beaches and daquiris

a midsummer week

It is summer again and London wears the heat as well as I do. A first memory of a sunbeam, lying in it with my kitten, and me laughing because he was small and so was I. Because he was rolling in the sun, and so was I. Did he smell the wool of the carpet too? Did it become one of his favourite smells? Still, sheep in the sun smell like home. It is hard to walk past a field without patting them, just for the feel of lanolin later. It is summer, and it is Bloomsday. I visit the church Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married in. I want to say it is to observe their anniversary but it isn’t. I want under their skin, I want to wear Ted’s, I want to know how it felt. I wish I didn’t do this all the time. It’s closed. I sit in Queen Square, thinking of doing the same five years previously when I’d packed my family on the train north after begging for some, any space. Things had become suffocating in the way that means you can neither eat nor breathe. I sat then, with no idea of any of the it of what was coming. Sat with the rain falling and the figs landing too, the London planes taking on the khaki look they get in the wet. Sat with the future a coiled spring. Sit for too long before running to Chinatown, it’s too early for supper really but we eat soft shell crab and he says it’s nice to see you happy, I tell him he sounds like a Sally Rooney character. Later: book launch, football, pints, yaps, closing time, soho and those stairs again, for one last glass and you know it’ll be the fatal one, and it’s still there, lingering the next morning when I’m back at St George the Martyr and it’s open this time. Space for quiet reflection the sign lies outside, some caretaker has the music blaring, with the beat eating right into my hangover, I can’t get a handle on the ghosts. Can’t blame them for not coming out to play. Underwhelming aisle, hardly anything for Sylvia to walk down. You get a sense of it in the letter she wrote after, dim little church, she writes. I’d give anything for them to turn the music down, even more for them to switch it off. Tables piled with second hand books, pick up a £2 Alan Bennett’s diaries, when I pay, I quip I was looking for Ted Hughes. Better luck next time, she deadpans back; must be nice to not be possessed by the dead.

Overnight, a strange fog rolls in. We become beholden to its whims. Sea and sky both disappear; a thick gloop turns the beach at low tide into a ghost-scape of exposed rocks, silver ridges of sand gleam until the greys sing, the pirates have stolen the sea, I say. It gets warmer, our skulls tighten in the vice grip of the rising pressure until the rain comes, hardly hitting the pavement before evaporating. You see it all along the coastline, rising from the melting tarmac, the chalk cliffs, my hair. It’s still wet when I interview a friend about his book. We’ve promised to behave this time. Someone pinches some books, the bookseller chases him. A small dog tries to savage a bigger one. Someone reads my palm. It’s what happens in this town. After party in a studio, memories of Christmas and the dark times. It’s better in the summer with someone mixing strawberry daquiris. Keep it quiet so the residents don’t complain. Hardly a moon as we sit by the beach, it’s the ritual, he says, that brings the revelation. I nod. Take time over my reply. It’s good, to sit like this, on a midsummer week and know it’s too late at night or too early in the morning and not care, because you’re getting somewhere with the things you think. This stuff takes a lifetime, Matt Berninger sings and he’s not wrong, even if he doesn’t qualify what the stuff is. It all takes a lifetime. The satisfaction of a life’s work, whatever it ends up looking like. You roll your sleeves up, worry sentences into being. You have to love that bit the most, I say, he nods.

6 am and the sun is up and out again and the fog’s retreated or burnt off. Kid comes back from a walk, wear as little as possible, she says. I take her advice, run for the train in a silk dress.