Blue Dress Hot Mess

I lie by the pool. Face-down on a sun lounger. I realise: lizards scratch like humans do.

My father hit me with a badminton racket. It was accidental, but I now have two curling whirls on my right arm which, if you were playing join-the-dots, would shape perfectly into an oval. It made the tears flood to behind my eyes in stinging sudden pain and uncontrollable laughter, but my eyelids held them like a dam which brimmed but did not burst. They are well constructed things, eye lashes. The dam did not even leak. I leave the badminton net – an annual feature of our holiday, made up of a wooden bench complete with green-checked cushions and moss – and walk to the fields, where the evening light is making magic and a hare runs in the stubble. I wear a nightie-dress, and smell of a funny combination of gradual-tan moisturiser and honey conditioner. (My sister’s boyfriend tells me it smells delicious, but my sister wrinkles her nose and gives me a look which says otherwise). We have a wasp nest in the base of our coffee table, which we are trying to get rid of by running from the kitchen at the back of the house with kettle-loads of boiling water. The wasps buzz angrily – homeless; my right arm stings – heavy. I go to bed, smiling. 

I am beginning to feel sun-soaked (which means I am a little burnt). My aim is an apricot-hue. I want golden shimmers to run through my blood. 

There are pockets of warmth and pipes of cold air; the beige net curtains blow out through the open windows, the former closed for the heat, the latter spread wider open for the same reason. The moon reflects a setting orange sun, and is blush-pink in its mirror, three-quarter full. 

The cool is a kiss. The view is a hope. 

Two grandfathers in hospital. That’s a full house. Or two empty houses, as the case may be. Are we playing Happy Families or Poker?

This is a place for children with sticky-outy tummies and thumbs in their mouths and naked piqued nipples and turquoise beads around their necks. It is a place for screaming and splashing and baby voices and grandmothers and paddling pools, and plums making jam on the ground in the heat. It is a place for wasps and lilac. It is a place with no name, because I know you can find it anywhere. I call it August. It is a place I like to think of as home.

The sky is not cloudless but expansive and wispy. I walk too close to a tree and it brushes my hair back over my shoulder. Golden strands tickle my red skin, coated in an oily sheen of pure gold shimmer, thanks to a body oil which turns you into a mermaid. I lean forward to pick the ripest blackberry and my dress catches on the thorns below. Fallen starlight and something brighter; the sunset reflected in the moon. I think that I am embodying the Provençal woman: nightie-dress so barely there; blue thong. My bare, sparkly skin is pink and ripe for picking. I fetch basil from the garden, and pour olive oil on pasta. I have grand plans for the house we stay in, when it is rightfully my own. The sun is hot; it bakes like heaven. Hell’s oven is nothing on Heaven’s bliss. 

We drink rosé at lunchtime and see old friends and speak French. Three hours of French, solid and straight and very proper, leaving me sleepy – rosé – and baking by the pool late into the afternoon. We went for evening jazz and listened to bad love music and ate bad cheese but drank delicious, delicious wine. A French famille ate their bad cheese next to us, but drew half a good baguette out of the maman’s handbag like unsheathing a sword. A baton of Tradition. A tiny poodle lay in a bag on top of a ledge, surveying the bad folk band with minute eyes, a branded Vineyard ashtray filled with water placed beneath its upturned little nose. Its family ate the bad cheese and ignored their haughty dog, who kept watch obediently and defiantly against my sneaky photo. The singer had a rich voice which sounded like smoke and wine and cigarettes. She smiles as I leave. Merci, I say, so sweetly English. (I do not tell her we think her band is not as good as her voice). A lone hot air balloon sails above the vineyard. The sun sets behind it – sets through it – glowing like an exoskeleton. A pulsing bulbous glow-worm, floating in the 9pm sky. 

Swallows fly; baby goats climb. The air is misted and velvet-tasting. The magpie rose solo, sailing softly over the vines. He is a thief of gem-like grapes, and he will be drunk off their nectar. We call it wine. 

I smirk at a note on my phone, made during a bike ride with my mother. Boxer shorts and hose pipes, it reads. Nothing more. 

The air is a kiss. Her tongue is cold, her lips pulse-hot. She licks me, toe-to-head. Languorously, she awakens and sopofies my senses all at once. It is dark – night – and the earth is still alive. There are crickets and blind moths and a red squirrel, running up the vines. The air is dark; darker now. She opens her lips, puts pressure on her tongue: I fall asleep in her embrace.