This is me Breathing

Eyes wide open

2008-09-04T14:58:00.000-07:00

We weren't sure what to do, in those last days. We made lists: those things we hadn't yet done, those things we had and wanted to do again. In the backs of notebooks, on receipts. It could have been a way of putting it off.

He took me to a place of his, in the deep heart of the earth. We reached it when the day had grown tall enough for shafts of light to probe the whiterock gully floor, where the river ran. He had timed it for that.

We leave our packs in the shade. A little further downstream, there is a round-shouldered boulder sunk deep in the way of the river. We stand at the top and watch sunlight dance on the surface of the dark pool below. I have a memory of a younger self letting fall a palmful of borrowed coins into a wishing pond, somewhere far away from here and many years ago. They caught the sun like that, flashing silver for a brilliant instant before winking out forever.

He used to jump from there, as a boy. He has told me this before, and now I stand on the rock and guess the length of the fall to the pool below. Too far. He is going to jump it today, I am not.

He turns back to get ready, but I don't move. And I think:

don't think.

The pull is so strong that I almost walk off the edge fully clothed. I am certain, in that moment, that if I pause I will remember I don't want to do it. I kick off shoes, t-shirt, trousers. Walk forward.

Now, I say to him. Now or I never will.

The edge is rounded, uncertain. I can feel it through my bare soles as I balance there. I am shaking.

He watches. I wait, breathing hard. Staring ahead into the dappled shade beyond the pool.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

Long seconds unroll in the shafts of sunlight from high above. My leg muscles tense, but refuse to respond.

I tell myself: one instant of will is all it takes. After that it is too late. One instant-

I jump.

I fall.

And the world does not end.

Hospitality

2008-07-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

The directions are as follows, scrawled into a page of my notebook:

Travelling on the M1 South, take Boysens Rd off-ramp and keep travelling away from Gold Reef City. Once on Boysens turn left at the second set of traffic lights, into Mentz st. At the next set of lights turn left onto Ophir Boysens Rd that becomes Soweto Highway. Continue along this road to Soweto through Orlando East into Orlando West. Turn left into Carr St.

The Mzimhlophe Ark is next to a block-house grocery store, with badly handpainted signs on the wall for various products. It is low-rise land, packed dirt, one-storey houses trailed through the dust, cracked stones showing their teeth where the rain has worn grooves into the earth. On the edge of the Soweto highway, an old man in holed clothes is stooping down to pick up a piece of rusted scrap metal, perhaps car undercarriage, to add to the collection hanging from his arm.

The Ark itself is housed in an old bottleshop, the brick cash counter still preserved in the bottom half of the front room walls, now built onto with thin partitions that don’t quite reach the ceiling. Within that one building is a reception area (a couch, some armchairs, a low coffee-table, a framed copy of the South African constitution, thumbtacked children’s paintings, an exuberant bunch of plastic flowers, and a set of frayed papier mache chairs), a kitchen (an iron frame that three industrial-sized pots can rest on, a gas canister, a table), the preparation area (along one side handmade cubbyholes with handmade notes identifying the contents: “spices”, “flour”, “meal”, along another a narrow countertop where tall stacks of bread are being buttered), the manager’s office (three beaten-up chairs, a desk, a phone, a friendly mess of papers stacked on the desk, floor, and all flat surfaces), a toilet (locked), a storage shed (gleaming silver racks of donated bicycles leaning companionably against one another, silver helmets dangling from their bars, and in the corner, a jumble of second-hand, sadder, smaller bikes, with stunted parts missing), a room for meals (rows of plastic tables festooned with upended plastic chairs, empty save for two women with an ironing board and a neat pile of lime-green t-shirts, matching lime-green baseball caps heaped to one side), and a classroom of sorts (ceiling-high stacks of the same plastic chairs, rows of crayoned drawings, three boys at a dontated computer, painstakingly drawing in an old version of Microsoft Paint).

We meet the manager, a beaming man introduced to us as Martin, whom the other staff refer to as baba, or father. We sit in the well-worn front room, making introductions, exclaiming over the cloth mural hung at one end, and listening to what goes on in this little place.

I am there as a representive of an NGO, to hear about their activities, their needs. They tell us about the hundred-odd children who arrive every day for breakfast and lunch from the big tin pots, about the homework supervision classes and the reading groups, about the victories of their lime-green bicycle team, which practise every Saturday on the streets around this area, raising the dust.

The two women who were buttering bread come in, bearing a tray of teacups and buns. I hesitate, thinking of the rows of empty tables where the children eat, the half-bare kitchen, the second-hand, frayed edges of everything, thinking of what this offering costs. It seems too much to accept.

But, I realise, to refuse would be worse. So we cradle the cups of hot chocolate on our knees and listen, and laugh, and do what we can to be deserving of this hospitality.

Up and Away

2008-07-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

We have the video still, and it tells the story better than words ever could:

Two pairs of sockless feet waving out a car window, toes wiggling in the sunshine, as the mountains of the Karoo rush by, as life rushes by.

I know how the backseat of that car tastes, of damp seat-sponge and shoe-dust and fresh-baked bread. The tomatoes rolling on the back shelf, a feathery head on my shoulder as we roll too, like kittens, soft-limbed and lazy and tangled. The bags at our feet, under our elbows, on our laps - like the barely-there mornings when we used to pile everything into our car for the long drive to France, cushioned in on all sides by belongings, pressing our faces to the window to say goodbye to the cat (who always knew and sat ramrod stiff with her back to us, refusing to forgive).

I know what came before, hours and hours before, before there was a road to wave toes at. The yawning dawn reunion at the top of High Street, eyes gummed half shut, trailing hastily packed suitcases. We put our faces to the window too then, to say goodbye to our temporary hometown, still asleep in the mist and the quiet that lays itself down before the day awakes.

We stopped an hour out of town at a farm stall, to inhale the morning smells of baking and vetkoeks griddling and coffee percolating and plan our route in the air - a vaguely gestured finger the seven hundred kilometres from there to our destination. In the parking lot there were two men, cradling pigeons in their hands. They passed them over to us, powdered downy things that struggled as we held them to our chests, then swung them out, up and out into the air, where - snap - wings unfurled and flight! Oh! Hearts fill, watching them take to the sky and wheel, smaller and smaller into the sharp speck of the sun.

I know what came next too, after the video stops. Put your arms out, one of us said. And we did, seven arms out into the blind-white sun, into the soft-strong slipstream that sucks at your fingertips, both wonderful and awful.
Up, he said, and down.
Up, and down.

A flock of finger feathers, beating slowly, then faster, until one little green car out to conquer the world must surely lift up, up, up and away.

Loosened endings

2008-04-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

They sit in a cardboard shoe-box at the foot of my bed. A fleece-lined sweater. A white shirt. Two well-thumbed books; some homemade CDs. A bottle of aftershave, half-full.

They have been there for three months. They could be anything, a nondescript collection. Everything.

But not everything. Some things I have kept. On my bookshelf, a book I loved too much. A stuffed animal with a friendly face. A journal already written in.

If the goal were to erase, there are other things too, so many things carrying memories in their tucks and folds. Sometimes I wonder if I should burn them. Sometimes I think it would be the neatest solution.

But the things in the shoebox are not mine to destroy. Not his either. They are unwanted, unclaimed. I look up the word that is rattling in an unnamed corner of my mind.

or·phan (n): those words or short phrases at the end or beginning of paragraphs that are left to sit alone at the top or bottom of a column — separated from the rest of the paragraph.

Tonight I go through them again, for the last time. I pluck a ragged scrap of paper from its place as a bookmark; my handwriting.

I think again about burning, but I know I won't. Instead I put them away, in an old cupboard where things go that have no other place to go. I don't want to erase, just lay to rest.

To find a home for all these loose endings.

Creative Destruction

2008-03-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

There is a city that to me will always be the sound of ice.

When you are alone, in an unknown place, every sound is magnified, every detail noted. It is possible, that on another day, with other people, I would not have noticed. But touching down alone, the wheels of my case click-click-clicking over airport concourses, and pavement slabs, and cold station tiles, I hear everything.

The snow has melted from the streets, leaving stray traces that only the everyday detective would see: darkened slush in the nook where the kerb meets the road, an untouched snow-pillow atop a scooter shroud, the cold drop of rain from a brilliantly clear blue sky.

(When I ask later, I find they have a name just for the rain that falls when the snow on high buildings melts, the rain that lives a second life)

And in an empty suburban street, the whirr of a straw-basketed bicycle fading away somewhere unseen, I begin to hear it fully. A soft whump, as a parked car sheds its load of snow in the morning sun. A syncopated tinkle of meltwater drips on a metal drain cover. The heavy whispering of whitened branches that let loose a small blizzard of snowflakes that are not snowflakes but feathery clumps of them, falling for the second time to earth.

In the deserted silence of this workday morning, the dying snow is playing me music.

And days later I discover a new note: the sound of an icicle, dashed like crystal against the wall of a wooden chalet. We snap them from the eaves, foot-long and smoothly ridged, instruments of the cold that we play tunelessly. Our breath smoking in the night air. And all night long the snow falls, covering our footprints.

Breathing exercises

2008-02-08T01:34:00.000-08:00

It is odd how it is the smallest of things that restore faith in the largest. The precise angle of the sun behind the avenue trees. The rich froth on the top of a coffee. And, quite without warning, the world is as it should be again.

Never Quite The Same River

2008-01-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

Everything is still the same when I return. Even the pictures on my noticeboard are there, pinned at the same off-angles.

I lie back on my bed the first day and stare at the ceiling, wondering what I feel. And I hope that I can begin to write again.

The suitcases are unpacked now, clothes folded and books shelved. And yet the words won't come. There is a bruise that feels deep, too deep.

This may be a separating page, or it may be a postscript; a pause or a full stop.

I suppose I feel a need to say goodbye. This has been a good place to share with you all. I hope it will be again.

Many happy returns

2007-10-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

It was a bad day, that day. The thought of being alone on the flight was eating at me. She had come to see me off, but she would leave after a few minutes. I held onto my bags and tried to concentrate on the moving queues, the information boards, numb.

She gasps suddenly. Then her hand is in mine and I am being steered firmly, away from the check-in area, through the crowds, and abruptly, stopped face to face with a boy I do not know.

I look at him, confused, then at her.

"Look," she says, pointing.

I think, of all the days.

He is holding a large, white, hand-made sign. It reads: Free Hugs.

I start to laugh, a spontaneous prayer of thanks. When you need it most, the world returns it to you tenfold.

Then I hug him.

Amoris vulnis idem sanat qui facit

2007-09-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting accross from her, between the two boys, and I started to cry then. I don't remember what brought it on - a word, an image -

and as I crumpled in on myself she caught me

somehow up from her seat and over by my side, so quickly that at first I didn't know who was holding me,

pulling me into their ams and rocking me back and forth

like a child in a mother's arms.

Berg Winds

2007-09-20T11:02:00.001-07:00

There must have been rains, recently. For although the earth is dust now, bone white and bone dry, there is evidence preserved within it: spindly three-toed bird tracks, a string of jackal prints. And hoof-marks, of blessbuck and springbok and red-hart wildebeast, like sectioned strawberries, like cloven flint spearheads, like arrows on a crumpled map, pointing this way and that. I like the crunch of them underfoot.

We walk on, past white thornbush and feather-edged cacti, not quite desert, not quite bush.

And then, just ahead, evidence made flesh: they stand, white-socked, curious on the path, horns pricking the empty sky. Then one shies, and suddenly they are all in flight, like the trickle of sand when it turns almost liquid, a golden stream flowing across the path, fleeing us.

One of my felow hikers pauses.

"Feel that?"

I stop too. There is a warm wind picking up across the Burntkraal hills.

"That's called a 'Berg wind. Comes down from the mountains. Hot."

I breathe it in, smell the land it's come from.

"It means change is on the way."

We stay like that for a moment, feeling it play across our bare skin.

Then we walk on.

One last day

2007-09-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

His hands shook that morning, holding his spoon over
the breakfast neither of us wanted to eat
(force yourself to swallow)
and later again I noticed
held his hands in mine to still them
as he said by way of explanation
I guess you're not the only one being brave today.

Beautiful Lives

2007-07-12T04:09:00.000-07:00

It was the package that began it all.

I had meant to wait until I could get home and close my bedroom door, but the cool gloss of the corridor with its dully gleaming postboxes set flush into the walls and its small etched sign reading: mailroom, and the view of the bright campus lawns through the far open door and the evening warmth all conspire together, and it seems suddenly churlish not to respond to this perfect moment.

So I tear it open, and it is the warm, worn edges of the book that strike me first, soft under my fingers like an old, loved friend. I open the first page and begin to read it there and then, hardly seeing the stone steps under my feet or the avenue trees casting their dappled shade or the clusters of students passing by with their own well-worn secrets.

I notice a parting in the pages, and find a note slipped in there in your hand. This image: hugging the book to my chest in pure delight, caught in the streamers of green and gold light from the oak trees planted generations before. A lesson: life can be unapologetically beautiful and still true.

At the corner of the street I stop to settle on a set of steps that look particularly inviting. Some friends come by and I put the book away to walk with them, into a changed world.

And you see, I knew: before I saw the two white-shirted girls rolling down the sloping lawns, before my small sound of delight, before my friend turned to find its source, before our eyes met in a little shock of understanding, before we vaulted over the low wall and left our bags discarded -

two pairs of tossed-off shoes

a trail of laughter

and lying in a heap watching the puff-clouds drift, covered in grass stalks, we feel sorry for the girls who pass us by, hesitating at our invitation, unable, unwilling.

I knew it would happen. Because of the package. Because you reminded me that we create every moment, the way we wish it.

Making and remaking the world to suit our dreams.

Barefoot

2007-05-31T05:14:00.000-07:00

It is an evening when you can touch the world, hold every part of it and understand that these are not things apart from you;
glass
streetlamp
lock of hair
wooden chair
star
- they are all revealed, all part of the whole.

And in this sudden glow of understanding - and it does glow, touching everything with a halo of light - you sit and breathe and smile, for no reason and every reason.

A story comes to you then. You read it in passing today, by accident, but like a jigsaw puzzle piece you have been carrying curled in your palm, you see suddenly where it fits

- perfectly.

So you start to tell it aloud, in a little restaurant in South Africa. An old speech by Desmond Tutu.

He talks about his time with the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. He shares a few different memories from it, one of which is about an incident many many years ago.
The ANC were banned, but a group of ANC supporters had decided to march peacefully.
And, like so many similar moments in history, around the world and in different places, they were shot upon by the defence forces.
And some were injured and killed.
It was an incident which went straight to many people's hearts and stayed there.

Yesrs later, Tutu was chairing the Commission when this incident was being looked into.
The day it was heard the room was packed with people
and with great emotion.
And he personally was aware that this was an incident which upset him, and was tense himself.
The commander of the defences forces went up first, and what he said upset the people gathered there further.
There was a very bad feeling in the room, a lot of hurt.

Then the four men directly under the commander came up. Three black men, and a white man.
The men who gave the orders to shoot.
So tense now.

and the white man stepped forward and he said
please
forgive
us

and everything just changed

There was applause, great noisy applause, and when the noise stopped
Tutu said in a whisper

we ought to take off our shoes

(and here you start to cry as you are telling it,
and the person across the table from you does too)

because we are standing on holy ground.

And you can hear a retelling from a retelling and it still has that same utter beauty,
a beauty with no answer other than to sit with tears streaming down your faces, gazing at each other in sheer awe
in the presence of it
knowing it to be true
knowing that people have this within them
that it does exist
when we find the way.

let there always be people who seek to show us that way.

Film Review

2007-05-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

I could try to lay out fragments of it for you, dissected.

The frayed edges of life,
and sadness
the broken pieces that rub against one another, the sound of broken glass grating
painfully;
the knife-edge of youth, when anything is possible,
an eternal moment unchanged by what does happen
the point at which endless alternative paths forward exist, and always exist
captured in a snapshot;
and the word
un-coffined
and a man keening in a half-empty classroom

But I can think of no better review than this:

that they stayed in their seats as the lights went up, every person in that theatre, unmoving, uncaring, the silent credits rolling by unseen.

tiny miracles

2007-05-28T02:20:00.000-07:00

Jane says: I am living in a miracle.

It should be too early on a Sunday morning for miracles, that slightly bleached-out time on an empty stomach, before the smell of freshly percolating coffee gets inside the day. The wind is chasing stray leaves in under the door, skittering like mice across the tiles. I am dreaming of butter melting on golden slices of toast.

We have been talking about many things, about big and small challenges, and battles to wage. But somehow, talking about these things with Jane, you find yourself building strategies rather than bemoaning defeat. There are white horses and pennants and other days to fight, and there is such a thing as the army of good.

She takes students up to get tested, she tells us. Whenever there is a need, or a reason to be concerned. She's been doing it for fourteen years.

She's never had a student test positive. She beams as she tells us this.

A miracle, she says.

In the tree today there were tiny birds, so small I stopped and involuntarily put my hand up, as if to measure them. They can land on the layer of algae on the pond surface outside my window without creating a ripple, as though walking on water. When they perch on a thin curved stalk of the pampas grass that sprouts from the bank, it justs dips a little lower into the pond.

They are too small to exist; perfectly, impossibly tiny.

When I see them I believe in miracles. I believe in people like Jane.

Joy is...

2007-05-19T07:23:00.001-07:00

... two young boys on a borrowed bicyle barrelling down the hill towards us, one across the bar and the other holding him tight, both bellowing with excitement at the sky, sunshine, passing trees, and at us as we jump onto the grass verge out of their way.

And it is also how we applauded them as they flew by, celebrating with the contagiousness of their abandoned joy. And how one of them looked back in astonishment at us when we did, still yelling, for several long seconds, leaving the bicyle and its cargo without a navigator.

And how even after they gave the bike a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill to tumble out harmlessly onto a soft grassy landing, both boys scrambled to their feet to look curiously back up the hill at us, two girls much too old to understand the secret exhilaration of that first dangerous flight.

Acts of creation

2007-05-10T02:22:00.000-07:00

A hot water bottle. That's what knitting was for me before here. A seemingly-endless hot water bottle in the shape of an armless, thick-set snowman. One of those singularly ugly things you eventually bring home from school, which is halfheartedly used once or twice before being relegated to the washbasket, then to the back of the airing press, and then finally, with no fanfare and considerable quiet relief on the part of all those involved in its brief and pointless existence, to the bin.

Knitting was unfashionable.
Knitting was disempowering.
Knitting was for old women.

The door opens again, and two boys tumble in, propelled by the force of their pent-up hesitation outside, both pushing each other in a flail of arms and legs.

They scuff around the room in a familiar pattern - first one will go to the table and grab whatever we have brought in, while the other will make unspecified, undirected noise, until myself or Lydia begin to explain the rules of the room to them in a schoolteacherish voice. One or both will then shout at the ceiling in Xhosa, refusing to make eye contact, while twisting out of our grasp as we make an attempt to steer them out by one arm. Maybe a old tennis ball or a broom handle will make an appearance at this point, and be flung around wildly, just short of striking us, but connecting solidly with a fellow student, or a piece of furniture. The one whose idea it was will then lose interest and make a loud and destructive exit, probably snatching away something from one of the other students before slamming the Grade 7 door closed behind them.

The room takes in a deep, quiet breath. The little dust-storms settle. Someone picks up the chair that has been knocked over.

The boy left behind makes the usual sheepish face they all offer when the regular drama has played itself out, and finds a place to sit. He meekly accepts the oversize needles I hand him, and with clumsy fingers together we loop the wool, and push it through, and pull it over, and count: one stitch. Then two, then three.

And I realise he is shaking with concentration. When he turns to beam at me as we reach four stitches I can see tiny beads of sweat along his hairline. Across the room on another plastic chair Xolisani is crouched over the points of his needles, squinting for want of his lost glasses (last seen somewhere in the long grass by the train tracks). Near him, Vuyelwa is winding the dark pink wool she picked out around one needle, as Lydia coaxes her along in a low voice. Siyabulisa has his mouth scrunched up in concentration, hissing as he drops a stitch and holds out his work for Brij to put to rights.

It is the quietest twenty minutes I have ever had at Amasango.

When the security guard comes to lock up, we finish up the lines being worked on - knotted, uneven, dropped, but created nonetheless, something that would not have existed otherwise. We pack the needles away into plastic carrier bags full of odd balls of wool, wool donated by girls in our residence, friends overseas, parents passing through. I pick up my bag, and my scarf (my unspeakably beautiful scarf that Lydia knitted me over many weeks, while walking to the shops with the ball of wool tucked into her handbag, or sitting amongst discarded research papers in the small hours, my scarf that I left behind in class one day and couldn't sleep that night for guilt and grief over, and woke before the cleaners arrived in the morning to race across campus and nearly cry with relief to find still lying forgotten under the desks, my scarf that has finally taught me what my mother couldn't, to respect my belongings and keep them safe), and nod as the boy says, his eyes on the half-finished row that I pack away:

Next week.

Then they are away, jostling through the doorway, released screeches exploding into the waiting sunlight. Something falls over noisily. Someone yells.

Next week.

Breaking bread

2007-03-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

He spots me on the way back up High Street, and is by my elbow before I have seen him coming.

You'll buy me dinner tomorrow night, he says.

I stop and take a few steps back.

You can't tell me to buy you dinner, I frown.

Yes, he says, nodding emphatically. Otherwise I won't eat.

And yes of course he can, this boy who sleeps on the street, because otherwise he won't eat. But it's complicated, it's always complicated. Why him and not any of the other hungry boys? If it's one Saturday dinner, then will it start being every Saturday dinner?

I have met the boy before, with a girl who lives in my residence. I come to her with a suggestion, because somehow this boy is a joint issue with us, part of the larger problem of poverty that we're trying to solve in our heads. We will offer to take him to eat with us at the dining hall every Sunday, on the condition that we see him at school during the week.

When another one of the girls from our floor hears she frowns a little.

Are you sure it's the right thing to do? she asks.

No, I say. But it's not one of the very wrong things.

I tick our hard-won lessons off on my fingers. One, it's not food during the week. If he goes to school he'll get three meals a day during the week. Giving food during the week takes away a crucial incentive to go to school. Two, it's not money. Money goes on glue, and drugs aren't allowed at school, so they get withdrawals and leave early.

It's taken a lot of learning to get even this far. A lot of mistakes.

Last week we took sweets to school. It seemed simple: they would never usually have them, and we had the money to buy them. But it was wrong from the moment I arrived.

What's in the bag, they wanted to know, clamouring around, poking at it, hands out. It changed everything; we stop being people, we are just the thing they want. They wheedle and beg and push each other out of the way, and it feels like all we had done was undone in a few minutes.

Even when we finally leave it isn't over. One of the kids who doesn't go to school spies the bag and follows us down the road, begging and pleading. Go to school, we tell him. We have an argument in the street, but I prefer the arguments to the begging - arguments are real. We learn to be tough, to stick to our position. No money, no food during the week, no concessions to anyone who is not at school.

Sometimes we end up back at square one. A boy we promised to get bread for has disappeared when we get back, and we spend twenty minutes looking for him with no luck. We question whether we give for our own conscience, or for their good. We tell ourselves it's not supposed to be easy. We wonder.

And then sometimes, when you're not looking, it is easy.

Yesterday a boy asked to finish my milk, and I say yes, because the question was sincere and direct and the milk is healthy, and we smile at each other and it's good, suddenly.

Today I had bought a loaf of banana bread, still hot from the oven, and a nine-year-old who introduces himself later as Zenethembu points at it, asking for some. We find a stoep out of the light drizzle and I break off a chunk for him and some for the girl from my residence, and we sit and talk and munch away.

And it comes to me then that the part of it that seems right is not the giving, but the sharing. I remember the biblical encouragement to break bread with your fellow man, and that is what seems most apt at that moment, huddled together watching the rain and sharing what we have.

The unbreakable thread

2007-03-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

She sits crosslegged on the grass with the tumbling frangipani flowers behind her. She refers to herself as a bit of a dork, and we drink pear juice and get excited about youth work and drama. It turns out she and I work in the same field, thousands of miles apart-

But young people are the same everwhere, hey, she says.

**********************

I'm out at a school for street children, as they get ready for lunch. The school is housed in an old railway station, on a patch of bare dirt ringed with wire fencing. One of the scuffed classrooms gets cleared of tables, and all the chairs are moved in. A great tin pot of samp and beans is dished out, one plate at a time.

I'm standing by the doorway, swatting away flies and listening to the clatter and scraping of chairlegs in the oppressive heat. A boy in a holed shirt beside me is hopping up and down in agitation, anticipating his turn. He has a paper hat on his head, made from a ruled page of a notebook.

I point at it.

Did you make that?

A cluster of boys start to explain how easy it is, and offer to show me. The hat gets passed into my hands.

In biro there are messages scrawled on it. Nosizwe loves Bulelani, one of them reads.

I think of all the times I've seen the same message on pencilcases and schoolbags and bathroom walls of all the schools I've ever been to.

And I guess she was right.

Between shifts

2007-03-11T15:15:00.000-07:00

There are a group of women outside on the lawn by the dining hall, lying on their bellies under the shade of the trees in their white smocks and white hair-caps, twirling blades of grass in their fingers.

The lunch shift is over, and the dinner shift still a comfortable distance away. For these few hours work has no hold over them, and their laughter keeps me company as I make my way across campus.

Hand to Mouth

2007-03-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

Today was not a good day.

I'm back in my room now, and that's about as far as I can get with it. But that's not good enough.

We were picked up in the morning. We take a road I have never been on, and a few hundred yards down it we pick up two men in faded t-shirts and jeans. They were waiting outside a corrugated tin trailer; a sign above the open end reads High-Class Hair, and inside there are two girls waiting on stools and the shadowy movements of a hairdresser attending a third. Across the road is a blockhouse shop with no windows, covered with a peeling mural for Cadbury's Dairymilk. It looks abandoned, but it's not.

The men direct us onwards, through streets lined with concrete one-storey houses. They are about twice the size of my bedroom.

The road becomes a potholed dirt track, but the houses continue, multiplying. Some are just patchwork contructions of tin in varying shades of rust, canted to one side. Some are made of dried mud and knarled sticks. Goats and skinny, high-bellied dogs are picking their way along the edges of the yards.

A series of images:

A pair of elderly women selling pineapples from a battered bus shelter.

Three boys playing checkers in the shade at the back of a house doubling as a petrol station, sitting on upturned plastic crates.

A line of clothes hung out along the wire fencing around a house, red-orange-yellow-green-blue, carefully rainbowed in order.

Dust. And scrub yards. And more goats.

This is Extension Six of the township. The unpaved streets are numbered, not named; easier for the planners. I'm trying, but I can't begin to describe what it is like.

We are there to visit a small plot of scruband that will be turned into a nursery for tree seedlings. Under the supervision of the two men with us, who both live in the township, the seedlings are to be sold locally. It sounded like a good project, but now that I am here, I wonder.

Trees. I look around. It seems an odd place to start.

But then where do you start?

On the way back, the woman taking us on the trip stops at the house of her gardener. He hasn't come to work for the last few days, and she is worried. He has no phone, so she couldn't call.

While she unwinds his chickenwire gate, I sit in the car and watch as a woman in a torn blue shirt fills a basin with dirty water. There are other basins in front of her house, for washing clothes. She comes out of her garden and tips the water out onto the verge, a long brown sluice in the midday sun.

Our driver comes back out to the car. She has tears in her eyes. Her gardener is very sick. She thinks he has tuberculouses. She is sure he won't be back to garden for her again.

I knew it would happen one day, she says. He is very old.

We leave him and his little house. I don't say much as we leave the dirt roads and goats behind, and out the window things slowly return to order. We stop outside our driver's office at the university, under the shade of an oak tree.

Students are milling around, calling out greetings. A miniskirted girl in front of us is blowing up a striped beach ball. I blink.

Are you okay? our driver asks.

I'm sorry, I say. I'm just very tired.

She gives me a hug.You just saw another world, yes? She says. It's hard, but it's good you saw it.

Yes.

Maybe it was a good day.

Voices from the past

2007-03-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

I have almost given up for the day, but I'm unwilling to leave without making some progress with my research, so I pick a book at random and begin to skim it.

I stop at a page titled "Call to the Congress of the People," a leaflet issued in 1955. I print it out, and take it back to my room. It's taped to the noticeboard in front of me now.

Sometimes the voices of the past can be heard so clearly, its a though they are standing just behind you, whispering in your ear.

This is one of those times.

Call to the Congress of the People

We call the people of South Africa black and white — let us speak together of freedom!

We call the farmers of the reserves and trust lands. Let us speak of the wide land, and the narrow strips on which we toil. Let us speak of brothers without land, and of children without schooling. Let us speak of taxes and of cattle and of famine. Let us speak of Freedom!

We call the miners of coal, gold and diamonds. Let us speak of dark shifts and the cold compounds far from our families. Let us speak of heavy labour and long hours, and of men sent home to die. Let us speak of rich masters and poor wages. Let us speak of Freedom!

We call the workers of farms and forests. Let us speak of the rich foods we grow, and the laws that keep us poor. Let us speak of harsh treatment and of children and women forced to work. Let us speak of private prisons, and beatings and of passes. We call the workers of factories and shops. Let us speak of the good things we make, and the bad conditions of our work. Let us speak of the many passes and the few jobs. Let us speak of foremen and of transport and trade unions; of holidays and of houses. Let us speak of Freedom!

We call the teachers, students and the preachers. Let us speak of the light that comes with learning, and the ways we are kept in darkness. Let us speak of the great services we can render, and of the narrow ways that are open to us. Let us speak of laws, and governments, and rights. Let us speak of Freedom!

We call the housewives and mothers. Let us speak of the fine children that we bear, and of their stunted lives. Let us speak of the many illnesses and deaths, and of the few clinics and schools. Let us speak of high prices and of shanty towns. Let us speak of Freedom!

Let us speak together. All of us together — African and European, Indian and Coloured. Voter and voteless. Privileged and sightless. The happy and the homeless. All the people of South Africa; of the towns and the countryside.

Let us speak together of freedom. And of the happiness that can come to men and women if they live in a land that is free. Let us speak of freedom. And how to get it for ourselves, and for our children.

Let the voice of all the people be heard.

Fear and Loathing

2007-02-04T13:54:00.000-08:00

He tells me his name is Pete. He hesitates before he says it, so I think it might be a simpler version of his name. Or maybe it's just that no-one usually asks.

Pete singled me out as soon as I left Arrivals at Johannesburg. I have too many bags, and clearly no idea where to go. He was by my side in a moment, offering to take me to the right terminal for my transfer.

He puts his hands on my luggage cart, but I don't let go. It's ok, he tells me, he can push it for me. After a few hundred yards I stand back and let him push it.

He's wearing a t-shirt that says PORTER, he has an ID card for the airport. But I am outside in the Jo'burg sunshine, with too many belongings to keep an eye on, too much money in my purse, and terrified of the poor black people all around me.

I wasn't afraid until I arrived. But thirty minutes after landing I'm thinking like an Afrikaans farmer.

It's not about the colour of skin. It's about having so much, surrounded by people who have so little. I understand, in those few minutes, what I couldn't from months of reading about the history of this country. It was fear that drove apartheid, fear of having what so many others need.

Everything about me seems ostentatious, unnecessary, undeserving. Rich. And Pete knows it. He's very polite, but I think he loathes me a little all the same.

Pete, who is not much older than me but who looks drawn and pinched in a way I will never be. Pete, who has to work weekends at the airport, to pay for his course in mechanical fitting. Or so he tells me.

I loathe myself a little too. For already being so on guard. For already being so cynical.

***********

On the connecting flight, I asked the Afrikaans man beside me if there were townships around the city.

What do you mean, townships? He says. You mean, where the black people live?

I struggled, not really sure myself.

No, I say. More like shanty areas. You know?

He doesn't give me much of an answer. I wonder how to read him. It seems defensive, a sort of weariness from always being on the defensive, always being attacked.

But I see them nonetheless. As the plane descends, skimming above the ground, there are suddenly crooked rows of corrugated tin huts crowded onto the bare dirt alongside the runway, rows and rows and rows. And it's there again, that same blank terror.

It's there too when my host asks me to lock all the doors as we leave the airport in her car. It's there in the clusters of barefoot black boys who stroll along the highway shoulder. It's there when I see that my new bedroom is on the ground floor, with a very flimsy-looking window. It's there in the panic-buttons along the university routes, in the squat woman who "minds" the cars on the main street for a fee, in the constant security presence around campus, in the reinforced locks on the doors and the warning posters all about.

My insides are eating me up. It's fear of black people, one part of me scolds. And a little bit of that is true - it seems different when the person on the street-corner asking for change is black. I am overwhelmed, intimidated by being white in a sea of black. Because there are no poor white people here, so it's alarming how fast you start to equate black with a potential threat.

It's a struggle to understand it, a struggle to be honest about it. I'm learning too much about myself. So far, I don't like what I'm finding.

Bitter.Sweet

2007-02-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

Things are going to change. And, like with all change, it's impossible to tell just how it will be. There's nothing for it but to jump.

I'm moving continents for a year.
I'm excited beyond belief.
And I'm leaving a part of me behind.

Copper in my mouth.
Let's jump.

Rain

2007-01-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

It starts to shower rain, and soon it is coming down heavy, long-tailed minnows streaking down the windshield, drawing liquid cracks in the land ahead and through our visions of sunlit travels.

Into the hush broken only by the quickening tempo of raindrops falling I wonder aloud whether he should turn the wipers on.

Wait a bit, he says slowly. Wait. Once I hit the switch it's over. They won't run like that again.

So we sit and watch openmouthed as the rain traces moving patterns into the glass, watching something few people, too quick with the switch, will ever see.

Connemara

2007-01-29T16:06:00.000-08:00

They crept up on us, circling the horizon steadily, broken-backed creatures lumbering towards us from the past. The clouds were kissing their tips so at first I didn't see it, but then he pointed-

Snow.

Snow like an eruption, spilling down the mountain crest, dappled snow the white of the cloud-wreathed sky. As we drive on the tops shift, moving, dancing, reshuffling themselves into a pack and then cleaving open down one smooth flank, a darkened scrubland slope cutting through the sunlit mountainside behind.

Don't tell me there is no god, because that day I felt it. I saw beauty, true beauty, fleeting and eternal.

Stop, I said. Can you stop? Here.

We pulled into the verge. And watched the slow play of light and shade, so slow you have to slow yourself too, come quietly and gently to a halt before you can see it, really see it... And then, and then, and then.

I cried in the face of god.

Illuminate

2007-01-25T06:57:00.000-08:00

(an ode to the Unilever Series)

I had been here before, in the daytime.

It's dark as the night outside now, apart from a four large spotlit circles thrown onto the walls, a tall shadowy gloom that stretches up two hundred feet into the cavernous unseen above.

It's calm here, the size somehow comforting, so comforting that I sit on the concrete floor by a steel girder, legs curled under me, and watch the smiling faces arrive at the bottom, one by one.

Sometimes they are proceeded by a long shrill scream of delight and a flick flick flick of shadow across the giant spotlights, flick flick flick as their body falls in loops and curves through the glass of the tubing, until they emerge, reborn, smiling, a great production line of smiles. Some bounce off the end, rolling over themselves in delight, some gasp and giggle, some get up immediately to go again, suited adults made children again in the spotlit gloom, for these few moments given permission to play.

I recall that this place used to be a power station, in a previous lifetime. Once, here, great turbines revolved, over and over, and created light to illuminate the city when it grew dark.

I stay there for maybe twenty minutes or more, listening for the faint rattling before each face emerges, marvelling at the joy there is at the foot of these glass snakes, smiling, smiling, smiling fit to burst, and when I get up from there to find my friend she says, you're beaming, and I know that I glow with their light.

Courage

2007-01-16T03:32:00.000-08:00

The first thing I did was, I swore. After I had looked up, then down at my bag, then back up again. I expected that.

The next thing I did was, I ran. I didn't expect that.

It's crowded on the street but I run, and I shout. Loudly. I don't know where my voice comes from, it's low and strong and unprepared. It just comes out.

Stop him, I shout. Stop him.

But no-one does. They pause, too late, as he shoulders through them, a smallish figure in a hood, faceless, nameless.

Stop him, I shout, but I'm giving up as he gets further away.

Two boys with backpacks, fifteen years of age perhaps, pass me out.

Is that him? One of them calls, still running.

I call back yes, and watch as all three disappear into the shopping crowds on the next street.

I slow, stop, try to catch my breath, cheecks smarting. From the cold, from the shame. I remember to be embarrassed now, alone and without any money.

At the station, I give my name. The officer writes it down in biro on a sheet of paper. The sheet already has something else written on the back in red marker. Pinned to the notice board is a handwritten letter from a woman asking for her mother to be found. I stop hoping.

Another officer stops by, looks over at the paper.

We have that guy, he says. Two young fellas chased him the whole way. Can you hang on a few minutes?

They take a statement, in a small room with three chairs and a desk with a hole in it. Three different officers come in and out while I explain what happened.

Could you identify him? They ask.

They stand him up in the next room, his back to me so he can't see me. He seems taller now. One of the officers lifts his hood up to show me a logo on the sweatshirt back.

Can you say that's him? They ask.

I close my eyes, trying to remember. I can't see him. I can't see anything.

I have stolen many things before. Food, mostly, from one supermarket. I didn't even eat it most of the time, I would throw it away outside. I couldn't say now why I did it. Maybe because it was so easy.

Can you say that's him? They ask again.

I was never caught. I was well-dressed. I didn't run. I just picked it up and walked out. I've thought before about speaking to the supermarket now, offering to pay for what I took.

No, I say truthfully. I was running, I remember running. I can't remember what he looked like. I'm sorry.

But it's him, one officer says.

He looks at me, lowers his voice.

It is him, he says.

I see how easy it would be. If it weren't a small wallet, if there was more at stake.

I shake my head. I'm sorry, I say. I can't remember.

They are disappointed. They try not to show it.

I've thought before about going back to that supermarket.

I wonder what will happen to the boy.

I just don't have the courage.

Tradition

2007-01-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

We had stopped for coffee in little plastic cups, at a family-owned store on the way up.

It's important, you said. And I understood.

We drank them in the car, ceremoniously, before starting back out for the valley. It's just coffee but it's something else too.

I can't feel my toes anymore, but I keep walking, over the ridged wooden walkway that spans the wetlands. It's cold, colder than I imagined, even bundled into your jacket and hat.

Walk, I tell my feet.

I don't know how much farther the walkway continues, and I'm afraid to ask. It curves away into the slope of the mountain, into the stark sharp colours of the land and the forlorn tangle of rushes.

Over the far mountain ridge the clouds are tumbling, boiling coldly.

I point. Look, I say.

We watch as a hole opens up in the great heaving mass of cloud, and a blaze of light comes pouring through. We keeping walking and watching, in silence, for some minutes, pointly mutely whenever the sun reappears. No words, just pointing, at the sky, at the places the light illuminates. The sun is too low on New Year's Day to reach into the valley, but the far heights of the mountain slopes that ring us are burning with light.

And then, the lake.

I don't think I can keep going, but I do, right to the waters edge, putting one foot in front of the other, willing the cold away so I can stand where the water hisses across the pebbles and grin at you. I do it because it's important, just as stopping for the coffee was, because this is not just about today. Because these things have an otherness already, a well-thumbed smoothness of familiarity. Because these things are the markers of a path into all that's yet to come.

Because this is how traditions are begun.

We are not poets

2007-01-08T03:36:00.000-08:00

We are not poets, most of us, most of the time.

Poems don't fit in the space between commuters, they escape in the heat of beaches. Too much work to read; too much of everything to write. We are not poets, and we are glad. Who has time for poetry?

But in the face of love not one of us does not feel the need to find ways of speaking about things beyond speech. We all want to be poets then. And when we sit down to write, all that comes out on the page is
i love you
i love you
i love you
i love you

It all happened.

2006-12-31T16:24:00.000-08:00

All at once. Everything.

Darklight dawning

2006-12-29T17:06:00.000-08:00

I know it was six o'clock because the church in the town centre had just finished ringing it out. It had been dark, fully dark, by three or four that afternoon. All days this far into winter are. It's night before the day has really begun.

So it was dark, but there in the dark I heard the birds start to sing.

It was the singing you hear at dawn, the long trilling leap and fall of new things beginning. And it was so clear and joyous that although I had heard the bells ring I still thought, perhaps, perhaps it was I who was wrong and it was not night after all.

Perhaps I had stepped sideways through to the morning.

There wasn't anyone else about on the path, so I couldn't ask. I just stood and listened, as they sang the colours of dawn into the night sky.

Maybe it's not such an unusual thing. But I prefer to think it was.

In the Night

2006-12-28T06:17:00.000-08:00

She checked in while I was at dinner. When I went up to the tower room, she was in the bathroom, and it was her suitcase and coat that I stood looking at, momentarily baffled, until I heard her moving about at the sink and put two and two together. I called out a greeting, picked up my bag, and left to meet some friends. Much, much later, when I arrived back and stumbled over my bed in the dark, she was already asleep, buried deep under the blankets.

And that's how it was that the first time she spoke to me that day was just after midnight, when she began to cry out in her sleep.

I have heard people sleep-talk before. I am used to waking to urgent mutterings, my brothers holding garbled arguments with invisible opponents.

Her cries are not like that. They go straight through me.

I am frozen for a little while, lying in bed, undecided. I want to reach out and touch her. I want to release her from what I am hearing.

But I can't move, can't decide. She is crying with her mouth closed, a dreadful sound, and I can't decide what to do.

Could you hear me? she asks suddenly, her voice clear.

Yes, I say.

I knew you were there, she said. I knew you were right next to me. I was trying to ask you to help me, but something had a hand over my mouth. It was awful. I couldn't call out to you no matter how hard I tried.

She is breathing hard, the words tumbling out. She puts a hand to her lips. We talk for hours until she can sleep again, until I can forget all the things her crying sounded like.

Tiny mysteries

2006-12-25T06:54:00.000-08:00

We're stopped at the lights, talking about something important, but not serious. Maybe they had beeped a few times already before I really heard it and looked around.

The couple in the car beside us are waving, and saying something from behind the glass. They're late middle-aged, the car a silver BMW.

I look at them, baffled.

I turn back. He shrugs.

We both look at the couple again. They're smiling, and the man is making a circular motion now, asking that I roll down the window. I search the door panel for the right button but I can't find it.

The lights change, and we drive off in different directions.

What was that about? I ask.

And I realise we probably won't ever know, but they were smiling and so I feel curiously happy, as if they were well-wishers sharing in the new joy of today and the little slice of happiness we just found.

If A Body Catch A Body

2006-12-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

I spill them out on the tabletop, a few years of left-over cards and envelopes.

There, I say. Plenty.

I hand my brother a pen.

You go first, I say.

It's Christmas Eve. I had shown him somewhere I like to visit every once in a while, and he had stopped at this card. Let's do it, I suggested.

So we start writing to no-one in particular, and soon the whole pile of cards is used.

It's dark out and our coats and gloves and hats are dark too, so we fancy ourselves as Christmas assassins. My brother steals through gardens and fairylit trees, picking out a string of cut-out stars he likes, or an undecorated house.

By the streetlamp light I read some of the messages he has written:

I like salads. But this Christmas, I'm all about the turkey. Fill up on your favourite food this holiday!

Hug someone new today. You never know, they might need it as much as you.

Dear stranger, I don't know you, and you don't know me. But does it matter? Merry Christmas.

Go for a walk on the beach this Christmas. Yes it's cold out, but the view is breathtaking.

For one, he had wanted to put in an excerpt from a book. I had just re-read Catcher in the Rye, so I took it down from my room and together we found the passage where Holden talks about what he'd really like to be in life. I read it aloud and my brother copied it down carefully.

We're on the third or fourth housing estate when I notice these two people. They have red flashing lights on their heads, that's all I can see of them. They ring the bell of the house next to the one I've chosen for a card, and as the door opens I hear them start to sing carols.

I stop to listen.

It sounds like carols would sound if someone had taught you them once, very quickly, just a few lines from each. The tune is all wrong. It would be funny, except it's not.

I stay there, listening, until the person who opened the door does something - closes it, gives them some money, I can't see - and the two fall silent. They leave to go to the next house, a father and a daughter.

I find my brother a few streets down, selecting more targets. I tell him what I've seen.

I don't know which part makes me sad, I say. I think it could be that the other person said nothing. I think it could be the way they kept going even though they didn't know the tune.

It's the father for me, my brother says.

We keep walking until all the cards are gone. I don't tell my brother, but I keep the one with the quote. I like the way it's written in his hand. Bits of it keep going round and round in my head, mixed up with pieces of the Christmas carols that weren't, and I think it was only right then that I understood it. About being the one to stop them falling off.

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this
big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's
around - nobody big I mean - except me. And I'm standing
on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to
catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if
they're running and they don't look where they're going I
have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's
all I'd like to do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and
all. I know it's crazy, but it's the only thing I'd really like to be.

What a lonely night to be falling.

Making contact

2006-12-17T07:30:00.000-08:00

There was a woman I read about a little while ago. She hugs people.

She came to Ireland, to offer hugs. And thousands of people came to line up and be hugged, one at a time. And I remember thinking: what a great deal of people who need a little affection. Who need it so much they would go to be hugged by a stranger.

And I also thought: I wish I had gone.

So that's why I pulled myself out of bed to stand on the main street of the capital in the biting cold yesterday. I can't speak for the others, I don't know why they came. But they did, and for a couple of hours we came together and hugged strangers in the street.

It was one of the most wonderful things I have ever done.

I hugged people from America, China, Japan, Nigeria, India, France, Uganda, England, Pakistan and Morrocco, policemen, street sellers, street-sweepers, tourists and day-trippers, the well-dressed and the barely-dressed, the old and the young, cuddling couples and overladen individuals. I bent over to be hugged by a three-year old in mittened hands, reached up on tiptoes to be held tightly by a boy with hobnail boots and pierced eyebrows. One girl and her friend came back again and again for more.

There's a moment, just after you offer to hug a complete stranger, when you don't know what will happen. Some will shake their heads and walk on, embarrassed or distrustful. But many, more than you would imagine, will dazzle you. Something drops away, and they smile and you smile and you both reach for each other in delight, just the sheer delight of recognising another person.

And then it's done, and you're not strangers at all anymore. And all you had to do was open your arms.

Why? some people asked.

I shrugged. Because it makes people happy, I told them.

I'm glowing still.

Here is the man that inspired us:

That which can be mended

2006-12-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

One of the boys from earlier comes over to Gail with his coat in his hands. A button has come off. He asks her if he can fix it, holding it out to her.

She takes a look, runs her fingers over the loose thread.

I have a sowing kit in the car, she says. Come back in a little while.

Did you ask her because she was a woman? I tease him. I know him from before and I like him, he's a likable sort.

He protests, embarrassed.

I asked the guy first, he says. But he can't sow.

We watch him go back to the others. Gail returns to her seat, and smoothes the coat out on her lap. She selects a needle carefully, unravels a length of thread. The needle flashes silver in her hands.

The girl leaning against the counter says, I was talking to his teacher earlier. His mother died three weeks ago. She was a seamstress.

We all share a look. There are too many questions, and there is nothing to say.

Next door is the sounds of boys running and yelling and happily crashing over furniture. Someone begins to bang out a few chords on the piano and a ragged cheer goes up.

Three weeks, someone says to themselves. I don't know if it's a question or an answer.

I watch Gail at work, returning things to right.

Being here

2006-12-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

I can't see him but his breathing changes, and I know he has fallen asleep. The film is still playing, his arms still around me.

When it ends I lie there and listen to him breathe. I know that if I move he will wake. I know I will have to move soon, but for now I let him sleep. And I listen. To him, to the soft bubbling of the gas heater, to the buffeting wind outside.

In his dreams he murmurs something. I murmur back - no words, just sound. Whatever the words for I'm here were before there were words.

The heater bubbles on.

I'm not thinking anything. I'm just here.

Falling

2006-11-11T03:24:00.000-08:00

Come into this space, if you can tiptoe softly. Leave your shoes by the door, hold your breath. Come in, but have care.

This is a space for two people, a little nook hollowed out of the fading day. This is the part not shared with anyone else.

They are holding each other, but she is holding them a little apart, palms against his chest. There is ferocious energy in their stillness, two falling bodies held in mid-air.

We can't, she says.

I know, he says.

We can't, she says. It's not... safe. I could... There would...

There would be consequences, he says.

He holds her gaze.

He says, I would take those consequences gladly.

She breathes in.

He says it again. And again, as they start to fall into one another.

Drop the curtain, tiptoe back. Pretend you were never here.

Because this is the part you can never share. This is the joyful terror and the terrible joy that no-one can hear. There will be no poems written and no advice given, no romance and no glamour, for this is beyond and before the thought of either, just he and she and these unspeakable words that are said in different ways at every moment of every day somewhere in a space just like this.

In The Simple Things

2006-11-09T01:57:00.000-08:00

There's a fire in the wood-stove when I come down to breakfast, a flickering heartbeat in the near-empty room. Smell of wood-smoke, of browning toast, of the damp morning air carried in on my clothes.

The scrape of chairs being pulled in. Watching the butter melt. The first bite of toast and the welcoming creak of the door as more people arrive in and take their seats. The soft mumble of barely-waking conversation, of voices being used for the first time that day.

Hmmm, I say.

He raises an eyebrow.

I'm trying to decide if I want another slice of toast, I explain. Hmmm nmmmm nmmm.

There is a happy sigh as someone takes a sip of coffee.

Well, he says, resting his chin on his hand thoughtfully. Well, you could have one half of my second slice. That way you won't have to decide about having another whole one.

I think, then take the slice from his plate and bite in. A neat little semi-circle like a smile.

I smile back at the toast, and swing my feet back and forth under the table. This morning I can sort of see how it's very very simple after all.

Saving our Souls

2006-11-08T06:31:00.000-08:00

I am worried that there aren't enough priests.

That is a sentiment I never thought I would utter. But here I am.

Here, people have stopped choosing to join the priesthood. Churches aren't closing yet, but it seems clear that they will soon.

Time was, I would have been quite happy about that. I don't go to church. I grew up in a school system that attempted to force Catholicism upon me, in a society that felt betrayed by what the Catholic Church allowed some priests to do to our children.

I remember being sat in front of my year class for the Penitentiary service. I didn't want to attend, and when I said so, several other people joined me. So they sat us facing everyone to mark us out.

How small do you have to be to do that to a schoolchild? How threatened?

But here I am.

I stole some money once, when I was a teenager. Afterwards, I wanted to put it right again, and I didn't know how.

We had a school chaplain, a woman I didn't like a great deal. But she had a tiny office, a cushioned space, the only space in my life to go and ask what the right thing to do might be.

She listened. And she didn't think I was terrible. And we found an answer that seemed right.

Priests, or chaplains, are people who don't judge. They don't dismiss someone because they are too busy, or. They don't balk at the challenge of forgiveness, or love for their feelow person. They don't forget that people are the most important part of life.

Or rather, they do all of these things. But they are people who are reminded, every day, to try not to. And they are people whose purpose is to remind us.

I am worried. Because who are those people now? Where now do we put aside a little space to ask about right and wrong, to struggle with forgiveness, to remind us that we are small and imperfect and that we can try to be better.

We don't train anyone to remind us any more. We don't seem to remember that we need to be reminded. Over and over again.

Early bird

2006-11-05T06:03:00.000-08:00

Oh god, I groan.

They've been like that since six, she says from the bed next to me.

We lie there for a while, eyes squeezed shut in the hope that our ears might be too. There are six girls in the bedroom above ours. It sounds instead like six fairly large elephants.

Right, I say. Right. Time to get up.

I manage to get a leg out of bed. Then the other.

Mmph, she says. She puts a pillow over her head.

There's a crack under the window blind, where I didn't pull it fully shut last night. The light is fanning in under it. I stare at it for a few seconds, then reach out to tug the blind up a little.

Oh, I say.

I find some clothes, a pair of still-damp shoes, and I slip out of the room.

A little way up the mountain road the trees start to thin out, and as I walk the sun lances through the gaps in the trunks like a signal light beaming messages across the valley floor; flash, flash, flash. Everything has a furry coating of backlit frost, a white edging on a backdrop of whiter mist, and the longer I walk the slower it all becomes - the flashing sun, the rolling mist, the drip of sodden leaves somewhere deep in off the road.

If I had a jamjar I could scoop a little of it up, screw the lid on tightly and store it away at the back of a shelf for the hard days lying ahead.

Instead, I cup my hands lightly in front of me and bring them to my chest. And I am surprised that hours later I can still feel a fluttering there, a piece of the morning carried with me. Those early birds still singing their dawn song.

Mantra

2006-11-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

I'm standing in the doorway, half in and half out of the room. I can hear music from the study downstairs. My brother has shut himself in there, turned the volume up high.

I'm listening. I don't want to hear the words, I'm listening out for anything else. For something that tells me I have to go down there and step in.

I lean against the doorframe.

There's a noise like maybe a plate being slammed down on the table, but not broken.

I'm thinking about how he said that I was strong. That he liked me because I was strong.

I don't feel strong. I feel like calling him, just to hear a voice.

Outside the firecrackers are going off.

Sometimes I wonder if I want something to happen. Something broken, not just cracked. Then I wouldn't be waiting, half in and half out.

Maybe I'm angry at her for doing what I hope I never do. For how I'm afraid that I will.

Downstairs, the kitchen door opens and they are momentarily louder.

I will not be this. I will not.

I go in and lie down on my bed, still listening. I start putting this into words, describing it to myself. Thinking about writing about it helps put a structure on things, pins it down. Calms me down.

It's only a small thing after all. Something to write about.

Driftwood

2006-10-28T00:58:00.000-07:00

I only really saw the day for the first time at about three o'clock, after everything had been packed away and the chairs straightened and we could take a moment to stand in the emptiness and breathe in and think, yes, silence is golden, the sort of golden that licks at the edges of things and alights for a moment on the dustmotes falling slowly back to earth, the sort of golden that softens everything and expands it and makes the spaces where things are not into a thing of almost painful beauty.

I wonder why it's only after a very large noise that you can hear silence so clearly.

I put the last chair back into line, and give it an absent stroke, and it's then I notice that the gold is coming from outside.

Has it been like this all day? I ask my partner.

I don't know, she says.

We stand on the doorstoop for a moment or two, dazed. The air has a sharp edge to it, and it's so thin that the winter sun pierces clean through it, picking out every grain and leaf in blinding relief.

I find a spot on the low stone wall outside and close my eyes. Listen, I say.

She sits beside me, tilts her head to one side.

The river, she says, opening her eyes. It's funny how I'm here so often and never hear it.

Some other people start to drift out, exchanging a greeting or two before taking a seat on the wall and lapsing into silence. We roll up our sleeves, or lean back to expose a neck or a midriff to the suns rays, making an offering of our bare skin on the last day of the sun's reign.

In a little while I will get up, and one by one they will too, to pick up the thread of their day again, but for a few quiet moments on a Tuesday afternoon we were all there together drinking in the gold of silence.

Losing the battle

2006-10-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

You come creeping into my daydreams, skirting the edge of consciousness in the place just beyond my vision. You find me in idle moments; a knifepoint traced across the skin on the inside of my thigh, down the arc of my spine, searching. Ghost-motions, shadow touch, an echo of what went before.

All day, you find me. When a lock of hair falls across my breastbone. When the tail of my shirt skims the small of my back. Like a lit flame I can't put out, scorching my skin. Rumbles of buses and strangers' touches, whispering to relent.

I walk faster, to outpace it, but I can't walk fast enough, the wind as it passess a caress. I almost run, I want to run.

Leave me, please leave me. I'm losing the battle to this conspiracy of touch.

Intake of breath, a little too sharp.

Please.

All the things I want and dare not say aloud.

Things I need to hear, Things I want to hear

2006-10-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

I say: They look exhausted.

He says: They are. There's just too much on at the moment.

I say: If you - I don't know whether it would help, but if you need someone to come and help out I will. Just let me know.

He says: ...

He says: I don't want to sound harsh. But you have enough on at the moment. And I don't want you burning yourself out because you need to be needed.

He says: I'm sorry.

I say: No. No, I needed to hear that. You're right.

I say: Thank you.

Pause.

I say: You drive much slower these days.

He nods, clicks on the indicator.

I say: Have you stopped wanting to scare your passengers silly?

He says: No. I just want the journey to go slower.

He turns then, to meet my smile with his own.

He says: This time with you is precious.

I turn quickly to look out my window into the falling dusk. Because just then I felt something very strange indeed.

Atavism

2006-10-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

It was just last night the skies opened, as though before the great flood. It came down in furious sheets, too much to believe could be held up there.

There, we point at a spot above although the whole world flashed violet. There. Needing to name it, as we have named everything too large.

She's terrified, but she wants to drive out into it. Maybe it's seduction, a force that large. Maybe we go out to meet it because there's nowhere to hide.

We inch out to the edge of the harbour, past the last lights of the town. The spray from the windscreen wipers are fistfuls of glitter thrown to the wind and there is nothing beyond but the raging dark.

Go back, something small is saying. Go back. You're not suppose to be here.

When we shut the door on this and turn on all the lights it will all seem very far away, but out here the raindrops bouncing off the pavement are shoals of tiny silver fish, as though the black tarred road is the surface of an unseen lake teeming with life, blind blank-eyed creatures shocked into existence by the electric air, and we will laugh later to drown out what it was we felt then.

Theme in A Minor

2006-10-15T14:17:00.000-07:00

The secret is this: it can only happen when you’re not looking. That’s why it tastes the way it does, sweet and slightly sharp at once, because even then you’re missing it already. It will never happen exactly like this again.

Perhaps it goes something like this: A plan falls through at exactly the last moment. That is how you find yourself midway up a sunny street on this mild Sunday afternoon with the thrill of having nothing in particular to do.

You stretch your fingertips out as far as you can, to see if the edges of this moment can be touched, and you think maybe they could if you could reach only a little farther. Then with someone else's voice in your ears singing of days much like this, you wander through the first open door.

Second hand books downstairs, the sign says, so you follow it. The ceiling is low down there, and the floor tilts at odd angles. There is a hush among the crowded shelves, the other people moving in slow sleepwalking circles, heads to the side reading spines, one foot out, one finger to their lips in a half-admonishment for silence.

There is a woman on her knees in front of Classics, re-sorting books with featherlight hands. She is humming a tune that you take out your earphones to listen to, something unidentifiable and wonderful.

You don’t want anything in particular, except to be here surrounded by these books that somebody loved once. You run you fingers along the shelves not for titles but for their feel, for a thick frayed binding or faded lettering, for a solid weight or an inscription-

To Judith,
I hope this brings you some comfort. I will always be here for you if you need a shoulder.
Christmas '93.

You lose yourself for a while, in the sacred bookshushed silence. You find - after an hour, maybe more – that you have collected an armful of treasurers, misfits, stories with their own stories to tell. The humming woman rings them up, handling them like old friends. You think, purchases, and roll the word around in your mouth. Things to be tied with a piece of string and wrapped in brown paper, like sausages and hatpins.

There is more to come, though you don’t know it yet; a quiet coffee shop overlooking the aimless crowds, the lost hours within the pages of a pocketsized gem that once belonged to a Peter you will never meet. Knowing and not-knowing, some spent and some still to come.

Outside, a little snatch of the woman's tune escapes you, but it’s already fading and you can’t remember how the rest of it goes.

Evidence

2006-10-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

It is so suddenly high up there, where the trunk disappears into a broad umbrella-weave of branches, that without meaning to I find myself sitting down on the pine-needle forest floor. I am still there, my head resting along the prickled trunk, looking up and up and up into a dizzying fall, when he comes back to find me. I hear him stop beside me, quizzical.

Look, I say, not moving.

He does, and after a moment slowly sinks to the floor too. We stay like that for the longest time, not saying anything.

It starts to rain, outside the shelter of our pine tree. Heavy summer rain, thick and fast. He points to a single raindrop falling down towards us. We find another and another, hypnotised by their fall.

Later the rain stops and we watch the light play on the branches high above. When a cloud passes the colours change, dulling to a flat tangle, until the sun begins to pick out the light and shade again, filling in the spaces and spinning out the tree-branches to impossible heights.

Somehow we're lying down now, as if holding each other was the most natural thing in the world.

Green and brown, he says, gazing up at the moving colours. Green and brown. Your arm across my chest. Your head on my shoulder. Green and brown.

I try out a hundred things to say in my head, but none of them sound right. I put my face against his woollen jumper and that way I don't have to say anything, anything at all.

One one thousand. Two one thousand.

Then I get up. In silence, we brush each other down, loosening the fine coating of pine-dust and needles clinging to our clothes, returning ourselves to order. I keep brushing my skirt even when it's completely clean.

All gone? I ask finally. He nods.

All gone.

I find one later, tangled into my hair. I hold it in my hand for a few moments, a tiny furred pine-needle, no longer than my fingernail. I look to see if anyone else has noticed. Then I crush it and let it fall, my betrayer.

Benediction

2006-10-01T01:44:00.000-07:00

Peter touches me on the shoulder.

Do you have one minute?

I excuse myself from the table, and follow him into the office.

He left these for you, Peter says in his careful English. He ask me to give them to you.

On the table in front of him are a few small packages. Peter hands them over one by one, with the same care he chooses his words. The last is a necklace.

It was made by hand, Peter says.

He holds it up between us. I have time to think that fastening a necklace around someone's neck is too intimate a thing for us to do, this almost-stranger and I acting out a mutual friend's wishes, but before the thought is fully-formed I am leaning forward slightly and he has placed it over my head as though we had always agreed it would be so.

We nod to each other, and there is something completed in that little office. Something simple and almost pure.

I wear the necklace all day. From time to time I touch it with one hand and I am filled with that feeling again, as though I have been blessed by another human being. It's red and green and blue and a little uneven and it's the most precious thing I own.

The Other face of the City

2006-09-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from another blog I wrote while staying in Northern Ireland)

Audrey is mid-conversation, one hand on the steering wheel, when her body gives a sudden convulsion. She grabs frantically at her cardigan, and the car comes to an abrupt stop outside a set of one-storey terraced houses. For a moment I think perhaps a wasp or spider has fallen onto her.

She has something in her hand as she twists around in her seat. It’s then I notice about six teenaged boys a hundred yards back, and see that she is holding a small rock.

You come back now! she says in a very loud and carrying voice. They do no such thing.

With an exasperated noise she puts the car in gear and drives on, rolling the window tightly closed.

Something dawns on me then. A string of overlooked incidents come together all at once, and I realise hardly a day here has gone past without something being smashed or tossed or broken.

The day on Magazine Street there was a noise I couldn’t place until a stone bounced back to earth. The evening there were shouts in the street outside, when it took me several minutes to understand that I was hearing cars revving and feet running, and looked out only afterwards, too late. The night we took a different route home after a concert, because up ahead beyond the next streetlight we could hear things being thrown and voices raised.

Not bonfire nights, or marching nights, just ordinary nights. They drop glasses and bottles as they leave the bar; casual, unthinking. There is a fine coating of glass on the city streets, like the glitter of frost. The crunch underfoot you stopped noticing; the background grumble of noise you stopped hearing; the CCTV cameras you stopped seeing until somebody new to the city pointed them out, that are then suddenly everywhere, on every street corner, hooded, unblinking.

There aren’t any police in the city, Catherine said last night, almost to herself. You never see them. And I thought back and realised, no, other than the marching day, there haven’t been any. I don’t even know what the PSNI uniform looks like.

There is a man that lives in a little metal cage by Bishop Gate. I see the shadow of him moving around inside, behind the wire-mesh windows festooned with crisp-packet and torn-wrapper pennants that flutter in the breeze. He is the next-but-last member of the corrugated-walled barracks that that has slowly emptied as the city settles uneasily into post-conflict life. Neither the man nor the blank gaze of the cameras he monitors make me feel safe.

It’s not political violence I’m worried about. I have long stopped being concerned that my accent, or my opinions, or even my gold shoes will mark me out. I’m worried about the loose everyday violence, of being a target of boredom, or drink, or a window rolled down on a warm sunny day.

Untouchable

2006-09-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

Can you help us? they ask, leaning out of the window.

I say yes. Of course I say yes. I am the new girl that day, eager to be of use.

It's trapped, they say.

Inside the room something flickers by, not quite in a straight line. It meets the glass of a window pane and skitters down to land on the windowsill.

I see then that it's a bird, a tiny bird. A green-tit, breast beating frantically, a little puddle of droppings under it on the sill. I don't know what to do, but I have to do something, so I move slowly towards it. The bird contracts into itself with fear.

I think it might die if we get too close, one of the others say, just as I come to the same conclusion.

It is three feet away from me. If I reached out I could touch it. But I never, ever can.

We stand like that for a few moments, me, the man and woman from the offices on either side of me, and the bird.

I cross the to the far side of the room and open all the windows there. Then I walk slowly back, my arms open wide. The bird takes flight again - over, back - and finally out one of the open windows. We watch as it vanishes into the overhang of the forest.

In the now-emptier room, we share a triumphant smile.

They leave, but I find myself lingering by the window, wondering what the tickle of feathers on my palm would feel like. I am reminded of the butterflies we used to stalk every summer, wanting so badly to hold something so beautiful, only to open our hands on the ruined creatures they became at our touch. Irridescent dust staining our hearts black. Some things are never meant to be caught.

Beginning of the end

2006-09-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

We should be gone but the sun keeps us there, on the pavement. It's an old street, the trees full-grown so that the light comes through in dapples and flecks and everything seems to shift slightly in the ghost of a breeze.

I stretch out my arms to let the warmth soak in.

Are we going? someone asks.

In a minute, I say sleepily.

Gently, Jamila puts her hand on my arm and guides me forward. I let myself be led.

Up ahead I see a leaf fall, and at the same time it does not seem to be falling at all. For a moment everything is just that leaf in mid-air, as though the rest of life had slowed and stopped until everything was focused on that one golden point.

Stop. Start slowly again.

I watch as it comes lazily to ground. We pass it and are still walking and I think, that leaf. I can see the underwater shimmer of the tree-leafed street and I turn the image over in my mind, dreamily puzzled. Something else is there and I can't see it.

We are at the end of the street when I realise it is summer and leaves don't fall. Not summer then anymore.

Autumn has begun today.

Line in the sand

2006-09-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

Up until then it had been one thing. Now it is another. Where was the line – after the second drink, before the third?

I can’t say when it happens, but something changes. On the table between us this new thing sits, and without a word being said I realise that if I wanted I could go back to his hotel room.

Something sharp and unnameable turns over inside me. I feel slightly sick and exhilarated all at once.

Days, weeks later, I am still trying to unpick that knot. Sick and exhilarated.

I don’t consider myself attractive. So when men show an interest in me I am always somewhat alarmed. And flattered.

This man is older than me by quite a bit. And he is my employer. He touches my arm and I pretend not to notice, but I know just there - a moment ago it - it all changed and can't be taken back.

A little shock flickers through me, reckless, and I feel guilty and excited, and suddenly terribly, terribly young.

I want to have not crossed that line. But I'd do it again.

****

When I was eighteen I worked with a photographer for a few weeks. We travelled in the rain along country roads around the little lost parts of Ireland, from site to site, staying in B&Bs with turned-down sheets and lavender cakes of soap. He knew my mum and some of her friends, and I knew him through them. I met his three blond children, all girls. One day he kissed me.

It was awful, and thrilling. I wanted him to want me. And I wanted nothing to do with him.

And I felt guilty for liking the attention. I didn't - couldn't - say it to anyone, didn't know how to explain it to myself, until one day I told a friend about it. He was angry. He told me he wanted to hit the photographer.

****

He doesn't ask, so it's easier to say no. I let him walk me home, step away quickly after our goodbyes. I shut the door and stay behind it for a few moments.

I am excited.
I hate myself for being excited.
And I half-wish someone would offer to hit him.

The Little Friend

2006-08-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

- When my husband was small, his brother Jack had a friend. They lived out in the house in West Clare then, and Jack would come back in from playing with Conor at the bottom of the garden where the woods were.

It’s late and the wine is nearly finished. Three of us are sitting in the depths of an old, squashed couch, in a room that used to be a forge. This room is a part of my younger self. Everything in it is loved and familiar; the rambling mural that runs all along one wall, the chairs and couches covered with woollen patchworked blankets, the golden arc of the wood-panelled ceiling above I would lie and gaze at for hours.

When I close my eyes and think of somewhere safe to be, this room is it.

We had been talking about ghosts.

- Conor had a hat, and a little jacket. No-one else could see him, but Jack was very clear about what he looked like. Jack would play with Conor most days.

If I turned my head I would be able to see her profile, but I'm comfortable where I am so I listen instead. Her voice still has the Dutch inflection that the years in Ireland have not worn away, her vowels slightly shortened.

I once had a friend that no-one else could see. His name was Pudding. My mum kept a diary for me when I was two or three, and I found it one day when I was a teenager. She wrote all about what Pudding said and did. Until I read it, I hadn't remembered Pudding at all.

- When Noah was about six we moved into the house. It was just after the parents had died and my husband wanted to go back to live there. It’s a bit in the middle of nowhere, the house, but there is a lot of space to go exploring.

She pauses, tips her glass to watch the wine resettle.

- One day soon after we moved in Noah came back after being out all day. I asked him where he had been and he said he was playing with Conor.

I do turn to look at her now, but she's staring straight ahead.

- Noah had never met Jack, Jack had moved out long before we arrived. But Noah could tell us exactly what Conor looked like. The hat. The jacket.

Pudding, I think. And for a moment I get the same feeling I did when I opened that diary.

That I wasn't entirely sure if Pudding was good or bad.

Golliwog

2006-08-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

At the bus-stop this morning, there was a man muttering under his breath.

This man is there most mornings. He talks to himself continously. Generally what he says is not of much interest. I think once or twice when it has been about the lateness of the bus I have spoken back to him.

This morning, he was talking about the bus driver.

I hope its not a golliwog, he said. Can't stand them, no. No golliwog drivers on my bus.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I glanced around to see whether the other commuters had noticed. I wondered about talking to him, but hesitated. The bus was coming into view. I was fairly sure this man had a learning disability, and I knew from experience it would be difficult, especially as a stranger, to really talk to him. Or not talk to him, but to - what? Change his mind?

I sat down, still arguing with myself. I wondered where he had heard those words before.

I remembered a book I had as a child. It was about nursery toys that came alive at night and had adventures. One of the toys was a Golliwog. He would take things on the others, or persuade them to do bad things.

I don't think my mum ever read me that book, as I tended to read on my own a lot at an early age, but perhaps she did. I've never asked her what she thought of it, or who we got it from. I've never checked to see whether we still have it, in the cupboard with all the other children's books that no-one reads any more.

I have wondered when they stopped printing books like that. Whether they burned the ones left in warehouses, unsold.

When I get off at my stop, I see a slim young woman in a light summer dress walking towards me. I know from her expression that she is looking for directions, so I slow down as she approaches.

Can you tell me where the sports centre is? she asks.

Her accent is French, and she is gorgeous in a way that makes me temporarily lose my voice. I notice the arc of her lips, the shape of her eyebrows raised to ask the question, then I point her in the right direction and she is gone.

I am several hundred yards down the path before something clicks and I think about her coffee-coloured skin, and what the man said about golliwogs. I turn it over in my head as I cross the road. He meant her.

I look back to watch her go, long coltish legs and chiffon summer dress. She is so slender, so outrageously unprepared for the world that awaits her.

I hope that woman never reads a book like that.

I wish I could forget

2006-08-03T23:32:00.000-07:00

It's a Wednesday evening, the perfect day for everything and nothing. I like Wednesdays, how unassuming they are. Unexpected things happen because so very little is expected.

This Wednesday finds me, around ten o'clock, in a small French wine bar, a rouged basement off one of the smaller streets. There are perhaps eight tables, and a bar counter. Large mirrors and paintings crowd the walls, and smaller paintings fill the spaces in between. It's tiny and wonderful.

My friend frowns into one of the scrolled mirrors. I hate looking at myself while I talk, he says.

Why? I tease. You look good in that shirt. Blue suits you sir - it's your colour.

I guess, he says with a grin. Blue's your colour too.

I pretend to consider this deeply.

Maybe, I say. Green too, and black. Goes with the hair.

We both pause to solemnly admire my hair for a moment. Then start to giggle. I pour more wine, watch the bubbles fizzle briefly.

Blue, he says then. Light blue. There's a blue-grey top you wear, with a high neck, you wore it to the meeting the other day and it's kind of soft and woollen and just the right colour for your eyes.

He stops. Looks away.

Not that I noticed, he says.

I'm not even sure it did happen that way. If I asked him, maybe it would turn out that it was another Wednesday, somewhere else, in an airport terminal or at a fast food counter, and my hair was up not down and there might actually have been no wine because it was weeks and weeks ago on an unassuming day and all I do remember clearly is that last part.

Portrait

2006-07-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

There is a girl sitting on the bus-stop bench. Her feet are half out of her slip-on sandals, and she has three large bags on the bench beside her. Her clothes are a little crumpled. She is sitting in a way that is not entirely straight, and her hands on her lap in front of her are half curled, not holding anything.

She is staring vacantly out into the passing traffic. She has been crying, but if anything now she looks somewhat beyond tears. Too tired. For quite some time she doesn't move.

A car passing beeps at her in recognition, and she straightens for a moment to smile and wave at the people in it. Then the smile goes bit by bit and her face empties again.

The traffic passes by.

Scar tissue

2006-07-28T09:35:00.000-07:00

[This post made me remember this story]

She was a very shy child. Painfully so, I think she once said about herself.

You wouldn't imagine it now. These days, she cannot take a taxi without learning about the driver's latest visit to the dentist, cannot walk into a shop without befriending the person behind the counter, the lady in line behind her, the man browsing for a birthday card.

But she used to be the girl at the back of the class who never dared put up her hand. The child who didn't understand numbers. The one who never spoke up.

What she had was art. She spent hours in her room drawing, asked for paints on her birthday. She was helping her mother to raise four younger children, and every spare moment was spent bent over a sheet of paper, spilling out what was inside her.

And in her lessons, she drew under cover of her desk. The seconds and minutes she stole when the teacher's back was turned were collected carefully, and became her masterpiece. Over weeks she added to it, this large drawing she kept hidden in her desk.

She was seen, one day. The teacher told her to bring it to the top of the class.

And she was told to tear it up.

Is this the point at which part of you stops being a child?

Or is this the part of you that is always that child?

I don't think that teacher ever imagined that one, small, now-forgotten thing in a schoolroom forty years ago would be the thing that never healed inside someone. I don't think that teacher ever knew what it was they did that day.

She still shakes when she retells that story.

Maybe none of us realise how easy it is to leave scars.

Coming Home

2006-07-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

There are three of us packed into the back seat of a small Ford, me in the middle. The Dutch girl beside me laughs in my ear, and at first I look to see what is funny. It's a moment before I realise that I'm reaching out to grip the two front seats every time we round a bend, knuckles white. The roads here are barely wide enough to allow one car, but our driver appears gloriously unaware of this. He glances back at me with a grin.

Don't trust my driving? he asks.

Road, I say. Eyes on the road.

Brambles scrape against the car door. The Polish girl on my other side bumps against me as we round another corkscrew bend, and we're giggling, all of us, because it's high and airy up here in the Wicklow mountains and the scent of gorse flowers is being blown in the open windows as the scenery whips by.

Wait, our driver says. I'm going to take the scenic route back. Just up here.

He takes a sharp turn off. The road rises in loops and twists, and here and there the grassy bank disappears and the feathered tops of fir trees fill the downhill slope. I grip the headrests tighter.

And then it happens. The bank to our right falls away and I can see clear to the bottom of the valley. The car is suddenly quiet.

It would look mundane if photographed, just as sunsets do. Too many times already someone has tried to capture it.

But to be there, in the presence of that view, is another matter. It is something that can never be shared, although it feels too big to be to held inside just you. It is to be silenced.

The valley below is a patchwork of fields, of the most vivid green. A green that doesn't exist anywhere else but here. Great shadows from the clouds above are slipping across the valley floor, and for a little while that is all there is, shadows and sunlight and different shades of fathoms-deep green.

No-one speaks for some minutes.

Do you ever get used to it? I ask our driver.

No, he says. Never. Every time its like this.

The giggles are gone. Beside me, someone sighs.

I continue to watch out the car window.

This is my country. My brother said to me recently that he doesn't feel he has a country, that being born somewhere within certain invisible limits does not give him a sense of belonging. Who he is comes from his friends and family and the decisions he makes.

I understand that. And yet that green, it belongs to me.

Funny how although I wasn't born in these mountains, and have rarely been here, I seem to have an old old memory of them. Funny how it feels like coming home.

Mercy

2006-07-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

It's a funny sound, like a bark. But not a dog's bark.

A sound we had never heard before, but which was still familiar, somehow. Or not familiar - known. It may have come in many other forms before, but it is always recognisable, always known. The meaning in it is always known.

Across the street a boy in a waiter's uniform is pushing a mouse off the pavement with a sweeping brush. The sound had come from the mouse, and it meant stop. It meant please stop.

A girl appears beside the boy and takes a picture on her phone. They laugh.

The boy pushes again and the mouse rolls over a few times and falls into the gutter. It is trying to crawl away but there is something wrong with its back legs. They are twisted in a way they shouldn't be.

My friend and I don't want to watch, but we are unable not to.

The boy follows the mouse and pushes it forward again, further down the gutter. The mouse is still trying to walk. It makes no more sounds.

I hear a voice saying kill it, kill it, just kill it, and I realise it is me saying it. Please kill it.

Someone.

I can't, I don't know how. I never thought I would need to learn to kill for mercy's sake.

This earth lullabye

2006-07-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

I hated the world today.

Eight in the evening and the sun is in my eyes. I hate it and everything it touches; the wheeze of the bus as it grinds gears, the sharp bursts of carhorns that jump-start my heart, the food in my mouth that I didn't mean to eat, everyone I've ever met and every song ever written. There is a hard knot in my stomach that has been tightening all day, and it tastes so bitter I need to spit.

When I get home and shut the door behind me, I drop my bag and I scream. A curse, any curse. As loud as I can.

Which is not very loud at all, not nearly loud enough to be satisfying.

Once, when I was standing at the edge of a clifftop, I tried screaming, really screaming, over the roar of the Atlantic. It always comes out so much smaller than expected. All that holding it in and it turns out there is very little to be let out.

So I stood in my empty house and listened to the dry silence and felt like thumping something.

Pulled on my running shoes because I couldn't sit still and I thought maybe the road would bring some peace. I used to run, years ago. I have never been athletic, but I liked the way the pounding became a steady pulse, and the passing of the earth below in a smooth silent flow worked its hypnotic power. I ran when I needed to escape, when my thoughts were chasing eachother and tying up my insides, and eventually the rhythm worked its way within and smoothed all the tangles clean.

But I can't find it today. I am out of practise and after a few minutes my throat burns and I have to slow to a walk, and there is nothing to vent the rage on. I hate the flies that gather under the trees, hate the cars that pass and force me into the verge, hate the heat and the pinch of my runners, hate it all with a feriocity that threatens to eat me from the inside out.

I swipe at the long grasses and stray barley heads that I pass, grind my teeth. I want to cry in frustration but the tears won't come.

I turn back and begin the walk home, angry and beaten.

On the rise is an entrance to a barley field, and without thinking I step off the road into it, along the tracks that tractor wheels have cut. The feathered heads reach up to my waist, and soon I am submerged, drowned in the scent of a summer evening.

Somewhere in the middle of the golden sea I stop. I can't see the path anymore, just the gentle nod of barley beards tipping in the breeze.

It feels cool here. Straight ahead down the curve of the hill is the setting sun. I close my eyes and I listen.

Cars on the road below.
Song of the birds hidden in the hedgerows.
Drone of a plane passing far overhead, and the snap of a barley stalk as something scurries by.
Me breathing, in and out.

I open my eyes and everything has changed.

The barley is blue. I have never seen it that way before, but as I stand there I think maybe this is why Van Gogh painted the sky yellow and the cornfields blue. I can see each grain on every head with utter clarity.

I can't explain. But as I walk back out to the road my eyes have changed. What was nearby has faded away, and the background things have come to the fore. Days go by when I don't notice the sky, but it is all I can see now. It is so immense that I hardly feel I exist.

Maybe something happens at sunset, and I never knew it. Because now I have the strange feeling that when I had my eyes closed I heard without hearing a song without words.

Whether it came from the orange sun or the barley I don't know. But it was like being sung to sleep.

I feel tired, and empty. It feels wonderful.

I turn for home.

Popcorn

2006-07-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

He wasn't there when the film began, so he must have arrived sometime afterwards. He sat in the aisle seat, a few seats down from us, and he had a large sports bag on his lap.

It was the bag I noticed, the way he was holding it. I had put my bags on the floor, like everyone else. But he held his to him. Right against his chest, his arms encircling it fully.

As though it were a child. As though it were something too valuable to let go.

Or as though it were all you owned in the world.

Confessions: my thoughts:
What if?
Smells, don't breathe, stop. Not too obvious.
Just - there, out of the corner - see. Beard. Not cut.
How did he get in?
Did he-
Maybe hides in the cinema, from film to film. Staff know, don't see anymore-
Kerbsides, plastic bags. Huddled blankets. Hand, cup, no faces.
Woman with her shopping trolley, everything in there. Talks to herself- Him too?

These thoughts are not fair, but I had them.

Halfway through the film, I needed to go to the bathroom. I didn't want to have to squeeze past him. I was afraid of having to touch him.

When I do get up and begin to shimmy across the seats, he stands up too. Sorry, he says, and he stands out in the aisle for me to pass. And he gives me a lovely, shy smile, then bows his head again.

Then he gathers up his bag again and seats himself carefully. I can see his eyes shining in the dark as he watches the film, the bag hugged to him.

I feel immediately ashamed.

Is it fear? Is that where those thoughts came from?

What am I afraid of?

I was reading someone recently, who wrote about the looks people gave her. How she could feel their disgust. How it made her feel.

I thought, after reading it, that I would never be one of those people again.

I am one of those people.

So I felt shame. But I also felt something opposite. How small is that series of actions, the getting up and moving aside. And how many times a day do we do something similar? Move around someone in the street, open a door, shift position to allow someone sit in the next seat. Little things with no significance.

But this man did that small thing with such largeness. In such a way that I forgot to be ashamed, and liked him instantly instead.

This is how those things could be done, the tiniest of alterations that make them gifts to one another.

That's how I felt, standing in the dark.

Like I had been handed a gift.

That was six weeks ago. And I am still thinking about him.

I catch myself wondering, if I went back, would he be there, in the same seat?

I'd like him to be. I'd like to offer him some of my popcorn, and we could sit there, munching, in the flickering dark. With our eyes shining.

Headlights

2006-07-04T05:24:00.000-07:00

Something almost happened today, but didn't.

No. That's not right.

It was thought something was happening today, but it wasn't. Much to everyone's relief.

While we thought it might be happening, I couldn't think properly. I would start to do something, and then forget what it was. It wasn't that I felt panic. I was quite calm. But there was a dull hum that was distracting me, making me forget.

It wasn't a crisis. Which is a good thing for many reasons, not least because it seems I wouldn't have been much good if it had been.

I remember many years ago, I was in a bus when it hit another car. What I remember most clearly was the silence immediately afterwards, and then a child of about nine got out of the front seat of the car, and began to wail in a thin voice. He was holding his hand out in front of him. Then he went down on his knees in the road.

I know they took our names, in case they needed witnesses. But after that all I remember was arriving at the farm for work, and putting on my gloves and noticing my fingers were shaking.

The person I was with on the bus said later, many years later: you went very quiet.

I didn't know what she meant. I had forgotten there was anyone with me until she brought it up recently, while were were talking about something else. I have no memory of her there, although I realise now she was the one who spoke to the driver first, the one who asked the other passengers how they were.

In my memory, I was on my own.

You went very quiet.

So that's what I do when something happens. Or almost happens. Or might have happened.

Like those rabbits that freeze in the oncoming headlights.

Today, nothing happened. But if it had, I know there were others who would have led the way, surefooted, to safer ground. Ordinary people, whose strengths are not visible in ordinary light. And I would have followed gladly.

Broken things

2006-06-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

His name is Jake.

Things I know about Jake: He wears a diamond earring in one ear. The girls love him. And he was trouble from the minute he walked in.

These groups are always tough. Today is tougher.

Eoin kicks the football in his face, Jake says.

The card says there are two friends, Shane and Eoin. At their first day in their new school, another boy asks Shane to play football with him. Eoin says not to. He says the other boy is weird. Why does Eoin say that? the card asks. What should Shane do?

Eoin kicks it in his face, he says again.

We're sitting a little apart from the rest of the group, at a table with some clover and wild daisies in a jamjar.

At your first day of school? Why would you hit him? I ask.

Because then everyone knows your name, he says.

And you get expelled.

Been expelled. Twice. Suspended three times. Broke someone here.
He points to just under his eye.
Eyesocket. Fractured it on him.

Why did you do that?
He started it.
What did he do?
He was asking for it.
What did he do?
He was slagging me.
So you hit him?
Yeah.

Is there no other way?
He snorts. My two older brothers, they kickbox, see? Wouldn't let me not.

Maybe in where you were. In the next school they won't take you back. I knew people that happened to. They don't come back.

He looks away, shrugs.

What does your older brother do now?
Probation, he's on probation. Been on for eight years.

Does he have a job?
No.
Shakes his head. Won't look at me now.

Okay, I said.
Okay.
Let's go back to the rest.

We let them out for lunch. I stay behind, looking at the jumbled chairs and forgotten coats and bags.

What are we doing here again? I ask my partner.
Today I'm not sure, she says.

It's something I do a few times a month. We take groups from schools, to run programmes with them in an old barracks in the mountains. I get on the train at the end of the day drained. The sort of drained that leaves you not sure if you can put one foot in front of the other.

Today I have heels and a dress in my bag. When the train reaches town I change into them, shake out my hair, and go to dinner.

Champagne flutes. Goat's cheese tartlets. The couple next to me are telling the table about their annual trips to Kenya.

I get up from the table and find a door to an outer corridor. It is glass-paned along one side, so that when I sit on an upholstered seat I look out onto the vast length of the gardens. It's raining outside, in sweeping sheets, and in irregular musical drips from the eaves.

Is there anything so beautiful as rain?

Glass pearls falling, shattering silently, lying glittering in the grass.

I put my hands over my eyes and start to cry. For Jake. And for me, because I can't stop thinking about how my make-up might run, or how oddly romantic it would be for someone to find me like this. It doesn't seem fair on anyone that I should keep thinking these things.

Jake. Who is twelve years old.

Just before the bus had arrived to take them away, I tried talking to him again. I reached a hand out across the table. Not to touch him, just to reach out. There were so many things that wanted saying.

I said, Jake don't. Don't get suspended, okay?

And the minute I said it I knew it was the wrong thing to say. And then he was gone.

I wish I had told him he was brilliant. It only occurred to me now that maybe no-one has ever told him that.

Why do I feel the need to fix things? It's not something I know how to do.
There is no beauty here.
Just the rain and somebody crying.

Every day an adventure

2006-06-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

The cat is sitting to attention in front of the glass doors, ears pricked, when I come into the kitchen. I open them for her and she creeps out a few steps into the night, belly low to the ground. She pauses at the edge of the decking, where the light thrown by the kitchen stops abruptly. Beyond is darkness.

I follow her gaze, but I can't see anything. Just black.

Black is the colour of nothing, I remember from long ago art classes. The absence of light.

There is no chill tonight so I leave the door open a few moments, breathe in the night-time scents.

There's a crackle, then, from the bottom of the garden. Cat and girl peer out again. The girl can see nothing. Perhaps the cat can.

A moment longer. Again.

I turn back inside. There's something at the bottom of the garden, I call out.

My mum joins me at the door, and we look out again.

Ears pricked, all three.

A hedgehog? she asks. She goes out to the porch railing, to stand beside the cat. Then she turns back.

Give me a torch, she whispers.

We find one in a kitchen cupboard, nested in unrolled twine and loose washing tablets. I don't expect it to work, but it does, and so out she ventures, picking her way across the lawn. The cat trots after her, close to her heels.

The phone rings and I go to pick it up. It's for her, so I bring it outside, down to the shed, where the torchlight is sweeping among the Hawthorn branches.

She's right here, I say to my grandfather at the end of the line. I hold the phone out.

She ignores me. Creeps around the side of the shed, cat in tow. Torch picks out pieces of garden; fringe of suddensharp grass blades, white clawed branch. Flat green cat's eyes wink.

Finally she takes the phone. Whispers to her father that she's on an adventure. He whispers something back. Together they set off through the clump of trees at the bottom of a suburban garden, to explore the June night, grinning like schoolchildren in the dark.

Sometimes my mother is far better than I am at being young.

For every action

2006-06-16T03:41:00.000-07:00

I lost my faith today.

Had been losing it for a while. Cloudy days, lonely thoughts. Feels like a delicate part of me has come loose, and is trailing on the ground, bruised and dusty. Was expecting this. Had too many good days recently, braced myself for the low that must follow.

Can't write on those days. Just stare at my shadowed reflection in the bus window, and out at the earth beyond.

That was today.

But then looked a little further, to where something had punched ragged holes in the grey underbelly of cloud, and the light was pouring out of them in shafts, illuminating here and there the distant fields as though spotlights on a great empty stage, out there at the edge of the world where they are awaiting the word to begin.

The things we are shown. Must be shown, over and over, to be taught the lesson by heart.

That when we are at our lowest, the road rises highest.

The Question

2006-06-14T03:06:00.000-07:00

I've started having conversations with her, in my head.

About you. About what it was all about.

I remember a question. It doesn't matter who asked me, or when. More than one person, on more than one occasion. It matters that it comes back to me now, in these last few days. Since I met the new girl in your life.

You're allowed hate her a little bit, my friend said.

I know, I said, as I watched her put her hand on your chest. But I don't.

I feel happy. I didn't expect to feel like that.

But the question keeps coming back.

So I've been talking to her, as I walk to the beach, or make lunch. There are things that I want to talk to her about, things I didn't expect to feel. About how watching you fall in love, watching you try to be a better person for her, has been a wonderful thing. About how it has made the world seem brighter, somehow. About how it has given me a faith in love.

And about how the question has been puzzling me.

Have you ever been in love?

No. I haven't.

Then why? Why did I want you so much? Why did I stay? Why did I try again, and again?

And it's in the moments before I get in to bed one evening, as I'm asking her for answers, that I get it. And like all true answers, it is too simple to be believable. It's an answer I should have already known.

It was because I wanted you to like me more than anyone else.

That's what it was about. That's what it has always been about. With you, and the others before. This is me; someone who needs to be liked. Who needs it desperately.

That need, it gets in the way. I don't want that any more.

Have you ever been in love?

No.

How do you know?

Because I have feelings I haven't yet felt, like darkened rooms I pass by in the far wing of the house, dust-sheeted. I can see the shape of them, waiting in the dark.

Waiting to be lived in. Waiting for the switch to be thrown.

And this is the faith she and you have given me. That one day it will.

Article of Faith

2006-06-12T02:55:00.000-07:00

One the bus, a man puts up his hand, so that a shadow falls across the face of a baby asleep in his buggy. It's not the man's child. He doesn't even know him, or the mother dozing in the stifling heat.

But he does it anyway, a careful salute, until the bus passes into the shade of the city skyline, and baby, buggy and man fall into shadow.

It was a nice thought, and I wish it had stayed that way. If I had gotten off at the next stop it would have. But later, after the mother awoke, I realised they did know each other.

I felt a little disappointed.

But I'm sure that somewhere, some day, a stranger did what that grandfather did. I didn't see it happen.

But it did happen. I am sure of it.

Tenacious

2006-06-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

She is beautiful. I can see that even from a distance.

Tall and slender, she glows slightly in the evening light, as though polished. And when I reach out to touch her first, that's how she feels - polished.

Look up, I tell my friend, the one who introduced me to her, and we both do. I have no fear of heights but the crow's nest atop the tapered mast seems impossibly small, a child's toy cradled by a cross-hatch of delicate roping.

One of the crew sees us looking.

Everyone goes up there, he grins. The first day aboard, everyone goes up.

There is wine, and light conversation. The mood is festive, a launch party for the new crew who set sail in a few days time. After some introductions I drift to the far end of the deck, to stand by the railing and look out across the river to the far quays.

Beneath me the ship talks quietly to herself, in sighs and soft knockings, and the rigging clinks a melody out over the still water. It's a place that encourages thought, a place that entices you to be alone with a small corner of it. I stand against her railing and listen to the singing breeze.

Along the far quay wall, a thin path of buttercups has flowered. I look closer, and see they are ducks, rubber ducks, thousands of them, flowing dowstream towards the open mouth of the sea.

A little tugboat motors past, its deck submerged in yellow ducks that have been harvested from the water. The two-man crew wave up to us, and begin tossing their cargo to the crowds milling along the quays. I can hear squeals as people catch them.

I take a sip of wine and turn back to the party.

Later, I notice there's a boy sitting cross-legged on the harbour wall beside the ship, with a plastic bucket he has filled with caught ducks. He is no more than seven or eight. He is passing his treasures out to the couples who walk by, one at a time.

Do you want one? he asks me. I nod.

I catch it, one-handed, and smile back at him. I wonder where he got the bucket, why he is here, why he gave something to me.

Among the wine-glasses and guests there are silver platters of finger food. I skewer some cocktail sausages with a toothpick, and lean far out over the railings with my arm outstretched. For a moment, I think perhaps the distance is too great, a yawning gap between the gently bobbing ship and the quay wall, that perhaps he might fall.

But he reaches out and takes the sausages in his fingers, whole-fisted, hot and crisp. He turns away, hunched over his find, the ducks forgotten.

My friend joins me at the railings. What are you smiling at? he asks.

Nothing, I say. I'm just glad I came.

The party is breaking up, gathering their skirts to negotiate the ladders to the higher deck, clasping hands in goodbyes.

There's just one thing I want to do first, I say to my friend. Come here.

I lead him forwards, towards the bow. I duck under one of the ropes and walk out along the webbing, over the river, to where the ship narrows to a point. The ship lifts, just there at the end, so that she pierces the sky ahead.

I sit on the rope webbing and put my cheek against her polished rail. My friend comes to stand beside me.

What's her name? I ask, into the calm silence.

The Tenacious, he says.

I think about it. Tenacious. Determined. Persistent.

The Tenacious is a tall ship, like the ships that left Ireland. Those that were able gathered at the ports, leaving behind those that fell along the way. They brought with them little, having already sold anything worth selling for food. A country starving slowly, bleeding its people into the sea.

Most of them never made it. None of them ever came back.

But it was hope that brought them to the quays. A sliver of hope in despair. A vessel to a new life.

Yes, tenacious, I think, as I give her a farwell pat.

A good name. A name to pierce the heavens with.

Hopscotch

2006-06-01T02:07:00.000-07:00

I'm running, in heels, to be somewhere. I'm a little late. I'm always a little late.

One of my shoes touches a pebble accidentally and it flies out before me, in a short arc. It happens so suddenly. I am flooded, in those seconds before it falls back to earth, with an abrupt confusion of emotions. Fear. Yearning. Hope.

It skitters to a stop and I am six years old again.

Holding a pebble, turning its flat edges in my palm until it is slightly warm. Weighing it. Calculating. Then, release.

And the clench in my stomach as I pour every ounce into its curved descent, willing it, wishing it. Knowing it too late to change where it fell, but raising up on tiptoe to silently urge it on nonetheless.

A little farther, just a little, oh, oh. Oh.

Chalklines on the pavement. Chalkdust marks on our clothes. Faces, bodies, screwed up in concentration until the bell went, or the light went. Endless summer evenings and the call for dinner, call for bed. Live to play another day.

My palms itch to pick the pebble up.

For what? What would I do with it?

I don't know.

Yearning, yearning.

I leave the pebble be, and keep walking, passed the green-glassed office blocks. I glimpse myself in their mirrored surface, green-hued. A jawline, a flick of hair, a foot in mid-step. Little pieces that I can't put together for a moment.

Someone I don't recognise for a moment.

I wonder what that six year old would think of me.

Waltz

2006-05-31T02:19:00.000-07:00

I think of silk, though I know it is mere cotton. The feel of it; a little rough, the raised weave, warm to the touch. A peasant skirt, not aristocracy.

But when it flares out just so, as I run down the stairs, I think of silk. The fullness of it, suspended in mid-flow, only the edges rippling smoothly. Only women will ever know that lightness of touch. The way a simple fall of cloth can make you someone else, for just a moment. For six steps of a stairway.

Velvet drapes. Polished brass. Shush of tulle and taffeta on marbled floors.

Slow, quick-quick, slow, quick-quick.

But the steps are stone, and the skirt cotton. I reach the foot of the stairway and cross towards the huddle of people waiting at a set of lights, before the steady mumble of traffic. The city is a little tired and dusty this evening.

The lights change and we all move forward together, in unison.

These are my dance partners, who turn around me and side-step neatly, the traffic the orchestra that builds and fades. We move to the silent waltz in our heads.

Slow, quick-quick. Slow.

Animal beat

2006-05-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

It feels like a giant's footsteps. That is my first thought, that something large is advancing across the airfield. The desk throbs with it, and the floor under my feet, a regular double-thump. Silent, but heavy. I can feel it all the way into my bones.

It's the drill, the girl at the desk beside me says. They're breaking up the old runway apron.

The beat continues into the afternoon, deep down from under the earth's skin. I know it is made of steel girders and pistons, but it still feels like an animal. A beast from a blind dark place. Out of the corner of my eye I keep watch on the tall office windows, waiting for its sloping shadow to stalk by.

When I leave work at the end of the day the memory of it clings to me, a resonance. Both fearful and thrilling.

Much later, I am sitting in the dark, looking down upon a shadowed stage. There are violins and keyboards, xylophones and cellos, but I have eyes only for the drums. The dance of the beat, its urgency, has caught somewhere inside me and I am transfixed. I think of metal and animal skin, dark earth and grinning mouths.

Show me, I ask him. We are sitting in a bar full of men, their chatter in a language I don't speak blanketing the walls thickly and pooling under the barstools. Show me how you play, I ask.

I have never seen him at the kit, but I don't need to. When we are together he plays me, unconsciously. He taps out a riff along my collarbone or hipbone, thrums a fluttering hearbeat on the inside of my wrist. It's always within him.

You're a snake, he said to me once. Snakes feel everything, through their skin. If you were walking a mile away a snake would feel you, every step.

He moves our drinks aside, puts his feet on my feet, his hands on my hands. Without taking his eyes off me he begins to tap out the beat. Marking time.

In my bones. In his hands. I am in thrall with words, but this, here, is something beyond words.

We are the only two in the bar. The men around us talk, voices rising and falling. I have forgotten how to speak.

Fright

2006-05-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

The cat died.

It took me three weeks to find out. Three weeks because I didn't really want to ask. And it was only after I had found an excuse to look around the conservatory, in vain, for her box, only after I had scanned the ground outside the back door for her bowl, only when I saw that the house was conspicuously empty of cat. It was only then I asked - casually, I hoped - while I set out the table for lunch.

She would have died anyway, the vet had told my dad. She had something wrong with her chest, from when she was very young, a bone curved the wrong way. It had begun to press upon her lungs.

The next fright would have killed her, my dad explained. A dog, or a screaming child.

So it didn't matter. It didn't matter whether she went to the vet.

Its logic finds me out, this refrain, over and over again.

It didn't matter.

And I who thought I could save her.

Save her. Saviour.

Anything but.

In the changing room at a department store, later, I stood in front of the mirror for too long. I don't even remember what I was thinking. I was late to meet someone but I still stood, looking at myself, looking at nothing.

Then I hang the clothes back on their hangers, put my coat on and button it up, pack my things back in my bag. I take a last look in the mirror, and leave.

I think of her out in the bushes, her death waiting around the next corner.

Puss, puss, puss, puss. Here, puss-puss.

She would have died anyway.

Unknown Soldier

2006-05-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

It's not often that I catch the train at this time of the evening. The crowd is different, their clothes looser, their faces too. The sun is sinking towards the western fields, and from where I sit at the station I can see them laid out below, a handstitched quilt of umber and ochre.

When we reach the city there are crowds everywhere, drawn by the match. I surrender to their pull, let myself be carried forwards with the tide. I'm distracted by my phone, so I don't see the escalator until I am about to set foot on the top step. I change my mind then, for no particular reason, and turn towards the stairway instead, straight into someone else's path.

He doesn't bump into me, nor I him. We pause just in time, not touching.

There is something about it: how he is just the right height for my bowed head to be level with his chest; how his voice as he excuses himself is low and unsuprised; how he moves slightly as if to protect me from the hurrying crowds. I'm aware of how the setting sun touches the soft fibres of his jumper, of the scent of my just-washed hair. Just that.

It all takes place in an instant - half a heartbeat - and we move apart and I am halfway down the stairs before it has fully happened. But it seemed maybe for that moment that time stopped, and the evening I go out into is slowed to half-time, the swing step of a slow dance.

I didn't even see his face. If we met again I would never know him. But I remember him, days later.

And that is enough; enough to connect me to him, to this whole moving city, to all the countless anonymous acts of everyday kindness that will never be measured or recorded or weighed. It's just one thread, so thin and transparent that it seems hopelessly delicate, like a small breeze could whip it away.

And yet it stays with me, even now.

I didn't even see his face. But I remember him. He is every stranger I have yet to meet.

Grace notes

2006-05-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

There was a man playing the piano on television last night.

I switched on for another programme, and left him on to fill the time. I meant to watch for just a few minutes.

At first it is elevator music, the music that is on in the background, the music that you never pay attention to. Then you begin to hear it. Achingly, achingly soft as he moves to the higher notes, and trembles there on the edge. The fall that carries the length of the piano, a full flight of steps into the depths, into the great tumult of the orchestra awakening.

The minutes pass and I can't move. My mum looks in, and sees me on my own. She starts to speak, then thinks better of it and joins me on the couch.

He bends over the keys as his hands skim ivory, dancing, then leans back, shoulders raised, head tilted, expectant, exultant. Watching, I feel strange, like a soft-footed intruder who has caught someone sleeping.

It's not acting. It's his heart made visible, the whole of it.

The camera follows his fingers and I notice he is wearing a silver wedding ring. I wonder if he played for her, before she was his wife. Whether she fell in love with him partly because of the music.

When he stops between movements, the audience stays respectfully mute. They hold back their applause. I wish with all my heart that I was there, seated among them, because I know that I would feel it then, a silent wave of appreciation flooding across the tiers and balconies. Gratitude that music such as this exists, and that there are people to play it.

Play on, play on, play on. From my sitting room, I beg of him. Play on.

Storm coming

2006-05-15T04:54:00.000-07:00

They said there was a storm coming.

I looked out into the white afternoon, scanned the clear sky for warnings. I didn't believe them but I went anyway, down to the ivied shed where the lawnmower skulks among the rusted shells of garden tools.

The grass is still. The lawnmower protests, thinly, as I wheel it into place. I notice then that there aren't any other sounds. Even the birds are silent.

I push. The blades whir and bite into the lawn, crisply, neatly. I lay down smooth strips, sectioning, ordering. The cut grass is sweet.

The first time, I think I may not really have heard it, but then it comes again. A deep grumble that seems born in the earth, not sky. From the South a hem of thick clouds have begun their march upwards, onwards. The light is turning yellow at the edges.

I push harder. I don't know why but I think of her, then, and the pushing is somehow to do with her. It's important that I keep going, that I keep pushing, into the yellow air that crackles a little with captured energy, that I keep going when I should stop.

I hit a thick hillock of grass, and judder to a halt, panting. When I look up, my neighbour is standing a few feet from me. I didn't hear her arrive. The thunder rolls out somewhere close the ground again.

Hi, I say, palming the sweat off my forehead. The first heavy drop of rain falls. We grin at each other, at my crumpled clothes.

Would you like to come in for some tea? I ask. I know as I say it that it's the right thing to do.

We put the lawnmower away together, and go inside. I make peppermint tea, and watch the water steam in slowly rising curls, carrying the scent of mint. As we take our seats on the livingroom couch the rain starts abruptly, heavily, drowning the cut lawn with sudden fury. We sit and watch in silence.

She lived across the street, and down a few doors. Our friend who died. We used to play together when we were younger, all of us, in and out of the connecting gardens, under bushes and over walls. We had a secret handshake, a set of rules. We fought all the time.

I hadn't seen her for many years when they found her, one morning, in her bedroom. I hadn't seen my neighbour either, until the removal, or the others we used to play with. That was our reunion, in her house, when we came to pay our respects.

It was an accident, my neighbour said then. It was just an accident.

Whenever one or more of us come together she is there, or she is not. A thing or a lack of, that sits between us on the couch. We are careful not to mention it, but it's there. She is there.

There's a flash and the living room is whitened suddenly, overexposed, the corners jumping out. I count seconds until the thunder sounds, realising only then that I have been holding my breath.

Can I stay here until it's over? my neighbour asks.

I smile. Of course, I say.

We sit and watch the rain fall, together, the three of us.

Burnt Secrets

2006-05-13T04:52:00.000-07:00

You write a lot, don't you?

I look up. He nods towards my notebook, pages filled with scribbles, notes.

Yes, I say.

I pull the notebook closer to my chest, without thinking. It's just something I do, I say.

My friend takes another sip of coffee, then sets the cup down on the table between us. He has his feet up on the cafe seat, a suited man lying horizontal on a purple couch. He closes his eyes.

I watch him for a moment, fondly, and then pick up my pen again.

I write, he says, sometimes. Sometimes I need to write something down. But then afterwards I always tear it up.

I open my mouth, to say something. But I can't think of anything to say.

I close the notebook and sit back.

I'm remembering a documentary I saw. It was about the children in Beslan, who lived through the school shooting between the Chechnyan rebels and the Russian troops.

There was a boy, an eight year old boy. Too old for eight. He explains to the camera that he draws pictures, every day, of the Chechnyans. And then he burns them.

I remember how ceremonial it was. The drawing and the burning. He lit a candle and touched the paper to it, watching as the flames took hold and ate the pictures hungrily. There was something hungry about his face too.

I look back over at my friend, at his closed eyes, and I am not sure what I'm thinking. I feel uneasy. Burning and tearing.

Can you destroy secrets?

And what sort of secrets would they be?

I wonder about the burnt secrets that collect within people, like ash. I wonder if they ever go away.

Parts of the Whole

2006-05-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

I suppose she used to be my friend.

I used to sit beside her, in school. We wrote notes to each other in class. The backs of my old copybooks are full of them, nonsense writings, bits of things. We drank orange and vodka together, down the laneway by the back of the shops, before we joined with the other lost gangs patrolling the nighttime. I held her up when she fell down, held her back from swimming out to sea.

But I'm not sure if we were ever friends. When I left, I never came back for her.

She wrote to me, out of the blue, last week. An e-mail I never expected to get. I wondered for a while whether to respond, because I couldn't really remember anything about her. I wondered whether I ever even knew her.

I haven't thought about her. Not once in the last year, maybe two.

Except that's not entirely true. Sometimes when I write a letter, I notice that my handwriting is hers. I have her g, and her f. I don't know when that happened.

And I begin to notice other things. Words that aren't mine. A particular way of flexing my fingers. One raised eyebrow. If I think hard, I can remember who they came from, these little parts of me that aren't me.

And the funny thing is, these people were mostly bit-parts, walk-ons. The extras you don't remember after the curtain falls. Those people who appear in your dreams, without explanation. People you had forgotten, missplaced.

The girl who stayed across the hall at summer college. The woman who shared your phone at your first job. The boy you hated on the weekend visit to London.

And the girl you sat beside in class, who was once your friend.

Shine

2006-05-11T14:27:00.001-07:00

It's a moment before I see him. He's waving a large coffee cup above his head, on the other side of the junction. Oversize mirrored sunglasses, tattered backpack, one thumb hooked into his jeans. Clearly a Californian.

Hey scruffy, I call out over the traffic.

You're ridiculous, he calls back.

We find an empty cafe serving full Irish breakfasts. He's leaving in a week, to return home. What's home? I asked before. Where I have to set up a Church, he replied.

When the bacon and eggs arrive, he pulls a book out of a satchel, a little battered around the edges. From travelling with me around Italy, he says, shrugs.

It's by CS Lewis. I turn it over in my hands, open it, read the inscription. I look back at him, blinking into the low morning sun. I decide I like it better for being a little battered.

Mere Christianity? I ask.

You're too proud, he told me before. Don't be too proud to leave the door open. I close the book carefully, put my hand on it where it lies on the table. The cover is warm under my palm.

Thank you, I say. And I mean it.

He smiles, leans back in his chair with lazy grace. He has to go in a little while, to work. Work is one day a week in a Christian bookshop. He says mostly he talks to the people who come in. They come looking for something, so he talks to them, to find out what it is. Sometimes he can help them.

It's the best job in the world, he says.

We talked before, about his church, about his faith. It's love, he said. It's love. And I see it, when he goes out into the world, when he walks across a road or holds a cup of coffee, that he burns a little with it. And when you see it, it has a strange effect. You love a little better yourself. A little more freely. A little more openly.

I wonder, looking at my friend, where he found this courage from. Because he's not sure, so it takes courage. You have to be brave to love. Who gives him permission to be so brave?

We part, and I take the book with me. It's an outrageously wonderful day outside, high blue skies and warm breezes. The sunshine brings people outside. They sit on the kerbs, drinks on the pavestones beside them, reclaiming the streets. There's a woman in a sunflower-yellow top, with lemon slices dangling from her ears. A four-year old charging the flocks of pigeons. They swing their arms, and gather at corners. The first sight of the sun and they open up.

And as I stand at the junction, watching them, I remember a quote that we used to have pinned up on our kitchen wall. I think maybe I understand now what it said.

That as we let our own light shine, we give others the permission to do the same.

Snowstorm

2006-05-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

It's snowing blossoms on the avenue. Pinks and whites, in swirling drifts. They alight on us as we pass each other by, men and women, boys and girls, walking through a featherlight snowstorm that falls like kisses.

I tell him about it later, during a stolen lunch-hour in the park.

It sounds like something out of a film, he says.

Yes, I say, head tilted back to watch the clouds go by. That's exactly what it is sometimes.

Travelling without a map

2006-05-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

This is the post I have been avoiding writing.

Stories are meant to have beginnings, and middles, and ends. They have a path they cut into the depths of the forest, and while it may detour ocassionally to overcome obstacles, the reader is always certain that there is a destination, that however far off course we may be taken, however long it takes, we are travelling forward.

When I try to write my own story, I feel as though I am caught wandering in circles. I am those lost travellers who wonder if they have not passed this rock, or tree, before. Who find themselves once again blocked by the same obstacles that they had tried in vain to find another path around. Who shake their compass, and wonder which way is true North, which way leads out.

Which way leads out?

I started writing because I wanted to find a path of my own. But writing tricks you, because you begin to believe in the story. You write yourself into your own narrative, and you think, I must be moving forward.

But here I am again. Where the thought of myself makes me sick. Where I can't look in the mirror, or dress myself, without feeling disgusted. Where I can't bear the thought of anyone seeing me, or touching me, without my skin crawling. Where I don't want to leave the house, I can't make myself leave the house.

Hello, familiar landmarks. I thought I passed you before, but here I am. Again.

I started writing because I thought, this is not normal. These things are hard to write. They feel sometimes as if they cannot come out. But I wanted to put it down, in writing, for the days when I can't imagine feeling like this. To remind me that there were days that I did.

And there is a guide, here, in the depths of the forest. I found him when I thought I was most alone. I spoke to him when I was at my lowest, and he comforted me. He saw me and he loved me still.

Sometimes I wonder, will I ever find my way out?

Perhaps not. Perhaps it is not a place you leave. But there will always be guides along the path.

They will not tell you which direction to take.

They will not lead you out.

They will only sit with you a while, on this rock. And when you find it in you to get up and begin walking again, they will say, let me know where you end up.

And I will come sit with you again.

Pretty

2006-05-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

What?

Nothing. He smiles.

I turn back to my glass of wine, tracing the stem with my fingers. The firelight and lamplights have sown it with liquid threads of gold that glimmer uncertainly under my touch. I pretend to concentrate on them as they waver, then turn back, quickly, to catch him again.

What? I try to keep a straight face. I fail. Miserably.

I just like looking at you, he says. You're so pretty.

I turn back to the glass. It's a while before I can manage a response, but I do.

I don't feel pretty today, I say, without looking at him.

Well you should, he says. He puts his head to one side theatrically, narrows his eyes, puts a finger to his lips, then nods to himself.

You should, he says. You're beautiful.

I flinch, and he sees it. He straightens up a little and puts a hand out, close to mine, but not touching. He's watching me closely now.

Hey, he says. Hey. Look at me. What? You don't think you're pretty?

I try to say something, but all that comes out is a grimace. I can't help it. I physically cannot prevent my face from twisting that way. I can't help it. I want to tell him I can't help it.

I'm sorry, is what I say. I'm sorry.

I can't help it.

Down by the canal

2006-05-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

All the women are wearing white runners under their pinstripe suits. They'll be click-clipping about later, picking their way daintily across marble and hardwood boardrooms, a few inches further from the ground, but for now they pass by with sneakered softness.

I'm sitting on a low wall by Rathmines church, in a fine early-morning rain. I stayed with a friend last night, a last-minute favour that was repayed this morning by a seven o'clock wake-up call. I hated him intensely for it when I was warm under several layers of duvets, but the cold air has cleared my head and I am almost thankful now.

He asked if we could stop for a moment, on the walk into work, to step into the church. I shrugged - sure - and took a seat on the wall to watch the working world pass by. I don't have anywhere to go this morning, and it feels wonderful to be on the outside, a little hungover, a little thirsty, but happy.

My friend joins my again after a few minutes, and we saunter down to the end of the road where it meets the canal. We take a pathway along by the water, fringed with blonde reeds and tall grasses.

This is your walk every morning? I ask

He nods. It helps me collect my thoughts, he says.

We continue on in silence for several hundred paces, in no hurry. A black water hen breaks out from the bank, head bobbing back and forth, striking out into the centre of the canal. I know that underneath there are little feet paddling, but the water is filled with morning sky, so it looks as though, from where we are, that it's moving by sheer force of will. That by just wishing it to be so it happens.

I close my eyes and make a wish.

Dumb animal

2006-05-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

I've just finished clearing away the dinner plates, and my dad has the kettle on to boil. It's the end of our weekly dinner together - he cooks, I clear. My stepmother is peering into the conservatory, and she says something about the cat. It's still not eating much, I think I hear.

Is she sick? I ask. For about a week, my stepmother says. Then, over her shoulder to my dad, were you not going to take her today? Traffic, he says, I wasn't home in time.

I go over to stand beside her. I can see part of the cat, a black furry rump in a cardboard box, through the glass dividing doors. While the others continue their conversation I press down on the handle and let myself in.

I'm still a few paces away when I stop. I don't need to go any closer, but after a moment I do, lowering myself to a crouch beside the box. I couldn't tell you exactly what it is, but it's there. In the angle of the head, or a paw.

I go back inside to the kitchen, and sit at the countertop where my dad is wiping down a cutting board. I pick my words with care, lay them out on the tabletop in a neat row.

I think, if you don't take her to the vet, she will die.

He looks in the cat's direction, silent for a moment. Eventually he pulls out a directory and begins to flick through it. I keep my palms flat on the countertop, for balance, because there is a tight little band squeezing me inside. A week, I think.

When I am sure he will call one of the numbers, I go back to sit with her. I stroke her head while she makings little clicking sounds with each breath, her ribcage jerking in stopstarts, abruptly. Her eyes are partway closed, and I don't think, looking into them, that there is much cat left in there.

My dad brings another box, and together we tip her into it. She struggles frantically, and far too briefly, when the flaps are closed over.

She mustn't be too sick, my dad comments. I wonder, for an instant, how we are related, and hate myself for thinking it. The box is quiet.

I gather my things and set out for the bus-stop home. He passes me in the car, with his cardboard-boxed cargo. I'm not sure whether she will return. I'm not sure whether I want her to.

I watch the car tail-lights disappear, and suddenly I want to take her with me, home, where she will have people to care for her. I realise, in the cold of the bus-shelter, that later in life I will be one of those people who take in the strays and the sick animals, until my house is filled with them. And I know that I will never be able to save all the dying cats, or animals, or people there are out there.

But it seems absurdly important that today I save just this one.

Limbo

2006-04-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

It's going on three am, or thereabouts, in a hotel room in the English midlands.

There is a hairdryer attached to the wall that has been pulled out, its cord stretched across a chairback, and I am attempting to limbo under it, for reasons unspecified. A friend is laughing himself silly from the bed.

As I fall on my behind for the fourth, or it could be the fifth, time - who's counting - it occurs to me that perhaps I don't have a natural talent for this. Or any talent. Come to think of it.

Indeed, I think from the floor.

But I tried, I tell my laughing friend. You can't say I didn't try.

Taste of summer coming

2006-04-28T16:39:00.000-07:00

There are a ring of mirrors above the sinks, and I look back at myself from each one, biting my lip. I came in here, to the ladies of the Gresham Hotel, to stand in front of these mirrors and assess how I look. I'm always nervous before I see him.

Idiot, I tell myself.

I pull a face, straighten my hem, and leave. Outside the sun is shining, brilliant shafts pooling on the flat office-block windows. The shadows are blue and cool and enticing.

We hug first, like we always do, and I have a few moments to breathe him in and feel the tickle of his coat-fabric, a few moments to calm the nerves. He makes a sound that doesn't have a name, happy and deep.

I draw away, without looking him full in the face. I find it hard to look straight at him yet, so I distract us with talk of the glorious weather and the complicated weavings of pedestrian traffic. We get ice-pops at a corner shop, orange ones, and as we lick them he catches me with a kiss. I grin, and start to cross the road, but he takes my hand and pulls me back to him.

That tasted good, he says, into my neck. He kisses me again, and I can taste sugar and summer in his mouth.

People are looking, but I couldn't care less.
Let them stare.
They can stare.
I want them to stare.
Just kiss me again.
Quick.

Lost

2006-04-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

I didn't even notice when she left this morning. It wasn't until after lunch that I realised she hadn't returned, and the others didn't know why.

When the office had emptied, later on, a little while ago, there were two of us that remained. It becomes a larger place in the afternoon, the morning smells of coffee and background chatter fade and I have the urge to freewheel about on my wheeled office chair. We talk to fill the empty space the others have left.

And then it is time for us to leave too. As my colleague packs up she asks me to field calls for the other woman, the one who left this morning, for the next few days. Sure, I say. And as an afterthought, is she alright?

It's the pause that makes me look up. She is putting on lipgloss, slowly. When she finishes, she puts it away, with the mirror, carefully.

I think so, she says. I think so.

She looks at me for a moment, weighing something invisible in the air betwen us.

She says, it was only the early stages, but they think she may have lost it.

She says, she hadn't known very long, but you start planning, even then.

I nod. Because I can think of nothing else to do.

She leaves.

I sit in the silence, alone.

There aren't any goodbyes for these losses. There aren't any markers, or masses, or family gatherings. There aren't any epitaphs or eulogies for those the world hasn't yet known.

She said, it only takes a few moments.

It only takes a few moments to lose everything.

I know why they call it the heavens

2006-04-22T07:26:00.000-07:00

This is my view in the mornings, before dreams have been fully put to rest. This is where my heart stays long after the sun has risen.

Stolen time

2006-04-20T02:16:00.000-07:00

He read me his poems, once, on a morning like this. He carried a small leather-bound book with him at all times, under his arm. It had gold-edged pages and he held it like a talisman.

We had gone into the city together one weekday. I had some free time while I waited for a work appointment, so we searched for traces of Joyce and second hand bookshops in the deserted heart of the old city, skittering across cobblestones and down backstreets that led nowhere.

I remember that as I passed by a great picture-window in a gallery, it began to snow, and we tumbled outside into the empty world to eat snowflakes as they fell from the sky. I remember him like that, head uptilted, mouth open, offering himself to the elements. We went for coffee aftewards in a castle basement, and I remember the solid wood of the table, and the eight panes of glass that framed the view from where we sat, in silence. There was a small slice of sky visible, in the top two panes of the window, a slice of sky that lightened, then faded. Then lightened again.

I asked him to read to me, from his gilded book. And everything about that morning had the taste of his voice, the rolling weight of full-formed words. We sat together, and sometimes we spoke, and sometimes we didn't. We watched the drift of clouds and drank in the slow passing of moments, and stored away little pieces of that morning for safekeeping.

He showed me the treasures in the everyday. He showed me how to shape poetry out of stolen time.

This morning I missed my bus. I saw it pull away as I turned the corner, watched it trundle down out of the town. I raged inside for a little while.

Then I realised I had twenty three minutes to myself. So I took out my camera and watched with new eyes through the viewfinder, as the clouded horizon shifted and broke into little pieces, as the thickened sky pulled itself apart into threaded wisps of blue-white, as the sun rose like the veiled moon and shone a silvered path on the oceans surface, from here to eternity. And I thought about that morning with him, and I started to compose this post to the rhythm of the tide.

Shaping poetry out of stolen time.

Last night...

2006-04-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

... I clicked play as I stepped off the train. As the first few chords rose up, I walked out into the falling night, into an inky sky where the places between the clouds were like holes torn in heaven, blue upon blue so deep that the evening air was full with it.

A boy gets off just in front of me. As he walks by the next carriage, a girl gets off and falls into step with him. They say nothing but smile, and I know they were meant to meet, that accidents do not happen on nights like these.

They run down the steps ahead together, still without a word, and as I follow them down I see that over the bar that divides the steps in two they are holding hands, and I am helpless, utterly helpless, to stop the smile from breaking out across my face.

And in my heart I'm on my feet, applauding for all I'm worth.

Struck

2006-04-12T02:56:00.000-07:00

It's so very ordinary, this evening.

I am on a bus, at the end of a long day. I have an old CD player in my handbag which shuts out the sounds of the road, and there's an open bag of M&Ms in there too. I take them out one at a time, cracking them between my teeth, trying to savour each one.

Across from me there's a boy, about eighteen or nineteen years old, nodding off to the rhythm of the bus. He has ebony skin, and I am fascinated. I'm not used to the way it glows, like polished velvet. I want to ask him if I am as exotic to him as he is to me.

The bus chatters on, a baby cries. Outside the evening has darkened to a watery blue. It's stuffy with the windows closed, so I take off my scarf, eat another M&M. I have a book open on my lap, and I start to read again. So very ordinary, this evening.

I'm reading about the bus protest in Montgomery, under the leadership of Martin Luther King. When the black people of Montgomery decided not to take the segregated buses, they organised car pools and taxis to get to work, or they walked. Someone recounts how they pulled up beside an old lady, walking with some difficulty, and offered her a lift. She refused.

I'm not walking for myself, she said. I'm walking for my children and my grandchildren.

I feel struck, stopped. It's difficult to explain what it felt like, or why. All I know is I felt like crying and singing at the same time. And that I had to put the book down.

And that I sat there, for a long time, looking out the bus window.

They used to call us the blacks of Europe. The Irish were the only country in Europe to be colonised. We were lesser. We were not quite people.

It's Easter Sunday in a few days time, and the papers are full of discussions about the commemorations of the Irish Easter Rising in 1916. A small armed group took over the centre of Dublin city, and declared us free of British rule. There had been rebellions before, there were rebellions afterwards. People died and continued to die on this island, for freedom, or something that sounded like it.

I don't agree with parts of it, or the dead that followed in our civil war. I am unsure how to feel about those men that declared us free, or the kind of country they envisioned after independence. I am uncomfortable with the legacy of violence they brought.

We talk so much in Ireland about sacrifice, about the boys and men who died for Ireland. But they killed for Ireland too. And so I feel torn. Not because I think violence is brutal, or frightening. But because violence is like a stitch dropped - it unravels things quickly, invisibly, running both deep into the past and on into the future, a fracture that never quite mends.

I wonder about the people in Montgomery, and Atlanta, and Birmingham, who had weapons and never reached for them. About what they suffered, and how many years it took, and how impossible it must have seemed. But they accepted the pain, because they wanted not just to break, but to build. That woman walked, because she didn't hate, she loved.

And there were those people in my history too. There were those that starved who went unarmed into the streets, to sing, to be counted, to walk.

When I go home, I write these words down. Because somewhere, sometime, someone walked not for themselves.

Someone walked for me.

Heartbeats

2006-04-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

I felt like sharing this today.

To my dad

2006-04-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

We've had our ups and downs, you and I. It hasn't been easy on either of us, I know.

I remember once, a Saturday many years ago. I know it was a Saturday, because for almost as long as I remember you, Saturday was the day we would go to visit you. I was sitting on my bed in your house, in what we called my room, but it wasn't anywhere close. The wallpaper was a violent burgundy-purple, with an abundance of those particularly awful tea-rose flower-patterns spreading across it, and in patches, maybe where a wardrobe had once stood, there were bald ribbons of wall showing through. I was staring at once of those patches, hating them. Besides the bed, there wasn't anything else in the room, so when you came in you just stood against the doorjamb.

Someday you'll write a book about all of this, you said, trying. I hiccoughed a laugh, and we smiled weakly at each other.

But I often thought about that, over the years. I remember my first thought was that I could never write about this, any of it, because I would be too afraid. I had seen, in the last year, just how easily hurt you could be. Maybe that's the point at which children grow up, when they realise that their parents are just people too, that they lie, and get angry, and petty. And lonely. For a long time the worst moments of my life were those few times I saw you crumble. You stopped being my dad then; you were just a sad, tired man, in an empty house. It felt as if everything solid had gone.

And I knew, if I were to ever write about us, about those years just after the divorce, I would hurt you.

We weren't very good at talking about it. In fact, I don't think you were ever very good at talking about the important things. Sometimes, I felt glad when you got angry at her, because then you would talk to me and some of the many things that had been floating around us would be said. And when it all got better, years later, in a way it got worse.

I remember when you and my brother hadn't spoken in months. He stopped coming to see you, and you wouldn't call him. I turned it over and over inside me for a long time, and then I asked to meet you for lunch. I was so angry by then, angry at you, that when I started to speak, my food untouched, I was crying too hard for the words to come out. The more reasonable you sounded, the more I hated you. I wanted to be hard like you, but I couldn't control it. He's sixteen, I remember shouting, and you're the adult. Be an adult. Please be the adult.

You may have thought you were protecting us, from each other, from the things we might say that would be hard to forget. The thing about not saying the difficult things though is that you can never take them back. How can I apologise for all the things I wanted to say, but never did?

Later, when I started seeing you regularly again, when I moved into your house, these thoughts ate at me. I tried to say I was sorry, by wiping the table down, by being quiet, by staying in my room. I wasn't really me, when I was around you. And it wore me out. So eventually I moved out again.

I'm a talker you see, I talk things out of my system. It has taken me a long while to learn your ways. I think now, in the time we spend together, I'm learning to say the things that are important without saying anything. Not, I'm sorry, but, I love you.

I'll never say any of this to you. But I hope maybe you know.

Punch in the gut

2006-03-30T06:47:00.000-08:00

I borrowed the title from a friend, but I'm sure he won't mind.

Definition: Those situations where you find yourself, quite unaccountably, sprawled somewhere at ground level. Certain basic rules of the world have, really very unfairly in your opinion, altered significantly. Gravity, apparently, being one. The world suddenly requires quite a lot more holding on than you remember.

Important events that you would assume might be accompanied by a punch in the gut often aren't. Death, for example. Death has different tactics, a more creeping quality that steals into you while someone distracts you with the news of it, and pockets your emotions smoothly. Death leaves you staring at the backs of your hands, wondering just how it is that everything is still in its place, quite whole, yes, quite whole, except for those curiously empty parts you appear to have missplaced somewhere about your middle.

No, the punch in the gut is something different.

It is both sudden, and anticipated. Often you have a few minutes to see it coming, but nothing quite prepares you for when it hits. Sort of like the tsunami might have been. You have perhaps enough time to say, oh that looks really rather large, don't you think? And then something has laid you flat.

And it's often something so very very small. Like when you ask someone you used to love, carelessly, whether they're sleeping with so-and-so. And maybe you already even know the answer.

And suddenly you're staring at sky, wondering, just how did that happen?

At this point, you would dearly like to toss off some witty comment that would demonstrate just how okay you are with all of this, but unfortunately you have become somewhat preoccupied with getting a firm handhold on the ground just now. Rather tiresome, that.

Perhaps, once you have dealt with these more pressing concerns, you might borrow a smile from someone else and try it on for size. And they'll pretend they don't notice how it doesn't quite fit you.

See, just fine.

Yes. Just fine.

What goes around

2006-03-28T06:36:00.000-08:00

I get a call this morning, from a delivery man. He's lost. They often are. The stationary suppliers and fax repairmen of this world are forever trying to locate our office.

I sigh, push out from my desk and make my way down to reception. There's a man standing by the entryway as I come down the stairs. He has a mass of flowers in his arms. I'm looking for my guy when our eyes meet and we realise we're waiting for each other.

There's no name, just a note inside the card that reads: "Returning the favour."

I'm looking at them now, propped against the filing cabinet opposite me. I'm trying to work out who they're from. And then it comes to me.

See, I did this thing recently. I had all these envelopes on my desk at work. And it really seemed a shame that they were just sitting there, unused.

So I started posting people sweets.

It started with jellybabies, but soon I had moved on to chocolate buttons and fizzy soothers and giant cola bottles. Every time I went into a shop I would take a look around for something interesting, something that would fit into an ordinary envelope.

And one day I realised I had some really big envelopes. Industrial-sized ones. Big enough for more than a handful of penny sweets. Big enough to take several packets in fact. And, because a friend of mine was sick, I packed in as much as it could carry and sent it off to him. Because I thought, really, there are few things that candy doesn't make better.

And this weekend I got sick. So here I am staring at a ridiculously beautiful bouquet.

This is not for a moment to pretend that I am a wonderful person. But the little nice things you send out into the world sometimes really do come back to you.

Which is really very nice to know.

Against the Tide

2006-03-27T00:33:00.000-08:00

Have you ever felt there was something you had to speak out about?
Have you ever felt it and known that - whatever you say - it may not make a difference? Ever felt the blood in your ears as you think about saying it, knowing it will not be something people want to hear? Have you ever felt your mouth go dry, and stared at your palms as your fingers shake? Have you ever known, that by saying it, you will hurt someone you respect? And that they may never understand why you said it?

Have you ever said it anyway?

Here's to that today. However small the action.

Gift

2006-03-26T01:02:00.000-08:00

You gave to me, even before I was there to receive it. You gave yourself over to me, as you give yourself over to us all, every day. Back then, when there was only the idea of me, I think that must have been when you gave up yourself first, everything that you used to be, to become something other than yourself. The better to give with. There is a type of giving that takes nothing in return, and that keeps nothing for itself.

I stop and I think about this morning, and yesterday, and already there are acts too countless to mention. My life is stacked high with the gifts you gave me. I sleep deeply at night surrounded by them, pieces of you and your life that can never be returned.

And on this one day, when we give something to you - insultingly small, unforgiveably brief - you turn to us with tears in your eyes, and you put your hands together and bring all of us into this moment of your happiness. And I realise that you are still giving, always giving, for the highest giving of all is in knowing how to receive.

Happy Mother's Day.

The falling man

2006-03-20T04:42:00.000-08:00

All this weekend, I have been thinking about a boy.

I don't know him. I don't even know his name. And I can't stop thinking about him.

In a basement bar on the quays, I'm ordering a drink when I feel a tap on the shoulder. It's a friend of mine. He's a little drunk, and has something on his mind. We find a small spotlit couch, under the stairwell. I'm lonely, he says. He looks at me sadly and I'm thinking about the boy.

On a night-walk along the shore I call into my South African friend. He's smoking in his living room, the French windows open an inch or two, looking out at the invisible sea beyond. I'm sorry I keep barging in unannouced, I say. That's okay, he says, and I know it is, because he never has anyone else to call around, and I'm thinking about the boy.

There was a documentary this week on the people who jumped from the twin towers, out of the flames and into the sky. A family was interviewed about a man who jumped, or fell, or both. That's not our father, one of them said, our father would never leave us, he loved us. And I'm thinking about the boy.

I make my bed, smoothing out the new sheets. I run one hand along the edge, pulling it tight, feeling the crisp thread of it under my palm. When I am finished I stand looking at the clean white expanse of cloth, and I'm thinking about the boy.

I'm thinking about how he came into work early one morning. How he wrote out, carefully, all his passwords, for his colleagues to find. How he took a plastic bag, at his desk, and taped it around his head.

I sit on the edge of the bed and my arms ache. I want to hold something, someone. I want to hold this stranger, all the strangers I will never know. It's such a small thing but it seems like the only thing worth doing. Holding each other.

All this weekend, I have been thinking about a boy.

Right Here

2006-03-14T04:16:00.000-08:00

I arrange to meet someone for dinner. I leave him waiting, but he still greets me with a smile and a hug. He's taller than I am even though I'm in heels and that's oddly comforting.

After the meal it's raining in the streets as I try to find the venue for a meeting I need to attend. He doesn't have an umbrella so he mimes how he would hold one over me if he did, and produces a scarf from his bag for me to wear. When we get lost, we get drinks in a quiet bar and talk about Kosovo and song lyrics and trousers before setting off on the expedition again. We bump into his uncle, who turns out to be heading to the same meeting as me, and together the three of us find our destination. He stands at the back of the hall for an hour while I sit in the audience, waits while I talk to people afterwards, and holds the door for me as we leave.

We return to the same bar afterwards, for another drink. It's a golden evening, when the brass bar fittings glow and the conversations around us are hushed, when the glasses are full of amber flecks of light and it's warm where you are. We sit sit by side along one seat, knees and accidentally hands touching as we talk and laugh and gesticulate. He leans one arm along the table in front of us, into my space, shielding us from the room, and his nearness, the almost protective nature of that act, fills me with a strange warmth. I don't ever want to move from there.

He asked me out once, years ago. I said no. We had met at a fancy-dress party in a crumbling little house in the back streets of Dublin, among fairies and hobgoblins and coloured cocktails. I thought he was the most delicious thing I had ever seen.

We've spent perhaps a whole week in each others company, if you added up all of the time we have ever spent together. And Monday to Friday of that week we spent kissing. Yet somehow, at some moment around Saturday morning, we seems to have decided that we were friends. Friends who might not hear from each other for months at a time, friends who know little about each other and less about the life the other leads, but friends nonetheless. Someone I just feel is a part of me, without having to think about it. Someone I can sit with and want to be nowhere else.

He leans forward, and I feel my skin crackle lightly. I want him to kiss me, and at the same time I don't. And I want to stay right here, in the golden barlight, undecided forever.