Goodbye to all that

Every year you’re surprised the old girl’s still got it in her, thinking surely it was curtains for wonder after all those hostile lunar plains and skeleton trees, breath fogging car windows under navy 4 o’ clock skies.

But careful: look away just once and she’ll slip through your oily palms, a wraith in a silk slip dangling one-armed from the sill of your open window, half dead even while her breath is still tropical on your dumb and hopeful cheek.

Through Calippo-stained lips you’ll scream This is it! The summer that changes everything!

But like always you forget she’s a dead woman walking. Girls lighting one cig off the last in the cut grass swell, a single wet pearl licking its way down a Corona, alien mouths under orange street lights in Hackney Central: these were her funeral’s dress rehearsals and you attended willingly. Warming up just in time for the cold, cursed to forget how fast she moves every year.

Like clockwork she scoops the meat of your heart out when the blossom comes in April, its sweet fruit an omen that this new season will make your stomach sick with too much beauty.

In May you drink long pale pints and feel her gathering strength, dissolute and vain, sharpening her teeth and binding her blistered feet. A man with hopeful eyes tells you woman you’re a weapon of mass destruction and only because you understand this season makes idiots out of all of us, you manage not to laugh.

In June she lies down on the molten tarmac in Soho and invites you to join her, screaming don’t be so fucking boring darling and laughing laughing laughing as beautiful boys in Jil Sander step over her like roadkill.

In July, sheet knotted between glazed thighs, a square of moonlight on your wrist, you write terrible poetry about your bewitchment then rip it to shreds, mango juice running through your fingers. He licks them clean: she says, get it girl.

August you can smell death all around, a rotting tooth that requires extraction. The spirits have skipped town, no longer willing to make the commute through this unlovely soup. She sympathises: she’ll be off shortly too.

Goodbye to all that. In the end, it’s the same as it’s always been. You want her because she’s already halfway out the door.

When is sunset today

Every day I search when is sunset today

reassured that two minutes later than tuesday

proves time is quietly breaking the back 

of this bleached and deathless february

and soon I will be in long grass with you

your palm a hissing iron on river cold skin

levelling all the day’s creases

And when dusk eats the purple sky whole

the day a slack fist, lime-greased bottles empty

An arriving still, your upturned wrists

cooler air an ache on coral chests

you take me home

fold me into cold white sheets

pour the wine, smudge thumbs against hips

unlatch the window to the street

shut the door

until we’re offered to the world

a single pearl, a lolling tongue

stunned inside an open jaw

Animal

Get it under your fingernails

Sink back against its teeth like it never bit you

Let desire do the work it was built for

It’s summer, so kiss a stranger under an orange street lamp

Find the part of them that the light never touches (touch it).

Locate all the ways they are coded

Pre-civilisation, beyond language

Feel their private needs shimmer under your palm

The alien weight of them

how they articulate want,

how they cup a shoulder,

how they hook a thumb into your cheek to remind you’re not dead.

Lay hands.

Shiver backwards into that black chasm reason can’t reach.

Collapse into the moon, the cosmic riptide

Let them tell you

You’re everything I’ve been looking for

and believe them.

Feast after famine. Promise you’ll never go hungry again.

Honey,

you want to know what’s beneath the skin of everyone you meet

To pop the hood, flay the ego from the bone, ruthless

until all is stardust and need.

You come alive when the inside turns out

Their sinewed pelt melting all over the carpet

because of how your particular body looks,

drowned in moonlight

on this particular evening.

Watch their breath catch

when they see the animal in you rise to meet the hunter in them.

The other me

swipes warm beers from bar tops/collecting a thousand guilty eyes/A body in a black dress/teeth deadly in the UV/waiting for absolutely nothing

I make cotton fists/ out of clean socks/and watch Mad Men/She walks long nails/across a leather stool/onto rosebud lips that say

more

I stretch into downward dog/And rearrange a delivery/She eats a burger/on Battersea bridge at 3am/juice snaking through her fingers/stars pointing/through the street lights

I water house plants/I juice a cucumber/She slips into a basement/on the edge of a city/as slippery as a lung/in the hands of strangers

dazed and thrilled/in the dank appalling heat.

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There’s an entire earth out there to scorch, you gorgeous bored fool. Don’t worry: a little danger makes the soul work harder. Colours get brighter. Salt gets saltier. Senses sharpen.

Forget acai bowls and spinning. The modern path to bliss is getting within rattling distance of the clink. When it happens, shepherd’s pie and telly on a Tuesday will no longer cut the mustard. Congratulations! Your life just became a life.

Your partner will no doubt be wildly attracted to your new carpe diem devil-may-care lease on life, and you may find the not-so-stiff corpse of your beleaguered sex life reanimated in appealing new ways. Be careful: this is heady stuff for even the most domesticated cat. Use your newly acquired physical charisma wisely: like the sun, one should not encounter it too closely.

Wind, meet caution. The moment has never been as thoroughly inhabited as it is right now. You’re about to demand the devil’s dance card and write your name in every space. If in doubt, run towards the dissolving limits at the edge of your conscious mind. What larks! 

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Viking country

In Iceland, the weather is a flirt, and like all good flirts, it knows that the hot is nothing without a little cold.

Driving across flat lunar plains, black moss and blonde brush studded with muscular Shetlands, you will be struck dumb by how charming indecision looks on a place when it’s the opposite on a person. On a whim, with a sigh of wind, that impossible wedge of sky may shatter into drifts of snow, your path an undrivable ghost. Tired old volcanoes in the distance will be carpeted in what feels like seconds and likely is.

In Iceland, you can think you’re having one kind of day but it’s soon decided for you that you’re having another. There’s a freedom in this if you’ll allow it. Acceptance is the national state of mind and the people who live here are enjoyably fatalistic, with an inclination towards humour that would be bleak if it wasn’t so good-natured. It’s a personality forged from inevitability, from fast adapting and knowing that there’s really never been another option anyway. Surrender like this is not easily cultivated as a way of living, but more and more it seems the only one worth all the effort.

The quicksilver weather is partly responsible, but so is geography. When you’re brought up alongside hard proof of earth’s relentless demand and capitulation, adopting its perspective must come naturally. Somewhere along the line, you must assimilate something of those indecent gaping waterfalls, pouting and spit-flecked like the bottom lip of an angry child; the great yawning craters, like someone took a bite out of the earth and left broken teeth behind. The inexhaustible menu of ruptured volcanoes, chapped mouths screaming nothing at nobody.

It’s hard not to anthropomorphise the whole experience, so don’t try. Give into it. When things are arresting here, which mostly they are, they’re not pretty, but gruesomely human and brilliantly destructive; beauty delivered by force. All cliches are correct and present: you are the beetle, this world the boot, and it’s clear that this country is giving no-one and least of all itself an easy ride.

*

Led Zeppelin wrote a very famous song about this land of ice and snow, and it’s easy to see how a place like Iceland might compel a rock star (or any person who ordinarily has the good life served up to them five ways daily). Beneath the uncontaminated charisma, all that healthful air and openness and light, there’s a sweet weight and a serene toughness, the imprint of a mythological legacy inaccessible to outsiders and lurking just out of eyesight. There’s something here you don’t get to fully have unless you’re from around here, and it doesn’t matter how famous or gorgeous you are. That’s a good thing for most people to experience, and especially the Robert Plants of this world.

It’s easy to see this, but it’s harder to be fine with it, especially if you’re a tourist with shameful delusions of grandeur. For a start, the volume of foreign visitors feels colonising and invasive, even though (or perhaps because) you’re one of them. Emerging from enormous tour buses, yawning, dusting packed lunches off, we’re padded against the wind’s bite by bright waterproof jackets and squeaky hiking boots fresh out of the box. You look at the rest of them and think: garish. You look at them and think: what are you doing here in my fantasy. And even though you knew it would be this way, everybody said it would be this way, you still feel short-changed somehow, because for some puzzling reason you believed you were owed something by your time here. Transcendence, maybe; escape, definitely. Certainly an experience untouched by Gore-Tex and biscuits in Tupperware.

That’s how places like this work. Like an emotionally unavailable lover, they imply special access to something not everybody is able to have while making it clear in practice that you’ll never get to have it. Like that distant lover, they may map out entire universes of intimate connection long before you’ve ever actually experienced them in any real way, ultimately unable to deliver, or at least not the way you designed it in your fantasy (and let’s face it, you are far from the only one who wants a slice of the action).

Their slippery dazzle is such that, in the end, you no longer feel that this is just a place, just a lover, but a conduit to a more profound experience of your personal selfhood. And you feel very strongly that you don’t want a waterproofed Californian taking selfies on top of your profound experience of personal selfhood.

*

If you have lived in a major city for any good amount of time, you probably think you know all about toughness. You might be a proudly jaded New Yorker, or maybe ten years in London has whittled you down into a scrappy little city pig. One of the luxuries of our comfortably gentrified lives is getting to craft our own preferred personal narrative, so if that’s part of yours, it’s more than understandable.

But urban toughness is textured differently to the rough crunch of Icelandic grit. In a city, whatever hard edges we’ve acquired were likely built around us brick-by-brick by the aggressive neon metropolis we chose as a home. We didn’t start out that way; we were complicit, sure, but we can’t take full credit, because big cities do this to all of us eventually. It’s the only way to survive.

The source of it all feels different for people who were born and live in Iceland, who seem hardwired with a mechanism for endurance and a natural fortitude in the face of adverse conditions. It feels congenital and intuitive; there, you could be objectively feeble as a person, but you’d still be kind of tough in some unnamable way. It’s what happens when you’re challenged from birth to submit to things you can’t change.

Most of us aren’t, of course. Most of us cringe away from the light of how we actually feel, and besides, our immediate surroundings are rarely in the business of teaching us the only true lesson: that everything does and will eventually pass.

*

Experiencing Iceland’s mercurial nature firsthand can feel like somebody is finally being honest about the way living can feel. Particularly if you’re a person whose mind works hard to balance at the edge of things, at times it will seem to mirror how it feels to exist at the mercy of discordant higher powers, the awful turbulence they wreak. One moment participating in logic, understanding the concepts of shape and colour — the next, suddenly less fine than any person has ever been, like all the lights have been turned out, the weather immediately inconvenient and deadly, your tongue a dead weight in your mouth.

Of course, before you leave the house, you can ask yourself: how bad is this really going to get? You can dress in whatever you believe will protect you, but you should know that it will not necessarily be the right thing. There’s no way you can really know for sure, so the best you can do is plan for the possibility of rain and keep one eye on hope. Sleet may become sunshine, sunshine will suddenly become rain: that’s the way it’s always been and always will be.

When change is drastic, it feels instant. But you should know, and you do know, that this weather was always there; it was just a little further away, waiting its turn.

Eventually, it was always going to snow.

The foodie

[Originally published in the sadly now defunct Cadaverine Magazine]

It’s my birthday and I’m eating dinner with a man I do not love. There must have been love once, because there is a square-cut tribute to it biting into the meat of my finger. 

Tom is the kind of man who calls himself a foodie full stop. You know: Foodie. Nerd. Gin Lover. Full stop. Full stop. He eats at an amazingly slow pace, placing his knife and fork down after every third bite in order to compose a thoughtful polemic on each flavour. Every bite requires a comma. Our life is all punctuation marks.

I eat quickly: all business. Mealtimes are not church; I don’t need to molest each ingredient behind the confessional. Try listening to Bach or the Stones or whatever, note by note, and tell me how good it sounds. Tom says things like London has such a boner for American junk food at the moment don’t you think which makes my guts pulse wickedly, wet and fearful for a life I can see but can’t yet touch.

My cousin says that it is not possible for lasting love to exist between two people with such different eating habits. I don’t know what I think.

We are eating at a restaurant in North London which is expensive but also hip, which is probably how Tom would like to be described. Tom is fifteen years older than me, and fifteen years richer. The bill will be on him, but I’ll pay for it in other ways. Not sex, exactly, though there will be some of that dry-lipped congress later. He is one of those men whose actions are engineered to generate emotional debt. Gratitude gets him hard, like small girlish tits and MDMA.

He smiles at our waiter in a cinematic, Hollywoodish way that he has learned from Matthew Mcconaughey. It’s placating and faux-benevolent; selected to demonstrate that whilst he is glamorous and entrepreneurial, he is also a man of the people, a down-to-earth nice guy. Maybe that’s why he’s so terrible at making women come. Earth is no place for the celestial shriek of an orgasm.

“I think we’ll have a bottle of the Castilian sparkling wine, thanks”.

He’s pleased with this. He knows that you can only call champagne Champagne if it’s from Champagne. He doesn’t want me to see that he’s pleased, because he knows that this sort of move only works when it’s nonchalant (something he has literally never been). He places two fists squarely on the table; they look like folded up hearts. I want to pierce their plump flesh with a fork like sausage and season the tiny wounded vales left behind.

We drink the wine and toast my advancing age. Its fizz is passive aggressive; it suggests Gatsby-ish jocularity, 22-year olds padding across wet grass barefoot, and I know that it makes Tom feel 40, which is exactly one year more than he is. At 24, I am close enough to winking Daisy Buchanan to make him feel even worse and Tom is the kind of man who thinks it is his right to be made to feel good about himself. So it’s clear then: there will be a fight tonight.

I take a piece of bread from the basket, compressing it between my fingernails like play-doh, taking care to ruin it with too much butter. Tom says no thank you without actually saying it because a curated gut does not accept unworthy victuals and I should know that, shouldn’t I. 

He has a remarkable way of not eating the bread that somehow makes more of a fuss than my eating of it.

We both order the steak; his theatrically blue, mine unfashionably well-done because if I had the taste for raw muscle I would not be marrying somebody with limp cowpats for biceps. I would be marrying a fruity god with arms like ripe nectarines.

“They massage the cows for over five hours, you know, to make it taste like this. That’s why it’s so expensive.”

This is an appalling turn of events. Tom and I have eaten Wagyu beef together over six times during the course of our relationship. It’s possible that, based on the facts I have learned over four years, I could write professionally about this pampered cut of beef. A thrill of disbelief that feels close to delight slinks up my neck.

I can feel it fizzing; the desire to start the fight that’s coming and drop a smooth grenade into the placid pond of this life that I have somehow participated in the creation of yet do not want. But I don’t have the words for all these things I do not want so I swallow a lump of gristle and smile.

And so life goes.

Dessert arrives, a pristine slice of gelatinous yellow. He mmmms repulsively like he’s swallowed Rihanna. I tell him about Sarah, my flatmate; the fight we had over a chicken carcass that I left in the kitchen for three days. As punishment, she left it on my bed, slick with grease, while I was away for the weekend. A fuck you via poultry, resulting in a fabulous screaming match. I ham it up in the way he likes, emphasising its sitcom silliness. He likes me ridiculous.

“You girls” he says, indulgently. The subtext is what-are-ya-like and I’ve heard its silky familiarity in a thousand different ways before. It’s designed to communicate that he has an understanding of me that others don’t, when really he knows what’s inside me about as well as our waiter Darren. I am marrying somebody who can’t see me. I consider the butter knife, silver-shining on its canopy of white.

He pauses.

I think: don’t talk about the chicken, please don’t talk about the fucking chicken. Tell me that I’m an inconsiderate little cunt, which I am 99% of the time, explain how you’re scared that you’re old and past it, which I know that you are, and that you don’t understand the point of Snapchat and how that makes you feel like you’re stepping further and further away from who you were when you were young and cool. Describe in coldly precise detail about the darkness you feel inside you at 3am or even better, shut up and throw your glass of precious fucking sparkling wine all over me, you terrible, terrible arsehole.

“Anyway, chicken. Nice. Did you let it rest for a bit?”

We get the bill. And so life goes.