(for my mother)

My grandmother walks towards me like junket with her frothy lace blouse sewn with straight lines down the front covering her breasts which reach to her waist, soft and creamy and smelling a particular way. The evocative image of women. She wanted to wear ‘April Violets’ all the time but only had a tiny bottle of it which grandpa bought her and he only rarely gave her presents. She had ‘Midnight in Paris’ too but didn’t seem to like it so much. She was the focus of my attention sometimes. My youth of tigers melting into butter which also melted completely in the pocket of the small boy who was sent by his grandmother to the shop in a story which probably had a moral. My mother had a strange sense of humour. She used to think bad jokes were funny like the one where you said, what are we having for dinner and she said, duck, duck under the table, ha, ha.

But I didn’t mean to mention these things.
Then the black poodle appears at the end of the hallway behind or through the wheel of the bicycle and behind it, everything is totally green. We will play the tarot now. But we don’t, I think I was going to suggest it but lost the conversation we were having because I was thinking about going into the other room, getting out the cards and telling the tarot, and that it may have worked better when everyone was stoned, more intuitive. The next time I surface, the conversation has already shot off on some other tangent and very quickly everyone is talking about West Side Story.

My mother. Here is an excerpt:
She lay in bed in the upstairs bedroom. It was dark, she looked at her sister lying beside her asleep. She heard voices and laughing coming up the staircase from the kitchen downstairs. Sometimes the voices would break into Polish which she couldn’t understand although it sounded familiar. She dreamed a dream of herself in a few years’ time, tall and beautiful, wearing a white frock, standing in the centre of the room in a pool of light with a violet ribbon in her long wavy hair. Her father’s friends sitting at the table turned towards her, smiling at her, calling her a Polish princess. In the corner of the room behind all the others in the shadow sat a young man with a moustache. Her mother came into the room holding some tools. “Come outside, Veronica, you must fix the roof, it has blown off in the wind.” She woke again. The voices from the kitchen were more subdued and she heard her father talking for a long time.

She rode around the town in the cold on an old horse with a very bowed back, bareback, and had an old dog which always met the train she was on and always stood outside the shop her mother was shopping in. She remembers the time she was abused by a teacher for being a burser, for being Polish and for her father’s politics. She remembers when she visited her father in jail when a local woman accused him of rape. He was acquitted on insufficient evidence. She remembers when she was a registrar at a hospital in the city and received a letter with a drawing of a gallows and underneath it the words, the penalty for rape is death.

I put my tongue in his mouth and he flinches.

There is the family. What is good for the family is good for you. Other ties are transitory and ephemeral, everyone you think is your friend now, won’t be your friend later. They all change and will become like their parents.

The woman with the bruised looking eyes looks back at her lover. Her eyes look bruised because of her makeup but also because of her expression. The expression can be seen anywhere, in fashion magazines and in French films. But there must be a reason for that expression and there must be a reason for the popularity of that expression. For instance, before me are two chairs. I imagine that one is male and one is female. One is tall and slender,

has articulated arms, legs and delicate cane work. The other is short and squat and has a kind of bulk, a feeling of substance. In the side of one of its arms is a boxed-in section which is meant to contain glasses. I imagine glasses of gin and bitter lemon in the days when bitter lemon contained quinine and we are in the tropics. In the tropics it becomes too hot. Those who are not acclimatised need fans and drinks and can hardly move, but are refreshed by showers in the monsoon period, when people walk around outside, don’t bother if it rains and keep on going without a change of clothes until the clothes they’re wearing dry out. Then it rains again.

Then I put a record on. Back to the seasons of my youth, sings Emmylou Harris, in my coat of many colours, my mama made for me. The record was chosen specifically for this story. Do you know what I’m saying in this story.

I put my tongue in his mouth and he flinches. At the party I felt him up for about an hour. We went back to my parents place where I lived then and he felt me up till I came, but we couldn’t fuck because I didn’t think we could risk it. After he left I went and kissed my parents goodnight and said we’d talked for a long time, we had a lot in common.

I put my tongue in his mouth and he flinches. At the party I felt him up for an hour.
He felt me up till I came.

I couldn’t ask him for a fuck because I didn’t like him enough. He showed me how to tie nautical knots until I calmed down. We went for a long walk and at last on the way back, an opportunity presented itself and we flung ourselves into each others’ arms. Neither of us knew why. I wondered if it was an instinctual drive or not.

She said, I wasn’t interested in boys I was only interested in my study. I never felt any pull away but he gradually grew on me and I suppose I love him. Some men won’t stay at home and spend the money which should be spent on raising their children, in the pub. They’re always with their mates. He’s different, he doesn’t have any mates. I’ve always been his closest mate really and I think that’s the way it should be.

She walks down a street which seems familiar but forgotten and comes to a doorway at the end of a short passage off the street. Next to the doorway is a brass plate which says Hamilton. Inside is a large dusty hall lit by high windows and there is a ballet class in progress. She watches the class from the back of the hall and as it grows darker the ballet class disperses leaving one ballerina dancing on her own. The ballerina does a series of dances running up and down the hall through the rays of lit up dust and ends in a dying swan position.

Outside through the open window is the city looking busy, the cars are moving quickly back and forth across the bridge. The buildings are very white against the plain dark stormy sky but above that the clouds affected by the sunset are pink.