The deli’s toilet reminds me of Harry Potter’s sleeping arrangement at the Dursley’s in the way the wall is at a diagonal angle to cater for the stairs that rise into my living room. It’s cosy for a bathroom. My uterus is throbbing and I start to wonder if it might just fall out of me like a clogged sink that is finally relieved of its obstruction and allowed to drain. There is a white paint stain on the concrete from when my sister and her partner painted three years ago. The stain looks like queen Elizabeth on the five dollar-note so much that I wonder if other people sit here and think of the queen in Buckingham palace while they empty themselves. My mind turns over all the bodies that have sat here probably contemplating something they cannot control.
We are both lying with our head pressed into the memory foam when T asks me what I am thinking about. I can never say, not really for there is no single thought but many parts of thoughts happening at once like when are kiwi fruits in season and will I have an egg for breakfast and when was the last time I had an injection and does my colleague resent me like I think she does and what should I get your mum for Christmas and I really need to go to the dentist and I haven’t seen my helmet in ages and will there actually be a war soon and I really need some new bathers and I haven’t had a flying dream in ages but wait, if I wake up earlier enough, I’ll buy some smoked salmon. I don’t have time to ask them where they’ve come from, or why they’re on my mind the way they are. There is only time to move onto the next.
My mouth is dry when I come to. The Dyson in the corner is still blowing air around the place. There’s an empty water glass on my bedside table; dust has collected in its base. I study the particles of probably wall, probably skin, probably insect and wonder about my own base, about what has been collected inside me in the window of sleep with my mouth open like it has been. Outside looks to be an ordinary morning. Overcast and still, I can hear a magpie’s call through the window. It’s eighteen degrees already, my phone says. I slept all night, eleven hours, through and through. The sleep was so inert I get small prang of shock when I see T’s scalp next to me. It’s funny how one adjusts then un-adjusts. He wraps around me so our bodies are like two sheets of pastry woven into a croissant, our bodies are bed-warm kinda swollen and I decide we are the croissant in the first stage when the pastry is pre-oven soft. My mop of hair against T’s scalp is like velcro. Seven twenty five become seven forty five and we unravel, become unstuck. I watch the muscles in his back move to collect a towel. It is true to say that he will never see this part of himself, only through a mirror not in the raw way I am seeing it now. The shower starts to run and I try to locate the dreams but find no narrative, not even a character. The dreams were for once so uneventful that I roll out of bed clean and blank. There are no new emails.
At the pool the water has a certain shape to it; it’s turbulent from all the squads in. I consider returning to the change room and pulling my clothes back on but I know I’d get home and feel ordinary about myself. I plop in the shallow end and tighten my goggles. A man tumble turns against my legs. He doesn’t say sorry. I can’t do backstroke without running into old sinking bodies. A man drowned at Fitzroy Pool three Friday’s ago. I don’t know how it took so long for everyone to notice, to realise he was not feigning death but actually dead. I don’t know grief intimately, I said to Sicilian Nic on the beach last week. Our bodies were too big for our towels and I had accepted I would be sandy. I do, he said and went on to tell me about it. I make triangles, moving around the slow bodies as politely as I can, for forty laps. I am thinking about how this will be my last swim for a fortnight.
Vince isn’t behind the counter when I stop for the expensive volkonburt bread. It’s the last one and I tuck it under my arm like a football. There is a chaos of health food junk around the register. Nut cookies and spelt liquorice straps whose glossy black finish deceived me one time and one time only. There are carob chocolate bars, vegan slices, sugar-free gummy bears, keep cups of all the kinds, small metal straws, large metal straws, ‘environmentally friendly’ popcorn, air dried strawberries, air dried mango, yoghurt bars, protein goo. A barely there-woman walks in with a mesh bag. Her legs are proper toothpicks, the kind that would have made me envious once upon a time. I become distracted by the paradox of the anorectic body. People perceive it as a symbol of control but people don’t know that the anorectic body has lost all control, completely. Anything else, Vince’s brother says. Then I watch him have a thought and lift up the gummies. These are great, he says. I shake my head. There is a particular sadness in health food, I think.
T has drawn the blinds so our living space feels like when I made those cubby houses out of sheets in childhood, so much so I can’t do anything but lay down horizontal and admire it all. There is an ice-cream in my hand, pistachio and nougat, which I am grooming into a silky mound, like when a mother cat licks her offspring. She cannot stop. A pandemonium of sirens move down our street and I am struck by the fact that somewhere someone is dying right now. I am nearly done with the nougat part. The sirens pick up until it becomes more unusual to not hear one than to hear one. How can so many realities occur at once, I wonder. I remember the pleasure of carbonated water after ice-cream and ask T to retrieve me some sparkling water from the fridge. I take several long, cold, bubbly gulps it’s almost painful and it’s exactly how I remember it.
Several boxes of moleskins arrive at the bookshop. Are you going to buy one, my colleague says to me. I push the spinner, assessing the various sizes of two-thousand-and-twenty-one. I don’t know if I’d use it, I say. I think about how my writing needs a diary, some sort of blueprint or direction. Lately there is only the quiet authority of my voice, no narrative at all really. I can’t plan ahead. Nothing is happening in my novel. My characters are simply existing and I wonder if it were bound and facing out on the shelf would anyone actually care to observe them. Last week Geoff called me out the back to where a separate wrapping station had been set up. I want you to wrap all these for a front window display, he said. Since I started at the bookshop, I have noticed Geoff watching me in his peripheral and I know he thinks my wrapping is slow and clumsy. Geoff had removed the backs of all the books. When I asked why he said these are the books that don’t sell, we save money by sending only the back cover to the supplier. I wrapped for two hours, thinking of all the poor authors whose books will not be read.
It’s twenty-two days till Christmas, I hear a woman say to a smaller version of herself. At the lights I cannot help but wonder what mine and T’s would look like. I feel embarrassed when I realise I am thinking this and look around to see if anyone has heard me. But the two bodies behind me are composed and busy with their own imaginings. I distact myself from genes and babies by way of counting upwards. There are eighty steps from the lights to the deli’s front door. I see The Wig-Man pull up for work and grease my face up toward him. Last week we saw The Wig-Man dumping the contents of his gutters into the front garden of the old lady who lives next door to him. Every time I clap eyes on him, I am struck by the uncomfortable time we touched: we were both at the market and reached for the same orange.
There are two hours between tattoos in a suburb I don’t know well. I fill it by doing something I have only done once or twice in my life. There’s one table free but it’s in the sun, the man with the long dark eyelashes says to me. The metal table burns when I bring my forearms to it. The waiter drops a juice the colour of healthy grass to my table. The heat of the table melts the ice blocks to the size of tiny baby teeth. I hear a child crying, something about a milkshake. I finish the juice quickly and order a coffee. I’m underlining a friend’s copy of Slow Days, Fast Company. It feels wrong but I can’t help myself. I imagine it is like writing him a letter in a code of sort where each underline, annotation, tick might tell him exactly how I felt on Thursday the third of December, 2020. In the book, Eve Babitz says she can’t get a thread to go through to the end and made a straightforward novel. She says she can’t keep everything in her lap, or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full.
In the full-length mirror at home, I feel brand new. An email pops up on my shattered phone: congratulations, you’ve been accepted, it says. Bits of my body are on fire and I stand here for a while thinking about how they will be on me forever, then about how many stages of living forever encompasses. Looking into the mirror, I try to remember the last time I sat down to write something clear and strong. I wonder about the details, the aubergine vase, the dust, the creases in my stomach. T walks in and I realise that he is both the details and the figures and the pulse. I tell him that I got in and he is thrilled, I consider if he might be more thrilled than myself. But promise, he says. What, I say. You won’t psychoanalyse me. I laugh half-hearted as if this is something I don’t already do. T stands behind me and looks in the mirror and for a brief moment I feel beautiful and sure by way of osmosis.
A customer is studying the title that sits front and centre on the counter. The title makes up the tallest pile on the counter like a podium and it is true, this title is The Winner. He spent fifteen years on it, my colleague says. The customer plucks one of the Shuggie Bains from the pile, the recent Man Booker prize winner. All the back covers are in tact on this title, so much so there is a large amount on backorder. I wonder if I will ever be able to organise the information of my experience, or if it will only go so far as Iphone notes, loose paragraphs and the sentences that strike me while I’m staring at the black line making triangles. I once read that woman are less likely to take big risks in their careers as women think consequently. Women tend to percept their own incompetence, error and failure and do not put themselves in the game as readily. They can’t remove the back cover of your book if there is no cover to remove in the first place, T would say. T always says you regret the things you don’t do more than the things you do. I consider if this is why I am slowly finding myself dotted in tattoos.
Tonight the temperature is going to be a high-minimum of twenty-four. In my lap is a book with the back ripped off. I have a wet towel draped across my forehead. The Dyson is blowing air around the place while T gets up for his third cold shower. The knotted mosquito net about the bed looks like a burrata right before someone presses a serrated knife into its belly. I unravel it and take my time tucking it into the corners. I go over the day including everything that was said to me and the way it was said. I think about the toothpicks, the red of my skin, the feeling of being full then empty then full again. I think about the old black lines of the pool and the empty black lines of my notebook and the new black lines of my skin. Then I think about all the things I don’t understand including the books that don’t sell and the man at the pool who killed the bee with his flipper while talking about the stock market. ‘I’m predicting a fall’, is what he said.
Yellow Days 