Octavia

Grief

Afterwards, he rested his face on my belly, licklapping lazily as he dropped drowsy kisses on my skin.

'I have...want to tell you something.'

The inside of my head is still hot red velvet clench. I curl my fingers in his hair as I exhale 'Anything.'

Then he says it, words muffled by my skin, lips nuzzling soft warmth. 

And it's as if he's punched into my stomach with an upper jab, his deadmeatcold fist slamming into me and up into me until my heart is forced pumping bloody tears up into my throat.

Once upon a time...

...Which means, every night, when the pains get too bad, and her legs jerkspasm like a crazed marionette, her excruciation wakes my Dad. Bent over with sleep, groaning leonine yawns he is sliced from softwarm dreams by the cold metal of the hoist and the wheelchair and the lift it takes to get her useless body downstairs, to the electric armchair where he can tie down the st vitus dance of her legs and slide bitter pills under her tongue without her choking.

He, exhausted by getting up every 20 minutes to move her (yet still her bedsores weep and crust into black blood pustules), falls back upstair and downbed and indream. But she, strapped down like a lunatic in a Victorian asylum, sits painwracked in the dark, making out the familiar shapes around her, the television and the piano and the framed photo of their wedding, when she stood so proud, so independent, and she cries, softly yet with such relentless despair that it saws screeching through my sleep.

In cotton nightie I tiptoe down the stairs to her, dragging my duvet behind me. I curl up against the side of the chair, resting my cheek where the electric motor hums gentle warmth, and arrange her hand, hanging cold and dead, so it rests on my shoulder. And there I whisper fairy tales into the dark: stories of witches and princesses and silken slippers and ghosts and white rabbits. 

Together the words and the drugs soothe her; but they also break with a clean branchsnap her hold on who is the adult, who the child. Every night she asks me what I think she should do; and as tears she can't wipe away flow down her twitching face she urgently enquires how I, at eight years old, think she should end her destructed destructive life.

Medusa

Lagershouting Friday bar and I'm on a date when I feel you nearby. Immediately I laugh kittenishly up at him and lean too close and let his fingers stroke my snaky curls so his puppyeager cock thinks it's in with a chance: but I don't look at you because my gaze reflected in the glaze of your indifference would turn me to stone. 

Janus

Lean close into me my love, you are so far away. 

My hand swan necks round the back of your head and yours round mine so we are a bent arm's width apart. Too far apart a part of me. So closer and our skin kisses, and I feel the contact with you cracklein my toes and there is nothing to see but you seeing me. Then close closer closest, pressing into one another, foreheads pushing hard hot and if you were a train window I would leave a greasy ghost on you. A breath of sweet yielding resistance: and then we push through into each other's heads, brains passing serenely through each other until your face reaches the back of my head, bone to bone.

We stay like this, brachiocephalic blood beating a new circuit through our heads, the black thoughts at the back of my mind at the front of yours; I peer out at the world afresh through your hair as you do the same. Homophrosyne. 'I've never felt like this before,' I whisper, my breath stirring your hair as the words pulse through our brain. 

A pause: and you are gone, withdrawn so sharp your forehead cracks against my chin and the vacuum of you aches hollow like yesterday's migraine. Your voice with out me booms harsh as you laugh a scornful slap into my face. 'Never? You've never felt two-faced?'

I am so cold a way from you. Don't, oh please don't.  

'Liar.'

You laugh again and walk away.

Release (it wasn't anything you said)

Happily and in good cheer, I spend my days swollen with yeast-bitter tears. I have retched back so many of these that sadness swills around inside me in the fashion of those pints of water scarfed back after a night out, which slosh uneasily on top of the 2bottlesofwine3ginsandadarkrumandcoke and sway lump heavy like a carrier bag full of vomit.

Resolutely and through necessity I smile on through the worst of things, through death and betrayal and the Thing I Can't Talk About and disease: but my belly strains evermore with this slopping pus. It hurts and I cannot put it down.

And so, when someone addresses to me a comment that has been even airkissed by criticism, I grasp the opportunity to use this as an excuse to sink my nails into my sides, to slash at them with kitty cat claws just so a spurt, a dribble of this sadness can be released and the pressure can drop.

And this, my love, is why I cried when you asked me to wear less of the perfume that sets off your asthma.

Sense

Once I had to interview an astra minor for a magazine. Core questions were provided by the editor: I just had to add the cottontails. So I aked: 'What smell reminds you of childhood?' and she said: 'Seaweed and sperm.'

This response didn't get published.

My smells of childhood: orange squash from warm plastic beakers and soap but most of all *home*, the scent stroke hit whenever I walked in the front door. It never changed and on rare trips back I have catcurled up in it, in its familiarity and associations and warmth.

This Christmas however I was hit by a huge wafting lack of it when I opened the door. Sniffed the air like an idiot coked-up bisto kid but nothing. My childhood home now reeks of hospital: of disinfectant and drugs and air fresheners and flesh gone stale and squalid and fetid stinking. That is, of my mum.

When my grandfather had a stroke and was in hospital, my dad and I smuggled in his dog, to raise his spirits, boost morale, blah blah blah. But she didn't recognise him, scittered back over waxed floors and strained for the door with her eyes rolled back in her head. Grandad and I both bawled (although he could do so only from his left eye) while my crestfallen dad comfort explained that the clinic smell was confusing the dog.

Two days later, we realised she had smelled death.

I caught Daddy kissing Sister Olga

My father has a crush on a Russian nun, who is in England to sell Orthodox icons at faux German Christmas markets. His voice fairy lights whenever he talks about her (which is often): how she came over from Minsk with five of her sisters, driven the whole way in a Soviet rattling minibus; how (the others scattered across the country) she is staying with Franciscan monks near the university, and is amazed at the contents of their fridge; how she has to stand alone all day in the cold, squeezed betwixt a bratwurst booth and a stall selling ties made of wood; how she smiles and shakes her head, bemused that foreginers should pay and display her religion on their Christmas trees.

Each fact a different colour for him, thrown at me in a tumble of excited exclamations, just happy to be talking about her; and on Christmas morning I received two icons (St Stephen and the Virgin) and a CD recording of the Russian Orthodox Easter service. Later, he produced the bag in which they'd come, tracing the cyrillic in breathless awe.

I wouldn't mind, but I'd asked for the new Girls Aloud CD.

Fairytale of Essex Road

I caught the eye of a Polish butcher this morning. Usually I stride numb past his leergruntdarling, my mind immuned by work and love and hate and oh caffeine need clench thoughts; but today i am weak. Weak because of Christmas. So i look him full face and his features turn golden and come away from the edges in surprise and then he grabs a hanfdul of raw sausages and makes fucking gestures at me.

Vicim rage and a day spent imagining scrotum slicing with a ham hook yes; but also anger at Christmas for doing this to me. For changing who I am, for making me tearful and snap mawkish and making fights with my love and taking bites from myself.

Christmas means families. It means migrating south on resisting wings to a prolonged period of my parents, of what they have become. My mother is dead to me herself god whatever; her days exist in pain and madness. 'Home' for me is thus catheters and bedsore ointments and slop feeding and massaging legs swollen like rotten logs while she either disrecognises me or rochester laughs or weeps slow maggoty tears. It is my dad's face alight with joy at seeing me and the guilt gullet twist of how gladly he salutes me as I come through the ticket barrier, his glee that of a puppy that thought himself abandoned.

And I am so angry, so angry for him. And for her, the most independent, the most battling: a single mother in the '60s, who when refused a mortgage by tweedsuits disapproving of her bastard child returned years later to pay for her house in cash. She who caught me creeping in the back door when I was 11 because I was afraid to walk past the builders (at that age I was tall was woman enough to blip on their radar) and made me parade tofro past them, 'becase no daughter of mine is going to be afraid'. She who now lives who for life years has lived able to do nothing other than survey not only the shell of her existence, but how she sucks dry that of my dad, and how she has forced the pink softness out of me. 

When you train to be a Samaritan, they tell you that carers seldom kill themselves. Responsibility deters them. As my Russian granny would say, sprasping the words between the gap in her teeth (sculpted by decades of drinking her tea through a sugar lump clamped there): 'In Moskva, there was no such thing as depression. People either killed themselves, or got on with it.'

So we continue our lives. Or rather, so our lives continue. And all you 'I'm so unhappy although there's nothing really wrong but GOD the futility of existence and no one sees it but us oh and I was bullied at school' bloggers?

Fuck you. 

Merry Christmas. 

Betrayal

Scanning their blog love and my mouth tastes like chew swallowing on my own lungs.

"The lungs of mammals have a spongy texture and are honeycombed with epithelium having a much larger surface area in total than the outer surface area of the lung itself."

And don't tell me just to stop reading. You try it. You try knowing the heartplungtwist is coming and yet looking away in vague disinterest, wondering what's on the telly.

How I thawed

I was walking home after a late shift at the pub. It was cold, snow on the ground and lager breath in my hair. I am too tall for icy pathways, my centre of gravity too high, my movements too tentative; the tips of my fingers were cold froze to the inside of my gloves.

I skithered past the university, shut up with all the students home for Christmas. Turned left towards the library and right at the corner and there was a man knelt weeping in the snow. I stopped. He was yes young and yes goodlooking and yes well-dressed; but his skin was cracked with snot and his tear tracks were frozen slug trails down his blotched face.

Hesitate headlines of murder and rape as I stood hovering beside him.

‘Are you [fading inflection at the futility of the question] okay?’

He looked up myxomatosis-eyed and he was so ripped in pain that I doglegged my gaze. Now I saw flowers shrouded in snow. An avalanched teddy bear. Gift cards slush sunk, with the odd wordphrase bobbing to the surface: ‘never forget’; ‘too young’; ‘rest in peace’.

Three in the car that hit the library wall in the first week of December. The driver over the limit, Malibu-marinated. Her friends not wearing seatbelts. All killed instantly. The Nottingham Post heavy with school photos and tearful quotes of bright futures and blah blah blah.

From down by my feet: 'I can't live without her.'

Compassion realised in a crashtide and I sank down beside him, the cold wet eating through my jeans.

'You knew one of them?' in hushed museum tones.

His eyes snap-focused on mine and guilt fury acid burn.

'I love her. And she's [spat out] left me. She's gone back to [hawking] him. And she's alive, she's not even, even...' One hand conducted shakily over the roadside shrine before his words drowned again.

I took him home, leading him by the hand as if he were a small boy, crunch sliding through the cold biting air. In the flat we warmed our hands on ikea glasses of cheap red wine; he had stopped crying, stopped everything, and when I declared it time to sleep he stepped out of his clothes and curled on his side. We aligned shoulders hips feet, warming each other, and slid into sideways dreams.

It was still cold dark when I felt his cock twitch against my back; his body clutched and his mouth crashed angrily for mine, so my teeth knocked into my lip and bled warm onto our faces. He gut screamed 'Bitch' as he came and the afterward was his hot tears in my hair and his heart hammering against my spine.

When I woke up, he had gone. And the snow had melted.