I lived on a mountain. My house had thick walls made of mud which men had carried on their backs all the way from the river banks of my home country. They were whipped up hillsides, forced over rocks wet with pure river water and through gullies slimy with stinking moss. The rugs in my house had been stitched by the women of my father’s house. They cried over each stitch. I could taste their tears when I put my tongue on the rugs.
It was a good place to live.
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They’ve always been a good-looking couple.
I said, ‘you’ve scrubbed up well,’ to Charlotte when I found her after the ceremony, in the still centre of an eddy of well-wishers.
She smiled. I felt a wash of everything run off her when she smiled, happiness, exhaustion, nervous energy. She smiled with her teeth shut together.
I’d do it. If you wanted me to.
I have taken you to Dr Somerset. He told us there was no more help he could give. I have taken you to Dr Trevellyan. She told us, ‘Could be three months. Could be a year. Some people can continue indefinitely on the medication.’ She told us that you’re not technically suffering. Your pain is deadened by the medication. She said a nurse would come and show me how to soften food and thicken fluids for you. I told her I used to be a nurse and I knew how.
Jolie visits once a week to check on you. She is checking on me. She takes your blood pressure and looks in your eyes. She checks your padding. She inspects your chair to see that it is clean and dry.
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I saw you from the top deck of the 243. I was with Marianne. We were going to see a film. I don’t remember which one. This is what I remember: seeing you. In fact I see you a lot in crowds, coming towards me along an underground platform, turning into a supermarket aisle. But this time it was really You and not just a shadow in a stranger’s face. I am used to the mirage of you.
I’m going to present to you an option: The Life. It’s a modular option. You can choose which modules suit you, but really the idea is to build them up. You won’t appreciate it fully unless you can see the whole. That’s the idea.
In the afternoon. Air too still in the house to breathe. Blood stopped in veins, backing up, thickening. Go into motion; push through. Fingers into fist. The muscle doesn’t rise like it used to. Moles slide along skin under which a bicep is now less visible. Push through.
It wasn’t long afterwards that I began to think of myself as apart from other people. I no longer felt part of the mass ebb and flow. I became, perhaps a little too, aware of my own uncontrolled jostling in eddies of circumstance.
Physical signs quickly followed. The first was probably the sharpening of my back teeth. I ran my tongue along them and drew my own blood. The taste of it was exotic and quickening. I cut my tongue a few more times, just lightly. Blood drained down my throat.
I’ve learned two ways to look at each thing. In this manner I navigate from one breath to another. Sometimes things seem hopeless, and as though there’s nothing I can do. I use the two ways to make the situation turn around. I learned the two ways from some programme on daytime television, whichever programme it was is lost in a purée of memories of listless afternoons.
During these days in between the seasons I sprawl on my bed in my sixth-floor two-room apartment in the city that has adopted me, in a country that is not mine. I spend my time eating toast and watching people from the single small window of my apartment. There’s a woman I often see. She looks about thirty, or thirty five, or thirty six. In this weather she wears light strappy summer dresses. She hustles a black hulk of a Victorian pram and a little boy up the street past my building a couple of times a week. She wrestles the pram up and over the street kerbs, it seems improbably weighty. The little boy messes about and gets smacked on his ear for it; on their way back he is usually occupied with a lollipop or packet of crisps. The woman arranges plastic bags around the pram and her floral dress is damp down the middle of her back and sticks to her body. They don’t notice me, I think, leaning on my elbows out of my window. Continue reading
By the time that the river finally spoke to me I’d almost given it up as mute. I’d spent weekends and evenings squatting in the muddy riverbank. Getting my trainers dirty. Pulling up spokes of grass and sticky weed leaves that turned my fingernails green and yellow. I would sometimes chat with thrumming insects, or pass the time companionably with shrill local birds. The birds harvested my insect companions. Maybe the insects were ignorant of the dangers of those red and black open beak triangles swooping towards them. I didn’t warn them. This is the natural rhythm of the riverbank, and I thought that I must keep time with it if I were ever to hear the river. I tried my best to tune out the burble of the fauna and the grumble of traffic passing over the bridge. I would sit with my head tipped to one side, ears focussed on the meandering folds and brown swirls of the River Hull.
This river splits my city clean in two, dockers’ East to fishermen’s West. Sometimes I feel as though we are two cities, sharing a moat. Further towards the mouth of the River Hull, where this winding tongue of water kisses the River Humber, are my favourite sections. There’s the part with the solid dark cocoa smell. There’s the part with the permanently raised halves of a once-was-bridge, now mossed over and shackled to each bank. I waited upstream, where it was quieter, where I could sneak up close to the water.
The riverbank animals and birds were surprisingly nonchalant about me, a human with whom they could converse. I tried to copy their indifference, but I could never control that twisting in my stomach when one would tell me, ‘hello again’.
I sought their advice on how to speak with the river. But their general disinterest in my presence extended to this topic. If they could shrug, they would have. I could never jump to my feet and, demanding answers, exclaim, ‘This is a conspiracy of silence!’ Any confrontational tone in my voice or posture caused even my most talkative contacts to scatter.
I varied my approach now and then. With my notepad and pencil stuck in my back pocket, I would pace up and down the bank flinging questions over my shoulder as though answering were not optional. Another tack that I trialled was to crouch in a self-made hide. Putting a finger to my lips to ask for complicity from my winged or furry comrades, I would pretend that I was not there. I thought that perhaps the river kept quiet when I was around.
The entire idea was absurd. It didn’t work. My belief that the river had a voice began to waver.
And then on Saturday the twenty-seventh of July (according to my notes), I heard a definite sigh. I knew that it must be the river: the sound curved through the air in the same implacable undulations with which its originator cut through my city. I pulled out my pencil, found an empty page in my notebook, checked the time on my ‘phone and wrote with a shaking hand, 11.37. The river expresses an audible heavy sigh.
I had learnt to hear the river.
I cleared my throat. Nervous sweat prickled under my arms and across my hairline. I ran through my pre-prepared questions in my head. My questions were stupid; I discarded them all. With a dry tacky tongue I barely remember asking, “What can you tell me?”
