5 years

Do you ever think about it, i wonder. Those few weeks when you couldn't get enough of this. When you would watch every move of my elegant and underweight body like a tiger who held a deer in his gaze. you thought that was me, didn't you, the deer. the light, the small. and i would walk around, aware of the watch, inviting the touch that was just a reaction, a reaction to where i was.

do you ever think about pushing me against the wall and pulling me on top of you and almost screaming but for fear of being heard about how beautiful i was, about how much you wanted me or are you too scared for those memories, too scared to remember in case it moves you, and you know that it will never move me.

i think i know the answer.

you don't know anything, i think. you don't know a fucking thing.

afterwards, in your self pity, and there i was, surrounded by lies that made me frightened, and a big over encompassing shit no please no shit fear that took control. alone, except for the possibility. and the illness came back and soon i was back where i started, 15 again, 17 again, wounded and strong. stonger than anyone would ever know, would ever understand.

stronger than you, that's for sure.

and all the time, the fear the worry, counting the days until it was safe again.
and i would think - what will i do? i would sit, holding my belly, wondering what i would do. and i knew the answer. i would take control. and you would be nothing. you would have nothing. if there was anything left over from this, then it would be mine.

you took me out of myself and i forgot what i believed and i forgot what i had been taught, and this was my fault too, don't think i don't know that. i let go of everything i thought to be right and let you take me, i let go of my control and let you hold on to it until i held my belly and took everything back.

and then, afterwards, i forgot who i was. and i thought i deserved it. lying back and taking it, and taking it, and taking it, and playing people off one another and leaving me in the middle, wondering where the fuck it had gone wrong, and hiding my wounds, and opening new ones.

do you ever think about it? do you ever wonder how i hurt afterwards, how i held my belly and rocked on the bed and tore myself open? i didn't even love you! i didn't even like you. but that's proof. that's the one that hurts the worst.

it was a long time ago now. when i think of you, i don't feel anger or hate. i don't feel anything - when i think of you i just remember me.

ideas

""What's your name?" he asked, as i took his coat, checked it, and replaced it in his hands with a slip.
"Julia," i replied. "Julia".
"Julia", he repeated, treating each syllable in his tongue like a legend.
"Julia Grace." I don't know why i felt the need to offer a middle name. but i was always vainly fond of the way the two names sounded together. 'Youthful' for Julia. 'Blessing' for Grace.
"Have you worked here long?"
I shook my head. "Just two weeks now," i replied.
He looked me up and down, the way they do. The gaze that takes you in, appraising, a horseman's gaze, checking posture and bone structure and seeing through the counter that kept me hidden, to make an estimate of what lay beneath, what value could be found.
"Quiet little thing aren't you?" he asked. more to himself than to me, i knew that this was a question to which i didn't reply. a tricky one, making me in itself quiet. "But pretty, you know you have a flower of a face."
i smiled coyly, the way Roberta, my friend, the girl who lived in the boarding house with me, had taught me to do. "Smile with your face to the side," she's instructed. "Not bold like, but more like you don't know how to take the compliment." She demonstrated and got me to copy her. I hoped and prayed i copied it right.
Two hours later he came to collect his coat. "Here's my card," he said firmly, qualifying the square in his hand. "I would like it very much if you called me up sometime."
He handed me his card. It was nicely printed, on creamy card that made you want to put it in your mouth and lick the frothy milk from it. His name and details were printed in a swirling italic print that stank of sophistication. "James DeLaney".
"Is this your name?" i asked, feeling suddenly foolish.
"Yes, James DeLaney."
"Julia," i replied, with an odd sense of wanting him to remember my name. "Julia Grace."
He looked at me curiously. "Is Grace your surname Julia?" he asked. "I had a fancy it was your middle name."
"Oh, yes, well, it is. Taylor is my surname. Julia Grace Taylor."
"James DeLaney."
Under the card he had placed ten pounds.
I walked home from the club at the end of my shift, feeling suddenly exhausted, the ten pounds burning in my pocket book like some kind of strange volcanic rock that i had picked up from the scene. "I could use this to get a taxi," i thought to myself. "I could use this to get a taxi and then i won't have to walk and then i won't feel so tired." But then, the taxi driver would wonder in his mind why i had ten pounds, why a girl alone walking home late at night would have ten pounds, his mind would tick over questions and assumptions and i wouldn't know the answers that he conjured up in his head but i know i would feel ashamed somehow, as though it was my fault i had been given ten pounds, when i hadn't asked for anything, i had never wanted to find ten pounds under the card as he handed it to me, i had never asked to be told i had a face like a flower.
i walked along the Camden road, turning off as i reached the house where i lived, that rose up to me in the dark like a grey gravestone, that made me toss on my pillow asking why the devil had i come to London, it's cold windows like a glare from the school mistress who had scolded me, it's door like a cavernous mouth of the dead body i had seen by the railway line, the shorn grass and privet hedge just a marker of the endless boredom of the streets i walk down on the way home, to this house that could never be a home, a haunted house, drab with the dullness of just being one more house on a row of identical houses, all bored, all mean mouthed and cruel eyed, just one of the row, the rows that continued to stretch and wind past the eye can see.
"I'll buy something nice with the ten pounds," i resolved. "I will go out with Roberta and buy the nicest thing i can find. it'll be elegant and make everything clear to me, and afterwards we will go to the pictures, and i will have this nice thing with me and then the ten pounds won't matter, because it will be transformed into something i own, and i will no longer be able to think about it in any other terms."
As i let myself in the gaping front door, the clock in the hallway struck ten, a bell for each pound.

today i learnt to upload an image on my blog.

why Lily Allen is Chad Kroeger from Nickelback

It didn’t take me very long to notice the undeniable similarities between Lily Allen’s The Fear and Nickleback’s surprise hit of last year Rockstar (surprise in that it was a hit that is). An interesting article in the Guide during the reign of terror that Rockstar held over the charts commented on how the song at first sight appeared to be a biting commentary on the excesses of celebrity life and culture, but then revealed itself to be, in fact, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL!
Listening to Lily Allen’s The Fear I was struck by some nagging thought in my head that reflected the sentiment there expressed. It appeared on the surface of this cute pop song, with lulling synths and pretty beeps that there was a biting critique on the excesses of celebrity life and culture. But in fact – just like Rockstar – it’s AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL!

Now, disclaimer time. I happen to not dislike Lily’s new track, whereas I hated with every fibre of my listening being Rockstar. But that’s not the point. The point is; Lily Allen’s song is as gloriously revelling in her own autobiography as Chad Kroeger was in his. Neither song is a biting commentary on the excesses and falsity of cheap celebrity culture. It’s a litany of their own lives.

Let’s break it down.

Does Lily Allen have a lot of money? Check!
Does Lily Allen have lots of clothes? Check!
Does Lily Allen have diamonds? Check!
Did Lily Allen take her top off and it appears in the papers? Check!

Did Chad Kroeger have a big house in Beverly Hills? Check!
Did Chad Kroeger change his name? Check!
Does Chad Kroeger not have to queue? Check!
Does Chad Kroeger have a tour bus? I think he probably does.

Anyway, the point is that Lily’s new song has been lauded as a deep and meaningful look into the society we live in that rewards women for taking their tops off and gives people celebrity for appearing on a TV show of no merit, interest or sense of reality. Her song has been received as though we didn’t know this already. And the recpetion has completely ignored the point that she is living the life that she is criticising. Just like Chad Kroeger, The Fear reveals nothing except a colossal lack of self awareness being represented as an important piece of social commentary.

Still, Lily Allen has lots of clothes and money, and I am working really long hours and have no money, so I guess she wins.

merry christmas and a happy new year!!!

Merry Christmas readers, and a Happy New Year!! xx

parody of a certain celebrity daughter

parody of a certain celebrity daughter

because her journalism has really been driving me crazy.

I sauntered downstairs once, the sun streaming like a hot ball of fire through the crystalline glass of the windows into my hallway, before wandering into my sister Xs room, pondering on what I will do with my boyfriend ( I have an amazing boyfriend you know, he’s like a cross between a dandy Don Juan, a pirate and a philosopher from the early twentieth century – a bit like me really which is why we get on so well, I love him and will probably stay with him until I dump him for a guy in a band who totally gets my restless dreaming soul and will take me to all the parts of America the tourists don’t go to and marry me) when I see my sister X sitting at her desk, putting objects into her mouth.
It turned out she’d discovered this totally new thing called eating, a way of tasting edible items, digesting them and transferring the solid object into a mystical energy that allows you to, like, live and move and dance!
Luckily I am getting paid to tell you about food because I like, totally know that if I don’t write about these things in a way that is reminiscent of a romantically inclined GCSE student – with metaphors that dig the way the sunlight dances in a dappled manner through the window, then you would never know about them, or get the chance to follow my trend lead.

Next week I will explain music to you, I discovered music the other day and you really need my guidance on it because it may totally blow your mind - it has transformed my life like the karmic cycle of the dharma wheel. And I’ll tell you some more about my boyfriend.

Did I mention my dad is famous?

Lyons Tea Shop

We do this walk most days, now, it’s a chance to get out on the streets, to breathe the muggy air that almost tastes of the particles of black dust that dirties your nails, the inside of your nose, your ears. But it’s worth it, to get out and about, to have a look around. We is my good self, 88 if I was a day, and of course Mrs M, my pusscat, (we thought we should have one Mrs. in the family) not quite 88 yet, no not indeed, although I have often become confused by the concept of cat years so perhaps she is, perhaps she is even older.
A trudge, I suppose it is these days, more than a walk. No longer for me the swish of my arms and cocky angle of my chin, feet kicking my skirts out of the way as I walk along, feeling untouchable, feeling that the streets will belong to me, forever. Now I trudge, a hobble almost, shoulders hunched over, looking sideways, along the streets past the market, selling the odd cuts of meat that look positively indecent, pink and shiny, dotted with the black flies that make you feel slightly dizzy in your stomach at the prospect of eating them, of course you would wash it first and it doesn’t do much harm but still, flies on meat, flies on fish, flies on veg – it seems that the market is more flies than produce some days.
Tucking Mrs M into my coat, hidden from the prying eyes of the bus driver, I lift myself delicately onto the steps of the bus. A seat is free near the door, it’s the right time of day for the bus, mid morning, the workers and the school kids safely arrived, the tourists not yet up. Not that there are any tourists in this end of the city of course, not where the houses crookedly shelter pound shops and kebab shops, where the litter on the street sits in the corners, building up higher and higher, a rat’s paradise, and the smell of Kentucky fried chicken and McDonald’s fries fills the air with a sodden, sickly scent, wrapping it around your throat that closes up at the thought of eating it. I think briefly about the Lyons Tea Room. No rotten smells coming from there, just a steaming cup of tea and a cheeky slice of cake, a safe smell, with a cheap luxury of sitting on the seats under the white scalloped ceilings, passing the time with a never ending pot of tea, staining the cups with tannin. But what am I at, thinking about Lyons. I almost laugh out loud! There’s probably no one on the bus that remembers the Lyons Tea Room, probably no one in a five mile radius.
I look around at the other passengers. There are a few older people, not as old as me, I judge, but old enough to be outside the commuter hours. A mother and a baby and a mother and a toddler, looking tired, more weary than tired maybe, and I wonder whether I would have looked that way, if I had chosen to have a baby, rather than just a cat. The mad cat woman I think to myself, the bogeywoman, living alone with a cat, the crone, the witch. But no, it’s just me! Just the same as I ever was, with thinner hair and less of a face, but the same really, never one to become a crone. Not enough bitterness in the blood to cause trouble.
My favourite people on the bus are the morning-afters-the –nights-before, as I choose to call them, wide eyed with sticky mascara, heels rubbing against pained feet, silky sequinned finery dusty and dull in the cold morning light. Some smiling with a secret joy of memories from the night, others looking sad and drained, and none of them knowing that I was once one of them, different patterns of dress but the same expressions, none of them aware that they may one day be me too.
It’s a grand old bus ride, it really is. Along the Hackney road, into Shoreditch, now overrun by “fashionistas” and artists, no longer the slum I remember of course, now it’s the swank, you’ve got to put on a little swank, that’s what my friend Mary always used to say, a little bit of swank will get you further than much else in life, and it hasn’t done Shoreditch badly at all. I love the bus rides through the City, city with a capital C, the winding streets that have stood in the same place since the Roman times, the houses that lean to over the streets that are dusty with the history, ghostly footsteps and horse’s feet clip clop under the roar of the traffic. Past the buildings that are imbued with a sense of money next to buildings that stood over cholera infested slums that even I am too young to really remember.
The bus drops me off at Oxford Circus and this is where I start to trudge again, can’t go any further anyway, according to the lights flashing to warn us all that we have reached our destination. I delicately step off, Mrs M tucked in my jacket, as the noise and scream of the Oxford Street city hits me like a blast. I take in the people moving around me like a brook diverts around a stone. Old people, we are invisible and yet as solid as a rock that people recognise in the peripheral.
I can’t help it when I walk around here, memories feel as thick as a treacle pudding, and if I didn’t have Mrs M to cling onto then I might drown within them, a terrifying thought. It’s terrifying to feel like you may disappear in memories, losing the sense of your own outline amidst the ghostly shapes that you once inhabited as solidly as you now live within your own bodily space. I cut through Carnaby Street and see Mary and I giggling and tottering on our heels and our sequinned dresses, over large mouths painted against powdered faces, wrapped up against the cold with furry collars on woollen coats. Look again and through the fog I see my figure, alone, back from the continent, drained of belief, drained of confidence, my ribs metaphorically broken. I don’t think about that time, of course. But her ghost is always moving along with me on the street, the ghost of the bad times as well as the good.
I get on to Brook Road, where it crosses with Bond Street and New Bond Street, and almost unconsciously gaze at the mannequins in the windows, the luxe products. Now I flinch from the reflection, as my body looking back at me merges grotesquely with that of the mannequin. Remembering, remembering that I thought I would really be ok if I could wear those clothes, if I could go into those shops and boldly hold my head up and say yes, I belong in here, you can’t remove me, I am part of your world. Of course, sometimes, after a windfall, a good job well done, I would hold my head high and demand the service that money could pay for. But most of the time, most of my life I was just too afraid. And now, now I am too old to be afraid, not afraid of the spiders in the bathtub, not afraid of the men who look at you with mocking eyes, certainly never get looked at by men in any other ways these days dearie, and most definitely not afraid of death any more, seen too much of that, for I have lived through history and it loses the power to scare you. Of course, sometimes I am afraid of Mrs M passing, but I know we’ll be ok.
I go passed the big houses in Mayfair, and always pause outside one of them, the one I hold the memories of, the memories now forgiven, the first one who I forgave everything because I had to believe that he cared, really, deep down. If I didn’t forgive him then it would have been admitting that something had gone wrong. So young then, 12 years after the Great War and 9 before the next one started and look at me now! Alive in the first year of the new millennium! We didn’t even think of such years back then, except to wonder if we would be living in space. How disappointing to discover that we aren’t, that in real terms things are similar, even if they all have phones and computers and bombs and rockets. Not living in space and not flying to work, but like I said, we didn’t really think about it then. I was so young then. Easily forgiving, didn’t know any better. It was later, after a second and a third time, a second and a third pain and let down, when forgiveness became the struggle through gritted teeth and stinging eyes, wondering when it was really all going to end. But all that is so far in the past and now I always stop outside his old house, where I would sit and lie, nervously, until the small hours, before it was my time to leave. Huddled into a cab, safe from prying eyes, before returning the next day to repeat it all over again. His is the only house I stop outside, the only one I pay a moment of respect for my past to. A hello, a salute to youth, to naiveté, to a beauty lost but not forgotten. He will be dead now of course. Already more than twice my age 70 years ago, and who knows what happened to him, he may not have even survived the war, let alone seen the decades beyond. I mourned him in my time in a way I never mourned the others, for in him I could mourn the spectre of myself.
Mrs M pushes her warm and soft face up to mine and reminds me to keep walking. Get sentimental too easily now you see, it’s something that happens in the extremes, an overindulgence in sentimentality. Still some distance to trudge before we get to the park!
For the park is where we are going! It’s good to see a bit of green every now and then, healthy you might say, and so Mrs M and I decided that we would make it a daily task to visit the park and see what we can see.
Since the days I first arrived in this big city that has grown outwards like my waistline ever since (for I’m not from round these parts duckie, however much I may drop my h’s these days) I have always come to the parks. I remember walking through these parks for hours, before my legs got so stiff that I can only trudge down to sit happily on the bench. I have seen lovers behind trees and I have been a lover behind a tree of course, doing my bit for the war effort (!), I have walked hand in hand with girlfriends blushing and being “picked up” and whisperingly giggling about the people we see. Now in the park I am invisible, as we old people are. I sit on the bench and watch the people go by, oblivious to the pleasure they give me. I want to laugh at the roller bladers, so clumsily graceful as they swerve from edge to edge. I smile indulgently at the laughing students, smoking and drinking and singing along to a guitar, kissing and hugging and thinking they are the first to discover it all. I listen ear half cocked to the ranters on speaker’s corner. I jump with a start, as I think I see myself coming towards me. It must be me, curl hanging out the brown felt hat, pale face and red lips emerging from the fur collared long jacket, nervous on lace up heels! Walking towards me, my own ghost – am I dead yet? But closer she comes and I see her chatting on a mobile phone and that her eyes are blue not grey, and it is just a someone, wearing the past as a fashion, not myself at all.
It gives me a shudder for all that. You get these fancies. I remember the me, walking through the park, cigarette held nervously between my lips, on my way to the club, whichever club I needed to go to that day. Fantasising for beautiful gowns as now I fantasise for my beautiful youth. What if I stood up and told her, she who had just walked off, that I had a coat and a hat and a curl just like she did, 70 years ago, when I was probably a bit younger than her. But to the young we don’t have a youth. She will have discovered it all.
It’s getting later now, and I want a cup of tea. No Lyons these days though. Just back to my home.