Here’s the thing: deep in my core, down in the place where my soul would be if I had one (only joking! I’m not a vampire – or is it reflections they don’t have?) – anyway, deep in that place, I felt the earth move. You know how they say it does? Except not in that way. This was more like a landslide, or an earthquake. Scary. Well, I tracked it down to something that probably happened when I was a baby – and then I came to a stop, as you do when both parents are dead and nobody else is around to tell you what happened. Well, that was the first thing I felt on waking – and the second was this. The second was the realisation – no, the memory – of what daily life is like. Like a prisoner waking from a sweet dream and seeing the walls around her, the echo of the gibbet on the floor, all the memories of long incarceration coming back. So. The prison of my life. What’s that like? Tell the truth, I feel bad complaining: I mean, we don’t starve, we’re not homeless – nothing like that. Oh, shit – now I feel like a total wimp. It’s just that –
OK let me tell it like this. Imagine you have a problem. You spend time thinking about the problem; you come up with a solution, you spend time and energy on the solution – and there! Problem solved. And for about two seconds you sit back and relax, before the same bloody thing surfaces again, like giving you the old one-two. You duck the first, but the second hits you square in the jaw. You know? And so you deal with that and then, bugger me, something else comes along. And so it goes. It’s like a plague. Sometimes in my darker moments I think – you know these blue plaques they put up for people? Famous people, when they’re dead? Well, instead of a plaque, I’ll have a plague. Sarada Gray died here of the plague which, although she was cured seven times, never left her alone. That’s my life. Same bloody problems, over and over. Karma. I guess.
Take head lice. These tiny black hyphens in your hair that can ruin your life if you don’t get rid of them: they proliferate like plague germs and then you’re crawling and depressed and nobody will sit with you. So you get rid of them, by combing and washing and disinfecting and boiling bedclothes and then, for about two seconds, you’re free before one tiny unseen egg, nestling in a burrow so close to your scalp, breaks open and starts to lay its own eggs. And so on. There’s no solution. Except, go back in time and don’t get the bloody things in the first place. That’s it. So that’s my life. You get the picture?
I know these aren’t real problems. They aren’t real – but they are. I’ll regret saying this, but I’d swap for a real problem, like being in a war or something. No, that’s rubbish – of course I wouldn’t. That’s an idiotic thing to say – don’t write in! It’s just…
I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like being a sink with a huge plughole and no taps. Or a field with hungry crops where the sun never shines and the rain never rains and there’s no fertiliser. It’s like being Africa. I know, I know – it’s an insult even to think of it. But it’s how I feel. You have to express how you feel – no? Even if it’s pathetic. So every morning I go down and look at the mat where the post should be and when it eventually comes bringing us demands for bills we have already paid or else have established through phone calls and letters and visits that we don’t owe in the first place and we are starting to think about threatening them with a solicitor – when these items come in the post, the post which never brings even one letter containing the words: We are pleased to say, or We are happy to accept your story; letters which contain somewhere in them the word publication, that miraculous word not preceded by the phrase not suitable for; I leave the post undressed on the hall table and heave a sigh which is an echo of yesterday’s sigh, postponing my hopes for another twenty-four hours, climbing the stairs to work on my next story.
My manuscript sinks with a sigh
my hopes echo
That was the start of a poem I wrote about it. So that’s my life. Want to swap? Huh? Well, you can’t. You think you could step into this? Huh? You couldn’t hack this in a million years. It’s my life, baby, and I’m holding onto it! So go live your own!
Now, where’s my bike?
