Something New

I have time and yet my time elapses leaving me frustrated and disillusioned. Each day I age and I am aware of an accelerating sense of purposelessness, my sight is increasingly ineffectual in dim light and likewise my desire for life diminishes as the light of youth fades.

My daughter is a celebrity and I am not. She has a circle of self-defined fabulous friends and I have long walks alone with my dog. We rarely talk and when we do it is over the phone, she will set down the handset and use hands-free; we will converse about nothing, our words for all in her proximity to hear. The dog enjoys being out and about, when we are out she can run and run but when we return she will lay forlorn and wait for my wife to return. I am sure she lives for her predisposition to flush out game and my wife’s affections. All else is disappointment.

I live on the side of a hill and today the hill fog matches the colour of the walls of my bedroom. It is silent except for the ringing in my ears and a stiff wind that is shaking the trees, but only a fraction of the changing air pressure or the movement of the branches gets through my windows. I have some paid work to do but it is dull and I cannot help but put it off. There is wood to chop, a house to clean, some food to prepare. I have a friend to ring another to see. Tonight I plan to go to see people in a village pub near where I used to live, but I may not. I used to go frequently, local and accessible, although I was an outsider, and a socially inarticulate one at that, I got by. Sometimes I felt one of them, generally middle aged like myself or a little older.

At 5pm my daughter’s latest venture is on the second channel. It’s an hour or two away yet but I have yet to work out what I shall find as an excuse for not watching. Still, hosting a 5pm teen show should hopefully mean that she will be mostly covered up. Made me laugh yesterday to see a female journalist from the Daily Mail bemoaning a bar where the on-duty all-girl waiting staff was dressed not so much differently from off-duty porn stars. At 11pm my daughter will be making gags about porn and flirting outrageously with her guests. My daughter is on the Daily Mail’s hit list of inappropriate young women. Little do they know that their ageing proprietor has been sleeping with my daughter’s ‘second best friend’ on and off for a while now; maybe the journalist was disappointed with her own ability to reach the parts of the organisation that others could fellate so easily.

I could pose a few questions for the journalist. What is the good of drinking poison in the hope that revenge will be served upon those who’ve trespassed against us? Do I give something of value to myself when I am bitter about my failures? Why do I drink my own vitriolic poison and hope for the best? I don’t think she’ll get it though. Apparently during a photo opportunity outside the bar one of a passing group of lads shouted she should get her tits out and then had voluntarily retracted after noticing she didn’t have any. Her point was that nothing had moved on and that feminism had seemingly lost ground again to male chauvinism. And where’s the economic imperative in that love?

I wish it were so

Admonished and sullen she sits to write but cannot get her father out of her mind. He is contradictory despite his protestations, hypocritical and still prone to behave as he did when she was very young. Mixing up sentences to make her laugh, creating sentences planned to amuse from a combination of splintered words.

She pushes around her desk the document she has to reword. It's clarity and structure dismantled by the garishly tracked changes imposed upon it. The paper was a chore from the very beginning, a proposal for change that contained nothing but old ideas; new ideas being excluded from her brief as everything had to be evidenced as achievable. I am beautiful she momentarily dreams, an involuntary sweep of interwoven self love and the physical discomfort borne of long hours typing pushes her back into her reclining desk chair, she stretches and rotates her shoulders, tenses her calf muscles with her legs lengthened and her thigh muscles taut and pressed together. The sexual surge only causing to heighten the absurdity of her office life. God I'd like to do something about this feeling she knowingly considers, unspoken even within her unconscious; but felt nonetheless.

The absurdity of her days is suddenly no longer a worry. A memory of her father's easy way of reducing her to giggles causes her tension to dissipate. The paper can wait she thinks and so she picks up the phone and arranges to meet him.

Voyeur

“What if the door is locked?”

“And what if it’s not? Your constant pessimism is so wearing”. He scrapes at the ground with a twig, not purposefully but negatively wearing away at the earth, flicking stones away, digging in to root out a channel. “Why should everything be against us?”

“Well you just assumed that it’s alright, no one said that said we can”.

It is two hours since I was disturbed, forced to hide, but I’ve managed to remain unnoticed, I have learnt to do this.

Crouching, uncomfortable and wet, my calf muscles aching under the compression my posture is placing on them, my lower back is tight and painful. It has taken weeks for me to lose the urge to dampen my fingers with my tongue, a magnetic habit that I had acquired before adulthood, but the dirt ingrained in my fingers is drawing them toward my mouth. I perceive stress as dryness in my hands; even though I am no stranger to filth I feel dirt the same way. A dry branch has caught against my sleeve and if I move there will be a sure consequence, a snap, a cause so simple as to effect my discovery.

I cannot see them but their voices sound weak, I picture them emaciated, lank hair matted, with lice, like me. Both of them have the bitterness of strong people no longer able to be the source of their own determination colouring the timbre of their voices. I wonder if once they had all of their material lusts satiated, were considered beautiful among their peers. Beauty lost becomes a source of suffering; poor beauty becomes incarnate.

“Do you think that guy who use to own this place is around? I’ve heard that he’s still here somewhere.”

The question brings a light and casual laugh and he pauses before saying “You know, I think I wish he were, now.”

His sudden change in mood seems to give her confidence. “Me too, I’m sure we could all help each other. He knows every brook and gully”.

“Hey do you remember when you first bought me up here and we found him, meditating? We had that fabulous Lamb that you roasted and he had that crazy smoke.”

So I know them, God that’s disconcerting, I am frightened and hopeful. I don’t remember that time, but I do remember their voices now; I think that we were friends though I have my doubts the term is appropriate. I discovered this place much earlier than any of my temporary acolytes; I was seeking refuge, to recede from an incessant life but, weak, came to hope that strangers would arrive. They did of course pulled-in by the parties that I put on. They weren’t exactly wild but there was enough of everything to fill whatever short term emptiness arose. I was happy to fund it all.
Those who came were younger people predominately, some seeking to retain a carefree spirit in their hatch-battened corporate lives, some just hedonists, others thinking that this part of the world may hold a secret. I never held much truck with mysticism.

“Look it’s getting late, have you any idea where we are going or shall we pick our way back?” The frustration in her voice is rendering her hatefully.

“Does it matter? The time I mean? We’ll know exactly where we are in the morning, and then we can get to the cabin, make a fire, take a wash and have a good sleep. God, it’s only one night in the open, we know that we’re safe here; we could hear anyone coming for miles if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“So much for a fun time then”

She says this with such resignation, her broken heart had hoped for something on which to rest, a few days of visions, childlike, slowly entering her consciousness but car, bed and shower are strong forces.

Within the cage there is kindness
And other forces some unknown
I lean against an old wall waiting
With tricks to play wood on stone.

It’s a song that I wrote when people listened. I thought that they always would.

“Once these things mattered to you” he said.

She continues in her resigned mode, the same as contentment just moved along, same life, same actions, but a different tonal centre. It is now so dark that I cannot see a thing. She begins to hum the tune to my song. The compulsion to lick my fingers strengthens with the compulsion to show myself too. I am so frightened of being exposed I am held in stasis. As each desire grows the other keeps it firmly in check.

“They do matter. Still. Look, if we head back to car we should meet that trail, the one which leads up to the ridge. It’s a clear sky now, the moon should be up soon, we can hopefully see the copse and then make our way down to the hut. I want to do this, for you, for us. I wish he’d never sold it, especially to those two bores.

“Good girl, that’s the spirit. And if we can’t work it out from the ridge, we’ll head back to the car, sleep there overnight and find our way in the morning.”

He’s pleased, his enthusiasm is almost unbridled. I can hear him take hold of her, the whispered intimacies. They crunch away across the floor of leaves and rotting wood, back the way they came.

I wait for maybe five minutes so as to be sure that they have gone. Numb limbs, stiffened and sore it takes me a long time to make my body move freely again. The hut is only a few metres distant. I pick my way at ninety degrees to the path they took, up the hill and find a more comfortable place to watch and wait. I hope that they will find it again. I want to see who they are, see if I remember them.

I sold the hut because I didn’t want to be responsible. Loneliness is cause for despair though it is better than death and some lives are so deathly.