cmcphailwriting

[cmcphailwriting]

the fictional city and gravity at home

The city became quickly fictional. I was now here alone, and that was my context, or lack thereof. I was now a watcher. I sat on terraces drinking and smoking as if in another only slightly different world I’d be doing the same in company, as though my friends and lovers had just briefly excused themselves. I went to clubs alone and watched as different groups of people and crowds moved around the dancefloor. I would watch who knew who, who came to know one another by the end of the night. I spoke in passing to people when smoking, but placed myself outside myself, as I answered questions about my origins without returning them. I could live how one might imagine to live in the city. To have a late dinner at home then go out, or to go to the cinema on a Sunday. A vernissage following a shopping trip. I could not focus on any reading or language practice, really. I was too embarrassed to take out my copy of Proust at a cafe, even though I really needed to read it for my classes. That would have been too far. I was acting it out, going through the motions, rehearsing, fake-it-til-you-make-it. I was forgetting about you. Despite all this - if I’m honest, forgetting was easier than I had thought it would be (!) The sense of relief was greater than the clawing pain, which, although pervasive, was somehow cleared out by the airy, heady quality of gladness. “Be proud. You killed the dragon!” texted my mother, responding to one of my moments of doubt. 

I would live in this fictional city until it was time to go home. I looked forward to its earthly realities, the texture of the sand and mud, and the enormous mass of the ocean on which I would reliably float. When I lie on those beaches I feel so heavy, like I can truly feel gravity pulling me down, holding me in place and embracing my sorry form.

[cmcphailwriting]

things grow here

When you see the beauty of the blue water you forget about the cold. When you dive into a wave just before it breaks, or afterwards, making sure to go deep enough so that you don’t get caught in the barrage, strong as it is to knock you off your balance. The sea. My thighs rub together as I walk back to the sea wall. I lost track of how much weight I put on due to medication; anti-psychotics, mood stabilisers, eating in soothing gulps after hovering over a stove of pasta and butter. 

I watch my teenage self standing by the corner of the science block, looking towards the school gates, where I stand. She’s wearing her uniform - a blue tartan skirt, shirt and blue jumper. Her skirt is rolled up at her hips, and her shoes, black ballet shoes, are falling apart. It’s cold, and her breath catches the light. She hasn’t met me yet, and I wonder if she would remember herself in me, crooked as I am. 

The sea wall is warm from a day of intense heat, beating down and soaking it through, and it’s painful on my sunburnt back as I lean back. Salt water drips down my temples and begins to dry into its fine grain on my skin. 

*** 

At a boarding school, to live truthfully is a challenge. To be truly and rigorously free requires not only adulthood, but an ability to exercise one’s own will. If one cannot be free in this way, the ability to morph and mould oneself is valuable. To be a malleable doll, for survival, but for convenience too, is just easier. For something to be easy means that eventually it 1 becomes comfortable too. If one becomes so comfortable being malleable, why even value the backbone with which you are born? It is stiff and gets in the way. Why keep a straight face–why object, when you can smile, when you can laugh? 

I am smoking too much at the moment. My friend Leon tells me that I’m not a real smoker because I only smoke around friends but that’s not true anymore. Today behind the castle the beach is empty and I smoke whole pack. I have a green notebook with me but I don’t open it, instead I lie here squinting into my phone. I think that if I wrote a book everything would be okay. 

The difficulty lies where a child finds themselves between a rock and a hard place. As far as I still understand it, I left my home for a school in England as a result of my parents’ divorce. To deal with the ongoing legal battle, my brother and I were to be out of the picture, to make things simpler for my parents. 

I would come to hate that without that decision, there would be have been no such school on no cold river, no housemistresses, no constant supervision, no running in the dark. Our routine was straightforward. Almost every half hour was accounted for. Breakfast was at the hall from 7:40 - 8:20. Lessons started at 8:40 and carried on until 12:45. Sports would take place between 2 and 5:30, depending on what team you belonged to. The doors for dinner would open at 5:40, and then, after eating we would make the trip back to the boarding house for roll call at 7:20, before doing our homework in our rooms until 9 o'clock. Then came the sliver of evening where we would steal away thirty minutes to be with their friends or significant others. Ending this came the 9:30 final roll call, then to bed. It is not to say that there would have only been light and joy in any other circumstance. It is impossible to go back. 

One night, I walked down from my room into the foyer, and heard the back door clunk closed. I turned around and saw my friend Eliza coming back from meeting her older boyfriend. Her face crumpled as she saw me, and I could see that her face was tracked with tears. We washed the blood off with cold water in the small sink in the corner of the room, and the other girls in the dorm milled around quietly, changing into their pyjamas and putting their uniform away. 

To live truthfully is a challenge. If I stand at those l gates, will she recognise me?

Leaving school was initially a strange experience. To be suddenly released, unleashed upon this big planet was a shock. I soon moved to Paris, where I lived in a small studio and took language classes. I forged a small path, befriending only a few older students who were studying abroad from university. I cried at concerts and smoked my first cigarettes–isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? I fumbled my way through university, not understanding why I could not appreciate the sun on my skin. Month by month did not matter, day by day did not matter. Partners came and went, usually fleeting, leaving any trace of my desire a broken arrow. 

After university, there was soon a giant plot around me. I was going to save the world and it was urgent. I was running through the streets, following colours as signs and interpreting messages written on advertisements in bus shelters. The radios of homeless men gave me directions of what to do next, and finally, while hiding from a fictional bomb, my friends prised me from under my bed and took me to A & E. I waited and waited, moving between shifting rooms and wan faces. After I threw away my bloodstained trousers I was given clothing that was pale green and covered in symbols that looked like little wind turbines. I 3 was preventing climate change. It was the 7th of November 2016. Donald Trump would never be president thanks to me and I was in Acute care because I was cute. 

These days, I check out books from the library and do not read them. I buy books and do not read them. I am writing a story and do not need other words, most of the time, except for those in another language. You are not supposed to read the works of Marguerite Duras if you have a mental illness, according to psychoanalyst and critic Julia Kristeva. I go on reading her thin white volumes. I write essays about them to give to a female professor who tells me where I am wrong. As I walk down to the sea I question why I need her approval. I keep a photograph of Duras above my desk. The written sea, she wrote. I return to this ocean, and I am swallowed under. It’s a baptism. 

When I was at school I thought about being baptised in the river. I had started a relationship with the school Reverend’s son, Sam. Gabriel was his middle name and I called him Angel Gabriel. Bethlehem was an imaginary place to me before I met Dina, who is from Ramallah. She brought me back a small embroidered bag from there when we were studying together in London. I think about how I want to go to Bethlehem as I swim to a pink buoy in the ocean, in the English Channel. I think about Frank Sinatra. I did not do it my way, but boughed and leaned, furrowed and pleaded my way. I put my head under again and gasp upon returning to the surface, catching my breath, gasping again until calm. I take strokes further out, strokes to another buoy, orange. I tread water and I think about madness. Too explicit, too wretched, it is like looking at the sun. It is Eurydice, disappearing. 

*** 

Sometimes I attempt to mine the core of my being and wonder if that core even exists, or whether it is rotten. I do not wish to be puritanical, or suggest that who I was as a child eclipses the experiences I have had since her tenure, but I wonder if the better of her nuances have disintegrated, have been eclipsed by a world that often functions with impunity. My face feels twisted now. I ask my husband, are my lips lopsided? He tells me no, but I look in the mirror and feel they have been twisted by the amount of time I have spent gritting my teeth. My insanity, I convince myself, is indelible. 

In different ways, I try to enshrine experience of my young self. I try to give acknowledgement, by an adult, that something happened, something not uncommon, not all that tragic, but awful all the same. I know what she wanted and I want to give it to her. 

After going to hospital, the fog dispersed, and my depression disappeared. The medication worked, and I wondered why nobody had spotted my symptoms sooner. The truth is that as much as a try to honour “her,” she is long gone. History is untenable, and to try to recreate one’s past self, one is instead faced with nothing. I am built upon this lack and look directly into the dark. This absence, this darkness over the deep, is so fertile. Plush and soft, like a blackish soil between my fingertips, things grow here.

[cmcphailwriting]

Jerome

The three of us walked down the pitch-dark lane towards the lights, evenly spaced, a strand along the slick-wet tarmac, flanked by grassy banks. When I turned around to see Alex, I could only make out the faint orange light of the cigarette held up to her mouth. Looking ahead I could barely see Jerome, a figure in the middle distance, vague; even then I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things.

*

I had known Jerome from the age of thirteen, when we first arrived at the school. He went home at night, and I didn’t, but he lived on campus. His mum was the Chaplin and taught maths and religious studies - I was one of her students for two years. She had short hair and glasses, and walked with a skinny masculine gait. Jerome was in the same class as lots of my friends, so I knew him a little, but we never encountered each other properly until we were seventeen. We got together in the way that many couples did at school, at the school disco. People would walk off together into the night, away from the coloured lights of the assembly hall, having drunk vodka they’d been hiding in their dorm underwear drawer in preparation for the occasion. My sexual encounters with Jerome were my first. Being at a boarding school, being outside was part of almost all sexual experiences. We would meet up outside my boarding house and wander into the woods, between nine and half past nine in the evening when we were given free time. Jerome and I had been meeting up in the evenings for a month, maybe even less. I remember that it was May fourteenth, because it was my friend’s birthday, and we’d been to a restaurant in the nearby town for a meal. When I came back there was some kind of outdoor event by the cricket pitch. We walked off together, as the couples did, peeling off into the spring and disappearing amongst the trees. We kissed and lay down in the grass and dust beneath the tree. I still remember his smell, which seemed to fill up my lungs and head. It was without warning, without hesitation, that he started to kiss down my body and remove my underwear. I just remember that what happened felt so sweet, precise and calm. No chaos and no fear existed in that moment, no darkness or discomfort. We are both bisexual, and he was one of the only people who knew this about me, which felt like some secret club in a boarding school which was fundamentally, explicitly against any kind of same sex romantic contact or relationships. We went together once, with sarcastic curiosity, to an event that the Christian club put on: ‘The Truth about Sex and Christianity’. I remember having an earnest young geography teacher tell me that it was wrong in God’s eyes to ‘practice’ with a member of the same sex. She told me until she was blue in the face that God hates divorce. I thought of my parents at home, not acknowledging one another in the street and planning the court dates for their own divorce. Jerome was religious, in his own way. After all, both his parents were vicars, but strangely enough, divorced. In that sense, he was warped, but so was I. We were young, abandoned in an English garden, with dry smirks as we messed around behind my dorms that night. I wish I could recount some conversation, some positive conversations of ours, but all I can remember is the way it felt. It was both urgent and comfortable, exotic and familiar. The conversations I do remember were those that ended it. It was me who wanted to stay together after school ended. It was the final day, the ceremony, the dresses, the suits, and us, standing on the pitches talking about whether to continue our relationship. I couldn’t believe what I heard when he said he wasn’t sure, as I had never been more sure of anything before. I pleaded that it wouldn’t be a problem, that we could get around the distance. Somehow I convinced him, and we had a happy summer, on the island. The summer was me,

sitting at the dinner table with my vest on back to front, having frantically got dressed for dinner less than five minutes after I’d come. It was him, lighting candles in a cottage on my birthday. I was desperate to make him know how much I loved him. However, this impetus became a dark pit, the bottom of which I could never reach. When he came to my family home he would say I love you, and I would say I love you more, but he said he didn’t believe me. The trouble arrived the day after we received our final exam results. I didn’t do well and got trashed at some results party. He called me at three in the morning, and told me how he loved me, that he would stab anyone who came near me, “slit their throat”, and somehow I felt obliged to say the same, but I was scared. He said he was walking along the river in the rain, coming back from a party, and somehow I became worried that he may never make it home. The next day I couldn’t eat, alcohol still pulsing through my system. We spoke on the phone and he was somehow enraged. His voice changed, everything changed, he was snarling down the phone. He said he hadn’t known where I was, who I was with, or what I was wearing. He said it was never possible to fully trust somebody, he said he had seen some photos online of me with another guy, he said he thought I was cheating. I was on the floor - I don’t think I’d cried like that before and have never cried like that since. I was retching. The carpets in my living room were a blotched red as I lay there, close, eyes congealed. I hung up and he called back several times, threatening my mother as she wouldn’t let him speak to me. A week later, we spoke. It was late at night. I was in bed, and his voice was soothing. He said he was sorry, that it would never happen again, and it felt like I was slipping into a warm bath. I woke up a few days later, knowing it was irretrievable. I thought about what had happened over the past few months. Photos appeared online of my friends on the last day of school. All the girls I’d spent those years with, my teenage years, in their dresses in the sun. I realised I knew nothing about what has been going on in their lives the past few months. While they had spent the day picnicking together with their families on the grass, I had been pleading with Jerome on the pitch. At the leaving ball, that night, I was anxious, only reflecting on that conversation, and only feeling relieved when I dragged Jerome out to the dark to have sex, when we told each other we loved each other for the first time. I had walked around school in a daze in those months we were together, nothing could touch me. I had this impenetrable look in my eyes, a clouding over. The obsession was mutual, the possessiveness toxic, but I wanted that. It was all consuming in a way that I’d always dreamt of. He has remained in my dreams since then, waking and sleeping, and when I would wake up from one of these dreams my whole day would be thrown. The last time we saw each other was when he was on his way back from a festival that summer. I was in the city, and he stopped by to see me so we could talk, but the conversation was brief. We hugged for a long time, and I was numbed. He didn’t want to split up. What had happened was so deeply painful and strange, something so visceral that I couldn’t put it aside, even though I was still in love. When I got back from the city, I traded my relationship with Jerome for painful ocean baptisms, swimming as early as the light and tides would allow me, seeing which was the furthest buoy I could swim to before fear of the darkness below set in. I went to university on the mainland the following autumn, drifting in and out of lecture theatres and making a life for myself in the city. Six years passed, I moved to different cities, met new friends and new lovers, but my dreams remained the same. I completed a master’s degree, and ended up moving back to the island to work at the local radio station. Tonight, he was here. His grandparents had moved here and he was over for the holidays. It was Simon who told me - my heart hit the back of my throat. He invited me out with them. Simon, who I hadn’t confided in in years, had been my ally at school. I decided to go. I didn’t see him immediately. I was waiting for my drink and felt someone looking at me, but it was disorienting - it was only when I looked up at the mirrored back of the bar that I saw him, further along to my left. He gave a little wave and made his way over. We first exchanged a few shallow words about how

it was good to see each other. He told me a little about his life and what he was doing for work, which he thought was boring. I was looking into his eyes and inwardly pleading, pleading - something, but I knew this was an invisible impulse. I caught my breath and told him about mine. We were twenty-four now, and one option of recourse from our painful past seemed to be speaking of our recent entry into the labour market. But perhaps only I considered it that way. Maybe this is how people talk. “Wanna see the music?” - he interrupted my thoughts. I had been looking at his hands now, his cuff, his collar. I more or less stayed by his side as the night progressed through different constellations of people, until it was me, him and Charlotte, who I had met that night. We smoked outside, and as Jerome’s hand moved to the small of Charlotte’s back my face felt hot. I looked down. We’d just been told about a party - Alex’s brother’s place - someone said. Jerome said he’d go if Charlotte would go, and I, mercilessly, said I would go too. It was out on the other side of the island, by the marina. If we want to go to the party, let’s go to the party. We got a lift from Charlie’s friend, driving through the harsh winter with the windows down. Jerome was shouting above the music, asking Charlotte questions. Charlie’s friend let us out at the top of the lane that led down to the marina.

*

Emerging from the lane to the street, we made various calls and looked around for people, but found only the dark, interrupted by the harbour lights and clinking of the boats in the bay. The three of us sat on a bench looking out. Jerome remarked on how drunk he was, and Charlotte waxed lyrical about her career as a drama teacher. I listened, wishing away my chosen fate. I chose this moment to praise the beauty of the lights of town opposite (it’s true, they were beautiful). I held my can in my freezing cold hands. The ground was slipping away from underneath me. Charlotte remarked that she was the ‘third wheel’, but we all knew that wasn’t the case. Little else was said, until I finally called us a taxi. In the car, there was trepidation over where in the neighbourhood the taxi driver would leave Jerome and Charlotte. I was going to another part of town. In the end the driver dropped them off together, under the pretence that it was equidistant to their places, and they would walk the rest of the way. As I was driven east the driver commented that their behaviour was strange. “Lovebirds, I think.” I pretended to laugh.

[cmcphailwriting]

6/100

his body was supple - malleable and soft under the pressure of my hands. we were seldom moving that morning, sleeping like great rounded stones, heavy and dense in the dark.

[cmcphailwriting]

4/100 sound

She collects sounds. Sometimes she collects those that are barely audible, voices hardly intelligible over the din of the room, cracking of sticks inside small forests, or great sighs of the ocean, moving colossal over the earth’s shore. She will listen in on neighbours, hand cupped against the door, she’ll jump at two cars crashing outside her apartment, and curse under her breath that she hadn’t kept a record of it. Once, she skulked around the maternity ward after an appointment, hoping to get a recording of a baby crying, the sound of their early moments enshrined, and, for no good reason at all, in her possession. She had 479 different recordings of the school bell so far, but only 80 of the chapel’s bells. She signed up to be a bell ringer, but they told her she was too young, no, too small, the ropes would carry her up into the air when ringing. However, she refused to sing. She felt this would muddy her mission of observing and recording. She wanted only to trace some world over which she had no influence, to bear witness as to what happened in this place. So in a way, it was a relief that she could not ring the bells, she thought. She did, however, ask the bell ringers to record their names into her microphone. Alan, David, Joan and Peter. Most of them had been ringing those bells for over 10 years, each day working out a schedule between them.  

[cmcphailwriting]

3/100 mass

That night, she was afraid the metal would bend beneath her, that her body would disfigure the thing, even though she knew it had stood for 40 years. The sculpture in the town square had been built in the early 1980s, by an Italian artist and teacher who had settled in the town with his wife. It was interactive, in the sense that it had swinging seat, made of a molten-looking metal that was curved at its edges. On either side of the seat were intricate panels, cut-outs, that if you looked carefully, listed all the towns and cities of France. Alice had sat here as a child, eating ice cream. She remembers this because of a picture, not because of a memory. The ice cream was pink, in the picture, so it must have been strawberry. She steadied herself on the seat, and looked over to where Stephan was standing, at the edge of the square. He was on the phone, and turning his body intermittently towards and away from Alice. Yes, I think we will be there soon, he said. Alice hoped this wasn’t true, as she wanted them to be alone. She carried in her bag a bottle of white wine and a packet of rolling tobacco, although she didn’t have any papers or filters. She didn’t buy any, so she could ask for these things from men, be they Stephan or others at the party, who she hoped would enjoy her company.    

[cmcphailwriting]

2/100 last night

The world felt quiet, except for the music coming from my computer. I had even stopped typing, and the only light in the house was my own. My bedroom was in the basement, and when I sat at my desk, my eyes were at street level. During the day, still working, I would watch feet pass, fast, slow. Once two small girls came up to the window, crouching down and peeking through at me. I pulled a funny face. They laughed, covered theirs and ran left down the street. A plate full of crumbs sat on my bed, and papers surrounded me. 03:00, 04:00. Words were getting more difficult to excavate, but at the same time they felt better, cleverer in the dark, like the loneliness extracted them from parts of my brain that I couldn’t usually reach. Later I make some pasta in the kitchen, with thick and shiny melted butter and black pepper. The walls in my bedroom were white, with postcards and pictures stuck on the walls, and an overflowing dresser sitting in the corner. I listened to the same album on repeat, a steady one, in some sort of trance. My eyes began to close, my head bobbing forward and then catching myself. I clear my throat, opening my eyes wide behind my glasses. I open the notes app on my computer. The moon and its spheres, I write. I don’t know what’s real and I don’t care--- I click back on word. I see a light turn on in the house opposite, and remember that people are waking up now. I made it through the night, which is usually an expression for something good. Writing about the uncanny felt again like it was bending my mind, thinking only about other people’s windows, other people’s walks home, other people’s phones and other people’s first loves, other people waiting for the bus, other people sitting in the passenger seat of their mother’s car, other people’s soft jumpers, other people getting dressed in the morning, an ex’s new girlfriend. A street you remember from childhood, flowers at a junction, haunting things, anything, writing on the bathroom stall, phone numbers, broken headlights, our faces in the mirror, any bicycle (with or without wheels), cargo trains, the diaries you used to keep.

[cmcphailwriting]

1/100 eliza

There was a dark blue and red striped tie wrapped around her eyes, and she was smiling. I had heard music coming from the room, and I'd gone in, to find all the curtains closed, light streaming through the edges. I watched her make her way around the room, grasping at air, as tinny music played through the speaker I spotted in the corner of the room. She shouted one of their names, laughing, and one of them, brown hair across his eyes looked at me suddenly and held up his finger to his mouth. She said another name, a girl's this time, and said, did you just come in? Who just left? I knew she was referring to me having just opened the door. I slunk against the wall and silently closed it, watching her. Several of them were hiding under desks, behind jackets and in cupboards. As she circled the room, she just missed me, arm waving past my right shoulder. Her metallic perfume moved with her, and when she finally managed to grab a boy's head to my right, he grabbed her and tackled her to the ground. She kept laughing, and there was a brief struggle between them to remove the blindfold. She looked up at me as the bell rang, and asked me who I was. The room was suddenly full of movement, each person collecting their books, bags and heading out. I looked back at her and hesitated before telling her my name. Were you here the whole time?, she said, no, I just came in to get a book and you were already playing.

I saw her again two days later, walking to the dining hall. She was flanked by two tall, thin guys, and she was dressed only in pale grey. One of the boys swung open the large wooden door for her, and she went through, disappearing towards the cafeteria. The door closed. I was on the other side of the lawn, and I didn't alter my step. Holding my books I headed for where the buses waited for us, exhausts steaming. The boy who'd held his finger over his mouth two days earlier came and sat down next to me on the bus, without saying anything. I glanced over at his phone, and he was texting her. After 20 minutes of staring out the dark window, moving between my own reflection and the pitch black of the fields, I arrived home. Inside, the Christmas tree glowed, with lights changing every few seconds in the corner of the living room, but that was the only movement in the house. I slipped off my half-broken shoes and ran up the stairs. It was warm in the house, and my body went all soft.