot that constantly flows from my nostrils, so that I have to carry around tissues wherever I go like a woman, honking into them and worrying about where to dispose of them. Yet I live, I pace and scribble, a solid man to all outward appearances.

He sits in the chair as the cat takes up its position on the bookshelf. I start walking along the perimeter of the room as he studies the ceiling, which is divided into nine quadrangles by peeling lists, to no apparent purpose. When I pass him the second time, close by, he gives me a little shove with his elbow. The cat, the little panther, raises it lids and trains its opaque eyes on the scene, then lowers them again when I reached the next wall, the southern one, say. Did you see him? he asks me. Did you tell him anything? Not a good word, or he wouldn’t have left when he saw you coming. This is a problem for me, do you understand? I don’t trust you. But maybe I shouldn’t think so much, isn’t that what you’re thinking? Isn’t that what they’d say? It’s true, I admit it, I shouldn’t think so much, especially about myself, I create more problems for myself every day. And no solutions. I’ll lead myself into perdition, I’ll take my own hand and lead myself down into Hades and tell myself get out while you can and don’t look back. Perdition, what a thought! he says, still staring at the ceiling. But it makes sense, he says, we can only lead ourselves into perdition, we have to be willing. Maybe they’re right, he says, maybe I shouldn’t think about myself so much. Maybe I should get a dog, maybe that would help, a loyal pet, not like this tart, gesturing at the cat. Or a chinchilla, or a snake, something that won’t run about, something to keep him company, something he can keep locked up. Tired now, faintly nauseated, I sit down on my cot and wait for him to leave. Why’ve you stolen it, he says, do you feed it? Say something. What do you do in here anyway? This walking around is pathetic, you look like an idiot, like a retarded prisoner. I hear you from downstairs you know. I leave to relieve myself. Oh very nice, he says, very hospitable. When I return he tells me he doesn’t think he’d mind prison too much, at least not solitary confinement. His room’s like a prison too. No, he doesn’t think he’d mind isolation much, he says, the walls wouldn’t make much difference and the seasons mean nothing to him. The interrogators wouldn’t know what to do with him, with their stupid games, I’ll tell you that for free, he says. They’d just think he was arrogant and try to break him down, you can tell them I’ve got their number, they needn’t bother. Whoever heard of such a creature! An abomination, he says, that’s what he is.

A new day, a new dawn as they say, the dawning of the final interminable day. What shall I scribble today? Should I list the things I’m going to do? But I’ll do next to nothing, I never do anything but next to nothing. I sit in my room and scribble when you send me the words. What words? These, I suppose, for lack of any better. For lack of anything better to do. Is this the best you can do? Then let’s begin. But how to begin, with so little to say, so little to do, so little done? And once begun how to end? Start with a question, that’s as good a start as any. This question leads to a second question. And then? The void I need to fill, your void, you. The void that enters me and fills me with words. This is neither beginning, of course, nor end. I’ve always been here now, in this place that has called me back, this place I call out to, this place of echoes. It’s a weird sacrifice you lead me into, if I’ve learned anything, if there’s anything to learn, which is unlikely. Here where your tide has thrown me, is throwing me, safe from help, where you throw me and draw me back into yourself. This is most moving. Grown men sigh and the ladies go moist. Enough. Continue, blacken the pages, there’s nothing worse than a white page. You say jump and I’ll jump, up to their world. Or is it still mine? No, nothing is mine, only ever yours, no world but you forevermore, my refuge and enemy, amen.

What else? Let’s say he appears at my door again. But he hasn’t left? Right you are, he’s still there, still here. And the cat? Gone. Where can it have gone? Sprang out the window perhaps. But the window’s closed. It’s served its purpose perhaps, what do I know. I go to the bathroom to take a dump. Sadly the door closes inadequately no matter how I pull it, and he has a sour look on his face when I return to my cot. Did you hear a thing I said? he asks.

I’m boring myself. Where else can we go? Nowhere to go. Propelled into action only by my bladder, my intestines, my balls. Then there’s the stomach, of course. And the brain? Mine could happily survive without the things these other organs require, in a goldfish bowl, say, or on a metal tray, hooked up to electronic devices with wires. And you, where would you be? Maybe I’d be free of you at last.

Nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. I could have myself take a walk. Take another walk, one more, on another path, through another village. Consider the possibilities. They are if not endless at least numerous, and if not numerous at least several. There are possibilities, let’s leave it at that. Or I could drink, get drunk, get drunk one last time, drunk again, like the first time, drunker than ever, I could walk out of here and go on a bender, who’s to say one can’t walk and drink at the same time, it’s perfectly possible. Then perhaps the possibilities would present themselves. Consider them. Imagine it’s spring, withdraw from the world and pour out, you’re walking and drinking. That’s it, talk to yourself as if such a thing were possible, as if the other you weren’t here. The squawks of the gulls as they coast offshore to who knows where, the surf’s wild spray, seeds flying through the air. Go farther, music down a windy street in the new village reminds you that there are still possibilities, maybe even for you. You could travel, see the world. You’ve seen some of it but what did it amount to? A grain of sand. And it would all be different now, for nothing ever ceases, of that at least you can be sure, seeds fly and grow, each possibility pregnant with possibilities. Maybe not so much for you, but how good to know they’re there all around you, despite you. Walk. Swig. In Paris they’re cavorting with baguettes and croissants. It’s spring there too. In Rome they stand by their mopeds and lick ice cream cones. It’s spring there too, of course. Seeds fly there too, through the sunlight and onto the ruins and cars, different seeds from different plants. Consider the Mongolians, driving their Ladas and throat singing in the dust. What season is it there? You could find out, take the Trans-Siberian railroad and get distracted on the way by a thousand sights and accidents. And even they would only be a grain of sand. This goodly frame the earth, where each possibility slips away from you into other possibilities, so that you’re always both outside and inside possibility, always leaving and becoming, dying and living! Where am I getting this from? The movies maybe. Maybe the goldfish bowl was better. Or the second brain, the gut that forces action with the dubious assistance of the bladder and balls, action without thought, without you.

I’ll describe my first meeting with my downstairs neighbour, barring objections. No? Good. He was sitting on a step in the stairwell, head bobbing between his knees. I’m drunk, he said as I ascended, I was drunk, but I’m all right now. I was anxious. Let me tell you, no stop, come back. Listen, hang on, no, I remember. And so forth. Squinty eyes. Greatcoat bunched up around his flanks. A thick brown woollen tie I hadn’t seen him wear before. I stood above him now with my bag of groceries. I was anxious, he said, looking over his shoulder, why was I anxious? He seemed legitimately puzzled. I was waiting for someone, someone I don’t know yet, but it doesn’t matter now, said he. Someone who didn’t know what he was doing to me, taking my time and making me suffer like this. There was something he could’ve done for me, he could’ve turned my life around, I prepared for this for a week. He must’ve seen you coming. But it’s OK now, I’m sorry, go on up, I’m sorry. Do people know what it’s really like to wait? I’m afraid to let go, but it’s already gone out of me, he’s already beaten me and now he hasn’t come he’s humiliated me into the bargain. Go, go on, don’t mind me, it’s fine. As I started up to my room he said, Where’s my cat? I replied I didn’t know and he turned back and recommenced his bobbing.

Strange turn, I thought. Something made me walk straight into my bathroom and look at my mouth in the mirror. I didn’t want to look at my eyes. Why not? It wasn’t guilt, exactly. I was alone in my room, I didn’t have much to feel guilty about, at least not now. Regrets linger but guilt wears away, humanity is charming like that. So I thought at least. My mouth I could control, my eyes I couldn’t, in my eyes I’d get lost. A woman could give me reasons, but they were no longer pertinent, I told myself. Or impertinent. The eyes lie, of course. And the mouth? The eyeless eye. It lies too, of course, but differently. Faint nausea. Fingers scribbling, eyes watching, lying. Quick, my room. It’s adjoined by a tiny kitchen, or kitchenette, and a tiny bathroom, or bathroomette, and forms a square around whose perimeter I can take 24 steps. Or could, if there were no furniture in it. Not that it’s heavily furnished by any means. There’s a bookshelf and a desk against the north wall, or is it the west wall, a chair which I keep by the desk, preferably pushed right against it so the seat is below and parallel to the desktop, even, as far as possible, when I’m sitting on it, as now. There’s a cot against the east wall, or is it the west wall. My clothes, such as they are, I keep in a cupboard in the kitchenette, for I’d hate to clutter my room still further with a wardrobe. What horror, how hemmed in I’d feel. But leave the kitchenette for another day, I want to focus now on the room itself, one thing at a time, one must proceed in an order, any order will do. As I say, I’d be able to take 24 steps around my room if I were to move all the furniture into the kitchenette, the bathroom and the stairwell. But where’s the point in that? Incidentally, I say 24 steps, but how do I know this if I haven’t taken the journey around my room without the furniture in it? In point of fact I’ve never seen it in an unfurnished state, for the furniture was here when I moved in, the first time I moved in. Then how do I know? Since the central part of the room is free of furniture in a radius of, say, a metre and a half from its midpoint, I found the only two unfurnished spots on opposing walls that line up, on the west and east walls I believe, or the south and north, and walked from one to the other as naturally as possible, counting my steps, then back again for good measure. On each trip from wall to wall I counted six steps, which I then simply multiplied by four, to represent the four walls, thereby coming up with the figure of 24. But there a question presents itself, namely whether each wall is as long as the others, which is the unspoken assumption underlying the above calculation, that is, whether or not my room is square. To resolve this adequately I’d need to obtain a tape measure and possibly an assistant, and frankly I can’t be arsed. Of course I could also move the furniture around to clear two spots on the other two opposing walls and repeat the procedure, but again, I can’t be arsed. Let’s say 24 then for lack of a more rigorous measurement. When the weather’s bad, as it usually is, I walk around my room, against the wall and around the furniture, counting my paces up to a hundred. Then I turn around and start counting from zero, and so on. I start with the wall and the furniture on my right, so that when I turn, having reached a hundred, they are on my left. I try to keep as close to them as possible without touching them. There’s a slight groove in the carpeting where my route runs, this is quite useful when I drift off. It occurs to me I haven’t mentioned the radiator, which hisses and rattles when it’s turned on but mercifully settles down after, say, half an hour. But enough about the radiator, it bores me.

Despite these diversions, at times it’s as if I walk myself deeper into my hole, as if my very diversion leads me astray. Other times I imagine it as a vortex in the centre of the room, which is why I stick close to the walls. When I know there’s nothing to be done I leave my room and walk as far as I can, along the coast and into town, unseen except by strangers. I look down at my feet, step by step, the hole closes above me, and the end is here, the endless end. Then the only solution I find is to talk to you, not the you I lost but the you I’m always losing, the unmasterable you. I wait for a word, for the word that pulls all the others with it. It comes, conjures up others and they pull me up and push me towards the frontiers of my blundering. Ah they’re coming like shit from a suckling calf now, the words. On, while you let me. When I returned this morning the cat was sitting on my welcome mat, in a sunbeam. Shiny as a beetle, wearing its gaze like a mask. It wants neither food nor caresses. It sits on my bookshelf and looks at me through half-closed indifferent eyes. Well let it, I’ve better things to do than concern myself with a cat’s affections, I’m a busy man. I have my pacing for one thing, not to mention my scribbling. False, every word, but it’s as much your fault as mine, you the first cause of these blunderings. You cast me out of myself and I hear someone calling me. Never anyone but you, talking to you about you. I would have fallen out of your favour if you’d had any favour to bestow or deny. Or do you? These questions are part of you and torn apart from you, like the stones on the beach which were once one. Which you do I trust, the one that washes up and over me or pulls me out and apart? I could start sailing, to pass the time, master of wind and tide and all that, but I’d have to learn and I’m not the learning kind. Rhythmic thumps from downstairs now, like a man hitting a table with a club wrapped in a towel. Maybe he paces too, with heavy boots on. I prefer it barefoot. A knock on the door interrupts me. Irritably I go to answer. There stands my neighbour with the cat in his arms. At the sight of me he becomes agitated and the cat springs out of his grasp and runs into my room. He seems to tremble. I stand and look at him. He’s wearing a shiny black skintight t-shirt such as runners and cyclists wear. He clenches his jaw and walks past me, into my room. I close the door and follow him.

Dusk now. To tell the truth if I must, I’ve always been afraid of it, summer or winter, autumn or spring. Melancholy in spring, outright blackness in winter. Of course it comes sooner in winter. Something ungraspable always descends on me with the murk, some fear. That or a tedium as great as those brown waters out there, which perhaps amounts to the same in the end. I left for this room, and soon after, this dream of a whisper, the wind through the half-rooted thistles, carrying mist from the crests of the surf. And a murmur among the reeds and gnarly pines. Was it my own call, myself calling my own name? But wasn’t I leaving that call behind? The mist had concealed dangers, and kept them close. It had dimmed my vision. I’d stood fast, plucked words out from the currents and commanded them into shapes, but as soon as I said them I panicked away from what might respond. I clutched at whoever was there to respond, this was a basic part of the problem. One day after the end, in one of the hot countries, I dreamed I was on a trip I’d never taken, spellbound by a desert landscape I’d only read about, when you wiped away my tracks and I laughed. Not you, another you. And I started talking myself into a new loss, or perhaps it spoke through me. Now there’s a high-minded thought for you. Not you, another you. Freedom they say comes when you know at last that you’re beyond having and knowing, know it deep in your soul at last. Neither my hands nor my face were mine now. Nor perhaps the other parts. Nor perhaps my belongings. I tell a lie, they were mine but they were leaving me. Or rather I wanted them to leave me. Or should I say I wanted to leave them. That doesn’t seem to make sense. In a sense they were no longer mine and never had been, but I still wanted them. I was at the end of something, my tether, or rather your tether, but also at the beginning of something. At the end and beginning of your tether, that’s one way of putting it. If they perished in a fire, my belongings I mean, would I grieve? And me, if I perished, would you grieve?

I wake up tired, the day’s heavy, I’m too much myself. My words return me to myself despite my efforts. Anchored in tedium. Dull hunger, nutrition and excretion, shall I clean myself today or not. I need wind and waves, maybe I should take up sailing. But think of the fuss and labour, the tarring, rigging and equipping, not to mention learning to sail. The outstanding event of the day occurred when a cat slipped into my room with me as I unlocked the door. Shiny black it is, aloof and unmoved by my advances. It sits on a shelf watching me with its opaque eyes as if to say, You’re wasting your time with that scribbling. Quite right.

There was the girl, for example, the one I lived with, and the other, the one I didn’t. And the time before all that, when I was less old, when I took to leaving my room and walking the streets like a ghost. All day and sometimes all night, for I was never much good at sleeping, or rather at falling asleep. Oh I could sleep, sometimes all day and night, it was the getting to sleep that was the problem. I took to walking, I was a great walker. It was their world, I told myself, I was just passing through. From public house to public house, a real nose for them I had, having a drink in each. If I walked myself into the ground, I reasoned, sleep would come sooner. Back in my room waiting for the doddery shower to warm up I stood at the window and watched the river that wound through town carrying its grimy load seaward. I’ve ever loved banks and coasts of all descriptions, never could live far from water, even in the grey aerial soup that passes for day in these parts. Excellent places for mediation and screaming in the wind, as everyone knows. The saving grace of this room, for instance, I mean the room I sit in now, apart from its cheapness, is what’s outside it, the crag-lined coast, the wash and draw of that great brown god that respects no man. Purple and lame. Sometimes a kind of mental mist would steal over me as dusk settled. The more I examined my face in the window, those empty eyes and straight lips, the harder it was to feel it was mine. It was a thing among things, untenanted, watching me from another bank. I’d fall asleep and dream I heard my name called by my own voice, calling back to me from far off. In bed in the morning a hundred images of women jostled in me, their bodies like a hundred flowers opening in the heat. Ah lyricism. Women I’d seen on the streets in a shop turning a corner boarding a train paraded through my mind offering themselves to me. A downy neck here, a cluster of freckles between brown breasts there, ah Eros. Brazen Babylon on one shoulder, coy Bethlehem on the other, vying for my attentions. End of vignette. I could start running again, to pass the time. That takes me back still further, this is one way to pass the time, to when I used to run through the sprawling unkempt cemetery behind my parents’ house, weaving between the crooked tombstones and jumping over the thickets. The odd mourner shouted at me for not running on the path, and for running at all, but I always ran on as though I hadn’t heard. It was their world not mine. Now what? Strange sighs and muffled whoops from downstairs I can report. In bed in the morning, no I’ve said that. But the night came at last, didn’t it, the night the morning had dreamed of. Pockmarked pavements, steaming vents, whiff of kebabs and stale beer. Panic town. Something stalked the streets, wove between the drunks, drove them close and apart, gorged on them. Numbed though I was by pills and beer I was amazed as she leaned in to my face and said something about her bellybutton over the pounding beats. I cringed. Must I do this? Later in a less noisy place she leaned in and informed me of some other part of her anatomy, I forget which, her toes perhaps, her shoulder blade or the small of her back, her bumcrack or earhole, no matter now. Later still she pulled me into a grove and showed me certain other things. Her tongue explored mine like a tarry slug. We’d smoked too much and I felt sick. Here we are, I said smiling. She drew my face onto her quivering breast with a muffled grunt. A hefty girl she was, let’s say obese. To be quite frank if I must, it was an experience I’d rather have done without at the time, though on the other hand I longed to be taken by the urge she seemed to feel and have done with. A grand passion. Mingled with the fear of being discovered and heckled. Despite my condition at the time certain smells I still remember. Of stale anxious sweat, for instance, and of her gash, or was it my member. Both, in any event, as the procedure drew to its conclusion. A marine pong such as you sometimes sniff in stagnant harbours where the fish are too stupid too swim out into the open and thus die by diesel or lack of nutrition. The next afternoon I awoke clinging to an ugly little totem of my secret life; I threw it at the wall, sprang up and ripped open the curtains. My things stretched on their toes in the sun like a cluster of cats, and I walked through the day wondering how long I should leave it before calling her, or whether she would call me. In the end, discouraged, I decided to let sleeping dogs lie. She however did not, and after a number of further encounters, I forget the number and it little matters, with many a stink and grunt, we moved in together without much thought. Early days! Every day breathtaking. We wandered around the flat sensing each others’ presence. Flesh to flesh, thought to thought. More than the eunuch daydreamer of my past could have imagined. Time gained substance, the mist evaporated and I moved straight into life. Oh but I did. The world came into focus, the tree outside, the fingerprint on the window. Strange scraping sounds downstairs now, note to self, buy earplugs. Do I continue this suspect narrative, and if so why? To produce a stream from the tidal depths, then disappear back into them and have done with it. A brief damming of the water that flows into and out of itself. To be taken, and for it to be over as if it had never begun. World without end or beginning. I’ve seen him, my downstairs neighbour, on his way to Somerfield’s, perhaps a word or two about him. He wasn’t there when I lived here last, or if he was he made no sign of it. His feet stick out in opposing directions and he wears a heavy old greatcoat, sometimes replacing it with a turquoise windbreaker. His choice of outerwear doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the weather, I’ve noticed he’ll wear his huge greatcoat on clear sunny days as often as not. Nor does his squint. Have anything to do with the weather I mean. Some time later, I forget how much, after all the dirty dishes, the snubs and halfhearted peace offerings, I fell back into the hole. I was tired, walking was like standing. Why was I even allowed to walk around? I managed to raise my eyes and say something to someone. I came home later and lazier than ever, and by the old savage route we became strangers to each other. She asked me why she was made to use my greed against herself, and I asked myself why I let myself sabotage her joy. We groped in our suits of armour and there was nothing but groping. These words disgust me. She said, You don’t know what love is, hence you don’t love me, etc. He said, stop poking your finger in my nerves, I almost wrote words. Talk, she said, if you dare. Why when I always want what you want do you never want what I want? I learned your needs better than you, you let me do your dirty work and feed me crumbs. Is this what you want? he said with maddening indifference. And now look where I am, she said, in this place you took me to, and you arrive the same, you never let anything affect you. Listen to yourself, they said. Fuck you, they said Onwards. There’s no rite to master this. The other one, did I mention her? Coy Bethlehem, how could I forget, I didn’t. The face I leaned into which leaned away from me. Which opened up and withdrew in lovely combinations as they walked arm in arm down dawn streets, she reluctantly he furtively. All the sweeter for being out of reach, only sweet for being out of reach. What’s the phrase, Stolen Moments? Softly softly, until you reach the pinnacle of your disgust. Pockets in time, more or less whole wholes from moment to stolen moment, or should I say whole holes. Then the long days, lost in memory. Lost now as then, though more closely then. Lost except for those timeless times that seem to remain, those moments of fictive truth or truthful fiction, dare I say presence, I dare not. As unreal to me now as then and always. This thought protects and exposes me being both true and false. A you unconquered and therefore trapped. In what? Who cares about this? I push myself out on the undertow of my words, to leave an emptiness for you to fill. You?

It was winter when I returned to my room at the cheap end of the coast. I’d forgot it would be, for I’d got myself in the habit of losing track of the months and as far as possible of the seasons, though of course that was harder. I’d managed to forget many other things too, as many as I could. I thought it might make things easier and perhaps it did, who knows. It was still to let, my room I mean, which perhaps tells you something about the room. I shan’t tell you – you? – where I’d been or why, after all I’m under no obligation, am I? In any case, given the habit of forgetfulness I’d cultivated and the fact, perhaps not unrelated, that I hardly knew why I’d gone where I’d gone in the first place, I – I what? Let’s just say I walked as far as I could and availed myself of planes trains and automobiles as far as my resources allowed, my only resolution being to return when half my inheritance was spent, and by God I stuck to it. I stayed in hostelries, then with whoever didn’t object, until they did. I was called things I won’t repeat here and would rather not remember since they seemed perfectly true at the time. No, it wasn’t a pleasant time, neither enlightening nor edifying, but then when was. Perhaps it will have been all these things when I look back on in say in five months or five years, if there’s more of me to look back. Lame, onwards, onwards. It was winter of course, in fact why not say it as it is, it’s still winter, the very same winter, as I begin these winter notes of a nobody. That’s better, one obligation met among countless unmet.

Sleet spatters down the window, this old window that gives on a slant of the brown ocean, the Atlantic I believe, or is it the North Sea? That’s right, be specific. Brown hands… I became an interloper. Playing the tourist. Having availed myself of various more or less decrepit modes of transport I passed through a couple of hot countries, I remember that much, time to remember again perhaps. Reremember. Nothing but sand and dust and bars. Torpor which like the dust was everywhere, covering you if you didn’t keep moving. This was a kind of incentive, and not unwelcome, since why else was a travelling? Otherwise nothing to do but drink. I told time by the number of bottles I drank, and how many I drank! You’d think time would have sped away and left me alone but I knew I’d soon be back on the hated old cul-de-sac. Sitting on church pews or cross-legged in cool mosques reading brochures I thought of how deathly dull heaven must be in the long run, and of the Creator himself, bored half to death by eternity, prodding us into action when we start to remind him too much of himself. This little scene by way of illustration, you understand, I’m looking back already. You, again this question of you, but I’ll come to that perhaps. There are fireworks in the sky, is it New Year’s Eve? So it is. My face lit red and blue by turns. No double glazing, I’ve returned to a coastal winter room with no double glazing. The lights and pops have stopped, replaced by my face framed by black, watching itself. Maybe they’ll resume shortly, the bangs and the colours, wasn’t that usually the way before? Was I in a hot country on New Year’s Eve? Perhaps they just don’t make as merry there. Stops and starts. Sleet again, greyer now. Remember now, let it remember itself. Remember when you first arrived, the storm that gathered and broke as you walked along the coast. The sky rumbling and spilling above you. I stood still and smiled, it couldn’t get any worse, as the drains swelled and the sun peered out. Just maybe there’d be another beginning from moments like these, I thought. When have I thought like that since? Maybe the first things that would whisper to me would be the half-uprooted thistles on the cliff, I thought. What would they whisper, what would the wind whisper through them? Fuck all, probably, but there might be something in all that nonetheless, laugh if you must. You? I must sort out this problem when I have time. Do I have time? Nothing but, I write because I’ve nothing better to do. Why then is it so hard to get on with it? Yes, talk bollocks and ask questions to no one till time lets you sort out – what? All the same there might be something to it, the whispering I mean. After all I’ve returned, haven’t I? But where else would I go? Better the devil you know, some say, though I’ve never heard anyone say it. People like me perhaps, and not aloud, which may account for why one seldom hears it said. I came back with my tail between my legs, there’s another saying I’ve never heard anyone say. At first the nights were like dreams in which some task was demanded of me that I failed to understand. Nothing to do but stay still among these dusty things, dustier now, reflected in the black window. The nights. They’re different now, aren’t they? This flurry of words for example, what brought it on? A hundred things to say and those but a fraction of a fraction.