hagiography

The woman walks, her stupid feet, attached to her stupid legs, operate on neural impulses from her stupid brain.

She moves under the milky spring sunshine, through streets slick with people, past windows oiled with invitation.

Snapshots, that she will never remember, freeze on her retina momentarily: a small white dog, puppyish with pink eyes; a woman carrying a grey parasol; another woman who is all ass and hips; a pair of winkle picker latticed shoes (brown); a bald man in a tracksuit.

She walks, she walks, an endemic rhythm possessing her body, the vital viral pushing her onwards, a slow song of peace playing through her headphones.  She would sing, except it is not ‘the done thing’.  She would dance, except it is not ‘the done thing’.  Instead, she walks.

A security van bleeps a warning.  People must step away.  The general populous are busy in their indifference.  Concrete underfoot and on either side.  Grey should alarm people, but no noise escapes, nothing escapes.

Patterns, black and white on a skirt, the cracks in the pavement, the curl on the crown head in front, totally unique and completely unnoticed, perhaps his lover knows that whirl, most probably not.  To reach out and touch is not ‘the done thing’.

In the stationers she buys a ‘Little Black Book’, it says so on the front, later that day she will offer it to a friend, along with a credit card, to cut up his lines of coke.  Other purchases, light bulbs, but she doesn’t want to be blinded so she chooses the lowest wattage.  It is a myth to think that the more light we have the clearer things are.

She pauses her stereo, and notices her knuckles and chipped nail varnish.  Faces all around her, like boiled sweets, some people are lemon, others orange, but she prefers the blackcurrant.  What are these plastic wrappers that obscure?  Are ears the twizzle ends?

She walks one way, until she realises she has forgotten her umbrella, so she retraces her steps and asks … of course, of course, she describes the item and remembers instantly why she never used to carry umbrellas and always wore a hat.  ‘You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on.’  Well yes, but what use a stupid head containing a stupid brain?

Sometimes, when she’s outside, the world doesn’t seem like a chocolate milkshake topped with popcorn.  Sometimes, everything shrinks, gets sort of squashed, compressed, seems wider than it is taller.  It’s hard when you’re not looking through your normal eyes, when everything seems fatter and wider.  It’s a visual disturbance, she’s used to it.  You can get used to almost anything, a beating for breakfast, debt for dinner, anything, normal is just familiar after all, and familiarity breeds contempt  or comfort, depending on your mood.

The tobacconist is a cacophony of jars filled with flakey brown worms.  The man behind the counter always wears short sleeved, checked, cotton shirts.  He smiles a urine stained smile.  If she smoked a pipe she would be confident, but she only wants coca cola rizla (her favourite).  Money exchanges hands and she is reminded of the metallic taste in her mouth.  It goes with the flat people and the black at the edges of her vision.

She walks.

In ‘The Dorset’ the waitress smiles, all coiffured and perfectly made up.  Her skin is the colour of the latte that the woman doesn’t want.  There is some momentary chit chat about the early hour, as the woman tries to find the right change for a black filter and croissant.  The knives in this place are so perfect, the butter so wrapped in gold.  Does that make us feel better, the packaging of jewellery, expense?

Everyone in the coffee bar is alone, seated in alienation, perfect in exclusion, nodding along to the Latin American invocation to a good day, a good life, a pleasure, a goldness of existence, gimme brown sugar, gimme coffee, gimme tobacco.

Her pen doesn’t work, no purple ink will come out.  She could ask to borrow one, but somehow the admission of need and the desire to share cuts her short.  She’s short anyway, always infinitely diminished and needy.

She rises, plugs herself back into the music, the personal, the stereo that will separate and alienate.  She can walk with these people and live around them, but she cannot be with them and their noise of traffic and chatter.  The slick spring half sunlight slides around her outside.  It’s almost a promise of summer, that strong harsh sun that she hides from.  She hides from everything, most of all, herself, but today, today, it’s different and she tries to find and name this feeling, so she can remember and live in it, so she can find that place, milky and nutritious, alone but connected in the only way she can manage.

Stupid brain, stupid goddamn brain.