They lived at the top of the lane in a cottage small enough to make friendship special. I knew they were my friends of my heart because when I went there I stopped pretending to be happy. Some said they were distant cousins through an adventurous uncle who had died somewhere I had never heard of in a borrowed car.  Perhaps they were, but their closeness never seemed based on blood. People moved rarely in that house. It was a home still enough to paint and I was always returning there in my head, painting out their silence,their careful conversation, their beautifully long words. Even the air seemed different. More gentle and free. Yet there was a sharpness too. And an anger that I finally met one Friday afternoon .

The eldest Katherine had hooded eyes that would watch me over her book, her hands so still I suspected they were made of stone. Perhaps her pain had given up over time and just abandoned her to these stalactite claws which clenched at the covers of her novel.

I can cope with stone fingers she would say. My soul is really granite afterall.

This was life in the slowest lane of them all. Thirty six aisles of monotony peopled by these spectres without any trace of courage at all. Duty and ties married to these pieces of magnetised plastic.

The man lifted his basket high over the angry child's head and took down a bottle of Talisker. He threw in another. They had paid him well this time and no one, but no-one could stop him now.

My father died in 1983 far too young and extraordinarily brave in the midst of the debilitating  mess that had become his life. I found this note book whilst tidying my study and in it were 'poems' I had scribbled whilst raging with upset and grief. Rather than just leaving them in the book going yellower by the month here are several that still resonate. I am still learning how to miss him and I do.

3/5/84

And then you went away.

Frozen pictures

And still waters

Letters returned unread.

I am here I think again.

Loving summer

just the sameness

I do not hope to know.

16/9/84

In our unknowing

Tunnel. Between two

alien caverns,

We met. And spoke a language

they could not understand.

Where you may go now

Behind the rocks,

Imagined, printed guides;

You know

Alone, Not I.

The first time she heard them knocking she was whispering to her neignbour down the 'phone that this time she was really going to say something this time about it all. Maisie had begun to say something about courage and guts and then this knocking had started, thumping it sounded like but muffled too and Terry had apologised to her new friend and put the phone down and then the thumping got louder as if someone was impatient somewhere, and then it stopped and there she was in her kitchen looking at her rich cream wall repeating those words from some cartoon, well I be damned. I be damned. And somehow it all seemed to depend she knew on this new state of mind. She knew she was new. Garish Yellow curry stains could sit there all week. Toast crumbs could stay submerged, drowning in old coffee. Shoes could lay in wait behind doors.She no longer had to care.

Rats said her son later and left the room. Her husband looked at her sceptically and went upstairs to write his reports. Only her daughter showed any interest and offered to turn the event into a song  for the Xmas concert.

Even the ant family had gone away. The pink stones under his old trainers were dark green with neglect, corrupted by his mother's long, boring illlness and the rows of pots seemed sickly too, glaring at him as an intruder. Everything stared at him, myopic and without compassion. For he was the last witness to this place's disappearance beneath dead things and they had to hate him for that; they had no choice.

Winter had come. His heart knew it.

Anthony had given up on love. He preferred punctuation and expecially he conceded the deft pauses of the semi colon. Such pauses allowed time to still itself momentarily and then to procede with a calming symmetry towrds the final stage of revelation. Anthony adjusted his tie and turned with his (much remarked) on boyish charm towards the stately mirror which framed the hallway to St Ursula's. Someone had mentioned the murky origins of this monumental tribute to a previous head and although Anthony was never one to gossip, he had to admit a certain thrill whenever he caught his profile on the way to Staff meetings and would rememeber Mrs Hardcastle's singular passion for Charmaine. For that was the name they said of the beguling French mistress whose loose vowels had nearly  brought this celebrated private school to its knees. To ruination they said, shaking their heads in wonderment at the small photograph of Charmaine hidden in the store room, with her eyebrows raised at the sight of something they could not see. She was small and very French. Marseilles her letter of aplication had  stated.But that was the trouble of course. It was her very origins that had started it all and so they went on, had made Mrs Hardcastle so very progressive.

Dr Whitstable stroked her compact leather holdall and sighed in her deliberate way, counting out the breaths before reminding whoever was sat in the red window seats that Mrs hardcastle had never worn pink before her staff and that morning, when she paraded her vision for the new extensions before the assembled staff,  the glimpse of the pink camisole beneath her dark grey suit was enough to confirm her own so -so  very reluctant suspicions. Of course it had all started with the incident of the mexican vanilla and things had just spiralled so inevitably one had to say, that everything became out of control within days. Everthything except of course one had to say, Mme Charmaine.

For Dr Whitstable loved poetry and found the words of those long dead a strange comfort to the daily routine of school life. Whenever she had acquired another significant and excellently bound edition of a poet close to her own heart and the syllabus in question( how opportune their close relation) she would make her way to the head's vast mahogany study and leave the crisp edged copy for Mrs hardcastle  insightful persual. On this day in question it was a leather bound copy of the Complete keats( with letters) which had arrived via Sergeant at morning break. Geoffrey Miller combined just the right amount of bluff civility with humility for Dr Whistable( and she was not alone) to enjoy their two minutes discussions about the playing fields, the new cook and so on. He would always leave at just the right moment and then Dr Whitstable would open her new book and begin reading, a model of academic diligence and curiousity;something the school would rely upon in the stormy days to come when Charmaine's effect became so very clear.

Sickness has its pleasures. I had spent a cold night vomiting up  throat stinging red stuff which  had once been a  meal and then  I rested , stretched  out on the landing waiting for the next inevitable wave of sickness. But everything comes to an end and so next morning I asked my daughter ( busy with her holiday cardboard) to bring the extension lead and find my favourite detective and balance him on  my knees. He fitted so well. The battered car, the cuban cigar and that familiar squint. His hair even darker  than before. And this time he was chasing a man in black who had done his time and wanted more. Much more. Many more places to imagine and to sing into life, to sing unto   death.

 He sang some evangelical rally call and all these doe eyed creatures of the late 1970s swayed in time to his guitar and I knew that this was new. This man was more than celebrity guest, killing his way to his arrest by the man with the knowing eye. This man caught at something in me. He laughed deeper than any human should dare and even his pursuer would stop and nod, knowing this guy could reach. He could reach you, me, all of them. I couldn't decide if he was mocking all the walls of convention shakily closing in or if he just didn't care. Because he had a voice that knew more, knew why and where we have to go places where we might be scared but then we go anyway, all ways, where the false light just fades away. I started to smile like him, broader than it was polite, I felt this parting of my head-my soul rippling and then all these sounds yippeeing out, soaring above and laughter, yes laughter, consoling everything, my fever richer, wilder, a  crazy pixie skip and dance!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQIrxhNkiAs

Coral had never combed her hair before. Each long thread of dark red hair lay basking in the failing sunshine of the September afternoon. She was now a second home to a busy family of small ants who had deserted her elder brother when he was moved. The girl had given her this bright yellow comb, holding it out to Coral's hand across the ditch when everyone else seemed far more fascinated by their  lunch than this short creature from Sumatra.

But the girl had liked her. She had looked steadily at Coral and Coral had looked steadily at her, head to oneside, taking in the girl's pale face, her solitary pride, her sharp white teeth.

A purple light began at the girl's wrist, spreading out along her fingers to the yellow comb which she held out to Coral, whose pink palms suddenly scooped up the comb and put its handle into her mouth.

Her eyes never left the child's once.