Blue Dress

Her breast is bared to the banks of the Thames at 3:16 on a Sunday afternoon. Weighted by milk; udder-like, baby-attached in a suction-like vacuum like the toothless gums of a squid. 

Flies crawl over me like slabs of dead meat. My thighs are exposed flesh, raw in butchers aisles, picked at by black bodies with no heads. 

I like the idea of putting colour into my writing, as though the pages are flooded by the lights – actors on a stage. Dark red for the brothel that pulses like DJ beats off the pages, throbbing between the white of the lines (white lines; bathrooms; rolled bank notes). Bright moonstone turquoise for the letters of my summer, shimmering white heat and orange fire (the fires in France – in Spain – in Suffolk – rage; I think of them, all flickering tongues and starving, starved, bottom-less pit mammoths, engorging and engulfing our land which smells like hay and crisps like Walkers in a cheese sandwich).

St James’s Park is full of little naked children and bra straps slipping down hot red arms. He licks an ice cream and sweats. She coughs, dryly, insufferably, embarrassingly on a first date. I walked this same way home a year ago, giddy with bad little kisses and gin on a summer night. I walk now under the fig tree, cinnamon chamomile tea in a thermos in my little hand bag, hair in a pony tail, long skirt blowing in a wind which strips dandelions of their Afro wigs, on my way to Shakespeare in the Square. My head is full of a desire to spend money; clothes or plates, a whole flat or a dog bed, a pair of designer boots or a tub of artisan gelato? I miss the traffic lights, dreaming. I sweat heat out of every pore, quite happy, quite full. 

It’s green for me, she whines. Her hair is tucked under her silver cycling helmet, sticking out in a flattened grey bob, too sensibly for the silliness of a warm July night. We are all in the road. Her whining is a flash of pessimism, reality, spitting oil in the frying pan, boringness and dullness unsuited to this mood of mine; to this July; to my blue skirt, my running legs, my chamomile tea outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, the fringe of St James’s Park. I cross the road. She disappears in a hot-head of fury, a pink spot of anger in a blue July kiss.

17/07/25:

I lie in bed the night before Lisbon. It is hot, the dying notes of the heat wave which has lasted an entire month. Heat Sea. An Ocean. I bathe in it, naked and sparkling, a silver slip-slide of base-level excitement forming a playground between my gut and my womb. I am a child on the first day of summer; the days stretch – long, far, seemingly endless – further, beyond the boundaries my short arms can reach. (Hold your arms out wide – tip your eyelids (shut) to the sun. They are the length of your body, horizontal). These boundaries are passable only in my imagination, and, there, I leap freely between their borders with bare toes sticking into the sand, tanned twin spindles for legs jumping over stepping stones, splashing cool streams of water onto grazes which appear unknowingly and regularly, like war wounds of a child’s summer. The slip-slide in my stomach chains, eases. I am reminded of my age – 23, tomorrow – and I’m aware I have not yet had a cup of coffee. The morning is viewed through fugged-up eyes, all condensation on the side of a beer glass, up the inside of a winter train window. I am in the lion’s mane, clenched between its jaws, rolling around its throat towards the pit of its stomach. I am in the midst of the morning, with the pissing dogs and spilling beer cans, the too-early commuters smugly clutching their Caffè Neros in the knowledge they have already achieved. ‘The next station is Clapham Junction’. We approach it fast, comfortable, rattling like my yellow suitcase up Victoria Street wearing a brown shift top purchased on my birthday last year. No one gets off; too many get on. The morning peace feels shattered, removed. I feel the stabbing need for my coffee – coconut. I see Lisbon like a mermaid ahead of me. She is ethereal, shimmering turquoise. She smells of flaked pastry and resembles Venus on the rock, iridescent in her delight like the inside of an oyster’s shell. Un-patriotically, she resembles Greece. She resembles womanhood; she holds up her mirror. One day – soon, after the plane, once I have brushed my hair, and certainly, certainly after the coffee – I will stare into it. I will see the reflection of my 23-year-old self. I will consider her, slowly, curiously, like that child on her first day of summer, like I have never seen each crinkle, each freckle before. Summers are curious (they poke at hairy caterpillars and stretch like cats on Italian doorsteps). Goddesses and mirrors are more. 

We pass little churches and raffia bags. He tucks her head into his shoulder and it fits just right. We send Excited Selfies, I take off my ring, and I write. ‘We are now approaching Gatwick Airport’. I get up; Lisbon.

Lisbon is monkfish, hen pheasants and pea hens. We walk around her Castle and think of women being less beautiful in nature. Our beauty standards are God-given (the theologian within me rebels, but can find no proof to disprove), literally in-built in our natural order, inherent like the mortar between the sandstone of the castellated walls. It has traditionally always been Human women who have felt the need to dress up, to tart up, to get ready. To paint their faces, cover their bodies, clothe their skins and line their eyes. Are we, to other species, the less beautiful member of the Human race? Are the Geordie girls with inch-thick fake tan and arse-skimming extensions just dun-coloured pea hens ruffling their dull, concrete-hued feathers in this relentless, carnal, visceral search of a mate in which we all, subconsciously, share (I picture this pursuit as a dripping steak, raw raindrops of grease-ebbed blood melting down my fingers)? It is the circle of life; it is natural selection. It is Sex for the Sake of Survival. The lizard eats the snail eats the frog. I squish the insect and it leaves a trail of yellow goo. Guilt stabs. We are ugly.

18/07/26:

Portugal is a mosquito net, embedded diamonds in the gilt of a mirror, rich red grapes and cerulean blue tiles all veiled over an old woman’s face. I had thought she would be Venus; expected youth, found age (a hangover of Porto Tonics and Fado singers, a haunting whisper down slippery cobbled streets, a whining tram canary yellow in the sunlight). I expected Venus; gold-crusted, young. She had black beauty spots and gold curls in her hair. The background was turquoise (it is darker, in reality: the sea is turquoise, sure, but the buildings are all blue, brighter than navy but darker than the gem); the foreground was golden. I find, in reality, Portugal is older; she has wrinkles where I thought freckles would lie, and her buildings, her bastions, her armor crumbles under heat and July sun. The sandals of tourists wear at her skin, beating her topaz body with flip, flip, flops and the beer-sticky soles of Stag Dos. She has a benign face, but not a historically beautiful one. She is no dowager, no Empress; no goddess, no mermaid. I find her middle-aged, with flies caught in her mosquito net (hanging in sticky orange strips down the doorframe of a hot village house in provincial France in the slumberous lull of an August dusty summer), a black veil over her face studded with balled velvet like sultanas in fly biscuits. She is keeping out of the sun. She is menopausal. She is hot — is cold — is cloud-scudded and empty, bulging with life in her stomach and emptiness in the extremities of her limbs. I find her aging, ageless. I find her beautiful, strangely. I find she is singing gutturaly but from her throat rather than from her heart, and the wine of last night dries flaking in her lungs. (Pastel de Nata crumbles on to the street). Smoked Port and pulled beef. Cinnamon ice cream and almond croissants. Singular stars, candles, Mary Magdalene and cheap pink sunglasses.

I feel whole and like I am growing, a sunflower towards some funnel of light. I wear white like an angel and lean with devilish thoughts against the bleached cool of the monastery’s stone. My bag is a blood stain, ripe red, Christ’s scared bleeding heart. My friend is a notebook, a scrapbook, a novel, the pages of our childhood spilling out and sticky with suncream, thoughts of our shared schooling spewing in chlorine-dripped ink stains and water marks, curls of lost time and crumples of folded secrets turned down as bookmarks between the chapters of our existence. We are known only to each other, caught between the bookends of our lives; friendship reads easily, in the summer.  

I find truth in death and I read epitaphs like a proverbial book. 

I feel almost like a bear cub, this birthday. Like the year has made me tired – a child, in the Quiet Corner at Kindergarten – as though I’d like to curl up on the warm stone, Thumbleina, in an acorn, and close my eyes. I think I would doze and perhaps I would dream. I would dream of rhubarb green and strawberry pinks, of blushing and clementines, of dragonflies and figs. I would dream of Cosmopolitans and tanned shoulders, of chipped coral nails and family FaceTimes. Of Jesus’s spread arms and denim patchworks of turquoise sea. 

We are Intense, fruity and elegant, Fresh, fruity and light. We are our wines and our wines become us, trickling slowly into our bodies like condensation drips, deeper deeper into stomachs swelling with rice and hearts swelling with fondness. Friendship is watered by wine, fed at its roots like the burnt, straggling trunk of a vine. We laugh; full. 

24/07/26:

Everything can be ascetically pleasing and building and nourishing and wholesome, and at the same time entirely empty. Like a jar of crushed tomatoes. 

I spend time nannying. The days are long long long and punctuated by constant ravishing hunger. The girls swing, eat tomatoes, pick up puppies in the crooks of their arms. I remember the rubbing burn of arm bands, and take all three with me to the shower in our swimming costumes. I am fought over at lunch and made to push harder, higher than the world, higher than the fairies (who live, of course, higher than the world). Everything is golden-glistening and light sky blue, adventures about worms bigger than wars about worlds. The crumbs of orange cake fall into my lap, and Sticky Fingers sing songs of Aussie summer through the speakers of my dog-haired Polo. I look for three blonde heads in my rear-view mirror and miss the way the girls would chatter-scream-laugh-dance-cycle-ride-eat. We are all souls, soulful, hearts full of chocolate cake and frozen bananas. Never once should that ‘bana defrost.

The days are quiet and the butterfly isn’t dead. I open the window and release her from the cobweb, watching as she unfurls her bright red wings and flaps wildly, desperately, free from her silk lead chains. Beyond the window is cool green grass and twirling summer flies; this side, the pane throws hot light onto the window seat, burning my face. Summer lies here, in the space between us; she is the hot glass and the cool grass, the window and the pane, the chipping white paint on the wooden frame and the butterfly’s wings caught in cobwebs. She is my pressed-up pink face and the dubbin on my loafers, the burrs on my socks and the salted butter on my loaf of sourdough. The flies drop, dive-bomb, die. The thistle mist floats off into the breeze, across the moors, across the pale blue sky. I watch airplanes fly and hear motorbikes roar. I drink champagne and taste the burnt crust of lamb on the barbecue. Geese clack and the dog eats bone. All at once and never at all, I am home.