Babbling Brook (3)

                                          

You gotta love writing, why else would you do it? Not for the money.

With The World’s a Stage she felt like Michael Cunningham fictionalizing the life of Virginia Wolfe. It took her hours to write.

You can basically watch live death on the internet these days.

At the weekend she had a visit from a sofa maker called Shay Long. She marked the page she was reading “Bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust” and put the kettle on. Shay produced his brochures.

Her father had been a classic Irish drinker: manic when drunk and a pain-in-the-hole depressive when sober.

She wondered if there was an asylum somewhere for people who considered ____ __ _________ to be a good song?

She chomped on an apple having peeled it with her old, horn-handled knife.

During an afternoon nap the poetry of Arya Wright floated into her brain: “Acquiring glances by merely moving a white wrist, Your shy smile briefly to please the creature you’ve kissed, In dank rented halls on eves of lust, To that beast half-crazed you gave your trust, your flesh, your unruliness.”

For a while she became hooked on Daily Mail Daesh stories, in particular the comments under the articles. She eventually broke the habit but found it harder than headshop coke to do so.

Arya Wright again: “Again a swoop of the wrist, A chuckle beneath the glass, And then it’s out with beady eyes upon you, To a seedy room where the beast dives in to you.”

Some days she just wanted to be an old lady feeding the birds in the morning from a bag of stale bread.

Her neighbour was in the news. It was something innocence-shattering like finding out that Paul McCartney was a closet Islamophobe.

Sweet Loretta Martin had issues about her sexuality.

Her boss said hello to her as she entered work. She knew if it came down to it, he would step over her if she was lying dying in the street.

She returned to her book: “There is a divine source which is ultimate truth…this truth can be expressed by means of numbers…and that, if followed correctly, these principles can be expressed with infinite variety to produce beauty.”

She bore stoically conversations on insipid topics.

That evening she opened her journal. Her notes had taken on a hybrid form of poetry, narrative prose, diary entry and fiction.

It came to her in a dream what she should say: “I am not your slave and you are not my master. You can’t make me dance to your tune. I’m not a monkey.”

She got out of her car on Blackhorse Avenue. She could feel the park pulsating just beyond the high wall. The sheer dread feeling of being alive transfixed her. Her aim was to make some magical, imaginative leaps in the course of her lifetime.

The voice of the author interjected at this point: “I’m telling a story I’m not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. My anti-novel will be built from scraps. It will be plotted with sufficient skill to disguise its implausibility.”

What did any of it matter? She was grateful most days, and happy as a newlywed woman rolling the words “my husband” around her tongue.

© Brian Ahern 2015