Jobelle

Jo reads books in her own room, she does not want to play, though sometimes we boil water in an old roses tin on a secret fire in the dark woods. We make jelly in the twilight and feel free. And we make dens. We made our most intricate den by the river down the back lane. The place was just far enough from the house to be truly ours, it was in the frontier country. We had our own stock of jelly there, we even had spoons. But one day when we came back to it, we found the rains had swelled the river and it had drowned our haven, our home had disintegrated into pieces of damp cardboard.

Mohammed in the sea

I met Mohammed in Barcelona for the Citizens Against Terror founding meeting. He is from Baghdad. It was only when we got to the sea I realised it was his first time he had seen it. These are Mohammed's first moments in the sea.

Mum and Dad

When they were happy.

I am disturbed

There are so many stories in my head. Folly’s dead, we buried her. The day before I had to catch her piss in a plastic funnel in the vet’s car-park. Vet woman gave it to me like I’d know what to do, like it was innate knowledge. I coaxed Folly to the rotting leaves, thinking they would make her want to piss. I didn’t know why, why she’d more likely piss in soft places. I guess it’s because at home she always heads for the long grass to piss. I didn’t think she would piss because she’d done a great long steaming one just before we left for the vets. I didn’t want her doing it all over the vet’s table. But she had more in her – a symptom of her disease. I’m not boasting but I was lightning to her piss, stooping with my catchement funnel between her squatting legs. Some of it went on my hand. We hobbled back inside but I was having problems with the funnel thing. The piss wasn’t running properly into the attached test-tube and I couldn’t hold it and the dog at the same time. Just then a mother and daughter arrived with a cat. I was half-embarrassed, half-proud with my piss. I felt I had status, authority as a piss-catcher, but also it was slightly rancid as it was dribbling down my hand. I almost asked them to hold it but the nurse woman came and took it off me.

The vet was a sour woman who barked complicated scientific language at me while I watched Folly’s eyes. I don’t hate her. She knows a lot about pituitary glands, I wonder if she has one? I think she wanted to convince me that she could do her job knowing that we moved from the last vet practice because they were a pile of shit. Her tactics kind of worked because I authorised her to kill Folly. We did it in the back of the car – in her dog-bed. While they prepared the poison I went out and opened the boot to say goodbye to her, to invest her with all my emotions. She didn’t know what was happening, she just looked sad. I cooed ‘Folbelle’ in her ear for a bit, kissed her soft forehead, and kept jerking up thinking it was time. We always said we’d make tobacco pouches from her ears. They were so silky. In my mind’s eye she’s tumbling after a tennis ball. Puppy. Her legs are still novel and she trips over them. Think how difficult it must be for a spider! The last thing Folly ate was half a fox. She found it by the lake. I think it had been shot. Christopher caught her chewing it’s top half and could hardly drag her away. I thought of it curled inside her with its violent eyes. There was wilderness in her. Imagine biting into a fox. Folly was huge, lying like Jonah’s whale in her dog-bed, farting. We were all repulsed. She shat out some of it before she died and the shit looked quite good, quite sturdy. Unfortunately she did it in the porch so I had to slop it with a spade. Yesterday I was sitting by the lake and Basil – the remaining dog representative - dropped the fox-tail by my side. That is all that is left. I don’t know what savage beast ate the remaining half. It was certainly not Folly, unless she rose from her grave. Once upon a time that tail was electric, quivering in the night wind, bushy. It was part of a motion. I wonder if we should make a hat out of it? But there’s probably fox flesh inside it, rotting and little insects would start tumbling into your hair. There must be foxes everywhere in hedges though I hardly ever see them. Badgers too. They shaved Folly’s paw to stick the needle in. That was so disturbing. I know she’s only a dog. I know she’s only a dog but the whole of existence screams through her. She didn’t know what was happening, Mum assured me, but neither did I. Folly winced when the point entered her veins. She still had feeling. A few seconds later I saw her eyes go out. It reminded me of Dad. Everything reminds me of Dad. There’s a fly buzzing at the glass of the window, it wants to get out, can’t understand how glass can be solid, and see-through at the same time. There are hundreds of flies in the conservatory, buzzing to get out. Heaps of them. It’s like a holocaust in there. And I’ve seen the spiders. I was dusting off the deck-chair covers so we could pretend to sun-bathe on them and it was teeming with spider legs. Big exotic species that looked like they should be in the Amazon. Not in Shropshire. They should be kept in cages. I bet they have fangs.

Folly was warm for ages. My tears dribbled down the to the end of my nose and mingled with my snot. I stroked her ears. Vet-woman and her assistant assured me that Folly’s twitching and shuddering was quite normal. It was just her organs ‘shutting down.’ It was dark. Reminded me of those nightmares she had, when she’d whelp in her bed and I’d go to her and hug her and whisper things like ‘It’s ok Fol, it’s ok.’

I tried to heave Folly out of the car to put her in the shed but she was so heavy with fox I just fell to my knees. I could have carried her if I had just held her body but with the bed as well it was very difficult. I had to hold my arms out practically straight, like some strange Japanese endurance test. Well, I just couldn’t and then I thought I’d tip her body out onto the concrete. That was when I fell to my knees. Mum shouted because she could see Folly’s snout and paws sticking out under the blanket. It was horrible. That afternoon we buried her. I still have a nick on my thumb where the spade cut me. Jo and I made a film of it. We felt like we were Belgian actresses, it was very arty. I’ve never dug a grave before, so my technique was rather amateur and I almost hit Jo’s leg off about four times (I should say 2-5 times). We made sure it was deep because Mum said other animals could dig her out and eat her body. It was deep enough for me to crouch in with my head underground. I tested it – quite cosy. It was surreal and funny until we thought of the body and the terrifying logistics of getting it in the hole. I kept trying to forget. Basil jumped in the grave and started digging for rabbits, which was quite sick. I was worried we’d accidently dig up Champy the horse who is buried nearby. Imagine the spade suddenly chunking on a giant staring horse skull, that would have been more shocking than the Troy incident. While we dug we listened to Duke Ellington, which kept the comedy of tragic-comedy alive. But how to get her in? We didn’t want to touch her. We couldn’t just throw her in from the bed, that would have been too undignified. We were paralysed, hysterical, pathetic. We decided to put the bed near the edge and then kind of roll her in. But she fell head first and landed with her arse sticking right out. You could see her arse-hole, it was putrid. Jo and I collapsed laughing-crying with more tears and more snot everywhere. There was just this big crater with Folly’s bottom rising out of it. We had to shift her round, it was a horrible way to go. Seeing her lying in that pit. I know she was old. I could calculate the dog-human year equivalent but really it seems pretty irrelevant. She was old. She had to go.

Bums

Jo and I naked!

Angel in Iceland

Dew drop

Bjork - Pj Harvey - Satisfaction (Full Song)

Yipee

Flora

You would notice her, I am sure you would. You probably already have. She is dressed in a blue silk shirt and narrow trousers. She is in fact quite blue. You would not know that she is not wearing knickers. Or maybe you would. She makes eye contact with you on the bus, in a way that people that ‘know’ do. You cannot keep your eyes off her. She is one of the few that you notice on the way into work, who keeps your pulse in tune or in time with some secret turning of the universe, who wakes you up even in a moment’s journey.

There she is again, reaching for the buzzer that alerts the driver to stop, that someone is nearing home. She buzzes the bell on the 73, coming to me, to my bed, to curl up in my arms again.

Wuthering Heights

Kate Bush mini-rock opera extraordinaire

Autumn Dreams

There are so many Traceys getting pregnant at sixteen
And the babies are bigger than they are
And they’re all in parks in November by the swings,
Smoking cigarettes, burning their fingers as its getting dark.
And there are so many streetlamps all orange
And so many divides in so many pavements
That when you are playing that game
You just can’t step over all of them
Or you’re always looking at your feet and then you step into things,
Cold metallic things like letterboxes and dustbins and car-parking meters,
The streets are littered with obstacles we can’t pick up,
They have all grown roots,
They are clawing at the cement, sucking out the lava
Or whatever they feed off,
Whatever is down there burning,
And there are so many bicycles left chained up.

And in the eyes of all the people there is sleep dust gathering.
In the diamond corners of their eyes it heaps up crackling
To be noticed by next day’s lovers and thumbed out.

And there are so many dreams circling these geometric cities
There are so many of us breathing
We are almost in unison,
A giant earth breath,
Blowing up heaven.

Cock fighting

I fight the cockerels with Eve Langley. We have made swords out of pieces of wood from the carpentry shed and wield dustbin lids as shields. The cockerels are deadly. They have a vendetta against human creatures. The most lethal ones wait behind trees and watch you innocently approach, then they fly out in a whirl of feathers and come charging after you. ‘Bum, bum, bum, bum,’ right to left, left to right, swaying on their surprisingly speedy chicken legs. You flash your head round to look at him, you are running. He is not at all slow, no pushover, and you know that if he tracks you down he will leap into the air by your face, his claws raking forward at your eyes in a blur of wing and beak. It is in this context that Eve and I set off on our missions, knowing the danger in store but realising there is a war with the chickens and we must play our part. We head for the hen-house, adrenaline pumping, alert as a hunter or prey. The hen-house is made of wood and corrugated iron and it sits under the walnut tree. It is dark inside and smells of hay and eggs and chrysalises. I am in front of Eve and I reach out my hand to push open the door of the hen-house slowly. My other hand grips my sword. The door is heavy and as it opens suddenly two feathery beasts fly towards my tender head. I fall back into Eve in an effort to get away, only then to see that the cocks are dead and hanging by the neck from string attached to a hook which hangs from the ceiling. Ron has strangled the cocks. I will not forget that moment until I die.

Two sisters

We are two sisters and we have almost always been together, though we are less than Siamese. In the attic we make ghost-trails out of loo-paper, put our fingers into split-open tomatoes with our eyes closed imagining they are body parts. We know the big room at the end of the passage is haunted. It has wooden floors. In it a train goes round and round on dusty tracks. There is a rocking horse in the hall with diamond eyes. It has a wicked look. Josie is climbing the stairs, she is seven years old. People tell her she is pretty and she is learning that this might be so. She wears a nightie with coloured pencils above a pocket on her tiny chest. She remembers the smell of vicks and the wooden floor under her feet is cold and smooth. She is in the room behind the kitchen, with the washing machine and the tins of wet paint. Her hand is on the round knob and she turns it with all might as it is stiff. She is frightened because she knows they are looking for her and her time is almost up. She is trying to be quiet but feels her breathing is as loud as breaking glass.

She is through the door now and the light has dimmed as she climbs the stairs to the attic. She is going to the place where she hides in her dreams, whenever the baddies come. It is a place not even they would think of. She is not sure of the exact spot yet, where she will cower, holding her breath but she knows it is up there, in the twilight place. The steps creak under her naked toes and she holds still for a moment, waiting for the creak to disappear. They must be on her tail now, surely, it is only a matter of time.

Ahead of her is that room, the most frightening room in the house. She cannot go in there. She does not know what is in there but she knows what could be. It is dark despite the small window. There is a sort of inner cave inside the room, made of chipboard, stuck onto one of the walls. It has a smashed out hole in its side and is like the place where murderers hold their captives while they make them suffer in terrible ways. She does not want to go in there. Beyond it there are passages you have to stoop down to get through. And further still there is a trap-door that looks into the neighbour’s flat. She knows for one time they crawled over and levered it open a crack and saw their shapes and heard their voices below. Men talking.

No, she will not go there. Instead she turns to the left and up three more stairs, past the forgotten kitchen with its neglected spoons and into the bedroom. She notices the remnants of butterflies at the window, golden admiral with wings of brittle silk. The windows are silver webbed so thick you can only just make out the lawn leading up the hill to the big tree and the tennis court and the husks of flies line the sill like the shells of bullets. She does not want to go under the bed so although she knows it is obvious she pulls open the wardrobe and climbs in, behind the ancient army uniforms that hang heavily from the pole inside. It is difficult to pull the door shut from inside as there is no catch. When it is almost closed she has to grab the edges of the lock with her fingers to get a grip and bring it towards her. The light contracts into a thin line that plays on the taffeta green silk of an old dress that touches her cheek and then it is so thin she is almost entirely alone and her breath is bigger than before and louder she is sure.

She feels her ribs rise and fall under her nightie and she crouches as far back as she can go, letting the coarse cloth of the uniforms shield, so that even if they open it, they might not know she is there. She wraps her arms round her knees and she waits. She will wait for as long as it takes though she is not sure how she will know what is enough.