Album: The Universe Smiles Upon You by Khruangbin
Food: Bruschetta. Plum tomatoes marinated in sea salt (the kind you crush with your fingers), garlic, basil, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Make a mountain on Sunday, leave in the fridge and work your way through all week.
13.06.21
She’d been putting off going to the supermarket all day. Ever since the early morning migraine had ripped open chaotic dreams, the thought of white strip lights and raspy air conditioning had trumped any pangs of hunger. But now the shade had marched fully across the small lawn and the droplets of sweat that had been falling in a steady drip from the backs of her knees had ceased, she felt she could handle it. She loved to look at all the people on days like this. Summer softens and heat, the kind of heat that hits rarely in this sharp, grey country, that heat made them strange, made them walk slowly, languid, their flesh dripping like wax. The women wore dresses that ornamented the streets with cinematic fresh laundry, white linen wafting in the winds of their walks. The men were different, sticky, tattooed, topless, swagger accompanied by the slosh of lager on the pavement. The Prince Albert’s doorstep heaved with the thick air of football, an estuary of two different humidities.
Five precious sunshine minutes stood choosing between white sourdough or olive bloomer. Slightly freudian, she fretted about the lack of courgettes. She was cooking for a date. The last meal had been inedible. She bought an aubergine instead and scalded herself for having a particularly gendered day. Bad cooking was symptomatic of liberation.
Later, as tomato juices dripped down her chin and balsamic threatened to stain a white shirt she pondered how sexual energy remained, for her, detached from visual imagery. The eroticism of sucking her own fingers clean of bruschetta could not be captured, translated or even explained and she was glad, even as the headache’s ghost whispered across her temples, to be, for the first time that week, alone.
‘I’d rather be left alone’ she told a polo-shirted man, early 50s with yellow tinted glasses and a worn leather phone case-cum-wallet, the type that flips across and fixes with a magnet. ‘Do you get strange men coming to talk to you often?’ he quips, pacing, uncomfortable, in the long grass in front of where she lay on her stomach in her triangle bikini, five summers old.
‘Yes. All the time, and I don’t particularly like it. I’d rather be left alone.’ Returning to his patch of empty cans and similarly red-faced friends a jangle of coins exchanged hands. Disproportionately pleased with herself for the concise, polite and yet unsimpering method of de-escalation she could not help but sigh at the predictability of it all. The tension of perversion that had pervaded across this secluded section of Kensington Gardens.
It is, and has always been, one of women’s incredible talents. Evolutionary necessity, she reflected sadly, but a talent nonetheless, to wordlessly read a man’s character and intention even from twenty meters away, even through a text message.
The day had no stillness. The people were in constant flux, a misremembered theatre game from her youth, moving to fill the space, always remaining equidistant from the other players. The worst part of the afternoon had arrived. The coming evening fizzed with potential, a sparkling water night, puzzling on the tongue and, overall, quite unnecessary but for now the hour was in limbo, the meaningful productivity of the day left behind, the shadows as long as the minute. During winter she would fall into the numbness of depression, panic unsettling her bones, the urge to slit open an artery just to see the blood pump just to be assured of mortality, to find something to physically hold onto. But it isn’t winter. She’s burnt her chest. It happened between the hours of 4.30 and 5.40 and all at once. She’d been boasting she could feel the sun’s UV strength, given herself made up talents in a heady spurt of lying believing, as she always did, that she could speak into action.
For the last hour she’s been watching a teen saga of epic detail. Sixteen years old, dressed in matching mini skirts, a post GCSE tint to life enriching everything with pubescent sexual energy, desire unformulated. Is it youth or innocence that powers the giddy-one-cider-tipsy-coughing-on-my-first-spliff acts of attention seeking? The inability to filter, horrific to witness, and she cringes at memories of her own embarrassing youth. A more sentimental person would reprimand the demand to socialise teenagers but she sees three parallel straight cuts on one of the girl’s legs and knows better to feel nostalgia. Hating yourself loses its sheen. She’s thankful for the years of mellowing.
14.06.21.
Two thickset men with shaved heads and ostentatious designer t-shirts, each a variation of the other, pause at the crossing, their hands gently brushing together. For a moment she hopes one might grasp the other and her heart stops at the possibility of softness but they cross the road further apart, speaking Russian as they pass her.
She presses tofu, chops aubergine and watches a man with a top hat, tails and fantastically shiny shoes cross a 25 degree celsius road. He takes a cigarette from a metal case and around him the glitch of time crackles.
Tofu burns, congealed cornflour sticking to the second-hand George Foreman grill and later, in bed, he tells her he loves the way she closes her eyes, which is frustrating because she can’t see to know if he’s telling the truth, if there really is something alluring in her downturned lashes. Were ducks monogamous? they’d wondered, prosecco in plastic cups watching upended mallards on the musty nectar air, night slowly clearing away the humidity of the day, brush and mop in hand, leaving a faint trail Zoflora in its wake.
She was hot and uncomfortable but not bored, drifting between worlds apathetically. In the early hours snatches of chaos once again seeped through the cracks of dreamland, white noise and mundane tasks gone wrong. Coming back to consciousness she did not find the roots of her hair heavy with sweat as she had the last few restless nights. Texts for the next day’s plans. Perhaps it was the breeze coming in with the streetside arguments through the open window. She ran her fingers over his back and made shapes out of damp on the ceiling.
Comments