Blue Dress

I wear no clothes and I spend quite a lot of time alone. I see a man who looks like a version of my cousin (who finished Cambridge today) walking down the street and feel as though I am staring into the eyes of the future. Macrocosm becomes mircocosm becomes Mcosm: a State. I feel the thrill of secret knowledge, precious as an earwig cupped in my five-year-old hands: I know something he doesn’t; I know what he will look like in his future; I have cheated Time.

We are given a pension review at Work. We all fold the paper aside in the into our handbag and nip it over for the men of our families to look at. There is something in that.

It feels like spring, but it is early June and the sun is out. The sky is very blue. There are massive white clouds and a bitter wind which cuts like a guillotine down the littered London streets. A plane flashes over the sun. Shadow — light. All the earth is honeysuckle-sweet in June. The threat of rain is heavy, a pregnant stomach, swelling. Her belly is all the horizon: the pavement, the sky. I am looking up at it from below. Sub-vagina. Below the waistband of the knickers, and the equator, which divides us earthly beings, and the heavenly expanse above. I trace the stretch marks of the clouds with an idle fingernail – unpainted – moving slowly over them, over her belly, and up, up towards the sun, up, towards that spherical burgeoning beacon on the horizon, above the horizon, above earth, above heaven, and above it all – the nipple.

It is hot, sooty-chimney covered heat, the spout of a power station chugging fug into the sky. We have swollen bodies. Like puppy’s bellies or pregnant pigs.

I told the beggar to have a nice day but I couldn’t give him any money. I feel kick-gut guilt. How can he have a nice day when he’s toothless, hunched like a grey cat outside Sainsbury’s clutching a broken cardboard Pret cup with grease dripping in visible bulging droplets from his hair? A builder stands by his open white van’s door drinking Gordon’s pink gin from a tin at five past one. I smile. 

I avoid a spider on the stairs and think about France all the way to work. The streets are clean after the roadworks, and the spider has caught a fly. It hangs — suspended — crumpled at the end of its rope. It is helpless and caught, alive but unable to live, trapped but moving, swaying, swinging, with all the carefree attitude of a child going too high on the swings at the playground. Time does not apply to it; we live in suspense. We hang, at the mercy of a creature not much larger than ourselves, at the mercy of a Nature so much more powerful, so much more silent, so much more deadly than we ever pause to consider; we might become that fly any time. Perhaps we already are. Spinning, spinning, the web wider than ourselves, the world, the social network all sticky and out of our control, pinning us to a point in a grimy stairwell in a central London council block like we are bogged down by alien green goo and quick-sand like slime. It cannot be helped; this Nature that is wider than ourselves. It fills all the stairwell, when we only take up the tiniest space, the tiniest dot hanging on the end of an invisible rope, swaying softly in the breeze of the cracked open window, funneling up the stairs, step-by-step, down-up-up-down, inescapable and unavoidably, desperately, desolating filling our void. We are flies. We buzz too much: there is too much noise. I swat it away and go to work.

We are trundling; there is no other way to describe it. Pre-adolescent male, hands in pockets, wire-haired mother. He is ignoring her, focussing much harder on this task than on his GCSEs. Oh quick, let’s catch the green man she chimes, ding-dong annoying, peremenopausally desperate. I send her a mental note of sympathy, of you’re fighting a losing battle; (I had mentally thought exactly the same thing; oh quick, Cressy, you can catch the Green Man. What if he doesn’t want to be caught?). 

K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

Clemmie, what’s your hamster called? Claris. Like it is the most obvious thing in the world. After all, what else would a five-year-old name her hamster?

Someone’s eaten a pepperoni pizza on their Saturday night. I can smell the chilli in the oil, dripping warm, fat, oozing, softly over my pale trousers. There is an ‘L’ sign on a green Land Rover, at which I feel a stab of jealousy. I’ll buy myself a Land Rover someday (Donna Sheridan style, light blue, convertible. Driven only when wearing a cowboy hat; dungarees).

We appear to be a nation of joggers. (I have never jogged. In fact, that is a lie. I have jogged, once, in France. I was 13, on a French exchange, and staying with a house party of just-teenagers at a beach house in Brittany. We jogged on the first morning to the crêperie, picked up a stack of pre-prepared crêpes to feed 9 hungry, beer-tasting mouths, and jogged home. We did not jog again the next day, though somehow we managed to get crêpes). Everyone is moving, pushing, surging: I am walking. I can smell the sweat off their bodies as they run past, their hot breath coming in jerks. Am I missing something fundamental? Walking through life when I should be on the run? No; no matter how fast I walk, how slowly I run, it will all happen anyway. If nothing else, those crêpes will still arrive, steaming and warm, on the light blue plastic tablecloth of a French holiday home on a plate with ditsy flowers on the side.

Pink Lady apples in a white plastic bag.

They are Premium Coaches, taking pride in our work. Me too.

Do we always feel like half creatures — like beings on the edge? Like sunlight cracked over corners of walls and pink wallpaper in the evening light. Like we’re waiting for something – always waiting – like we’re about to get on the train, feel the hurtling rush of the tube, step on it, step off it, ignore each other and press so close — too close — to see right in front of our eyes. Like I am lying naked in my bed – waiting for summer. My body is orange and the sunset is pink; the fan is billowing my hair and my legs are splayed as in sex, though I am alone. I type and watch the curtains ruffle, and dream of France and feel prickles of sweat slip down my back. The fan is whirring against the noise of London traffic passing through the open window – a crack of life in my static, satiated, permanent reality, in my perception of life beyond. I turn to look at myself; think I have abs (I don’t: it is the way I am lying, propped up on one arm to type, sprawled over white bed sheets stained a little dirty from three days’ heatwave and restless, deep, deep, sleep); admire the way I sparkle (sun cream, moisturiser); trace blue veins from my crotch down my legs like the drip of the bubblegum ice lollies the boys were licking after school. I flop back like a sea creature, just caught, like a toddler exhausted by a tantrum, like a dog collapsing on its side after a walk. The light is golden now, and it catches the gilt frame of my father’s artwork which hangs as an abstract reminder of our mortality on my bedroom walls (it reminds me, again, painfully, like pressing on a burgeoning spot or sticking a finger into an open wound – horribly nostalgically for a 22 year old – of France. I think briefly of my parent’s lost youth. Of people’s days going by as they watch them, from behind desks, from sunlit terraces, from the stern of a boat). I sit up: I am bare faced in the light, shining under slick layers of face cream and perspiration. I am waiting for something. Aren’t we all? 

I curl my toes on the bed head, tracing the pin-cushion studs from left to right with one blue-gelled big toe nail (though they are only small). I have lost my sense of waiting. I flick back, flopping again, rolling on to my side. I will put my phone down, will read instead of write (but I will write mentally all night, all night, and it will keep me tortuously awake like a broken record, like Spotify on shuffle-play, like movies on a loop. My head is a nursery full of crying babies, a church full of evangelicals, a village hall full of the WI. It is noisy; it is inescapable. And, at times, it is really surprisingly good fun).

Lena Dunham makes me think about having little lipstick on the glasses so they’re easier to wash up: the only reason I have male friends.

Shall we play Mermaids? No one’s asked me that for so long. Perhaps this summer I will re-find mermaids.

I have concluded that people pleasing is a self-interested and self-invested state: selfish. I tell Lucy so: it is all about the Self, not People, not really. It pleases; the pleasure goes straight to your soul. It comforts; the comfort is a bed for your own insecurities, the lyrics of a mother’s lullaby, the silk of a pillow case against your over-moisturizd face. It is mediation rather than interference, meekness, self-victimisation, a placing of the self at the centre of someone else’s issues. It is Fibonacci. More fibb-ing. More indulgent than sticky coffee sauce around a chocolate fondant pudding. Saturating, cloying. Fat. That is why, to the addicted, it feels so damn good.

The sun has gone in, so I pull my white vest top off the back of the burgundy garden chair and up over my head. I pause at my neck – my sunglasses got caught, went over the back, stuck in my hair; my tummy is a little pink, like strawberry flesh just ripening, or like the Jelly Shoes with silver sparkles we used to wear in the sea in Cornwall. My leg is tucked up as I type, my white thong the only thing between my vest top and the seat. Legless, I shove the sunglasses back onto my head, hug my knee, decide it is getting colder, and watch a helicopter come in to land. The heatwave is dying, but like a tearful mother waving her child off to college she is clinging, reluctant to let go (there are swathes of rain above the clouds, somewhere out to Surrey).

I pick my gel nails off in Shakespeare and drop the plastic curves between the seats of the theatre, watching my friend’s scared wide eyes as she embodies a character so different from herself, in stature, sex, society, that it only emphasises to me all she is attempting to escape from. I wonder idly if she prefers this mode of existence; never fully being anyone, just a series of minds, a series of bodies bound by the beat of her one living heart. It is almost psychopathic, acting. A case of disassociative identity; will she ever find her own? The mind runs away; the nails are curling on the floor, wood-shavings.

Her perfume arrived before she did. 

I continue my conversation with Lucy. There are two stages of people pleasing, I conclude. Stage one: the pleasing. Stage two: the anxiety. The roundabout of the mind which has no Arc de Triomphe to anchor it in. It runs like a fishing line reel down, down to the bottom of the sea. I am not hooked on this latter stage. Lucy is.

We laugh about the affliction of being a Girl (the capital G symbolises the bridge to Womanhood which we are currently caught on, playing Pooh Sticks). We over-complement other girls and admit it’s because we’re actually a little (read raging, green-eyed, jade fire-breathing) a little bit jealous of them. We use other people’s products in the shower because somehow they will make us so much more beautiful than our own tried-and-true (read stale and boring) beauty regime. We are fascinated by the contents of another friend’s bathroom cabinet (what does this do? She removes — down there??). We accept our own worst traits with the attitudes of martyrs (our fates are unavoidable, unknown), and feel like bees circling the hive of a family holiday, uncertain which entrance in to take (we can be honey sweet; we sting; we die). We know the skins of our friends but not their flesh, and we force ourselves with pressure which builds from within, like the fizz beneath an exploding bottle of champagne (we pop the corks on the lawn, seeing who will fire them furthest).

We ate slowly but talked quickly, our mouths the mobile scooters to the Ferraris of our minds. I drank quickly, she — a little slower. Oceans and seas and years and time zones divide us, but we are Girls; we play Pooh Sticks on the Indian Ocean and silently thank the stars above that we met.

A crow picks apart a pigeon, bare breasted in the road. It is it’s Friday Night Feast. It is gruesome.

I try to read but I am far too distracted by the other people on the train. The three large Americans (husband, wife, spoddy don’t-wanna-be-here son) who have squeezed in beside me on my table for four: the mother eats M&S apple and peanut butter greedily like it’s the first snack she’s ever had; the father reads the golf news on his phone, which is itself the size of a small iPad; the son – long, greasy dark hair brushing his elongated shoulder blades – has keys in his ear lobes and watches something — probably porn — on his phone, sideways, tilted away from his father’s watery grey eyes. A little boy is pointing at a dog (“Hairy Maclary!” – I smile, that particular highlight of English literature having been lost to me for many years), ignoring his mother who is telling him firmly that they cannot start lunch until the train leaves the station (it is 11.00am exactly). I drink a green smoothie and type, dressed all in blue and reading (or not) a horse racing thriller loaned me by my sister’s husband’s mother. The train smells like croissants (it is Saturday morning), and wrinkles like plastic bags. We leave, promptly; 11.02. 

I think about the narcissism of singlehood. Singlehood or singledom? Is being single (in itself an artist’s creation) a neighbourhood of spinsters or a kingdom of fellow-subjects? My singledom for a man? Is he worth the price?

Time slows down to the pace of a bumblebee. Fuzzed legs in the style of a flower; marjoram on my tomatoes. I am pink as my knickers and hot as a cat. July is turquoise with orange flowers. Love’s Labours never were Lost on me.