One Day in March 2020

I will make myself feel stronger – not the correct wording.

I am feeling better: I feel, stronger.

I have to weather this storm and get on with it.

The morning is bright: birds fly, sky overcast. Workout is done and, when I write these pages, I will have breakfast.

          I will not hoover the sofas – someone else can do that. I will not be distracted from what is possibly the most important piece of work that I will ever create. I will write.

          On Saturday, I walked for two hours, to a place on the road, just outside the city, enough for it to become countryside and the houses and breakers yard were past. It was there that I found a broken house; long deserted, probably a small holding; house, turf shed, buildings for animals. All small. All covered in growths of different sorts: weeds, hedges. And evidence of a fire, for recreation. A new addition. The hearth inside was cold a long time and fallen in on itself. I stood for some time, lost in the memory of the place. That road was once a drover’s lane where cattle were walked to market. The people who made their lives in the house watched the herds pass towards town, the men behind them stopped and passed the time of day, got a drink of water and moved on. They passed again, once the cattle were gone, sold and their pockets contained the money they brought.

          I felt I was trespassing here. The house was deserted but to enter passed the door still seemed a liberty. And there might be rats. They hadn’t dissuaded the lads who came with their cider bottles, all scattered and empty on the ground.

          Most striking were the disposable nappies, like huge bloated slugs, swollen with rain water. They lay everywhere on the ground, so long that moss had grown on them and their plastic was stretched beyond what an infant could produce but still completely intact. These things never do breakdown, do they?

There’s a magpie on top of a television ariel on the roof across the road and its long tail wags like a ruler. In the time I took to write that, he has gone on, to another rooftop where I can’t see him.

The world has become quiet.

We are all forced to look at the best and the worst in ourselves, our weaknesses, our self-importance. It will put manners on many, hopefully.

          I am crying a lot; I’ve found that I don’t hold much anger, just tears that fall easily. I don’t miss people but, yesterday, I missed my mother. I did not miss my father and now I feel like I really should have - should do.

I didn’t know him well, only that he had a temper and became irritated. Internally angry, intelligent, creative. My abiding memory of him is his weight, his tiredness and sleeping a lot. I see him walking a grandchild up the street by the hand. I have no memory of him doing this with me but I know in this second that he did. I don’t feel sadness for that lack of remembrance but I do feel regret, somewhere, that I didn’t know him.

His time spent in the house, when he could no longer work, started when I was ten. He died when I was fifteen. Probably the worst five years to live with a girl.

I was not nice. I withdrew. He irritated me with his presence, his breathing, his eating, and I lay upstairs, after school, avoiding him. I didn’t know that was all the time I would have with him. I don’t know if anything would have changed if I had known that.

          I think he wanted more for us, his children. He tired, but I think he found it hard to instil that in me and, in the end, his ill health and my adolescence did for any relationship we could have had.

          Now, it’s as if he never existed, unless one of us mentions him. Perhaps it is different for the men in our family?

          As an adult, I am more like him than I ever knew.

          I always felt outside of our house, outside my siblings. I was in my own head so much. What did they do to get close to each other, that I didn’t do? Was it me or them?

          And now, I wonder what good that questioning will do for anyone. If I hadn’t been me then, perhaps, I would have had a different life.

A stupid assumption; I am me. I always was.

I was like my father and I still am.

Creative, like him.

Frustrated, like him.