Punker dog in Berlin, his hair matted and scrufflish, his gait insouciant. He has a green streak in his fur, top of the head between the ears, that matches the green quiff on his master. The thought of this dude dyeing his own hair like an old lady in a salon and then tenderly saying, Ok now we do yours, has undone me.
Things you can do in silence, in the dark. Cycling alone under trees, flicker, flicker. Watching petals fall in flakes of tiny silver alight on the black liquid wind. Swinging on a swing someone’s fixed to a low bough overhanging the water, the wind rushing gently and softly as cat’s paws past your ears.
On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”
I walked downstream to the picnic place where someone had made a heart of stones and filled it with pads of moss. The stones have gone now but the moss remains and some of it has taken root. A wet Spring. It makes not a green heart shape exactly, but something like. Heart like a blob. Heart like jelly, like a cloud.
I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!
I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.
Call off the search! I think I may have found the world’s heppest hipster. All those people complaining that they’re not one can relax: this guy blows you out of the water. He is tiny and slight – built like Prince – and perched on his front steps in a crowded cafe street, wearing skinny black jeans, elfin boots, and a cunningly off-the-shoulder stripey sailor’s jumper. He caught my eye because his elbow was pointed above his head at a most uncomfortable angle – like an alerted bunny’s ear – as he gave himself a beard trim, slowly, searchingly, luxuriously, into a bevelled mirror on his lap, using a large pair of silver antique dressmaker’s shears.
To turn the tide of a rainy & dismal afternoon I started reading. Beryl Bainbridge’s elegant eloquence has cheered me up no end… as her characters in this novel might say. This is from Master Georgie:
“It began to rain before I reached the Washington Hotel. I hadn’t my shawl, but a spot of damp was nothing to me. In winter, when the wind howled up from the river, I huddled in the doorway of the Star Theatre. Once, an actor came by and said I was pretty and why didn’t I come inside to get warm by the Green Room fire. I didn’t go because the rouge on his cheeks made him look more angry than kindly. Besides, I knew he was buttering me, the line of my mouth being too determined for prettiness and my eyes too deeply set, which lends me a melancholy look. Another time, in December, my feet turned quite blue and Mrs O’Gorman had to rub them with goose-fat to restore the circulation. What did I care! I’d freeze stiff for Master Georgie.
“In summer, my favourite place was on the granite steps at the entrance to the railway station in Lime Street. From there I could see down the slope to where the hotel stood within its square of garden, the red roses bobbing tall in the wind. On clear days, beneath high blue heavens, the humps of the Welsh hills rode the horizon. Now, the grey river met the grey sky, and a low white sun, sliced by the masts of ships, sailed through a splash of scarlet petals.”
It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed.
A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like the apples from that tree,” she says. In the next street three raw apartment blocks rest on torn earth, now rained in. A dark tree yields the faint squeak of some almost-sleeping bird. I tell her how I crouched by the river and watched a pair of ducks, colourful male & dun female, surf past with lolling expressions on their faces (or so it seemed); the current is rapid and swollen with snowmelt after the spring freeze. Five minutes later they passed again: looked like the same couple, still skating pleasurably. I thought they must have flown up to have another go. Yes, she says: they do that. I would too, I think, if I were feathered.
Walking home past an outdoor restaurant in town that provides rugs for its hardier patrons. Everyone else was huddled indoors, it’s barely ten degrees and the wind is icy. A woman wearing a piled confection of blonded whipped hair drew on her cigarette as I passed and said, drawlingly, “…but it’s ok. I paid him in shag rate.” She saw me listening and fixed me with her eye and blew out a long, expressionless stream of blue smoke. Dragon lady! You are fire. I adore you.
Last time I was in Switzerland I said to my host, It’s so pretty! It’s like an endless reel of picture postcards, seamlessly unrolling.
Yes, she said. And if I’m not on my knees in the garden on a Sunday morning, pulling up daisies with a pair of tweezers: my neighbours won’t speak to me.
