Well, today I walked until my feet were sore and I just cannot imagine why? Someone told me last night about their roaming heart and I just felt so enclosed - you do too - sometimes - don't you?
Someone once said; 'the things you own, end up owning you.' I suddenly felt engaged to my sofa, imprisoned by my toaster and mocked by my books.
I walk for about a mile and came to a wooded area and a tangle of weeds and I trekked through as I needed to take the road less traveled. Then I saw it.
It was somewhat larger than a chickens egg, but white like the low sky of the northlands and only just; lying in the cold. It reminded me of something from a distant galaxy; only how could that be, I've never been there, not in this life at least. The mist on the ground covered slightly the base of the egg but it stood up right proud and strong; its granite looking shell like something beyond the work of any Italian sculptor of any age or age to come.
I figured it had been abandoned - by what ever it was that left it there and yet it seemed to stare at me.
I picked it up. The egg. It lay in my hand between me and the swaddling city below. I stared at the marble correctness of it.
An hour later, it was home and I took it to my office - it lay there on the cotton wool I had fashioned into a nest.
And I watch it still - almost breathing through its shell - something. I wait for the tiniest sound or movement, like I'm waiting for the definitive answer to some question I never even asked.
It moves so little, if at all, like a bomb waiting to be itself.
I can't leave it; I love it so much - already! Love without knowing, or reason, stored within a shell.
And if I wait and no alligator nor swan nor snake, then soldiers will come and I will eat my love piece by piece.
You won't understand - no-one knows what loving an egg is like - or, you all do, but you don't like to admit it.
I woke up this morning and for a moment, as the snow hung from the window and the light gently burned through the curtains, I forgot about my egg. I was happy again; momentarily lifted from the burden of such things. And as I lay confused by this dream I had of the floor crumbling at my feet and a girl I had never met, who lives in the sky, I smiled because the day had come.
It is these moments, when the curtains are still drawn, that the stillness and ancestry of the room makes a noise of escape into your own self. It's like being under warm water, without the need for air; you would stay there and never surface and although you can still hear the world in the distance beyond the glass and the brick of your cave, it does not belong to you; and nor do you require it to.
But then the egg came back to me. It was like coming up. A wave of rich love from toe to heart, thickens in the arms and flushes the cheeks. The taste of metal and the memory of the precious gift.
I went to look at it; half expecting a dragon; or something that lives in the sky. Still, no movement, clay white and perfect; full and safe as my heart. Can anything come between us? No! Not the sound of the radio nor the dripping shower head can drain this moment. I've never been so happy - honestly! Than today here with my egg - my beautiful egg.
I shone a torch through her body and saw shadows in her x-ray. Maybe one moved; maybe it was the light. But there was something curled into an egg shape and its potential was palatial.
Its whitewashed face - so cold, empty and pretty. My tabula Rasa!
Today, I will give my egg a name - something pretty, something Russian.
Omsk lies in her nest as we post, quietly, beyond quietly; she may now enter my dreams.
I watch her as she sleeps. A blast of spotlight hides me in the shadows, moving slowly. I remain a servant to this love; she an unblemished ghost.
If Omsk is a Swan, she will glide over houses; if Omsk is an Alligator, she will eat whom she pleases; if Omsk is a dragon, she will burn up saints like idols in spotlights. If Omsk is a lady; she may love me, she may not.
I leave for some food and drink, coleslaw and some white bread. I come back. The night has moved on. Omsk has not; although it's hard to tell what happens beneath the surface - some ocean full of unknowable things, beyond exploration.
I touch her with my finger nail, some connection is made, a texture in the nail and in her marble coat. Her smoothness and beauty, upon close inspection, is made from a million imperfections that we are blind to see. She is drowned in fierce light and the eye, under this scrutiny, can moon walk her skin, like lips on flesh; the flow, the one, the other. There is no difference now. Omsk, not giving in to the touch of my finger, remains still. She can not come tonight. She is a sea of tranquility.
I am suddenly in panic. I am alone with an egg - what is to become of us?
Time is pulling us together, second upon second, and apart also. Just me and Omsk here in our tower of light, alone. And then somewhere, from the bedroom next door, there is a presence; soundless and dark. I'm sure it knows of eggs and hidden things and it is ticking, just ticking.
Today I googled the phrase ‘marriage laws’ and found out this;
Men cannot marry;
Grandmother
Mother
Mother’s sister
Mother’s half sister
Father’s sister
Father’s half-sister
Adoptive mother
Sister
Half-sister
Daughter
Adoptive daughter
Sister’s daughter
Half-sister’s daughter
Brother’s daughter
Half-brother’s daughter
Granddaughter
So no mention of eggs.
The snow outside came down, now with a sudden thickness, the colour of eggs. I turn up the central heating, to make it warm for Omsk. I find myself incubating her. I find myself wanting her to become what ever it is she is; and yet, I have a grain of doubt.
Sometimes I find myself running – just running , across the landscape like I am fleeing and I don’t know what from; tripping over flailing knees and tipping head first in to the speed I have created and just when I feel exhausted and can run no more; I turn up the speed as if delving into some deep well of black water; wrenching it up, splattering and coughing against the sides of the brick work, nothing but a circle of light ahead. When I run I forget myself.
It used to be the same during sex.
Omsk is all I think about when still. I phoned in ill at the office today. I said I was sick. I didn’t mention that I was in love with an egg.
Love is an illness; that much is true. It is like an addiction but more painful.
I am so scared that when I ask Omsk to marry me, she will say no. I imagine the word ‘no’ and how it goes off inside my head, as pressure releases and the windows blow in, I imagine the pain as the skin is ripped to shreds and the shell cracks.
Sometimes I don’t want Omsk to hatch. What will she be? Will she still love me?
She’s amazing! Did I tell you that? Asleep on her bed, Omsk looks so warm and secure, as if I’m watching her through a plastic crib for the first time. The moon is full tonight, like a stone mill-wheel clinging on to nothing. They both have me tonight. I can’t describe it fully.
I took a photograph of Omsk today and took it up the hill to the spot where I found her. I waited in the naked trees for two minutes or four hours, I didn’t really look. I wanted to see if something came back for the egg. A swan, an alligator, a snake.
Nothing, until a dog came sniffing through the undergrowth. It spied me and stopped. Had it smelt the egg? Did he suspect I had it? Have I kidnapped Omsk? Our gazes were not broken until a woman came up behind it calling. She spied me too and stopped. So now, I had four eyes to stare into.
-What on earth are you doing?
I could feel myself shrinking. I was the size of the dog now, barely above the weeds.
- Are you Ok?
- Yes, I’m err waiting for an alligator.
Then she was gone. The dog too. It was getting dark. The moon had spun into the sky; a big wide tear. The trees had become shadows and the city began to melt under my feet. I knew where happiness was, that moment. I left the photo of Omsk where I found her in case something came back for her. I left my phone number on the back.
Walking back through the city to my flat, I had the feeling that is the reward of all this; the highest of highs. As small as I was, the lights shimmered, kaleidoscoping on wet streets. The city was a cooking pot and drum machines blew crushes from every doorway. I was the riches in the road that moment. I knew where I was going and who I was going to. This was my apartheid. We have become separated in knowledge, you and I. And even before the cold dripping steel of the key slid into the lock; I knew that this was a charmed life.
Sometimes, I want to wake up and the egg be empty and I will never find out what it is that lies there within the shell. How you will unravel from your shell. It is beyond such a fragile mind.
My mother calls. She is worried. I haven’t checked in this week. She misses her baby.
I listen to the answer machine play out and I tell it about Omsk. I couldn’t tell the real one. She can’t cope with change.
She grew into the fifties, a bright young thing, a socialite; out of a universe of post-war gloom and into the space age. She had a Jackie Kennedy haircut, which changed with the blooming of the sixties and meeting a man who looked like Rock Hudson. His power was a draw to such a fragile bird. He was a statesman and an emperor to her. Then, by the end of that decade I carved my name into her side. And I was here.
Did the promise of those long warm summer nights at endless parties, materialize? She swears it did. She clings to it still, in old photos and memories, like she can still taste it. And the blood of the past is still there in the air. She misses her baby.
Yet, you are before such matters Omsk as you sleep in the night. Before life with the space race in front of you, I am in orbit around you; waiting for you to land and you pulling me in.
Times before you Omsk have faded into cliché. My past crumble in your present. Valentines day 2007 and all is quiet but my heart is at war with itself.
I slept with you on the pillow next to me and I had a dream in which my life unraveled itself like my sticky legs were freed and with a SMACK I shouted the room down. It was all there in a hotel, my whole existence within the corridors of this unique world, room after room full of people who I knew or once knew, laughing and living and yet again I was just passing by like a journalist or a ghost. A room for Munich, Rome, Pamplona, Bejing and Omsk. A room for each of my lovers. A room for each of my girlfriends; Elenor , Rachel, Claire, Cathy, Fiona, Sam, Silvia, Angela and Omsk. Could this be heaven? Constantly passing through room after room and each room leads you to another paragraph of you life?
I wake up, midnight, a day of no special consequence and I sense my mother is in danger and that’s when I first heard the electronic voices outside the backdoor.
I have heard the voices since I was five. Lying in bed at night, watching the lights scrape the ceiling clean and white. I have had the same words in my head, over and over. Sometimes I resist them; other times they seem to pull me in, like I am a moth and they are the campfire! It smolders but shines so bright against such an unholy darkness. I am just game here!
The letterbox speaks so loud that it hurts and I can’t shut it out The light finds its way around the curtains.
When I was a child, the words did not compute inside my brain. I received them like a sealed envelope. I feel cut off, like Rachel in Manchester, my little epileptic lover, who would just shut down. When laying in the sun on a field just talking about the only thing we knew ‘our love.’ She would suddenly just stare just out of focus. That was my real time with her; when she was cut off and I had her all to myself. Her petit mals were so engaging, so full of life in their stillness.
I remember lying there in the long grass of Gatley Hill all alone, with my lover. Her face, a stone cold egg, staring out across the fields and down towards the brook. Just seconds before, we had been lost in our private world; our imaginations ablaze in the wild grasses. Then the laughter; and as it petered out I turned and found her frozen in the air, cold as the stream that passed down at the bottom of the hill before the estate and the world began. Her eyes didn’t flicker, just stone still. She was a doll and the most helpless creature that has ever been. I brushed the hair from her face and watched her carefully as people watch the dead. She lay in my arms beyond the birds singing dementedly and the children rolling down the hill in the distance; screaming and yelping. I touched her lips with my fingers and her eyes slowly refocused.
She looked at me quietly for a few seconds in the shade of the long grass. She had come back, quietly, with no fuss.
- I wish we could stay here forever
A lone plane flying from Manchester chalked a line across the sky; slicing us in two. There was a sadness in her voice that I didn’t get; but in later years I recall it as The Knowledge. She had it, I did not.
She lay her head across my chest and we fell silent. The clouds were gathering far out at sea. She knew.
I knew Omsk was scared of the voice in the letterbox. I went to comfort her. The lights were coming in from all sides of the flat now, growing brighter, the voice growing louder.
Rachel didn’t have long to live but she never told me until the last days. I didn’t even guess. I pay everyday for that mistake. I never even saw how she became thin and quiet and her skin changed too. I wasn’t looking out for anything like that. The beauty of her dazzling eyes robbed me of seeing any illness in her. For all my cleverness, I had nothing.
But I do have something. You know that don’t you? My Omsk, frozen in time too, is waiting to be. She is perfect in every dimension. I’m waiting for her to open like a distant eye. I’m waiting for her to change the universe in one breath.
Seventeen years old, Rachel told me on the roundabout, on the park at the bottom of the hill. I had made us into a spin and she and I stared inwardly at each other, leaning back and holding on with hands. She, clearly in focus and a smudge of universe behind; gave me a look of a girl watching a boy on a platform growing smaller and smaller. The last of the summer was squeezed out that night.
The sky grew pink and chilly. The street lights had come on and the orange lamps picked up two faded figures stood by a swing facing each other, one with a head on the others shoulder. I pull her by the collar and smiling I said.
- you can’t. I won’t let you.
I needed her petit mal at that moment. I needed her to freeze and stay like that forever; preserved; never changing; never fulfilling anything.
I’m sat under the letterbox and the voices are still there. I have Omsk in my hands. Silent. She has given me so much without knowing. The light that shines through the curtains floods the room and I’m back there with Rachel again, feeling like I’m about to be executed.
I kiss her and a tear falls down her face and into my mouth. It tastes of glass. Her face is orange as she snorts back the snot and I look in to her eyes and I wait for her to freeze. Nothing.
From a crack in the curtains a neighbour spies a boy and a girl at the end of their journey together and as I look down at Omsk on my knee I start to get the same feeling
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, I can hear the birds outside and see the light behind the curtains.
Remember when you said we were going to go away, where no one could find us? We were going to find our own place somewhere. We could build a house out of wood, on stilts and live in the deep forest, just you and I; remember? We could go where the butterflies are as big as dinner plates and the light changes everything. No? I never said it although I have thought about it often.
To hear you on the telephone after that night, Rachel, was more than I could stand. I felt removed from you, for the first time. Detached; like a painting is from a subject. There I was, at seventeen, sat in the dark at the bottom of the stairs in the old house, trying to fit a life spans worth of words into a few hours we had left. And I was speechless.
The point is this; she wasn’t perfect, I never said she was perfect. She was a bit of a tomboy and she was never the smartest. She was abandoned as a child; then adopted by her parents. She loved art but only ever painted bunny rabbits; like a little girl would. She spoke like a child sometimes. But she was perfect for me, you know? We were not the best jigsaw in the shop but we fitted well together. Where there were dark things, she brought light. Where there was suffering, she brought relief. Where there was science, she brought magic.
Omsk is perfect, because she has no life, just as Rachel is now.
I look out of a chink in the curtain and I see a man on the roof of the building opposite. He is dressed in black armour and he is carrying a weapon. He is as a crow in the persistent rain, fluft out and standing in the umbrella of its own self. The rain, tacks streaks into the glass. If there were a time for Omsk to hatch, if this were fiction, it would be now. I am willing her to show her face, not just her beautiful belly. She will not.
The phone rings and it is a man who wants to know who is here with me. He is softly spoken and kind. I tell him about Omsk. He asks if she is Ok. I say fine. He asks me if I want to come outside. I ask him for what? He says it is just to talk. I tell him I am talking. The phone goes quiet. I put it on the floor.
Somewhere, a long time ago, I was on a gravel path behind the mourners following my girlfriend. She had a beautiful, smooth white coffin that was small and light. I used to pick her up and throw her over my shoulders. Now, on shoulders again, she is carried gravely through this field in silence. Such small steps. Such tiny feet. Scraps of flowers, fading letters and windmills line the path. Cuddly toys; an alligator, a swan, a snake placed beneath shining marble stones, to what end? Then, a magpie clatters over the drizzling horizon. I am momentarily lost to this universe.
The numbness that began that day has only changed by a matter of degrees since. I am, myself, alone.
The heat in the room is changing. The light fading again. And I have brought Omsk to this place so I must stick with her. I do not leave my love ones. They leave me.
There is nothing in the fridge but I am Ok with water. We are ok, Omsk and I, we make a promise to each other to stay for the other. I made that promise before. The body needs so little to survive; just water, a little food, love and hope. And, this is all we are, lest the things we truly do not need!
I have lived without hope for so long; I have forgotten what it tastes of. In my memory it tastes of an English summer in a meadow on Gatley hill; the perfume of young bodies; the drifting shapes of clouds.
I am sat at the table, Omsk sat on it. It has gone dark. There is no electricity. I can just catch the last sheen of her shell in the light that manages through the drawn curtains. I am beginning to lose my faith in her.
Twenty years ago, when they lowered the coffin into the ground, I caught her mother’s eye. She looked at me as if to say, you’ll be Ok! I couldn’t take my mind off the box and it’s shell and the cold earth surrounding it. All I ever needed was in there.
I came back the next day, alone.
From behind a curtain in a house across the road a man sees a crow black figure stood motionless in the rain; a magpie bounces across the wall. He has no flowers, or words or ideas.
A patch of bare earth like a plaster lies silently in the field. The earth will settle they say. Things move on. I will be ok.
I am drunk with hunger. I wanted to tell you a story about an egg. I cannot even do that.
I have begun to think a little more loudly. I hear the rain and it sounds good. I am overpowered by the voices that are creeping under the door and try to get to Omsk and I. My imagination is beyond the ceiling that threatens to fall; bowing with liquid that runs down the walls. The ants are back. Their universe seems so solid; unshakeable hierarchy of ants. I watch them crawl over your skin.
Sometimes, when I sleep, I can hear the forest, talking simply of creatures and drifting airs. I am alone in the bracken by the glass brook. I hear the call of animals, I cannot put a name to, perhaps dragons, swans or eggs! I see the sunlight fall in spots across the floor. The blossom is out again, soon she will fall.
Where am I?
Here with Omsk, I feel an ending, as the spots of lights trace across the curtains, pulling me down.
From the door I spy a man on the roof pointing a gun. I see the police cars in a line, one by one. I will be swallowed by their uniforms. The blues and the reds of the police lights bathe the bricks of the houses opposite with their curtains drawn and their mouths tightly shut. I am beginning to unravel.
Alone, in the dark room for the first time, I close my eyes and light dawns. A bedroom, perhaps a million years ago, full of toys still and the walls a shrine; a dizzy height, overlooking the garden with its shed and your arthritic Labrador. Somewhere, a child wails and voices blunder unintelligibly from the road.
Life is still here, my lovely. So still. I will be soon inside you and I will reach the eggs you have.
That was the first moment of all this. It had to start somewhere. Every moment since, can be traced back to this time; our prehistory!
That’s when I decided to walk out into the lights. After being in the dark for so long I find it hard to see in this glare. I cannot see beyond it. I am made to stretch my arms out wide; like a crow in the comfort of the sky. I am made to kneel before this world.
If Rachel could have become pregnant, I might not be here, kneeling in the dirt, surrounded by police, with an egg in my pocket. Although, you never know, do you?
A dull summer in Gatley, Manchester, a light easterly breeze. I find you lying quietly on the bed, listening to The Smiths, thinking, plotting a way out. You were smarter than me, by a mile. Oh, I had the words, but you had it all. And, all that could have hatched never did. We never stood a chance. Reel around the fountain.
But it’s OK that things don’t hatch, like Rachel or Omsk. Some things never change or lose their way. Some things are above life’s menial demands.
And with the cuffs on in the back of the van I see the city slip by one frame at a time. Shop by shop, the adventures and hatchings of people are revealed, as stills.
Closing Down,
Half Price Sale,
Everything Must Go!
I am quiet in my head and yet I can see the woman in the park hanging from the tree in the mist, swinging on the dog’s lead. She is quiet. Her eyes strain in her face but she is still, the bloody animal at her feet. The city below lies still and permanent. My hands are sore and wet. I can smell her blood. It smells like Rachel’s blood.
Posts
