Leaving Home



It is very dark here, like a winter Sunday afternoon indoors with tea and toast waiting for the next BBC teatime period piece – with the lights on.

She lists possessions in her head – not going to be one of those honey girls who fills her cell - yes a cell like nuns have – with fluff and toys. There is some thought required to paring down my music she thinks. Here into her head, clawing its way against the acid worms of all the pop she thought she liked, comes raw blues, the sheer beauty of it, all that stuff she heard played by her dad and now she is making a list of which records to steal from him. But records mean a turntable and boxes, all too fragile for such rare and important things. Yes – I’ll take them off his hands but so he won’t miss them - and I’ll dye my hair green for something to do. She is between two delicious states, of misery and excitement, such conceited fun and back to missing him but who does she miss most - will she miss most? I wish he’d write to me she thinks to herself once she is there, with the record player carefully installed and all the records dust free in their sleeves and boxes. I’ll write to him, I need fancy paper and pen and then I’ll be like some Austen girl, those weedy types who read it all and forgot what it would be like for them to live like that. How Slushy I have become. But anything like that is a letter from home, even if he doesn’t live at home anymore. He is up in some room like this, wishing he could write probably.

Here comes the obscure blues in this room, maybe some Muddy Waters as well, because he is not that obscure, ska and regga, soca – all that stuff and now she thinks of puff and fluff she wants to write, half-wishing she had a quill and the dismissing it with shakes and embarrassment. I am so soppy, wishing for him in this tiny room, breaking regulations in my head to get him in, and stay the night. Do they have regulations? Not sure if all the wardens bother any more, all did this back in the sixties and went through all the prohibitions for us. Nothing left for us to rebel against someone said. No! I was in the middle of a letter, genteel rubbish about the weather maybe though not quite that pad perhaps. I’ll tell him of the lectures, all those things we take apart he hates, a mush of dissection or cold, clammy samples and next week onto the dead bodies and I will have them taken apart on the slab like nothing more that next days’ dinner. I’ll burst with all this, need to write down everything, the days the nights, the wide stares across the city from this window, sleeping with the curtains open so that the lights can get in. And no one realises how big the city is or how big the world is. Sometimes they think that one little bit of writing like this will convince everyone how to be nice and good and stop everything from going wrong but it is always wrong, like one big sentence – a thought to love everybody. I love everybody.

Oh! Come to my party she thought and then distracted herself with a view of the trees behind her house –well just her father’s house now – how is he on his own? I haven’t thought to ask these last few days – he always seems the same as if nothing gets out of that brilliant brain. I think of the trees there, so old, been there for years and years, back beyond any history I was taught or even the classics my mother did so long ago. The rain was falling on them as Roman soldiers reached this far north the first time, making shelter in those woods and marvelling at how peaceful the countryside seems from in there, like hiding in the hedges during children’s games. I’d love to be back there – is this homesickness? She thought again of her father, alone and flicking through the channels. Maybe she would tell him to get out but thinking about it, maybe he was already. Thinking back to the few days before she left for this place, she began to realise that he might actually have been going out without her noticing it. Maybe he is worried about what I would think about that she thought, maybe he thinks he is just protecting me but I want him to be happy rather than to think of me. After all he is paying for all this and she looks down at the pile of new, pungent text books lying on the table and is sad and happy all at once.

Now she thinks of having a party again. Some of the others here are quite friendly, but we need to break the ice, play them some blues – maybe not. Something in this world bends, a small tragedy somewhere unrelated apart from being in the human world, a death unnoticed in the streets around this new building and it makes me shiver with the injustice and the pure randomness of what happens here. How can anyone let that happen? Paradise will not be like that she thinks, back again in those trees to make her think of home and then again sad for her poor father alone with all that vinyl. And there on the table is a letter from him, not her father, but him, and opened it is blue and cool and rough to the touch, not like the thin, lines stuff she makes her anatomy notes on, all that stuff she won’t ever have to remember. It is poetry, mad and unscanning in the dimness of the single light she had left on, beautiful evocations of her home and his home and how they walked across the moors that spring day, gentle and shy in the drizzle and now calling her home, celebrating her success, the days and days ahead that make her the cleverest person he knows. He writes about her pose against the bus stop when they first met that day, how her leg angled perfectly against it and how the wind was just right, just strong enough to lift her hair in the way that made him fall in love with her. How they walked the length of the bus, passing by the old ladies. I saw them wink to each other she thinks, I had forgotten that. And all is good grammar and bad grammar and no war anywhere.

Back in her wood, the soldiers have broken camp, and are marching under orders to the coast so many miles south, back to the boats and Rome. The rain still falls, unheard in the clearings. Over the moors above the house, the wind links then to this room, this small cell, like for a nun she thinks again, and she is happier than she has been for weeks. The world does not go backwards but everything that happens in it flows forwards and becomes us. I love everybody she thinks. I love everybody.