wormhole

it's autumn and everything is changing again.

I arrive lost, and panic. My brain: the spaceship adrift. Tottenham Court Road: the wormhole. One wrong turn away from the correct exit means a loop of five lightyears, and when I find my way out there are creases about my eyes like pressed silk. She’s sitting on the corner waiting for me, autumn coat, looking calm among hundreds. It is five past four when we enter the venue, we are late, I still do not know where I am, which event we are even here for.

There is a lady frowning at us; are we part of the set-up crew? Are we performing? Which event are we even here for? Another lady, all teeth - arranged in what she may think is a smile, achieves the glass-eyed friendliness of a shark - tells us the event is not for four hours. October 4th, 8pm - not 4pm. Lucy hadn’t had her glasses on, I hadn’t even looked at the poster.

Let’s walk, I say, I need to get my bearings, and we do.

How about that pub with the big tree growing through it?

Lucy has never been, but she knows the way. She is dynamic, oriented.

At the table, talking forgiveness, I tell her that I don’t even know what he looks like – I have never known. Everything she has ever told me about him, a million scraps of newspaper headlines, have made a formless, papier-mâché man with no face. Then she scrolls a corrective route, and lands on a folder. Inside the folder is two years. Two years of a totally unfamiliar face next to a very familiar one. It’s funny what you can pack away, cram into a digital photo album, relieve an overpacked-suitcase-brain some of its burden. A weekend road trip to Sheffield, The Rolling Stones gig with his parents, graduation in full dress. It’s funny that what remains is only ever the present. Present things cannot not be packed away, flattened, merged or made two dimensional; the distance is vast and immediate when the moment passes, and they can. Sensory memory is weak – strongest in dreams amongst the abstract. It becomes impossible to know what it feels like to hold a cheek to your brow bone, to recollect laughing together. How long can someone remember the face of a passing stranger. Not long.

We drink Guiness around the big tree, fake tree, confession booths about. It is as if we are underground, pockets of floors. This pub: the rabbit warren. Our forgiveness: the tunnelling rabbit. There are other types of this, more unfamiliar faces, next to very familiar ones. I try to cram it all into the suitcase, glue the faces on to the formless names I have heard for three years, but these ones are difficult to merge.

We walk again to drink elsewhere and wait a long time in line at a contrastingly small Irish bar. I am reminded (by what? who?) how much I like vermouth. I tell her I have been thinking about the blues. I tell her that we – royal we - are selling the boat, our home of a year and then some. It’s funny how much you can pack into a small boat; pack, unpack, move, move on, throw away, start again. My mind is busy deciding the fate of everything which is not nailed down; the spices (bin), the towels (bin), the tea towels (keep - weird affinity with these), the unmatching plates (um). Some of it will stay here, none of it is really mine past the moment it leaves my hands.

Chinatown hisses and vibrates. I wait and Lucy runs to check if we can get a table quicker at the other place. Lucy wants to start wearing high heeled shoes, but she could not run to check which restaurant could seat us soonest in high heeled shoes. Lucy likes cheap chip shop mayonnaise, and has an eerie fear of air raid sirens, which immobilise her. Lucy wants to move house, feels immobilised by that too. But she belongs in the city, she is grounded here – dynamic, oriented - attached by a retractable tether. I am here by a frayed old rope generations old, which has recently been walked about everywhere, and now tangles easily when I leave. The spine is a stubborn bone, but mine cracks easily under strong arms wrapped around me like warm water, draws a shiver, like something leaving the body.

Mine is a strength by circumstance, not a strength in character.

We eat crispy seaweed and fried noodles, and I tell her not to worry, about moving house or anything – I have moved house 25 times, embarking on the 26^th - change is good, but I am not convinced. I will cry, three weeks from now, in someone else’s kitchen, remembering the cupboards that fell open and closed in cadence with our footsteps, boat rocking on the water.

The event, when we arrive at eight o’ five, is a reading of dry prose, two dry martinis £37. Like sandpaper in the throat. I grimace, arrange my teeth in camoflage with the sharks. There is a chandelier. Guy at the bar claims “I had the worst martini of my life the other day – it was all vermouth”. We must bring back bohemia, say the women at Groucho Club, whilst the men boast the cost of the membership.

We chew our olives around the stones and leave quickly.

Lucy walks ahead, turning back to me, elongating her vowels the posh way, and we throw our heads back laughing. To be irked by this would be as futile as sweeping leaves in autumn, as the man in the park next to my work knows. Every day, more leaves. I feel sorry for him, but he may thank the leaves for keeping him employed, curse them for not hanging on longer – I can’t speak to his fulfillment. Anyway, we walk back through Chinatown, back past the Irish bar, and the pub with the big, fake, leafless tree. I know where I am now, but the next time I arrive I will be lost again.

Finally we dance, to the blues, which cannot be packed away, nor truly possessed, it is just something, which some people have for a while. And the noise it makes comes humming out of them, croaking through the tense muscles which furrow their brow, dragging spectators through a tousled melancholy - leaves raked along a graveled ground.

And even more finally, post-script, I arrive home to the water. This hall: of mirrors. Our days are numbered now, like the royal our’s always were. Stan just takes the glass, finishes the last and moves on. I add more keys to my keychain. This is a countdown, the last of everything, 3pm final sun, no more no shirts no shoes sports in the park, last of the short shadows, by the time you think about it it’s over. I will miss the mornings of misty river - a sheet of steel held to the low sun, glowing, steaming, hissing with birds. Miss Lucy and the leaves. Learn to say goodbye to pieces of home with the confidence that they will emerge elsewhere, out of the wormhole. Press your face close to them and enjoy their smell on the way to the train, it won’t last much longer than that.