alone again or

When I was a child I remember looking at an orange on the table, and thinking, How do I know that is just one orange? A single orange?

Somehow I felt it would have been easier to conceive of a single orange if there had been two oranges next to each other: you could look at one orange, and see it as an individual orange, because it was not the orange next to it. Then you could look at the other orange and understand that this pair of oranges was in fact two single oranges.

I went to a festival on my own this weekend. I didn't feel alone. Walking around the fields by myself I felt I was everyone and noone. I would have felt more alone in company, I think.

last words

J painted a caravan for a fashion company a couple of months back to promote their latest collection. It was called "From the cradle to the grave". They wanted a baby on one side and a coffin on the other.

At M's funeral her older sister told some stories about M as a kid. How, as a toddler, she disappeared from the back garden for ages and reappeared with armfuls of flowers she had picked from the neighbour's garden. And how M was first presented to her older sister and cousins, lying in the middle of their grandmother's large double bed, this beautiful baby with a shock of dark hair, large dark eyes.

One evening, a month before that, J and I were sitting with M. J was watching television. I was chatting with M. What was he like as a baby, I asked. Beautiful, she said to my surprise: she was always one for the knee-jerk put-down. Everyone said how the drugs had made M not M anymore. She'd lost her sense of humour, they said. I do know everyone says that about their babies, she said, but honestly, he was just the most beautiful baby, with these gorgeous large dark eyes, and I said, He's still beautiful. M turned to him with an expression too sad to call a smile and just stared at him. I don't know if J was aware. He just carried on watching the television.

I can't write about M anymore. Or J.

you do it to yourself

This is a line from a Radiohead song which would play in my head everytime I looked at M in her industrial humming hospital bed that took up the whole of the front room so that noone else could sit in there comfortably with her.

It's true. She did it to herself. And I knew she knew that because at no point did I ever hear her complain or express bitterness about her situation, though I once overheard her - J put up a curtain between the front room and the kitchen to give her privacy, but she seemed to think that because we couldn't see her once it was drawn, we couldn't hear her either - I once overheard her say to a visitor, "I keep thinking - naaaaah! This ain't happening."

And that's one of the things she must have been thinking about as she lay there, before the morphine dosage shot up from happy to high, to terrified and terrifying. I know too that while she could still think at all, she must have been thinking of the other things she did to herself in her unhappy life, the things she did to herself that fucked up her children's lives.

After 3 months of working up the courage to make his decision, J is leaving me. Yesterday J came up to pack his things. He told me about a funeral his friend attended recently. There is a tradition in the dead man's community that at funerals the names of close male friends or family members of the deceased are read out. The people named are then taken to a place where all the other mourners beat them up. J's friend left the funeral with four broken ribs. J said, "It's to hide the pain."

mouse arrest

I am being held hostage to a mouse, a big mouse - I hope it is a mouse - which is sitting on the steps outside my flat. I can see it from my window. I have knocked on the window. It is ignoring me. I am playing Roni Size with the bass turned to "defibrillate" in the hope that the vibrations will drive it away: I have heard that a mouse's heart beats many times faster than a human's. Perhaps Roni Size's vibrations will send its little mousey heart into a spasm.

I have not left the house for three days. Luckily, I work from home.

I have enough food to last until Thursday, when a friend is dropping off her dog Jess for me to look after. Jess, a terrier, is mad for mice. But I am running out of cigarettes. Perhaps this is a sign I should give up.

At the wake for J's mum, who died of liver and lung cancer, we all stood in the garden, drinking and smoking. I ran out of cigarettes. When I left for the shop to get more, a shop I'd been to before, I got lost. I passed a man working on his car, bonnet up, head buried in engine. I called to him and as he turned to me I saw that he'd had a tracheotomy. When I asked for directions to the shop he had to press a little button on his voicebox before he could speak.
"That way." he said.

mink

This is P's favourite insult. He uses it of sleazy people, people who are disgusting or dishonourable.

P and I have just come back from one of the Scottish slate islands where we went on a writing retreat. Two dogs took us on a tour of the island one hot day, through tangles of wildflowers, over rocks, past abandoned quarries which had been flooded. We swam in one like the ruins of a roman bath. Sheer rock flecked with gold, the water slate blue, smooth, calm, shadowy. But this would be a bleak place in winter - exposed to wild winds with the great heaps of slate piled everywhere grey and unforgiving with no sun to pick out the metallic sheen. And half the island's population gone since many of the cottages were only holiday homes. The ferryman told us that the trend for second homes meant cottages went for six figures now and many local people could not afford to live there. He was a happy man, the ferryman. Every night he'd go out to sea to catch his tea and dig up veg from his allotment to eat with it. He had lived his life on the island and would tell us about it as he ferried us back and forth. One time he pointed out a group of black and white birds with orange bills. Oystercatchers. They were under threat, he said: some years before there had been a mink farm on the island. Animal rights activists had freed the mink who now lived wild and ate the oystercatchers' eggs. We asked if anything was being done to preserve the oystercatcher population on the island but the ferryman said no, they were not a protected species and that gradually they would just die out.