Truth, Lies, Dreams
Everybody is back in London. I mean everybody, and we are crammed in Mum and Dad’s house in the cul-de-sac… Isabelle, Imogen, Elaine, myself of course, even some of Elaine’s friends that I don’t know.
And I am sitting on the orange overstuffed leather armchair in the TV room, my legs hung over one of the arms, when I get a call from Ted Bucco.
Read moreTed’s in London. Yes, he too is back in town, and he wants to meet up at four o’clock.
The line is crackly. I can picture him sitting at a café in Piccadilly Circus. It’s already dark and the buses and taxis in the background are speeding through the rain, their lights washing across raindrop screens.
“I want to see the Louis CK movie,” he pleads. It’s in town.
“But I cannot,” I say back to him but the line is really bad.
“I want to see the Louis CK movie at four,” he repeats.
“But I cannot right now,” I insist.
Isabelle and Elaine, and Mum and Dad are in the room with me. There is the general bustle of others passing through and into the kitchen. It makes hearing Ted harder.
“How about tomorrow? It will be better,” I suggest.
Ted’s only in town for a few days. And the line is still breaking up.
“Look, give me a second while I move,” I tell him. “I’m going upstairs where hopefully the connection is better.”
As I step out from the room, I see one of Elaine’s friends in Mum’s bedroom, the other side of the landing. She is naked, and she is balanced on her hands and knees, on a stool facing away from the dresser.
The woman stretches her left leg up and back, pointing her toes towards the mirror, before putting her leg back down. Her long blonde hair covers her face so I don’t recognize her. Again, she stretches her leg towards the mirror, before putting it back down.
I cannot believe what I am seeing. Who is she? She must be one of Elaine’s friends. And who would do be there, naked, while visiting?
“Hang on,” I say again to Ted.
And I hesitate a second too long before continuing up the stairs.
London photo by Luca Biada via Flickr.
Line drawing by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy from The Cleveland Museum of Art via RawPixel.
It’s Christmas Day and we are all together Mum, Elaine, Me and Dad in the Coring Road house, in the living room with its opulent fake gold embossed wallpaper.
It’s already the afternoon and Elaine and I are bored enough to look through some old stuff that had been put away in storage.
Read moreThe sun is coming in from the French doors and Mum and Dad are talking while I am pulling things out of old cardboard boxes. I look at each item before handing it to Elaine to look at too.
The room is reversed. The couch, where mum and dad are sitting, is on the other side from the radiator where Elaine and I are looking at the boxes. From one box I’m pulling out her old soft toys, one after another.
The next soft toy I pull out is the purple teddy that replaced Big Ted after Big Ted got burnt in the fire.
“He doesn’t look like Big Ted,” I tell her as I push the teddy bear in Elaine’s face.
It’s purple and triangular, the wide base at its bottom is white. I guess it wasn’t supposed to be an exact replica.
And then I notice Uncle Vartan has shown up. I go over to him and give him a big hug. He feels warm and full in my embrace.
“You’ll have to take the baby for a walk,” Elaine says. Uncle Vartan has brought with him a baby that sits in a pram at the end of the couch.
“I don’t want to take the baby,” I tell her. Then again it wouldn’t be terrible if I took the baby for a walk, out in the fresh air.
We are bored and need to get out of the house.
I clamber up onto the truck behind me, to see what other boxes I can find. It’s a huge army pickup with a metal frame which I use to lever myself onto the back of the flatbed. Then I turn to Dad.
“Why don’t you put all your stuff in a storage unit rather than in this old pickup truck?”
He looks up at me.
“It’s slow,” he answers.
“What! Slower than a storage unit?”
I laughed at the absurdity of it, full belly laughs. And I couldn’t stop laughing, in fact my belly was rippling with laughter until I awoke…
“You alright?” says Siobhan as I stir to.
“Yeah,” I reply.
“I thought you were having a seizure,” she says.
“No,” I reply, “But I have to write this dream down,” still laughing.
Photo from PxHere.
It was my last day in Hong Kong and I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye to Dee.
We’d only met up once during my visit and I was doing my final walk back up the shoreline path in Lamma. Lamma, with its narrow paths and hustling stalls on either side.
Read moreHopefully I would see Dee on my way.
People, many people were pushing past me as I climbed the path. I knew not where else to go, though I knew that Dee’s house was somewhere off to the right at the end of the path, somewhere after the path split into two.
At the fork, the right turn followed the shore, the left went into the forest, but I reckoned I’d have to turn around before then, to head back to the pier. Any later and I would miss the ferry back to Central.
Further down the path I’d left one of the restaurants and was pushing past people up the hill when, as luck would have it, I saw Dee coming down towards me. She was with a girl.
Dee saw me as she approached. She was wearing a formal pale green frock with pleated skirt. Her hair was short bob blonde.
Once she was near I spoke, “I’m leaving Hong Kong today.”
Her friend carried on down the path to give us some space to talk.
“Oh,” Dee replied, and we hugged.
Her skin was pale, her shoulders rounded and plumper than I remembered, against the pale green straps of the dress.
We embraced and my face was close to her ear. I wanted to say, “I love you,” but her friend was still in earshot and I was afraid.
I thought I would say it just as we were parting, but before I could spit it out, suddenly Dee said goodbye and turned away.
Instead I continued up the hill, following the line of the shore, knowing that I’d missed the chance and that it was gone forever unless I double backed and caught up with her; unless I caught up to wherever she was going.
I was still kicking myself as I approached the fork.
The stalls either side of the path had thinned out.
A couple of lads were walking towards me and one of them made a joke about the other. I caught the joke and tittered as I passed them, and then the first one, the joker, said, “You think that’s funny?”
“No,” I replied, even though I thought it was. Yes, I’d got the joke even though I hoped he hadn’t realized it.
His friend squared up to me and began to push me, and so did the joker. So I pushed the friend backwards until he stumbled and fell hard onto the path.
The joker was harder to deal with, and only when I pushed him against the low cut wall that separated the shore from the path did he fall. He fell over the wall onto the pebbly beach below, and when I looked over the wall to make sure he was OK, all I could see was that he was riled up.
The joker stormed back up the stairs to the path and squared up to me again.
His friend was still lying groggy on the path.
This time I used the joker’s momentum. He ran at me and instead of pushing him away I deflected his force and projected him over the wall good and proper.
By this time the joker’s friend was coming to – just as the joker fell head first over the wall. The joker’s arms and legs were splayed apart as he landed.
I wasn’t afraid of his friend – instead his friend looked over the wall at the joker with me, but the joker looked like he was out cold this time. He looked unlikely to get up any time soon.
Photo by Judy Gallagher via Flickr.
In the village where my sister lives there is a grey stone church on a hill.
The church overlooks the village even though it is low to the ground. I think to look at it one evening, as the light begins to fade.
Read moreThe church is lit up on all sides with Christmas stalls that shine in bright yellow winter colours, but the highlight for me is the steeple bell tower where Lizzie’s name is in lights. Her name is spelled out in full, Lizzie Monroe, along the length of the tower. I am surprised but also proud to see my sister’s name carved out in yellow neon, prominent, at the highest point of the village.
The only other place where I saw her name was on theatre posters online.
Here, Lizzie’s name is double lit with big yellow baubles like you see in an actor’s backstage dressing room. She must be important in the village, I think.
I’m going to take a picture but instead I walk around the church to look at the stalls, at the yellow christmasy decorations, at the steam of glühwein and red cheeked shopkeepers rubbing their gloves to keep warm.
When I return to the front of the church the bell tower lights have been turned off and some townspeople are in the process of dismantling them. They have brought Lizzie’s name down onto the grass and the neon letters are no longer lit.
“Before you completely take it apart can I take picture?” I ask them. “For my 101 year old mother.”
Two large women in dark blue anoraks are almost silhouetted against the dusk. They stand up the two sections side by side. There is one section for Lizzie’s first name, another for her surname. The sections are unlit but you can still make out the names from the shape of the neon.
I take the picture. Even though I can make out the name, I’m disappointed that they’re not lit. Christmas is closing up, I realize, so I decide to walk around the church again before it’s completely gone.
But when I return to the other side of the church I see that it’s still brightly lit with the yellow tinsel shops that line the church so I take more pictures as I walk, one last time, along its length.
Why is Lizzie my sister? Surely we’re talking about Elaine? Or are we talking about me? Am I all three – Lizzie, Elaine as well as myself?
Photo courtesy of PxHere.
It is a thin man, a DJ, who shows Leif and his escort onto a thin embroidered grey carpet that follows the length of the tent across the grey sand.
Read moreLeif and his escort walk along the carpet, her arm hooked under his, to the entrance at the near side end of the tent. His escort is demure, her dark Thai eyes turned down to avoid my look. She wears a tight silver skirt and she holds by his side until they reach the entrance, where the DJ parts the curtain to show them to their table.
Each table is long, it fills the length of each tent, and each tent is dedicated to an individual party. Leif and the Thai woman are invited through their entrance.
A gold ornament shaped like a netted leaf provides privacy from the rest of the table. I’m not clear what the other end of the table is for when only a couple are sitting at it. Maybe it is a place to put the courses that follow the usual Harira starter.
The tents are lined up in rows, our tent next to Leif’s, and we wait at our entrance for the DJ, for our escort.
Once Leif and his escort is settled, our own escort shows up at the far end of our own tent, at the beginning of the runner. She too looks Thai, but she is old and her brown thinning hair is plastered across her forehead. She smiles at me in greeting, but her teeth are also brown and she is missing two of her top teeth; only three of her teeth, on the right side of her mouth, remain.
At first I think she may be OK, and though we make not be able to communicate, that too may be OK.
But then, “This will not do!” I tell the DJ.
I think I am with Siobhan, I cannot tell, but we will complain, I think.
We enter the tent, leaving the DJ behind with the old Thai woman, and we push past our table and past the gold leaf ornament, until we we find a back room that must belong to the manager.
On the wall are rare framed pictures of gold and platinum LPs. The wall is maroon and shielded top to bottom by a thin glass wall which protects the mementoes behind it. There is a brown electric guitar, a Stratocaster I notice, behind the glass.
Guitars are propped on stands in front of the manager’s desk and, of course the desk is big and mahogany in the dim lit tent, but the manager is not there.
“This will not do!” I repeat, and I push on the glass wall. I am not sure whether I am trying to break it, but when it cracks unexpectedly, I want to go for it, we want to go for it. I kick at the glass wall, then I take one of the guitars from its stand and wield it at the glass to shatter it.
The whole glass wall falls towards us, and with it, the gold and platinum LPs, and the encased Stratocaster. They fall altogether, towards the desk and the glass smashes satisfactorily into splintered pieces, and spreads around us, across the carpet.
Photo from our trip to Morocco, April 2024.