Scraps

The jaundiced glow of the cheap Argos lamp pervades everything in my memory. Her limbs, her laughter, her love have all been infected by that block-colored flat light.

Sometimes, if I try hard, I can smell the aftermath of her perfume. But I don’t. It tastes of char and ash for a long time afterwards. It is better, always better, to focus on the incidentals.

So I focus on the floor. The anonymous grey carpets of student housing. Hoovered once a week; fat with the accumulated sex and spilled wine and vomit of years, months and days. The carpet is now an abstraction – a symbol of the once real carpet. But soon, soon her feet invade. She had big feet – size 6 at least. I can see her red toenails under the deniers.  I can see the shape of her ankle, now the calves now her knobbly knees.

A raven caws in the garden. The sky turns a dull blue as the clouds foment and gush.

Selfish. Shellfish. Selfish. Shellfish.

Lullabies are for the infant and the geriatric. We must make do with Valentine’s Day gift coupons instead.

She had a boyfriend when I met her. Big-muscles, big-bones, big-jaw our baby boy was a public school golden-haired motherfucker had a slur for an accent and fucking wore fucking tweed and laughed gregarious and lived in Zone II and did not know how the innards of charity shops worked. My job was to bite down and stay. He had his epigrams and smooth cheeks and Ovidian humor. Sure, sure, I said. But I will see you on the other side of sanity, dear something-Huntington. 

Meanwhile, I went to the circus of the flailing limbs. I did Sambuca shots every Friday night and my drunken, ridiculous-grinned, fluorescence-ringed pictures showed up on the club albums. Hey, hey, hey I was doing my bit. You can’t accuse me, mate, of being an effeminate squishy little worm. Yeah, I may be five four but I can down as many as you. You think I can’t pull? I will show you, Mr Fuck-Face Huntington, I will show you.

It was a charnel house. The skulls, clavicles, ribs and joints heaped up on each other till they resembled the pile of limbs they were not. Each skull had once been a full-throated, weak-kneed, heavy-topped sensation, pushing in and pulling out of twilights, midnoons and late evenings.

The clock swished its tail and went on mating with the house lizard. Tick Tick Tick Tick.

Break, heart, break they said, like a big heaving pearl, sweating and birthing, living and dying on the eve of the birth and the dawn of the death.

I said no. No, I am not foolish, merely behind – behind the times, the states, the hours. I will get there oh you will see, I said I screamed.

But then the thin cold line sweat sliding down my spine reminded me that I am nothing, nothing, nothing. Not lyrical, not critical, not poeticall.

If I could eat fish and live amid the lensed up wit like so many around me, I would. I WOULD. But the itch to be bigger gets worse. I scratch and scratch and turn red but not clever. Well read, but never clever. The ossuary of my many lives will tell the story of crossroads and crises. Nothing more.