We're in New Zealand...

The journey to New Zealand was like hibernating for the winter, without the joy of sleep. The flight entered Auckland over the ocean, and it looked like we'd be landing in the water. Gazing down at the azure depths, it was immediately apparent this country would be less like Scotland than I'd imagined.

With the hole in the ozone layer hovering somewhere above our heads, Jimbo has been browning to the colour of marmalade-roasted chicken, and even I have sandy flip-flop lines that don't wash off. I've been wearing one top a lot, and when I take it off, you can still see it.

We've had lovely weather - in the high twenties - but as I write this from The Lazy Cow Backpackers, in Murchison, the rain is almost torrential. It's really early, but we need to check out at 10am, and I've been missing the internet, so I dragged myself out of bed at 6am, knowing the computer would be free. A man was already busy in the kitchen. "I can't find a bible," he said to me. "I always read the bible in the mornings." I didn't ask him why he doesn't carry his own then.

Today we are hoping to go panning for gold. Yesterday we made sand sculptures at Sandy Bay, near Abel Tasman. We're on the South Island now, but though the landscape is more dramatic (there are glaciers, golden beaches and craggy hills that look like slain stegosauruses), my favourite places remain picture-perfect Greytown and Martinborough, the stylish Napier, and colourful Wellington, all in the North.

We happened across Greytown, immediately loving its colonial architecture and sunny feel. The campsite was in a memorial park and run by an elderly Australian lady called Noeline who drove around on patrol several times a day. We learnt from her that one couple had been dodging site payments (at $15 it's been our cheapest find yet - last night's double room was a hefty $70) and had bowel problems. Through the communal kitchen we met Meri and Paul, though Paul has lost his name. We fondly remember him as Richey, because that's his REAL name.

Imagine Jimbo's surprise at finding his favourite musician, previously assumed dead, not only alive but brimming with health and vitality. He hadn't met Meri and Paul yet, when I led him into the pub where we were meeting them (arranged through some scribbled notes left outside tents), and now that I have Googled Richey Edwards, I am astonished Jimbo managed to not only keep his head, but appear cool and charming all evening. "Paul looks just like Richey Edwards," he'd whispered to me. Of course I knew who the missing Manic Street Preacher was, but as for how he looked, in my mind he was a hazy, eye-linered and razor-cheeked amalgamation of Ian Curtis and a bloody forearm. Now, though, I think James is right. No longer anorexic, and suiting his salt-and-pepper hair, Richey Edwards is in New Zealand, working in vineyards. "Don't you think Paul looks like George Clooney?" said Meri, trying to throw us off the scent. And in his delicate way, Richey seemed utterly uninterested in music, and hadn't even heard of the Super Furry Animals, despite being Welsh. Yes, our Richey was even Welsh. Very good at cooking lamb.

The sun has come out now, and the other hostel inhabitants are stirring. I want to write about Napier's art deco buildings but I shouldn't hog the computer, and also it EATS money - $6 an hour. I hope we find a lot of gold today.

Man with drawers

All bikes have baskets in Cambridge

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. I have a daydream (today, now) of being at a desk, in a lounge, sipping cocoa and writing on a computer connected to the internet. Living on one’s own means sacrifices, and mine is not affording the internet right now. I’m constantly connected – using my phone – but writing suffers. So often I think, I must write that down, and then don’t.

There’s far too much to say at the moment, to say anything much.

I didn’t write my Dolce & Gabbana fragrance reviews yet. After writing my previous rant I found myself less interested in them, though it was piqued once more when my friend Jo told me her girlfriend, Polly, had been tempted to purchase. Funny how the minute a fragrance is placed on skin-I-know, I start salivating. Nose to floor, like a hound. Though my dresser is a mini-metropolis of bottles, the ones I truly devour are those I’ve caught a whiff of in someone else’s wake.

When I was in Cambridge, yesterday, my dear friend and I had dinner at an Italian restaurant – Strada – and when I went to the toilet it was like jumping into an olfactory photo album, where memories become 3D and tangible. I’m imagining figures looming at me, Jumanji style. First, at the top of the stairs, I was hit by a powdery cloud akin to an ex-boyfriend’s Helmut Lang cologne – wood, heliotrope, vanilla and musk, with a herbal lavender quality not unlike lipstick. Which made me think of him in London, where I place him in that fragrance, despite never knowing that world of his. The iconography of tube station signs, typography, the rim of a decent wine glass, the smell of vinyl records and the squeak of white trainers on a shiny floor. Snippets. And in the toilet itself, lingered the gardenia aroma of my friend Hannah and all the Hannahness that comes with: semi-tailored skirts, shimmery bronzer compacts and discussions about relationships, gold sandals, a strong mind.
When I sat back down, across from Thomas, I felt like I’d been on a ride.

Earlier, I’d snuck out of the conference to get some change for the parking meter, with the deliberate intention to soak up some of Cambridge’s sites. I soaked up a lot of rain; when I had to talk, later, my hair looked as unwashed as that on the head of someone mid-childbirth.

I love to walk around Cambridge. In Cambridge, shoes make a different sound on the pavement.

Just testing...

Just testing if I have now connected Twitter + Facebook with Gum.

Dolce Vita

I have detected a slight animosity towards this new ‘Anthology’ fragrance venture of Dolce & Gabbana’s – are they meant to be ‘exclusives’; are they meant to be cheap splashes? I was told by a sales assistant in Debenhams that they are D&G’s answer to the recession, and certainly, at £35 for 100ml, they contain a lot of fragrance for your money. Unlike Marc Jacobs, whose linear splashes are minimalist, soothing and rather millennial, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s set of five ‘tarot card’ offerings are more complicated and a chunk derivative in concept. Armani Privé, Hermes, Chanel and Tom Ford seem to be the frontrunners of having boutique, chocolate-box collections that only those visiting Important Big Cities clutching a secret treasure map can get hold of (I did read that Selfridges, Oxford Street, will be housing the Chanel Exclusifs – at least that’s one location unearthed, if one does ever fancy parting with £150-odd for a bottle of Beige or Bel Respiro).
If this is indeed D&G’s attempt at having an especial range, they’re unabashedly lowering the tone by selling them in Boots – and good for them. I’ve always appreciated the slightly trailer-trashy, gold earrings-and-velour catsuit ethic of the D&G fragrances. Ah, Sicily, you smell of a Quentin Tarantino film extra’s skin, and we know what else she does to pay the rent…

Despite using Mario Testino, whose fashion photography for Dolce & Gabbana is typically flamboyantly clashing and overcrowded, the ad campaign for the Anthology fragrances are as insipid as a Wimpey homes estate built circa 1990. I absolutely adore D&G’s joyful, garish aesthetic – but where is it here? Okay, it’s nice to know Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and Eva Herzigova are still getting work and looking, well, deliciously airbrushed, but how, exactly, do their naked bodies sell this set of tarot-inspired fragrances? How much fun D&G and Testino could have had using tarot card iconography – Le Diable, stars and moon, the house of God, floral decorations, coins, swords and bright sunlight. It’s not so much the cast I object to, as the missed opportunity for vibrancy and symbolism.
The video advertisements for these fragrances are actually insulting. With the overplayed ‘Freedom’ by George Michael as the soundtrack, the models are filmed arriving to their photo shoots. That’s it. Fragrance is one of the most luxurious and empowering gifts we can give ourselves – able to transport the wearer into dreamscapes as tangible as scenes from the most glamorous films, the most descriptive books. Chanel understands how elevating fragrance is for the wearer. I’m very disappointed by Dolce and Gabbana’s condescension, trying to market wishy-washy dreams to an apathetic public. I was also recently very annoyed by the commercial for Dolce & Gabbana’s fragrance, The One, featuring Giselle, which failed to communicate that there could be any other One but her – utterly shutting women off from being the star in their own show. I thought it was conceited and unpleasant.

I’ve written so much about the advertising, I’ll review the fragrances another day.

James Hancock

I'm writing a short story at the moment. Here is how it begins...

James Hancock sat in the car watching his wife. Inside the house, she busied herself with the porcelain dolls on the dresser – smoothing out tulle tea dress crinkles, straightening lace and flattening hair. Through the net curtains, Abigail was a dark, slim shape against the golden yolk of lamplight; her army of dolls had featureless, crocodile egg faces.
James felt he’d rather like to pull off the drive again and check into a hotel, where he could sit on a bar stool and sip Talisker whisky, the taste of which invariably made him think of semen and sea air. In movies, wanton women hung around bars, smoking cigarettes they balanced between elegant, scissor-blade fingers. Did they still do this since the smoking ban? James imagined they would idly finger their clothes instead – cuffs and collars – slowly churning the material into butter.

Mia Moanroe

I’ve had an unpleasant experience lately, regarding a mystery throat infection that has lasted for more than six weeks, four consultations with doctors (the latter of which was private and expensive), three types of medication and a lot of tears. I’ve been systematically tired, exhibiting a temperature, and unable to think clearly – I actually feel my ability to memorise facts has decreased, sometimes losing my way in conversations, and my balance has been off. Additionally, I’ve had a croaky voice that has made my job, which involves singing and speaking, pretty wearisome.
Why is it that doctors told me, ‘You’ve got a viral infection’, when in fact I’ve been harbouring streptococcal bacteria in my throat for perhaps months? Dr. Findlay, who, to be fair, has been very kind (being the doctor who finally had the savvy to swab my throat), didn’t say if it was type A or B, but I’m assuming the former which can cause sore throat, tonsillitis, scarlet fever, meningitis, toxic shock syndrome and a whole host more, rather than the latter, which can also lead to meningitis, septicaemia, pneumonia and so on. Doesn’t sound very pleasant, though most cases of 'the kissing disease' are not so severe. I’m more annoyed that something so simple took so long to diagnose – and really, was the referral of me to a speech and language therapist necessary? Some might say, a lucky side effect, since I speak like a gerbil-sized Miss Piggy and have been told before by my singing teacher I could benefit from re-learning how to talk.

One of the doctors I saw earlier in the saga did rather reluctantly give me some antibiotics after asking quite seriously, ‘Why are you here again?’
‘Because my throat has been bleeding and it feels raw and tickly.’
He prescribed these bright red and shiny tablets, which I believe belong to the macrolide family (were they erythromycin? azithromycin? I don’t recall) – but the would-be, could-be superbug that strep is, has been emerging indifferent to this family.

Meanwhile, there was talk that it could be LPR – where your stomach acid erodes your larynx on a daily basis, and I was put on proton pump inhibitors. The expensive and award-winning private doctor (Mr. M) took one look at me and announced, ‘You’re not the right shape. Stop taking them immediately.’ Though young Dr. Findlay (who my mother speaks of like he were a pop star) was the most attentive (with the first two doctors being less so), Mr. M wins in the flattery stakes by saying, 'You're not a hypochondriac, you're a high performer, like me. We get frustrated when even the slightest thing puts us off our stride.'

Anyway, we’ll see how the Amoxicillin fares in the throat wars. Funny, now I’ve had confirmation I am ill, rather than loony and stressed, I feel both vindicated and poorly.

Luckily, I’ve bought a big, fat biography to read – Marilyn Monroe. Apparently her vital statistics were (with some variance depending on source) around 36-24-36 and she weighed 118lbs. Mine are 36-28-35, which has given me something to think about, since I don’t weigh 118lbs or anything in that ballpark. I was up at 4am this morning plucking my eyebrows for the first time in about five years. I’m easy to fill up with good intentions. It’s just fun, really – one has to have a play.

A fortnight ago...

With no internet at home, I have to post things in breaks at work.

Before:

I’m writing in bed. I’m told Mummi, my Finnish grandmother, wrote her books in bed.

Today I hand-washed a load of clothes in the bath, using the same motion as when you’re kneading dough. When I’ve seen my mum kneading dough, she’s looked like she’s done it all her life and through all of her past lives – strong, sinewy forearms, the colour of copper pots. I tried stirring the clothes with a pole I accidentally left out of my bed-build, but that didn’t work at all. The worst part was ringing them out – how tough and heavy wet fabric is. I wished for one of those old-fashioned rolling devices that juice the water from the garment, and had a small fantasy about sitting by a waterwheel, my cotton skirts bunched around a wooden stool.

If I’m going to be ill for a few days, perhaps I should play Zelda.
No, Mia, what you should do is write. Write some short stories; write a novel.

Next day.

It’s thundering out there. The rain sounds nice – like plants are popping and unfurling with the glee of it. I can hear little streams trickling along gutters and through small concrete bays. I’m in bed again. I got my first ever Tesco Direct delivery today. They used so many bags, like they bag-up separate meals. Minced beef in one, salmon and a packet of spinach in another, two bottles of carrot juice in another still.
I’ve just been playing Peggle, which takes me back to certain places – on an aeroplane, in a study framed by Norfolk fields and vast, watercolour-streaked skies, lying on the leather sofa at the Mediterranean villa-style dwelling Jason and I occupied near Gresham, where we looked out on pheasants, and in on bright, orchid-esque vaginas the artist-landlord had painted as a young man.
And now I’ve just rubbed LUSH’s Sympathy for the Skin into my hands. It’s made of vanilla pods, almond oil, cocoa butter and fresh bananas, but to me it smells of waffles with syrup, playschool paint and PVA glue. It’s made my hands shiny, which reminds me that one thing I find really attractive about my friend Joey is how shiny her long fingers are. I don’t know why shiny fingers should be so appealing, but I find them to be so – maybe just simply because the light catches them, and brings out their elegant lines.
I have a perfume by the designer Castelbajac, which was created to remind women of a time when they played with felt shapes, made potato prints, shaded with crayons and stuck pasta to card. I think PVA glue is actually mentioned as inspiration, interpreted by the designer as almond and placed amidst delicate orange blossoms. To me, it is nostalgic, but makes me think of soap suds and other people’s laundry. Bounce sheets. It has the most incredible throw – I’m wearing the smallest squirt on my wrists and keep getting whiffs of cotton sheets, icing sugar and tumble-dried towels.

I’ve just been reading some of my old fiction. Things like this:

Pavements are the last thing I’d think to photograph. Ivan must know something I don’t. He says they’re remarkable; our courses, our lifelines. We hammer our feet on them and still they stay faithful. He’s a romantic about the daftest things. They offer us dog shit and chewing gum, and set us up with third drains we have to remind ourselves to hop over.
‘What do you get from a pavement?’ I ask him.
‘Look close enough,’ he says, ‘and you see ridges someone’s grazed their knees on, tiny impressions from high heels. Stories.’
Then a crisp packet will blow past us and he’ll say, ‘Who ate those?’
And he talks like that, peering into me.
So, we’re walking down the road and I’ll trip on a cracked slab and he’ll go, ‘What a pity nobody was around to see the girl catch her boot on that very slab. Still, the pavement knows.’
And I’ll be like, ‘You’re fucking mad Ivan.’

Ivan photographs me too, naked. I feel inadequate compared to the pavements. He reckons I’m too young to harbour tales in the crevices of my skin. Yet, he traces me like a map anyway.
It’s pavements, girls, and desserts. He takes pictures of knickerbockerglories and banana splits. He reckons they break his heart.
‘And why do they break your heart, Ivan?’ I ask.
He swallows a lump of Neapolitan and nods approvingly. Thinking, ‘she’s bitten.’
‘Because, Ivana, desserts are like the American dream. They appease and promise.’

I reckon desserts are kinky, but Ivan’s not like that. I roll the glace cherry around my mouth and tickle his leg with my hosiery toes.
Ivan and I are like chalk and cheese, wax and water. He says he likes the way my fringe curls when it’s been raining and the halo of frizz that snaps up. He digs the mousy roots sprouting from my head when I can’t afford the hairdressers.
Ivan’s posh enough to put black pepper in his wine and on his strawberries. When he cooks Sunday dinner he floats the meat, veg and spuds in a Yorkshire pudding paddling pool, full to the brim with gravy made from turkey juice not Bisto.
Ivan loves me but he’s not into fidelity. He knows all sorts of girls. There’s this one girl, Jolene, who wears square black glasses and men’s ties. She comes over sometimes and I stay at my mum's. They rent these French films I watch the next day. One time Jolene took my hand as I left the flat and said, ‘Stay Ivana.’
So I did and we drank these sweet and sour cocktails. Jolene played with my ponytail through the movie and kept saying things like ‘She’s a doll, Ivan.’
But Ivan said, ‘Leave her be Jolene.’

Then Ivan called up Orn and Sid and we got stoned. They sniffed lines on the coffee table and when I threw up in the toilet Jolene rubbed my back in a maternal way.

Other than Jolene, there’s Ruth and Samantha. I’ve only met Ruth the one time. She’s a stripper. I know she’s coming over when Ivan sets up huge reflective brollies and drapes white sheets over everything. She’s his muse. He says he’s like Toulouse Lautrec and she’s a lady of the night. In the photos she’s like a 30’s silent movie star with black arched eyebrows and fixed curls. He makes her hold fruit bowls and brandy glasses.
Samantha’s a writer – she’s been in City Life and won a prize for her second novel. The first one didn’t make a splash, but this new effort’s getting her famous and she doesn’t have as much time for Ivan these days.
Ivan’s dead pleased with her though. There’s this minor character that keeps popping up in her work called Bovin, who’s living it up in Milan, sketching tourists by day and running a brothel with his brother Dolce. Bovin sends the lead girl in the book these little vials of Italian perfume she wears on her adventures with the important characters. Ivan reckons there’s a bit of him in Bovin. Not least because Bovin has a wonky walk like Ivan. They both drag a leg behind them.
My mum’s mum told me my granddad had a shrapnel wound from the war that made him only able to turn his head left and not right. She said it made her heart beat fast to see him shifting his whole body round to check the wall clock. She’d take him straight up to bed – her little soldier boy.
I think of Ivan’s gammy leg like that. I don’t think Samantha does because when this hooker called Reba notices Bovin’s handicap she chucks up in the gutter.
Ivan’s failed to notice Samantha must find him slightly grotesque.
So anyway, I love Ivan and he loves me, but though I know he loves me these other girls are like ghastly spirit bitches that float around our ears when we’re together. When we’re together-together they slip between our bodies. He wears them like johnnies on his dick – this membrane between him and me.
When Ivan and I are out at a restaurant and he’s a-snap-snapping at the ice cream sundaes I’m all smiles and in my head I’m thinking:

Jolene, Ruth, Samantha.

What are they doing right now? Do they like tea or coffee – and I bet Ivan know the answer to this. I bet one of them drinks his fancy fruit teas but another likes regular breakfast tea with a heaped spoonful of sugar and lots of full fat milk. Maybe he gets out the cafetiere. And whoever that’s for, I bet she drinks it black with a sour face that Ivan finds sexy because it reminds him of the face she pulls when she comes.
When we’re out at a restaurant Ivan says, ‘Ivana, darling, shift the wafer, it’s casting too much of a shadow.’
And I’m like, look at all the shadows Jolene, Ruth, Samantha are casting over your face. Can I remove those? They’re contorting you into a Picasso head.
But I say, ‘Sure Hon.’
I rub his hand and make slurping noises as my straw sucks up the last Coke from the pile of ice in my glass.

When I walk from Ivan’s in the mornings to catch my school bus, the pavement slabs move like a travelator beneath me. I see snippets of graffiti – ‘Is a cock’, ‘PA luvs’, ‘Read this your gay’.
I stamp over the white, black and blue scrawl, grinding the words into the concrete.
I trample over- Jolene, Ruth, Samantha.
My friend Paula leans against the bus stop wall waiting for me. She’s always chewing her hair because she thinks it’s coy. We smoke a Benson and Hedges between us, reapply our Collection 2000 lippy and board the bus in a cloud of Givenchy’s Hot Couture.
She says, ‘Hope Dan’s in school today.’
And I nod, flash her a wink and think, Fuck it, ki ll them.
And then, No no, I can’t believe I just thought that.

As the bus begins to roll away from the stop I take my own photographs with a blink of my lashes.

An old lady shuffling to the post office with a parcel tucked under one armpit and a poodle under the other. I fancy she’s knitted jumpers for her grandkids from patterns in women’s periodicals.

A young mum I recognise from the Elysian estate pushing her grubby twins to the park. The pram is so wide one wheel threatens to run off the curb – it might lob the kids into the road to scuff their raspberry jam knees.

It’s Ivan in his funnel-necked felt coat, head flicking all around him. He takes in the benches, the cars, the pavements. Looks up at the bus and pretends not to see me waving lamely from the upstairs back window.

My heart feels like it occupies the whole of my chest; a clumsy and swollen equestrian muscle. My bra strap is pinged by the boy behind me an d at that exact moment – as the elastic stings my skin, like a raindrop falling and bursting on a flower, I accept that I am shortly going to knock those girls heads off their coconut stand pedestals and out of Ivan’s life altogether.

I liked Ivana. She was ballsy. I’ve used many of her observations of being in love with Ivan in other things – she was capable of a lot of depth, for one so young. I need some more characters who can chat at me like she did. She let me in on a journey to Cromer with Ivan:

I look at the ceiling. The top of the car is made up of little dots. Holes. I poke it.
‘Don’t poke that,’ says Ivan.
I bite at my finger, seeing how much pain I can endure. The teeth marks I leave in my skin look like baby teeth. I rub at them and they fade.
‘Ivan,’ I say.
‘What?’ he goes.
‘I need a pee,’ I say.
‘No you don’t,’ he says.
‘I do,’ I say.
‘Ivana,’ he growls. ‘Can’t you just keep your mouth closed for five minutes?’
I wrinkle my nose up and feel the sting of tears in my eyes. I think, I could pee anyway to make a point.
I squeeze my wee muscles and do a bit. Just a tiny bit so my knickers are damp. I daren’t really wee in the Dolomite because he won’t find it cute. He’ll fix his rubber skin into that disgusted face he does at me more and more as I pull out the stops to make him want me.
‘Ugh,’ he’ll go when I try to be alluring. ‘Can’t you just grow up?’
His face will look like the Scream mask, and I’ll let silent water come out my eye-a-ducts.
I mentally jump over the trees, counting them, one and two and three and four. How many types of tree can I name, I wonder. Pine, Oak, Chestnut, Sycamore.
Sycamore seeds remind me of playgrounds in autumn. Collecting the helicopter currency in mittens, and ready, steady, throw! Down and down they twirled, showing, for the first time, nature was designed. I remember thinking, who would have thought to weight a seed like that, so it’s so pretty on the breeze.
Autumn, with an ‘n’. Another early lesson. I remember thinking that Tracey girl was thick because she wrote fink, instead of think. But maybe she was clever really, and did it as a joke to herself. Like me and my wee that’s starting to make me sore down there now.
‘Why do people get bed sores, Ivan?’ I ask.
‘What?’ he snaps.
‘Why do people get bed sores?’ I ask.
He looks at me like I’m an odd ball and I see a twitch of the Scream mask coming but it doesn’t fully surface.
‘Because they stay in the same place too long,’ he says.
‘But why do they get sores from that?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, Ivana,’ he sighs. Sighing like life is being pushed out of him with bellows.
‘Maybe it’s dampness,’ I suggest.
Old people, sweating like meat in the night to the thought of a dance with an old flame. A girl in a polka dot dress and lacquered set hair smelling of the first hairsprays and cheap perfume like Charlie Red. Tentative feet stepping side step to side step, toes awkward. The rise and fall of heels on a shiny floor.
A moustache leaning in to an ear, whispering. The young man so close he can see the heartbeat in her neck.
Old people sweating in hospital beds, dreaming of lost love songs.
I’m quiet then. When Ivan and I are old the decade between us will mean nothing. I’ll be forty and he’ll be fifty. I’ll be sixty and he’ll be seventy.
‘When will you die?’ I ask him.
‘What the fuck?’ he exclaims, like he’s scared or something.
‘Will you be seventy-five, ninety-nine, a-hundred?’
‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ says Ivan.
‘Come on. How old?’ I press.
‘Fifty,’ he says.
‘Well, don’t think I’m coming with you at forty,’ I tell him. ‘My Mum says sex just starts getting good at forty.’
‘Well, don’t then,’ says Ivan.
‘I’ll wear mourning clothes for the rest of my life and kids round my way will call me The Black Widow. I’ll have a cobwebby house and inside I’ll use things like thimbles and candle snuffers.’
Tut, goes Ivan.
‘Actually, I’ll live in Beverly Hills where I’m a famous crime writer-turned celebrity biographer, and I’ll wear Chanel twin-sets and tights that make your legs look tanned. When the phone rings it’ll have that old-fashioned bell sound and the earpiece will jump in its brass rest.’
Ivan’s getting shifty in his seat.
‘What do you mean, sex starts getting good at forty?’ he asks, not looking at the road for a moment.
I stare out the window, jumping the farmhouses and hedgerows.
‘Ivana,’ he goes again. ‘What do you mean? Think it’s crap now do you?’
‘No!’ I blurt.
‘You do, you think I’m shit in bed don’t you?’
An aeroplane has left a snail-trail in the sky. The puff puff of a jet engine. It looks like a ladder to heaven.
‘Ivan,’ I say, looking at my fingernails. ‘You’re so insecure.’
I celebrate this table turning with another éclair. I shove the wrapper in the door but it falls out.
‘Don’t litter my car,’ snaps Ivan.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ I sulk. I bang my head against the seat a few times.
‘Stoppit,’ goes Ivan. ‘Do you think I’m crap in bed or don’t you?’
‘Only sometimes,’ I say. The exhilaration of being petulant rises like champagne bubbles.
‘What’s that mean?’ he asks, brow knitting like a creeping thorn bush.
‘Watch the road,’ I order, taking full advantage of my new rank.
Ivan swerves on purpose into the oncoming lane where the cars are few and far between.
‘Woah,’ he warbles like a loon, lips jellyfish loose.
‘Don’t,’ I murmur. I don’t fancy upsetting him further so I look out the window again, at Peter and Paul, blackbirds on a wire.
‘I always think cars are like bullets,’ says Ivan. ‘A wrong move and you can take someone out.’
‘Fly away Peter, fly away Paul,’ I say. ‘Come back Peter, come back Paul.’
‘I hit a rabbit once,’ goes Ivan. ‘It thudded under the wheel like a potato.’
‘That’s sick,’ I tell him.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve hit a spud with a cricket bat, have you?’ he asks. ‘We used to, as kids. Potatoes and plums. Plums soared over the houses but potatoes just exploded into the bat wood.’
‘Did you ever swing at an egg?’ I ask him. ‘I’d love to do that.’
‘Yeah?’ Ivan looks at me and then puts his gear stick hand on my head like a spider. He does that thing where you feel liquid travelling down.
I giggle, and shiver.
Ivan and I smile at each other and he hooks his little finger around mine.

Ivan taught me some stuff too. I didn’t know much about Cromer, until I re-read the following:

‘Cromer used to be the place to be,’ he says, spitting out crumb bullets. He slurps his tea. ‘Mister Barclays bank holidayed here in the 1700s. To take the waters.’
‘You what? They drank the sea?’
‘No, stupid. They bathed in it. The railway was built in 1877, blah blah. A London writer and critic called Clemet Scott mentioned Cromer in some article and before long all the high society was getting the train up here. It was a most fashionable place. That’s why there are so many Victorian hotels.’

Sometimes it does frustrate me that my characters are much brighter than I am. Ivan drives a Dolomite, and I know from his musings exactly what one of those is and looks like. But, neither Ivan nor Ivana have come to much yet. Pearl, Benny and Felix, Reba, Alma, Matti Lahti… When are these characters going to be so forceful they take me hostage?

Changes

I shan’t do anything I normally would, today.
If only I’d have slept naked, I’d walk to the bathroom nude, swinging fingers against the fleshy sacks I camel-carry on my hips. Now I think of it, I can pull this T-shirt and pants off – there. I feel statuesque and a bit horny because every swish of legs is tugging on the tuft of pubic hair I should have trimmed, but didn’t.
I’m not usually up yet, but now, as I lean a little way out of the bathroom window, I see I’ve been missing the most beautiful, indigo hour. Like a child’s advent calendar, each lit window holds a gift – a halo of yellow enveloping the folk inside. You’d look after me, if I were there, wouldn’t you, figure in the yonder house. Yolky, comforting light-bearer.