The Park, 08.34

I Am The Patron Saint of Elsewhere

First frost of the season, ground barely hard packed and the leaves, when we jump in them, soft really, a light frost then, not the kind I knew and remember, but enough for her to be delighted. She eyes me with the eyes of a hard boiled sceptic when I say Jack Frost, this child who believes in nothing other than the evidence of her own eyes, which places her in a quandary this frozen morning of the type she has not seen for over a year and so barely recollects, because everywhere, frost, making Jack Frost less of a leap than Santa say, who she’s refused to believe in the last two years. She smiles, in the way she does when she’s humouring me, then shouts, frozen mushrooms, and yes, there are frozen mushrooms massed under a tree, and a squirrel too, fat and digging to the right, burying acorns littering the ground. I tell her the squirrel has such a good memory that it remembers where it puts every nut and she assures me I am in fact wrong and I cannot remember if I’m wrong or not, although I tend to believe children, their heads so full of little else they have the capacity to hold tenaciously to every fact. Whereas I am running through the list of everything I have to do before going away again, the outfits I need and the things that need washed and the notebooks that need taken and the work that needs done before and so preoccupied with this that perhaps the accuracy of my squirrel facts are a little off and she tells me to look, and the toes of her welly boots are covered in ice, collected as she scuffed through leaves and grass. Ice she now packs hard in her pink gloved hands and raises to her mouth and no I scream realising she’s just about to eat it, and she laughs then, reminding me how she used to eat ice in the garden, a garden I tell her that ran no chance of dog pee but really I probably should not have let her eat the ice then, and will not now. We pick our battles.

Overcompensating on this frozen morning for the fact of going away again. Away. Back. Throwing so much at them when I am here instead of there. Think of Nick Laird, and how all of last year his Light Pollution echoed as some regretful refrain you are the patron saint of elsewhere, when I became this patron saint. Bemoaning how hard it is to travel, how difficult to be in constant and perpetual motion, to edit on trains, in strange hotel rooms, too many new beds, too many unpredictable showers. I wore this sainthood with the righteousness I felt it deserved. How hard too to leave my children at home in their own beds, the youngest too young really for her mummy to be away as often and for as long. And yet.

And yet and yet and yet. I do not stop doing it. I do not let work take a backseat or second place. It is what it is. It is what I will live with. Flinch when I think of therapy bills. Recriminations. The tacit remarks from other women. And yet too, the other side, the split perspective of Laird’s poem, I wake alone and freezing, still keeping to my side. Here’s the voice of the one left behind, and yet, I would wake in hotel rooms, still keeping to my side. And how he mocks the one who’s left, away with the kidney shaped swimming pool, the very shade of Hockney blue. Imagine assuming sainthood for that, for the swimming pool and Hockney blue, and book festivals and signings and promotional tours and call that work, it’s a charmed life really, if you stop to think about it. And yet. Each assured of how difficult it is in our own fixed polar position.

Then he mocks himself, His Orphic Loneliness, with Dog, becoming his own tragic artwork, and I have been this too, the sainthood of the one at home with the kids, with the shorter straw surely. Until, we get to the end and each collapse into the other, your coming home may seem an anti-climax somehow, and a trespass. An anti-climax and a trespass for the one coming home, the one at home; each knowing how it is. How small the domestic territory is. How marriage and the compromise it entails is mostly a question of space. Anti-climax. Trespass. This is how it was, is, when arriving home late, I would close the Uber door quietly, and I would try and turn the key in the lock as softly as possible, use my phone torch instead of turning on the light as if breaking into my own home and come morning the children would seem to have grown miraculously, and it would take a while for us to adjust to each other; them too loud for me, me too distant for them.

This morning, we will share eggs on toast, she will drink apple juice, I will drink coffee, before assuming my sainthood again and wearing it thin.