Blue Dress Hot Mess

They smell like Pornstar Martinis and teeter down Victoria in slim-fit white high heels. He brings wine. He clasps flowers. (He wears a green fleece gilet and cords which taper at the ankle. He is slightly uncomfortable in this uniform, and wears it like it doesn’t quite fit; a child on its first day of September school, an army cadet at its first parade. He is not wrong; the uniform doesn’t fit. If he truly belonged to the tribe he attempts to resemble he would never, never be wearing cords which taper at the ankle. It is an unwritten faux pas. Oh well; he will learn. Perhaps his awkwardness is in part owing to the large flowers he has attached to his chest like the multi-coloured breast of a summer robin). I smile vaguely in his direction. I dream of someone bringing wine to me. We would sit, open it in the sun. Soak in alcohol and sunshine alone on a balcony in Pimlico. I would be topless. I like to be topless in the sunshine. Drinking wine. I think it would be rosé. 

The world feels bright on this Sunday morning. I am going to church, and then I’m going dress shopping. I have a baby-blue handbag slung over my shoulder, and tawny see-through sunglasses which hardly keep the bright glare of the day off. There is heat coming. I know it. I watch a small family pack themselves up for holiday from the pavement in Pimlico, and I watch groups of teenagers huddle outside cafés (I think this is odd; teenagers should huddle behind bike sheds, corner shops, in the back-ends of church yards. They should not huddle outside cafés. It feels far too cosmopolitan – good cocktail). A man shoves a large Subway sandwich into his mouth, down his throat. I think of the open jaws of the crocodile in Peter Pan. Captain Hook, Hook, Hook, and a Sunday Sub. A whippet wanders the streets alone. So slim, so fine, so elegant. So definitive: my status; my desire. I do not dread work tomorrow. That feels like a blessing. I check my watch, and, as usual, I am running late for church.

We sit at marble coffee tables in Duke of York Square and drink hot matcha tea from paper cups. This leaves a green rim where our lips have pressed, outlining the hole in the plastic lid like painted circles around potholes. We are going shopping. It is a softer Sunday. 

London makes me sneeze. I kiss my Uncle (not a euphemism), and avoid treading on Pom Pom dogs in the street (throw a smile at the frustrated pink-spectacled middle-aged owner, male. Art collector; interior designer? Heterosexual. Just). 

The lilac is blooming and the earth smells like warm grass and bluebells. I’m just cooking my supper and I’ve got no knickers on. Life feels about right for a Saturday. 

This time London smells of sulphur and my sister is talking about cassocks on coatracks. (I mentally capitalise this: Cassocks on Coatracks). I ate chocolate cake for breakfast in a pub in Hampshire, and I delight in the lit windows of London’s white fronted streets. Her buildings are ladies in debutante white dresses, but they are older (no wiser) than a deb; they are the mothers at the tea-table, the grandmothers at school pick-up, the ladies making coffee for the homeless on a Sunday morning. They have the air of having seen it all – seen nothing – turn a blind eye, and wink. I wink back. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be Mary Berry?

05/05/26:

Give me a clue, who’s in the loo? Chant it on a Monday morning. (I work in a school; I hear all kinds of chants. A little boy sits in my office, very serious, face drawn. His tousled hair falls over his tiny forehead, completely untroubled by spots. He looks at his teacher: “Tell me”, he says, like a character in a play, a Christopher Robin, a story-book innocent, “tell me: if you were born in Scotland, why do you speak English so well?“).

There are Builders eating brown bread sandwiches out of lunchboxes with the cast of Frozen on. Anna is looking pristine, hands clasped over her purple cape, hair braided casually right down her back. Elsa has her mouth open (I do not think she wants some sandwich). I think she is singing, belting, drawing in all her breath. LET IT GO. The pasta’s in the pan. LET IT GO-OH! 

I walk to work, holding my flask of coffee. The little girl (I am not lying when I write she has pig tails – I would not lie, for Ernest Hemingway tells me to write only what I know) I walk behind has two little plaits over either shoulder, each with little bows at their ends. She is too perfect for words, caramel-milk chocolate hair, straw boater, tiny fingers. She is locked on a desert island. Her brother (he is on a blue plastic scooter, and is, oddly, less noticeable for me to write about. He is a passenger in this game, a co-conspirator not the main event, a Best Supporting Actor to his sister’s great, living, fantasy) trundles along at her side. He scoots on the pavement – over the side – on the pavement again. His father pulls him back by the collar, a warning hand, tired eyes. Brother, I think we gotta leave this island and find us a new place. I’ll pack all our toys.  It’s too hot here. (The person next to us at the traffic lights sneezes conspicuously. That is not part of our fantasy (I, too, am on the desert island. I remain unseen). May has not brought her sun hat or sun cream. Instead, she has brought jackets and those thin, single-layered scarves. Our island may be tropical, but London is not). 

Tiny old ladies hunch over French fries. There are children on the floor – will you marry me? I’ll let you play in my paddling pool? It’s an offer I could never refuse. 

10/05/26:

They call it Moonlight Shadow and the buttercups are rife. 

The boat was called Moonlight Shadow, and my thermos flask goes upside down in my precious designer Mark Jacobs and it doesn’t spill. (We go to the Buckingham Palace Garden Party, Tuesday afternoon, and the wiggly boy at school announces he has worms). May is a graceful beast, a dual persona. She has large doe eyes and long, long, fawn coloured limbs which click gently as she unfurls them in the sun. She is quite unprepared for the weather she throws at us. It is a side of her tempestuous soul which her long, dark, mascara’d lashes attempt to disguise. Her brown hide is speckled by hail, then, too quickly, her white tail bobs bunny-like into sun. My hands freeze and my eyes stream, but I love it somehow. We are lying under a blossom tree, this doe and I, and snowfall comes in plumes from its branches, just like the grey winter coat malting off my pony. There is a bath on the street in Pimlico, and I step in front of a Sainsbury’s van at 7:51 in the morning. Still, I sleep with my doe. She sleeps with me. We are content.

The world smells like fried bacon on a Saturday morning in May. 

He hopes to give it to his Son Some Day. Try that out loud after a few drinks. I host my first London Dinner Party and we drink No Name Natural Wine – Blanco – and play Empires. We are children growing old, adults staying young. We drink and eat defiantly, proving a point: we hope to give it to our Sons some day. This feeling of youth which flows like life-blood, thicker than water, looser with the wine, red like patriotism and untouchable like grandeur. We will give it to our sons Some Day. Some Day far from now, far from the sun-socked balcony and candle-lit white table clothed table, far from the turkey koftas and orange cake, far from the ten faces of ten friends (one of us is marrying soon; one of us has never been in love; one of us springs with hopes of four-leafed-clovers and believes in love like fairytales). Some Day, far from now, we will give it to our Sons: the heavy-set gold ring on his finger; the feeling of Being Young. (The next morning I write the beginnings of a blog and it auto-deletes. Symbolic of life? It can’t have been worth the words. I drag the un-clothed table back onto the balcony, and fold washed napkins into squares with a next-day sadness which makes me search them for leftover feta stains, as though the remnants of food will re-anchor my straying vessel of a self firmly in the glowing waters of last night. The candle wax has melted on to the table cloths (my grandmother’s worst nightmare). I smile, and scratch at it with my nails. We will give it to our Sons Some Day. And Daughters too; always, always, to the Daughters too).

Her boyfriend told her to Stop Crying in the Chippie. I dramatise the words. ‘The debut novel by Cressida Valentine. Stop Crying in the Chippie: A Metaphor for Life’.

The 19th of May is a Monday. I remember it by various sayings, drifting to me like the telegraph wires of communication which buzz and vibrate outwards from the epicentre of my School Office.

I lost my tooth this morning.

The cupcake lands icing-downwards on the imitation wood carpet. 

Nanny forgot her knickers so she’s wearing her wet swimming costume, and Mummy must – must – drop round her white filly ones because she refuses to wear the pink ones I wave at her from the cupboard in the office (kept specially for just-such disasters). I think of her damp, clinging navy costume seeping chlorine slowly through to her woolen school blazer. I cringe. I call Mummy. Mummy brings her knickers.

She gives her a Lily of the Valley card on her 56th birthday with ‘Deepest Sympathy’ penned in curly cursive inside.

I’ll see you when I’m married!

I believe “are they alliums?” has become the new flirtation technique. 

I am the bravest of them all. I’ll go for a swim, plug my phone in, fall in love. 

I slip my boat shoes on for the first time this summer and it feels like coming home.

Fishing’s not about luck, it’s about how you wiggle your worm. (He wears a graphic tee. He has a belly and a sun cap and eagles on his arms. The writing is stretched taut over his stomach, so that the ‘W’ warps illegibly into the letters below. It’s about how you Iggle your Orm. So Iggle it).

There is half a moon and four stub-tail gulls. The bees bash into my arms and I have no socks on my feet (cold grass, yellow buttercups — yes I like butter). Nothing stings except the prickles of nettles down my legs, and I lie naked in the sunshine with shimmering skin and a flash of coral knickers (stomach down, dog-on-my-book. Stomach up, bare breasts little mounds which sparkle in the haze; heave; breathe; sigh; shudder, like a baby’s snore. I taste summer on my tongue, shimmering softly down my body. It tastes of the liquid sun-cream mothers lather on children at the beach, and sparkles a little like fizzy elderflower. The pool is full of dandelion heads. They are Time, clocks, drifters of nothingness). There is a single bead of dew on the base of my fingernail. I watch it: do not move.

The river smells like sour cherries and muscovado sugar. The light is yellow and the dark is grey. The moon has grown from a half into an almost-whole, and I salute the dying sun. 

We share a mutual wee. I laugh at him as he eyes me, leg cocked on a thistle. I am squatting on a dock leaf (much more comfortable). We’ve never done this before, I say. The sun is setting in Turkish Delight colours and the horses swish summer flies off their spring coats. We are caught in the in between – knickers down (not that I was wearing any anyway). At once exposed and molly-coddled by nature in her tawny hour, the dog and I wee in the field. We are part of her bosom, live moles on her creamy skin. Her golden hair is glimmering and ready for brushing. It requires a hundred strokes (by candlelight) before the bedside mirror. She is flushing with the graceful effort. Pretty, soft, late May, late evening. White nightgown, blonde hair. Too early, yet, for stars.

I am sitting in the woodshed on the final Saturday in May and there are pink poppies waving gently in the garden.

I am striding out in a pair of clean dungarees, which never happens, because dungarees are, by default, dirty. The dog’s ears are pinned back by sticky weed, and I wonder what my sister and I have in common except parents.

The feeling of falling in love is temporary. 

The honeysuckle is acrid and stenches like sex after the rain (I can hear the thunder in the background, grumbling slowly, roaring like a belch from the stomach of a sleeping beast. The beast is London; it snores; it wakes, some great living city in the pouring rain, great grey skies all gunmetal in June).

We go to the Cricket and I watch – keep your eye on the ball – as a man stands poised like a meerkat, bag of Haribos between his lips and two pints of dark black Guinness in his hands. He scouts like an unseeing owl for his clan. He is blind to his own beauty, but I am not. He has a sharp, straight, small nose, and circular, very green, eyes. His hair is dark (it gets paler at its tips, naturally). He would look good in shell-rimmed glasses. His knuckles are dripping with spilt beer, and straining a little with the effort not to spill any more. I admire him like an animal at the zoo, and look back at the game. I am all curiosity for our human nature, us Kings of the Animal Kingdom; we are in the strange constructed reality of Sport – a pseudo-reality we crave. It divides us – like we need further reason for division? – and unites us – temporarily, but with unmatched richness – in ways political systems could only dream to recreate. Is all the world a stage, or all the city a cricket ground? A football pitch? A tennis court? I hear them shouting at the World Cup from the pub 50 metres down the street and conclude unsatisfactorily that we create a simulated reality for something to do; we are children in need of toy soldiers and doll’s houses; we require occupation, so we give ourselves a purpose. Perhaps that is the reason for Art. If it is, is does not detract from its greatness.

A cast of characters; a Life; a world. (Capital L, little w. It feels right, so I wonder why?). The rain runs marathons down the window panes, diving my world by a transparent wall of speckled glass from the horror of Life beyond (London; endings, heaving traffic, quiet solitude on a Saturday night; the Rivals within; the rivals without). The drops run relay races and play tag-It, sudden sprinters pushing through like Derby winners, little children all in a line (crocodile, not two-by-two), packed tightly between the white lines painted on wet grass at Sports Day, running, running, like rain drops, like weather, like birds migrating and cricket balls through slips, running like their lives depend on that – that finish line. It is unknown and yet so certain. They know exactly where they are headed, but have no idea quite what for. They are my raindrops down the window pane, my weekdays, my Saturday night. They are mosaics of water patterned softly between me (under a Zara Home wool-blend beige blanket), the balcony (under a lichen-lined film of chipped white paint and a blanket of pooling rain), and the World – capitalised this time – beyond (Itself tucked tightly like a baby in a cot under a blanket of car-metal grey). I am picturing Life and thinking of nothing much. I am 23 next month. I wonder at my Twenties. They have been a funny thing, like a toddler in the bath (we sit in the cooling water of the draining tub and rub bubbles into a little flopping cone on our heads, giggling).

My friends are two Paddington Bears, preening one another (sticky fingers from marmalade and sex). I love them for it, maternally. The sourdough is out of the oven and dark, making the flat smell like bread crumbs just caught in the toaster. Breathe deeply – it is Sunday. Rest.