The World in Black and White

The World in Black and White



Day One, Morning and Evening.

The café table wobbles on the uneven mosaic floor and spills my coffee into the saucer. I pick at sugar grains scattered on the table with my fingers and I know all the words to the song. This has become a game, sitting here, playing watch.

Then there is Hekate. Who is Hekate?

I see her smoking at the zinc bar, elegant in boots, her long dark hair plaited down her back like a spine. She also knows all the words to the song and mouths them between drags on her cigarette, the filter tip lipstick stained.

I too wear lipstick; its bright red marks the rim of my coffee cup, a sign, a trace of myself.

I like the daily disappearing shuffle of the café and its clanks and steamings. The uneven floor and wobbly tables and the soul music that pervades the air along with worried desires.

It is my constant in seeming invisibility.



Hekate is wearing her animal print coat, She picks up her pet polecat.

The polecat wears a red harness and lead. The lead dangles against her coat. The polecat makes little clicking noises and shows is small pointed teeth. Hekate tucks the animal under her arm and continues to talk with the man at her side.

I have seen them together now for three days and I do not know, but I assume they are lovers. They stand or sit next to each other too closely and constantly touch in small reassurances of visibility. They also look alike, the same dark feline beauty, the slightly dissipated elegance, and their almost monochromatic melancholy that makes me want to be someone else.



I pick-up my reading glasses from the table, the waitress chalks up the lunchtime specials blowing dust layers into the air, I wrap my scarf around my collar and leave the café.



Outside the rain drizzles and the grey of the city folds around me. I turn round to cross the street and I am startled by the sudden bright red of a bicycle.

I walk to my favourite museum, with a haste that comes from drinking too much coffee, hunched into my coat against the rain



I have been to this museum many times before but today it still feels as though I am entering a mind. The double height gallery is stuffed with paintings but it is the drawings I have returned to see. There are thousands of these housed in pullout racks in the wooden cabinets along the dark pink painted walls. They are arranged in categories and I am looking for the depictions of Goddesses.

I am the only person in the gallery, there is barely any daylight entering the space, the drawings are dream like. They reveal, through conte crayon and graphite, Goddesses of the earth, sea and sky. They are depicted frozen in their vigilance, unapproachable from any direction.

I find the drawing of Hekate. She stands with triple arms outstretched, holding two flaming torches, a whip, a long bladed knife and a key. Her long dark hair is thrice swathed with bands of leaves.

I am lost in the imaginary space of the drawing and I fail to notice I have been joined in the museums main gallery by a middle-aged couple, until they startle me by beginning to ascend the spiral staircase that towers against the wall in the centre of the double height room. They are English, they both wear raincoats against the day and I resent their presence. I push all the drawings back into the cabinets and leave the museum.



I step back out into the street. The rain has stopped, leaving a sharp scent; a mixture of wet leaves and too full drains. I walk back to my flat through the damp street.



I still move like a dancer even though I no longer dance. My body has a physical memory that it traces despite my greying change, despite my howling injuries, ever present with their pent-up rage. I have stopped collecting meaning around this physicality.







I have been living for the last two months in this three roomed flat, a bedroom, a bathroom and a combined kitchen living space with a small balcony window overlooking the street. There is a gap in the street opposite where there must have once been a house. Its half-painted railing remains with a flat tired bicycle chained to it.

I have a table near the window where I like to sit.

In the evenings I sometimes turn all the lights out in the flat except for a candle in a small amber glass, I play no music,

I just watch.



Tonight I go back to the café. Hekate is there, standing by the bar with her animals. The polecat is curled up in a ball at her feet, her black dog, a small whippet like bitch, sits looking up at her, trembling slightly.

When I walk into the café the dog begins to howl. Hekate tells it to be quiet, the dog growls at me as I pass. I sit down at the table I like as it affords a view of the whole café and I order a red wine. 



The waitress brings me my glass of wine, a Shiraz, deep and full of autumn and of course, intoxicating.

I like to be drunk, it helps silence my ghosts and eases my muscles, better than anything else.



I sit in this café and watch Hekate. Tonight she wears a dress splashed with red roses against a white background. It fits tightly into her waist and breasts, short to the knee and three-quarter sleeved; her legs are bare except for her boots, battered black leather. She too drinks red wine. She stands at the bar like an invitation. The polecat uncurls itself from her feet, she picks it up, it’s dangling red lead mingling with the roses on her dress. The man from this morning joins her at the bar, greeting her with a lingering kiss on the lips, her lipstick leaves a stain on his mouth. Their hands curl together, caressing and claiming. The polecat nuzzles against him leaving traces of its yellow under fur on his black jacket.

I watch them and remember.



I sit here and watch others, bits of lives: the boy that always sits on his own, his cuffs frayed to lace on his sweater, the woman with the bright hennaed hair who pours over musical scores, the middle-aged man who wears an earring and clothes two decades out of date and Hekate of course with her animals and lovers. Her black dog growls at me for a second time as I leave the café.



My elegy wraps around me. I walk up the steep steps to the old square where I sit outside a different café even though it is not quite warm enough.

There are gas heaters in the café awnings, the waiter lights one and insists I try the house specialty, a concoction of kir and sparkling wine. I know this is an overpriced cocktail designed for tourists but I am not tempted to argue or bargain. The square is quiet; the evening is too far into autumn. I have the song from the other café playing repeatedly in my head and I think about the shoes I left behind in England; lavender leather, thin, supple, scented, the soles worn so thin.

    I still have dancers feet.

It begins to rain again, drumming on the café awning and catching in little pools on the edge of my table.





Day 2

The flat that I rent does not remind me of home. There are very few books, just what I have bought with me or acquired over the last two months and the dog-eared guide to the city someone has left behind. The kitchen was never meant for cooking in and I never do. I make tea with the Liptons yellow tea teabags that I have never seen for sale in England. There are no paintings; the walls are universally blank except for a small framed sepia photograph of this street, as it must have looked one hundred years ago.

There are no rugs but everything matches, blue sofa, blue gingham curtains to hide the plumbing under the sink, blue bed cover, blue stripe around the tiles in the bath room. There are no mirrors in the flat. I use the one from my handbag to apply my make-up. The people in the flat downstairs smoke, its scent seeps through the floorboards in my bedroom. I drift to sleep on cigarette fumes and their endless arguing. I do not know how long I will stay here.



I can remember all the houses I have lived in, their peculiar footprints I keep rolled up as maps in my head. I can unroll these maps at will and walk around my past, tracing my imaginary vistas, altars and rituals. Exploring again the residues of the unresolved trails of myself. I line up all the different versions of me as protagonist in these one act plays with tenderness not present in real time.



I like the absence of things. Leaving the present because the past was constantly crashing in, flooring me into misery. This sad ‘I’ being carried around like a discordant soundtrack. I felt like I would burst and all the bits of melancholy would create minute black holes of despair like inverted fireflies.

Here in this city I can greet my ghosts as they are without the baggage of memory.



When I first came here I had no edges to keep. I slept too much, I drank too much, I dreamt too much. To balance my metaphors I developed a New York style of method acting around my days; I pretended to be someone else. Someone whose boundaries included not too much REM sleep or red wine.



This is how I came across Hekate.

I saw her on the first day I ate breakfast in the café on my street corner. She stood at the bar in her fake leopard print coat with her animals at 9.30 in the morning smoking, gesticulating, drinking a small cup of expresso. Her beauty like a flag. I asked the waitress who she was: Hekate, pronounced heah-KAH-tae.



Day Three

The autumn is beginning to turn into winter; today the sky is bleached white, a perfect blank. I watch silent birds circle the rooftops, their hollow wings effortlessly arcing. My spine aches, a dragging tiredness in the pain, which is almost sweet, bruise pressing. I fell almost a year ago and now I have an injury to my fifth vertebrae that will not heal. I can walk now but with a slightly bent gait and of course I can no longer dance. In this city I find a dark acceptance.



In the café the windows have steamed up, I warm my hands around my coffee cup and wait for Hekate to appear. She and her animals usually arrive around 9am but today she is late.

I fidget with the packets of sugar on the café table, arranging them into a neat pattern within the small bowl. I order a second cup of coffee.

Hekate comes into the café. She brushes past my table and I can smell the cold on her coat. She has no animals with her today and she has a camera slung sideways across her body. She pulls the camera off over her head with a twist and it catches in the buttons of her coat. One of the buttons falls loose and rolls under my table. I pick it up. Hekate has not noticed its loss and I do not tell her.

.

Hekate rests her camera on the zinc bar; she has a conversation with the barman about the light being too flat to take good photographs. She drinks her usual espresso and smokes too elegantly. She is very near, I can see the chipped red varnish on her long fingernails, I think about speaking to her but I do not.

At this moment she is perfect.

I check my lipstick in my small handbag mirror; the red has run into creases on my upper lip.







That afternoon the cold turns to rain again in the city. When I think of these days that is the soundtrack, rain on roofs, rain on windows, rain on pavements,

Day three (Later)

I wander through the city’s streets and find a gallery I have not explored before. It is housed in a very old building that used to be some sort of grand residence, most of it is being renovated like vast swathes of this city, but part of the ground floor hosts a photography exhibition. The hoardings that hiding the building work act as a sign to the gallery, an expanse of deep blue with the photographers name stretched across it in white lettering. The blue holds my eye in the gloom of the day.

The photographs on display are grainy, black and white images of doorways and gates. The artist has placed himself directly in front of the image as if in waiting for some sort of “Open Sesame” magic to enter into another realm; permission to pass. The pictures are large, almost to scale; the possibility of the passageways opening seems very real.

The gallery has no windows, the light within is selective, a spotlight above each photograph, I travel from image to image as if discerning worlds and their transitions. I particularly like an image of a boarded up doorway and window, there is the edge of the photographers shadow caught on the left-hand side of the photograph. At first I think it is my own until I move away and it remains.



I left England with my ambition disappeared. I wanted an itinerary, a guarantee. I went looking for ghosts.

I have a love that is my skin, a constant in everything, a constant north that is enough, but I only know that now.

I used to live in a street; a suburban street that was so quiet, the loudest sound was a blackbird singing at twighlight.

This city is black and white at twighlight, the damp closing in from the river. I know nobody here, nobody to reflect back who I was, dark mirrors. I have become invisible.



I used to be able to walk into a dance studio and know what my body could do, arcing in the white room, translating a story in my head through movement. I trusted that translation; if I was warm enough I could fly. Now my wings are impacted, growing inwards towards my spine.



I left behind my shoes and my love. I wanted to place distance between me and things, between me and you.

I think I see you but of course that is impossible.





My coat seems too thin and I am cold as I make my way through the city streets. I have wandered far and I need to cross over the big bridge that spans the river.

There is a frost and the bridge is icy, the statues that flank either side are blank and unforgiving, the bridge’s lamps burn yellow and all other colours fade away as the sky turns to night.

    I find a café with pavement heaters, I huddle under one and        drink Grappa from a tiny glass. I sit and watch the tourists looking at all the buildings in the square they are supposed to look at. 





Day Four

When I first awake my spine does not ache. Sleep has relaxed my muscles and it is only when I move I remember. I do not sleep well these days.

I often dream I am dancing.

Today is the beginning of the third month of me being here. It is November, a month ringed by short dark days. When I left autumn had not begun and now it is winter and I have missed the browning of my garden. I am sure you have collected all the pumpkins up and put them into store. I remember last year, their huge squatting ripeness amongst the gossamer leaves going to powder. Did you sweep them up? I looked out from my upstairs window and noticed all their sharp points of colour, orange and red, amongst the dying green, wrapped in the endless webs of garden spiders. Autumn is spider time. I read somewhere they might take over the world. I have no garden here, just the small balcony and it is too cold now to open the windows.



Through the window I watch two magpies as they swoop and cackle on the grey roofs tops, all monochromatic, two for joy.

I remember a time in England when wherever I looked there was only one. The magpie seemed to be always behind me in the small city park that I passed through every morning, waddling after me with its hopping walk or long tail flapping into a tree. I used to dread seeing that magpie, its black and white wincingly obvious no matter how much I tried to ignore its call.

There is a skin layer of sadness in me, an epidermis that is ever present.

If I scratch the surface I reveal all those remembered things, a life not lead somewhere.





For five years I took a particular train everyday at the same time from the same station. When I stopped taking this journey I had the notion I might see my former self climbing the station stairs and sitting waiting for the train; wearing the clothes and hairstyle that I had then, my past lives colliding.



I walk about the flat barefooted, my steps creating soft thuds on the wooden floor. I used to paint my toenails, always scarlet, but now their paleness seems shocking, a nakedness which makes me feel almost tender.

I persist with my red lipstick; my ‘red badge of courage.’



I breakfast today in the café on the corner, which has become my habit. I eat very little, the disappearing feels quite safe.

I watch Hekate.

This morning she has untied her hair, it cascades in glossy folds around her shoulders, she flicks it back away from her face with her fingers as she speaks.

She has taken off her coat and it is draped over one of the red topped bar stools.

The man at her side caresses the leopard print fur of the coat. Hekate kneels down to pet her black dog and the curtain of her hair mingles with the animals fur, black against black. The little polecat is circling around her feet making its peculiar clicking noise, the man picks its up and both Hekate and he mimic the animal’s noise, all their heads close together.



Drinking coffee always makes my heart beat too fast.

I consume two in a row because I do not know what to do with this day. All ambition I had has been lost to my age and my injury; there is a sort of peace in this, a pause of months in this city.



I have a city map, made for tourists with a certain purpose, the must-see attractions easily readable with little versions of themselves carefully illustrated.

I have been to none of them; I just walk the streets and like to feel lost.

I walk with my slightly sideways bent gait around the city; it is cold now, I wear leather gloves, red like my lipstick.





Day four later

It is so cold today, almost too cold to walk, despite my gloves and coat, the raw wind leaves me feeling naked and my eyes stream as if I am crying. I decide to cross over the bridge again into the student district. Lining the bridge despite the cold are little stalls selling art and craft objects to the tourists that throng the bridge whatever the weather. Most of the wares are tawdry, mass produced fakes of artistry, but nearly at the end of the bridge is a girl selling tiny abstract paintings made up from bits of map and text and blocks of luminous colour; magenta, turquoise, cobalt blue. I pick up one of the paintings, no more than five centimeters square, it is jewel like and compelling; painted on heavy watercolour paper, in cream and blue, scribbled text in pencil and a bit of map of this city. The text has run against the paint and I cannot make out the words.

I can easily afford the price on the back of the cellophane cover, so I buy the painting and ask the girl selling the pictures about the artist. She tells me she is the artist and she is also a student at the art school in the city. She is not very open in our exchange, only responding to my questions with one or two word answers. She looks a little unhealthy, a blemished, none too clean complexion and lank dark blond hair. She is wrapped up against the cold in so many layers of clothing, all mismatched and lumpen, she herself seems the very opposite of her delicate work.



Something about my new purchase makes me feel buoyant; I am suddenly hungry so I look for somewhere to eat. I find a lunch café in a little street not far from the bridge and I order scrambled eggs and coffee.  The place is full of students, some alone huddled over books or newspapers, some grouped around the café’s tables arguing and smoking. I feel slightly out of place in my good coat and middle age, but this mismatch does not dampen my mood. I do not look at the little painting again at this point; I want to savor its idea.

The eggs are good, light and hot, served on thick white toast, the coffee is mellow. I look up from my meal to notice the girl from the bridge market walk into the café. She takes a seat not far from me and I surprise myself by saying hello. She does not seem particularly pleased to see me, but nonetheless moves her seat to sit next to mine. She unpeels herself from her scarf and coat and without her bulky outer layers I see she is much more slender than I first assumed. Beneath her coat is still a jumble of layers; a cardigan over a dress, the dress over ragged edged trousers, fingerless gloves over paint stained fingers. The girl orders tea and toast and we begin a conversation of sorts. I do most of the talking and she answers in nods and monosyllables.

I find out her name is Katia, she is 19 years old, lives in the student district and is in the second year of her undergraduate course at the art school. The small paintings on her stall are miniature versions of her real work, which I am duly invited to view in her studio space at college.

I pay for both checks and follow Katia out into the cold again. The art school is on the other side of the district and we walk quickly through the streets hardly speaking at all.

The college is a gloomy red brick building with big stone steps leading up to the entrance, inside there sits a doorman in a glass fronted booth, Katia explains me away as a guest and I am lead through a myriad of corridors to her studio space. The room is top and side lit with vast windows that overlook the rear of the school; Katia’s workspace is at the back, curtained off from the rest of the room by a collection of old and very paint stained curtains.

The curtains smell of damp rooms and turpentine as we pass through them.

The space is about three meters square and the back wall is taken up with a painting that spans most of its width and extends vertically towards the roof light nearly for the same distance. I feel physically winded by the  impact of the painting, its sheer scale in the small space is shocking, like a blow; its colour, a shifting mix of reds, oranges and magenta blocks, interspersed with illegible text and imagery, obscured faces and hands like massive old photographs.

The painting makes me reel and I feel the need to sit down.

Katia clears a wooden stool of rags and brushes and covers the seat with a sheet of paper. I sit gingerly down and take in the rest of the studio.

There are other paintings of the same size stacked against the wall with their backs turned outwards and an untidy work table in the corner littered with jars of pencils and brushes, drawings and open sketchbooks, paint stained jars and handless cups, scraps of newspaper and magazine cuttings, paint rags and lidless paint tubes. This creative debris extends itself underneath the table and obscures most of the floor. I sit among this tide of stuff and ask Katia about her work.

She mumbles something about memory and loss, about the importance of scale, about residues and ambiguity. Her voice fades away, it occurs to me she does not like talking about her work and I wonder, not for the first time today, why she has invited me to her studio.

She turns some of the other canvases around for me to view, the same mixture of shocking colour and obscured imagery is displayed in each, the same sense of falling in space, a sort of vertigo, is induced in me with each painting. I do not fully understand my reaction to Katia’s work and I am disturbed enough at this moment to want to leave the overpowering smell of paint and turpentine for the winter streets.

Katia senses I wish to leave and becomes even more sullen, not looking at me, roughly turning the paintings back to the wall. I ask her if she would come for a drink with me later, she shrugs and then nods in agreement, we arrange to meet at my usual café at 8pm.



I return to my flat later that afternoon anticipating the idea of the little painting. I unwrap it from its cellophane and gaze at it under the lamp on my table, for at 4pm the flat’s interior is dark. I pour myself over its blue edges, the scored out dirty white block on the top left hand side obscuring a red dot; chrome green taped layers, nothing truly revealed. There is a printed ‘B” that seems too obvious, too vulgar in its bold blackness, stamping on the jewel blue, edgy marks scrawled around it. The red in the painting has a rhyme; it circles the painting in recusant spots. The painting makes me think of urban scratches on billboards, walls and doorways in European cities, of maps I cannot read.

The painting is a tease, it gives me no information, it just hints, a vacuous promise; it pretends to be formal, it pretends to be wild, it is neither. It is about deception.

I wrap the painting back in its cellophane and think about this afternoon, I am glad I bought the picture.



Day four Evening

Later that evening I go to the café where I have arranged to meet Katia. She has arrived before me and is already drinking a glass of beer at one of the corner tables where I never sit. I go over to join her and notice straight away that she seems agitated and I ask her if anything is wrong. She just shrugs and says nothing that can be changed.

I order a red wine and another beer for Katia, we sit in silence for a few minutes.

Katia is staring into middle distance at something in her past, I touch her hand slightly and she is back with a jolt and surprises me with a tiny yet distinct smile.

Her teeth are very small and even, her lips drawn back to reveal this perfection.

She begins to talk to me about her work, she relights her cigarette and pulls up the sleeves of her cardigan. I notice she has a series of very fine scars on her left forearm.

Katia tells me how important her painting is to her, about how she physically sometimes needs to paint, like she needs to eat and if she does not her body aches. She says that is why the paintings are so big, they have to be much bigger than her or what she is trying to create  is not reflected back; the paintings have to overpower her even though she paints them. The little paintings she sells on the bridge are so easy to do, she could make hundreds and nothing would be revealed; they are like a musician practicing scales and of course they sell. The large paintings are just not domestic, she does not know if anybody would ever buy one. She does not really care; she says she would paint if she never sold anything, except sometimes money was a problem.

I sit and listen to her, she speaks in staccato as this afternoon, the beer oiling the progress of enlightening; she sits hunched over the table, gesturing with her little cigarette held between blue stained fingers. There is something ragged about her an something very strong, angry and strong.

She does not ask me about myself and I do not offer any information, she is enjoying the attention of a stranger; to roll out the drama of her life without the interruption of exchange. I offer to buy another drink and as I turn to gesture to the waitress, I see Hekate enter the café with her animals and stand at her usual spot at the zinc bar. When I turn back to face Katia, she is muttering to herself and shaking her head; saying she cannot stay, she suddenly gathers up all her possessions and begins to leave. I try to calm her and place my hand on her forearm in a concerned gesture. She stops for a moment, takes in my hand on her arm and then glares at my face with a look of pure hatred.

I am so shocked I give out a little yelp; Katia then pulls away from me and leaves the café.

In the space of this leaving I resume my habit of drinking too much red wine.





Day Five Morning

Each hour is broken by a waking sleep, too much wine, and too many dreams; dreams when I remember, dreams of houses and gardens underwater, dreams about always leaving. I wake finally fully with a fine coating of sweat on my skin as if I have been running, running away, and the aftertaste of dreaming, its inky fragments leaving traces that refuse to dissolve and disappear.

In the morning I always long for twighlight when my shifting memory seems to drain of its colours and I see the world again in black and white.

My meeting with Katia has burnt a hole in the silence I created for myself in this city and I cannot repair it, a story has escaped through the hole that must unfold. This morning I want to walk around it and reconnect with my ghosts. I want to think about myself in the third person, to watch myself from a distance moving about the city but not part of it and I want to think about you.          I want to imagine you in England, I want to trace your morning movements around our house and hear each remembered sound: the whistle of the kettle, the tap tap of the teaspoon as you stir the tea, your footfall down the hall, the drone of the radio with English news. I have hundreds of these intimate sound bites I can replay at will, accompanied or not by still or moving imagery, my iconography of recollection. And then there are the physical memories; the weight of your body sleeping beside me, your particular scent like sun on stones, twenty two years of sensuous resonance reconstructed to order.

I want to feel my blue edges again without the interference of a new narrative, this disturbance in the shape of an angry young painter of whom I know nothing about.

I make my morning tea as a reflection of my English memories with tea that is not English, a fake mirror that sweetens my nostalgia. Still lying on the table is the small square painting I bought yesterday; I trace its colour and surface with my fingertip and recall the massive versions Katia had shown me in her studio. She pulled back the curtain to theatrically reveal paintings so big it felt like entering another world, subjunctive realms where nothing was distinct.

I reconsider, maybe indistinction is what I am seeking, a lack of clarity after all those endings. I think about Katia, the passion around her painting and the fine scars on her forearm.



The day outside is crisp and clear, I would have preferred rain. Everything in the street is outlined in a sharp light, defining the now winter city in its pearl grey colours, pigeon pearlesant, mauves and blues; tonight the sky will be full of stars.

I know Katia will in all probability be at the bridge market selling her little paintings as yesterday, I could walk to the bridge and re-enter the story but I do not. I sit on the edge of my decision and savor it. Instead I visit the café, returning to my habit with deliberateness, returning to my watching.



Day Five Later

I sometimes imagine Hekate will visit me in my rented apartment, sit in the balcony window in the half–light of early evening and reveal her life to me in fragments; I in my turn will revolve in my own memories, unraveling. I see these images in the blur of sepia romance, romance that is beyond bodies, like a fiction.

My café vigil continues, I am the spy, always on the outside. Hekate’s life dances before me as a mirror of loss and because of this I am afraid to speak to her, she tells me so much more about myself with silence; if I spoke to her the ordinariness would break through.

Instead I revisit my past, faded and stained, like my lavender shoes.

Hekate must be about 30 years old, certainly no more than 35, she has that slightly oily olive complexion that ages well, she has a ripeness about her, if you bit into her, the skin would spring back from the edge of your teeth marks like a resistant apple. I look at her and I am lost and found.

I would like to innocently sniff the skin on her forearm as I used to do after a day in the sun with my own skin, comforted by that familiar biscuity scent underneath the sun lotion. I would like to walk with her around this city when it is not winter, late in the afternoon when the pavements give back the heat from the day, she could gently trace her life for me in its streets and vistas, her hand brushing mine as we strolled with no need for coats; sweet fiction.

I gaze at Hekate;

I have become the watcher.

There was a time when I was the gazed upon, my dancers elegance. It is hard to remember when I noticed the absence, when I became mostly invisible, even to you.

By then we had become used to each other, we became invisible together, welded in middle-age, our summer gone.

Your face was the same, just dropped, slightly misaligned from my memory bank of photographs; you on top of that hill in Wales, head bent over a map, freckled skin, beautiful knees in shorts. You always said you had ‘footballers knees’ and now of course you will not wear shorts at all, “Nobody wants to see 50 year old Knees.” Well I do, I wanted to see all of you still.



When my mother died you did not understand my grief, why I grieved at all when I hated her. I tucked away my small inheritance along with my visible grief, each gaining interest annually. When I fell on the pavement, I fell back into my sorrow, its increments post- dated until I couldn’t even be with you anymore. When I looked at you I saw myself, the backs of our hands tell the truth of age, our woven lives lost their sanctuary,



I know Hekate is a cul-de-sac, but I cannot resist the idea of her in wanting to forget my own desiccation. So I play out the novel in my head, my imaginary bohemia, a black and white film where I do not age.

When I injured my back I could no longer pretend to be the dancer. The past 10 years crashed into me and I could not maintain my myth. I had to work harder and harder to maintain moves my students did effortlessly, I became better at verbal instruction,avoided demonstration and the truth of the practice mirror; these things I had noticed but my memory of dancing was still in the present, I did not really see my reflection in the practice mirror.

Mirror mirror on the wall, it was not that I wanted to be the fairest, but I suppose like the wicked queen I did not want to be old.

So I ran away from all my mirrors including you.

I used the small amount of money left to me by my mother to come to this city alone.



Hekate is talking to the barman, they are laughing at something, I suddenly feel myself physically tipping,I grip the edge of the table to steady myself but my sense of reality spins; voices in the café seem far off and the noise of my own heartbeat deafening, it is though I can hear my own blood coursing through my veins. I stand up and walk out of the café, clutching my bag and coat like armor and have the distinct feeling I am somewhere watching myself at the same time.

Outside the cold day feels more real, I let the cool air dry my sweat and my panic recedes as I remember to breathe. I breathe and walk in rhythm and return to my body, feeling the pavement cobbles through my boots and at last the need for my gloves.

I walk without thinking over the bridge to the student district, no Katia at the market and I have no idea where she lives. I think I can remember where the art school is and I retrace my journey from the café to college that I made with Katia when she took me to show me her paintings.

So it would seem I do want to see her; with my sense of reality slipping again some conversation would be good and I am still very curious about her. I leave a message for her at the porters desk asking her to meet me at my flat at about 7pm tomorrow, I leave my address along with a request for her to bring some more of the small paintings with her as perhaps I would like to buy another.



Day Six

Katia has left me with 12 of her little paintings. I cannot decide whether to have none or all of her tiny solipsistic worlds of codes and intrigues. She has also left me with the residues of conversations about myself and about you. I miss everything about our life but it is that very missing I have come to look for;I want to see how I exist in that gap. Our middle aged bodies, mirrored breast to breast, that soft puckering of the skin on the crook of your arm, that counting of crows feet around your eyes, the wrinkle of the upper lip into which lipstick now bleeds, mine or yours; a mixing I cannot bear.

I should reply to your letters, I should go home.

If I bought all of Katia’s work I would probably have to go home through lack of money, the acts of purchasing and staying intertwined. You always said I only dealt with absolutes, black or white, feast or famine.

I make notes in my note-book about each painting, a rational list of wanting.

Katia is coming back tomorrow. Still unable to decide,I leave the paintings and take a postcard from the back of my notebook. It depicts one of the goddess drawings from the museum. I write on the back that I miss you and go in search of a stamp to post it.



Day Seven (last)

I have to go home now.

I bought another eight of Katia’s paintings and have no more money to stay. I will miss this black and white city, I shall return to England and its shades of grey.

There is nothing left to find.

I will keep my sadness wrapped like a gift in my memory, there is no redemption here. I could walk the city’s streets for a whole year and even the spring would not chase away my ghosts, they are my shadows now.

Katia’s anger is her purpose and I am not part of that, I will probably not see her again.



I have paid the rent on this flat until the end of the week, a few things to do, to finish.



I walk to the travel bureau in the weak afternoon light to book my returning tickets. I pass windows lit up in the gloom without as yet curtains or blinds to block my views of the interior lives of strangers. I can feel all the edges of my body, its familiar aches, its expected gestures, the way my feet point slightly as I walk, the upward tilt of my chin as if held by an invisible string through the top of my head, my hands thrust into my pockets, rings loose against my thin fingers. I feel less substantial than when I arrived a few months ago, as if the city had desiccated me; I am whole but more hollow.

I pull my coat collar up around my neck and smell my flesh in the warm fug that rises from the fabric, traces of my perfume like a persistent thought, mix with my own scent. I sense an absence of something, my body’s signature turning to dust.

What will I find when I return to England?

My love gone?



I visit the café in the evening with the hope of seeing Hekate.

I know I will not speak to her, but I want to see her, to watch again with the bitter sweet knowledge of limitations- is this the last time? Stuffing in memories, as artificial as happy family photographs.

She is at the bar, her animals twisting around her legs, she is smoking as elegantly as the first time I saw her. She has a way of raising her lips to the ceiling in exhalation which is perfectly choreographed with the flick of the cigarette between her red painted nails.