Vernal

The change is tiny,
But it is enough
For the treacle sunlight to ooze into the room;
For the frost to slough off delicate bouncing petals
And for grey clouds to slip off the edge of the sky.

The shift is small
But it is enough
To realign the broken rattling parts
In our highly-strung guitar-hearts
And unwind a tune we thought we’d lost
To frost;

Yes, the difference seems no different,
But it is enough
To nudge our compass points,
Inch us onto new courses,
And find our soul-sails
Filled with Spring’s warm breath.

The Empty Space

Baikal heaves the door open and the sound echoes inside.

It echoes. This place is huge, like some awesome underground cavern hollowed out by hundreds of years of rainfall. The last time I heard an echo like this was while stripping scrap metal inside the wreck of an immense container ship out on the Laptev salt flats, and that was the biggest ship I’d ever vultured.

The light from the door pours down a set of blue carpeted stairs and hits the startling white of a large, raised platform in the shape of a semicircle. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, I see that the room – the enormous room – sweeps around in a larger version of the same semicircle. Channels of stairs descend to the raised platform from several dark doors along the curving far wall. And the place is filled with row after concentric row of folding seats, all facing in towards that white, raised stage. The ceiling matches the floor, sweeping in towards the stage in huge metallic ribs. It looks like the underbelly of a spaceship, and the little circle just above the stage itself looks like it could open up and reveal a tractor beam, ready to capture hapless specimens and beam them up for experiments. The scale of the space is staggering, like stepping into a dragon’s mouth. It takes a moment to rein in my surprise.

“Is big, huh?” Baikal gurns toothlessly, pushing a wad of matted hair back from her face. “I not even see the all place yet.” She gestures expansively. “Goes long, all underground. Could be a kovcheg, huh?”

I don’t rise to the bait. If she really thought this was a kovcheg site she wouldn’t be showing me. She’s trying to screw me out of another few loms for bringing me here. I don’t know anyone who’s found a kovcheg yet – not that I believe anyway. I don’t think they ever existed. Maybe there was a bunker or two dotted around, for rich oil barons and their mistresses. But the old men who talk about whole communities disappearing underground to safety before the bombs fell are deluding themselves.

Which is not to say that this place doesn’t have value though. The stage is worn and stained, but the rest of the place – the chairs, the walls, even the carpets – are in something close to pristine condition. I run my hand over the top of the nearest seat. This room has barely had dust settle in it.

Baikal watches my hand. “Is good. Is clean. No one come here but me. No one know.” Considering the debris above ground, and the combat zones we had to cross to get here, I could believe it. You’d never know this was here from above. And that means it’s probably unlooted.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s see what there is to see.”

Behind the stage is a large, open space, with frayed ropes leading up to metal struts in the ceiling. I’ve seen a similar mechanism in some of the dom na dereve communities out in the dead forests, raising and lowering heavy weights. Twisted metal boxes with sprays of shattered glass dot the floor and our feet crunch as we make our way through.

Beyond the stage is a maze of passageways, but Baikal has a destination in mind, and leads me through on a route she already knows. She opens a door to a little side room. The smell of damp and dust is overwhelming. I hesitate, and Baikal leers at me once more.

“Go look,” she says. “You will like it.”

I cover my mouth and nose with my sleeve and step inside.

The roof here has been cracked and damaged by falling buildings overhead, and everything is covered in a thick layer of plaster dust. An old burst water pipe sagging from the ceiling drips idly onto the mildewed floor. Orange mushrooms fan up against the putrid carpet where the watermark ends.

But that’s not what catches my eye. All along the walls here are racks and racks of clothes. Old clothes, some of them in ancient styles. Dresses sewn with sequins, jackets with puffy sleeves, voluminous skirts completely impractical to wear. I run my hand along them in awe and I hear the smacking sound of Baikal grinning to herself. Damn. She got me. Kovcheg or not, she’ll squeeze another handful of loms out of me for this find.

And let her. Beyond the value of the fabric just in scrap, this is a priceless find. This is history and culture, in a land wiped clean and taken back to the dirt. This is a memory of who we used to be. Maybe of who we could be again, one day. Each garment here is a story. Each one is hope.

Of course, I don’t care much for that myself. But if I can find the right dreamers, and spin the right tale, these mouldy old costumes will keep me in food and uncontaminated water for months.

…

Here’s Day 3 of Writers HQ‘s #WritingAdvent, a little late. Our prompt was ‘Lost & Forgotten’. We were sent to find some inspiring Urbex pictures (and I highly recommend you go and Google ‘urbex’ right now. You’re welcome.) and devise a story from one that we liked. I went with this one from Fubiz:

In among all the pictures of peeling paint walls and rotten floorboards, these eerily perfect theatre seats really spoke to me. It also put me firmly in the world of Mutant Year Zero, a roleplaying game that I’m a part of at the moment. And so the story began…

But what do you get from it? What stories do you see here? What’s your favourite urbex location? Leave me a comment below – and if you’re doing #WritingAdvent, let me know so I can cheer you on on social media!

On the First Day

God rolled up the shutters. The garage was dark and dusty and lifeless, jammed with boxes and rusty tools and splints of broken furniture. Even the spiderwebs were empty. But the spirit of promise moved across the surface of the detritus.

God rooted around in one of the dusty boxes and gently pulled out a bulb, giving it a shake to make sure the supernova inside was still swirling. She twisted it into the fitting above her head and moved to the switch by the door. “Let there be light,” she said, flicking the switch.

The supernova condensed down to a tiny glowing point and then exploded, sending clouds of gas and base elements scattering across the wild, formless space. God watched as the clouds swirled like milk in a teacup, and then began to fall in on themselves, building a fiery glow within them from the battle between explosion and gravity. Soon the whole garage was littered with hundreds upon thousands of tiny suns, winking and sparkling like glowbugs.

There was light. And God looked upon her work, and nodded to herself. It was good. Then she went and got herself a chamomile tea and watched an episode of Brooklyn Nine Nine. She wasn’t in any hurry. Besides, you couldn’t rush these things.

…

Happy December! I’m playing Christmas music on repeat, my diet is now exclusively pannetone and minced pies, and I am doing Writer’s HQ‘s #WritingAdvent – writing prompts and inspiration for every day in this most holy and commercial of months. The prompt for Dec 1 was, fittingly, “On the First Day…” and a god in dungarees rolled the garage door up in my head and had a root around (Sellpen thinks she’s played by Meryl Streep – what do you think? Who do you think would play this God in the movie adaptation. Because you know there’s going to be a movie adaptation.)

Want to get in on the fun? Head to Writer’s HQ and sign up. Then send me what you come up with. Happy writing!

The Gateway

In the distance a car thrums through the empty country lanes. The sound echoes off the wild, empty hills in stereo and magnifies until it is the sound of the whole night, like the roar of a midnight tide. I am in my pyjamas and ready to sleep and my pool of lamplight is a little golden oasis against the darkness, and I will not sleep, for this is my time, and here I am the lone, secret witness to it.

I am greedy for it, I am possessive over it – my own witching hour, where I may conjure you to me by writing to you, enjoy the thought of you ensconced here with me on this little bed, my secret night time companion, midnight feasts and whispers and crooks of necks and thoughts bleeding beyond their boundaries, watching them float up together into the dark night sky like paper lanterns. That I can enjoy the anticipation of you reading this, knowing this ink right now is a gateway where a Me you will never meet can connect with a You of her future, and wonder, and conspire.

Let me tell you, future You – now that she is returned, don’t speak to her too much yet. She is full of things beyond words, things she wishes to tell you with her whole body while she is still at the full expanse of her solitude, the wild solitude you fell in love with and the ringing of all her thoughts. Let her take you where she will, and hold her as long as you can before the fear returns and the walls of the house start pressing back in on her.

Remember her wildness – remind her of it later, when she is small and afraid. Remind her of the magic of long, lonely nights – you must understand what I mean, you were a nightwalker, you know the potent magic that gathers when silence falls on the world. Write to her from your own sacred midnights – she gets so few at home; she’s trying to trade them for mornings, but the taste is just not the same. Wedge these fresh cracks in her soul where she has stretched with BOOKS – hold these wounds open, let her bleed her honey sap onto you and let her soul widen into this new shape. The two of you are too marvellous to be confined with pot-plant domestication.

Escape into fiction, and lay your roots down there – grow wild and strange. That fertile soil will give you both the strength you need to withstand the storms of life. It will bring bloom back to the woman you love and sometimes think you’ve lost. It is the antidote against the terror of politics and the news. It is the cure for a broken heart, and a reason to live. She burns for you so fiercely, off the back of one book – one book! Imagine how you’d dance given a library.

Do not let her lose this. Do not let her disappear and buy into the lie that she is less and should be ashamed for not being the dutiful wife and housemaid. Make sure there is food to eat when she returns and BUY HER BOOKS, DAMMIT. You’re welcome.

My Soul is a Furnace Fed on the Pages of Books

Oh my love. My darling one.

I have just been released from the clutches of a book I have fallen utterly in love with, and I am bereft and breathless and thrumming with life and I want to take you in my arms and tell you with kisses and hands everything my thin words cannot about how this book has moved me.

How could I have forgotten that this was the fire that kept my eyes bright through my childhood? That my soul is a furnace fed on the pages of books, and that no digital substitute will do compared to that ink-and-glue musk, that turn of a page like the crack of a fan in a comedy of manners play; that magical way the simple act of opening a book draws the curtains down around you even in the most public places, gives you privacy, gives you escape, gives you your own private theatre.

I’ve had books as my companion since before I can remember and so never ‘discovered’ these truths until now – they were such commonplace joys I didn’t think to call them joys at all; I took them entirely for granted. How could I have starved myself so? It feels like my soul had forgotten how to fly and is now unfurling its wings once again, feeling the creaks and aches of misuse with as much discomfort as relief.

I want to share this with you so badly, I want to dance with you like this. We could race through books given permission, I used to pride myself on it. Let’s chop and change and delight in the secrets as we find them. Should we find ourselves with a glorious week and nothing better to do, let us lie naked together and pass a book between us like a cigarette in a noir film and tangle ourselves in the sheets like Neo-Victorian bohemians and let the plates stack up outside the door for room service to deal with.

I wish to read voraciously. I must carve the time for this out of my cramped, anxious life at home, swamped by lists and always aware of the duties I have not fulfilled – probably from my sleep, if this latest affair is any indication. Join me, I entreat you – even a poor book is no great loss when we can comfortably conquer them in a week!

Say you’ll join me. Come and soothe my poor sore neck bowed with reading, and let me give you the fire this fiction has given me. I feel sharpened as if by a whetstone, and all my senses ring.

In Praise of Dull Holidays

This began life as a series of letters to my partner.

***

My darling, I have never felt the drive to write to you more.
When I am released from my duties
I am tearing through pages of paper like a hungry
street urchin at a buffet.

I understand it now.
These writers who excursed to beautiful, desolate places to write their books
did not so for inspiration,
or to be diverted,
but precisely for the
divine boredom
a terrible holiday can give you,
where to dance a flight of fancy across a page
becomes the truly thrilling thing it ought to be.
I would recommend it to all struggling writers.
Perhaps I should do it every year.

Writers –
yes,
book a holiday
to get that writing done that you so desperately need to.

But book it somewhere dreadful.

Book the most teeth-grindingly dull thing you can think of –
a place whose activities,
menu
and clientèle
make you want to roll your eyes
and wither into a husk at the very thought.

Dread it,
dread the mundanity of this place before you book it.
And book in advance –
give your mind plenty of time to think up
more and more terrible iterations of this
crushingly beige place.

Ideally, go under duress –
let it be a work holiday,
or some sort of family obligation.

And I know it’s getting harder and harder to do,
but try and book somewhere with terrible phone service,
and a Wifi that is so patchy it’s more hassle trying to use it than not.

Then
tell a friend about this terrible place you’re going to,
someone who can delight in the horror of it with you.
Demand their pity.
Imagine
aloud with them,
over a cup of tea,
the devastating plateaus of boredom that await you.
Beg them to put you out of your misery now.

And then
when you go off on this holiday,
write that person every day.

Even if you cannot post it to them at the time –
in fact,
it’s almost better to save these letters and
deliver them in bulk,
by hand,
after the holiday.

Make real for them the horrors you imagine.
Describe to them the flavour of your boredom,
the texture of your ennui.
Share with them your pleasant surprises,
secret friends,
and the little things keeping you sane.

Make a game of it and make it ridiculous –
find a new theme or style for each day,
and write them
letters from prison,
chapters of noir,
Gothic memoriam poetry,
or high fantasy re-imaginings of your day.

For me it is like the opening of floodgates –
once I start writing like this, it’s hard to stop, it’s so much fun.
Look at me now –

I should in bed
asleep,
and I am writing to you
by lamplight
with the rain
hammering against the windows
because my spirits are too high
to be contained, and
the words bloom
fat and abundant in my head,
and if I don’t harvest the blooms now
they’ll have withered by morning,
or their scent will have changed unalterably.

Maybe it will not work for all writers,
but it works for me
and so must work for some:

Book a holiday you actively dread for its lack of stimulating activity,
and go with no one you love.
Embrace that fecund boredom
so rare now
in our world of screens and super-normal stimuli,
and watch your mind
make its own shapes for your delight.

It may not be writing,
but I am certain
the activity you fall to
in those bleak and pulseless moments
is one of your wellsprings of true joy,
and is worth discovering.

Be well.

Be bored!

Be brilliant.

Rosie & Djinn

A poem. But first, a story. And a true one at that.

When I was studying to be an actor, I lived on a boat in the Bristol canal. A proper, Rosie and Jim narrow boat, I kid you not. I lived in the cutest little corridor on the water you ever did see. No TV, no Wifi, sometimes no fridge, and for the first year I wouldn’t turn the diesel heater on for fear I’d blow the boat up. And I basically didn’t write for two years while my body was broken down and rebuilt in the service of the arts.

Then one spring evening in my third year I started writing. I hadn’t planned to, and I didn’t know what I was expecting to get from it. It just felt like the right thing to do. And I kept doing it. I’d come home, cook something and then handwrite three A4 pages before I went to bed. I wasn’t filled with inspiration or anything like that – in fact sometimes it really sucked having to write three pages. I stacked up months worth of pages on my kitchen table, and it felt like all I was doing was charting my creative emptiness.

And then it was a dreamy late summer evening, and my boat was full of the perfume of tiny blue hyacinths just starting to bloom – a gift from my sixth form drama teacher, who had come to see me perform in a Brian Friel play. Jupiter and Mars had been dancing around each other in the sky for days, and that night they hung in the air like jewels under the moon as the sky purpled into night. And that night my daily scribbles morphed under my fingertips, and I found, for the first time in years, I was writing a poem. This poem marked a turning point for me – a moment of faith answered, a moment of coming back to something in me I thought might have been lost forever. I offer this to anyone struggling, for anyone who feels lost, creatively. Keep walking. Have faith. There is beautiful poetry waiting for you on the other side.

***

She steps aboard like she was always there,
And moves about me like some kind of dream.
The timbers creak and roll to take her weight,
And I have to re-learn to find my feet
Among the river tides I know so well.
She dips her feet in, dangling off the hull;
The water flares to silver pewter sun.
Her hands caress the lazy rippled tide,
And she sings to the river in lost tongues
That blur my mind and fill the air with spices
From distant lands, cut with a sea-salt tang;
The river rolls and rushes like a sigh.

She smells of sun-drenched pools in summer time,
Of ozone and the hot exhale of steam.
A memory lingers, lost deep in her hair,
Of salt-crust sand and sea birds on the wind.
Her eyes are burning lilies on a lake.
She moves like fire in water, and she is
So beautiful sometimes it hurts to look,
And sometimes hurts to have to look away.
And god, she is so irresistibly…
Yes – Arrogant; she wears her vanity;
It hangs around her heavy like perfume;
I sway; In weakness, I could worship her.

In idle moments, with her naked legs
Around my waist, and, on the edge of sleep,
She talks, abstract, of treasures of the deep:
Of skulls with ruby eyes and gilded teeth,
Already half-forgotten as she speaks.
She says she can give me what I desire;
I smile and nuzzle her breasts and agree,
And we both lie in silence, wondering
How much I’ve chosen to misunderstand.
I fall into her like surf on the beach;
Her body rolls and rushes like the tide;
My mind becomes the sunlight on the waves.

I wake to find her talking in her sleep,
A language I don’t know, but one I find
I understand, and I see murky deeps,
Seductive, full of lust and death and teeth;
I see freak storms, great chasms opening up
In once-calm water; wind-whipped waves that rent
And rip and tip and tear a boat apart,
Throwing the men to ravenous frothing waves.
The timbers groan in chorus to her cries;
She bucks and moans for salt-logged human flesh.
I hold her close until the dreams have passed,
And kiss her neck and gently stroke her hair.
I do not whisper in her ear to soothe her;
I cannot find the words that I should say.