I always wanted to be Huck Finn. He knew how to talk to people. He knew how to drift wide. He still does. There is this loosening out of my words, a special tilting of my head when I think about being him and even the way I walk into the supermarket changes. Normally I’m a clipped sort of woman – all angles and hurry mixed up in this one-in-a- crowd shape, but as soon as Huck descends, well there I am, soft hips, that swagger and yet so preciously gifted, visited by those gilt edged words. I like that, it is a Huck thing, and these gilt edged words. Yes, I lean towards people close as a knowing wink and something happens. Like I sweat out an event, an adventure between us and all of a sudden the edges of everything shift and I swear I can smell magnolia and baking and just that far off bite of tobacco. God on a Huck day I can even see the monstrous Mississippi from my car window just like that! I can smell the lost bloated creatures floating up the river when the full Huck Finn thing is upon me.
And before you start thinking this is some crazy, lonely tale of a frustrated widow with no friends, let me tell you I have lots of friends. Lots. So many in fact that sometimes, and I know this may sound untidy and cruel, they feel like some infection staring out of my gut and then clambering everywhere so that I have to go upstairs like a pale Victorian gentlewoman and retire for the afternoon. My duvet and I have got this thing going on. It’s a little dependent and a little prairie dog wild when I get going, but honey as Huck would say needs careful finding and then even more careful handling. You’ve guessed- Huck is the wide side of me. He does feel so wide of me sometimes that I nearly miss him, and after Huck it is so very hard to get back to where I was. And if I was honest, and after honey I am always honest, then I am not sure I want to, not ever. I want to wander, to go adventuring, to go on my uncivilised way.Everything changes as I just said, around my words, my verbs.
When I first met Huck Finn I think I preferred his friend Tom Sawyer, and sure enough my brother even looked like a real Huck then. But we sort of swapped naturally somehow, it felt right, and that summer of his birth even the stinging tarmac roof of our garage joined in the game. There we were, summering wide down a steaming river, far, far from home, watching the world drift crazily past, drinking purple cordial, throwing mud at kids.
Getting to find the Huck in me takes time and he hates to be found too quickly. So we are talking wide time, time where the instruments showing stiff regular intervals don’t figure for me at all. It is as if the world had made them all up one day and then lost interest the next. When I become Huck I am just aware of my pulse and my breath and my hunger. I am here, not there or way over there. As Huck, when an afternoon arrives it seems as if morning has simply shed away her skin. Surprise and wonder are everywhere. For this is wide time, time which is off limits, off the mark, peripheral yet central to all that Huck feels and does.
How do I find Huck then? And where do I call him from? For I do call him. I hearken after him, till I hear him, calling back and I begin to navigate my way around everything differently and the shape of everywhere loosens up.
Well, as I was promising to tell you, about my Huck change, I do this thing I learnt once in a room with a picture of some dismal old church with a falcon- the falcon was paying attention to something we couldn’t see but we wanted to and somehow that falcon became my route for finding Huck. I tilt my head just to one side like that falcon and get that wide look; taking a long, slow breath. After this I begin to go wandering. My left side takes me back to places I believe I have been one time, places I recognise as once true. Things give themselves back to me still all shaped up the same. With my right I go wandering to what might be, the colours are different, sometimes more jumpy, flickering. And once I am travelling in any direction, then this particular steamboat fills out, I freshen up inside, time becomes wider, and Huck re-emerges, gap toothed, strolling, smiling, filling my mouth with gilt edged words.
I mentioned adventures sometime to you and without them there would be no point in telling this story. None. So today, with a tilt first to my left and then latterly to my right, I Huck Finn resurgam, will tell you a tale. So I hope you are setting down wherever you are free and safe and just letting time get just a little bit wide and a little bit creased…
<o
:p>
Navigating people had always been a worry. But bridges can be found and this story mentions just one adventure with such a bridge. I have told you that I can be that woman who hurries, checking my small watch and smiling so small. That afternoon, I was tired of checking my watch, of my fake belief in yet another list laid out on the passenger’s side and so I checked my mirror with more pleasure than usual and pulled over into a side street where I parked up and took the deep plunging breath that wiped out the me that lived neat and civilised and tilted my head rather archly to the right. The tight, knotty feeling in my head began to unravel and islands of colour danced through my head, with a voice over laughing, asking me the shape of Walnut Bend. Night steering has a different way the voice went on. Sometimes I heard the voice clear, sometimes the voice got swallowed up by river sounds, and sometimes the voice reminded me that starlight has more shadows than the day……
When I walked into the town later there was a lazy roll to my hips and dark grey smoke trickled out of my mouth, and I knew Huck was back, starving as ever.
The girl at the counter smiled and made a joke about the range of breads left needing a miracle from God. I didn’t know about God but the girl was fun and the jalapeños danced around my mouth, tangoing my tongue whilst all the empty spaces inside me got filled up and I slid down my bench seat and started the longest laziest yawn of my life, winking as I could at the girl who held up her coffee cup in salute. A family staggered in with bags and these odd looking sticks or poles and then three older women came who didn’t seem to like their food nor each other ‘s face very much…
I was Huck the dragon there with all this hectic eating and I know I was breathing fire when the couple finally came in, and I don’t know why, but I stopped chewing and had to watch them; there was something about their grey shape together that didn’t look right – that bothered me and they had this smell of old tobacco about them that didn’t go somehow and those dusty suede shoes they were both wearing. They looked married in their coats yet too similar to be joined in that way and their faces were sure unwelcome to my coffee girl because she dropped something that clattered and her lovely face just lost that smile. A word rang out of her mouth and the visitor just ripped out this long knife yelling and screaming at the coffee girl and he opened his coat and then there was this animal I swear baying for blood or its mother and all I could hear was the beat of my heart galloping along, reminding me of why I was here, that I was Huck right now.
‘No one will get hurt. Sit in your chairs please,’ the man released this loud whisper in a voice more apologetic than cruel. His companion held onto her knife having eyes only for the girl, whilst the creature suddenly let out this terrible choking noise and spat yellow sticky stuff all over the floor, shivering and moaning and crying like it was about to die and go to that special hell for untamed creatures. Who wanted to shift from their plastic chairs now? No one stirred a muscle. We were set down in dead water, all jumbled up with that poor creature, which wasn’t looking too good from where I was sitting.
When I Huck, I am a chancer. Believe me.
‘Hey, hey!’ I said. I didn’t move from my chair, but I lowered my eyes, tilted my head just a twitch and looked hard and gentle at the desperate thing gagging at blood, dripping in strands from its black mouth. The creature’s dark amber eyes locked onto mine as if I was owner of every last breath of this world and I started to breathe just that little deeper, then deeper, still looking at him and I searched down for my breath and then brought it up, still looking and then released it out and then again, and again and after a time, again. And the creature started to follow my breath, started to become like me – breathing and heaving, its whole body wrestling as it found air again, gradually relaxing into a steady breath, the amber eyes growing brighter, calmer.
Risks take you around those river bends for sure.
‘Who are you? What do you call yourself, today?’ I asked the creature whose eyes were still fastening on mine, like love, like honey…
‘He isn’t going tell you anything!’ cried the man staring too.
But the creature knew something had changed in his world and carried on gazing at me, drinking me in and the amber eyes began to ignite some more and the flecks of darkness spun away, spun back somewhere to a smoky room with a desk with low legs and a smell of bitter tobacco and through the smoke I saw a letter written twelve years before in violet ink signed by Alice for John. Even without tilting my head at all I knew that Alice had walked for John every day because he was ill and that only a miracle could have saved him and that there had been no miracle for John. He had died nearly alone, but not quite and it was the not quite alone that today was causing all this trouble, all this pain. So I stayed in that smoky room with the letter.
Something was sat at the back of the room and was watching the letter, guarding the words for the man who had no strength to leave his bed. I brought all my attention to my feet and breathed even deeper and stepped slowly towards the corner, all my senses alive, waiting, yet tangled too, and then the lonely feral smell hit me. It yearned. How can a smell yearn? I don’t know, yet I know it did. I swear. A deep sigh and low growl were flung towards me out from the corner and then the near pitch black fastened itself about my face, cold and wet like something dragged out of the river. And of course you’ve guessed already it was my creature, my thinner, younger creature, doing what he had been told to do, scared by what he couldn’t save, crouched in his corner, without a name.
‘‘Weird story, ‘you are saying. ‘Come on Huck, this tale is drifting wide of the mark, way too wide to be true! ‘
I have to agree with you of course, but like that very famous guy once exclaimed at the beginning of his book about his hungry orphan, ‘It is true!’
I can even add more shades to this story. I can widen it more and we can truly lose sight of the bank. For as I walked towards the creature in that room, it was as if he was chuting towards me already and when we met again who could deny that we weren’t connected, that we knew something enduring about one another? But what happened first I ask? Who decides what comes first anyway? Some woman once told me that in a certain light I go all green below my elbows and then, would you believe this, a light fur appears on my hands. I can’t see it, but does that mean it isn’t there? I hope not. I really do. But I digress and I must press on.
So back to that unhappy couple still standing there in their coats, gibbering (for that was it sounded like) at the poor girl behind the counter asking for their money and the real story and looking so uncomfortable and so messy that I had to find those gilt edged words of mine pretty fast because that knife was making everyone nervous!
‘Supposing Alice had loved John differently to you both(I had their attention) and supposing her love didn’t end where you might believe it did, (disbelief) but went on, in a different way and somewhere, back in your memories, you might find that different love again( shaking heads) and know it meant something to John, ( more shaking heads, but less sure) and might, if you decided it was ok, mean something to you or not or you could let it go…perhaps if you found a name for your companion he might also help you both search out the wonderful places you have used before and could use again, when you are ready, perhaps soon or sooner or a little later than just now. And maybe because you know the story might have another course to take, then you could, now, if it may be ok, find it and use it and enjoy how powerful you feel now you are both being so new.’
I had no idea after all this Mississippi meandering where I was at all and though I had borrowed some of thes
e gilt edged words from that guy I had once seen one time( I can’t tell you everything can I )? I felt someplace in them shift, just slip somehow and loosened out what they thought they were hurt about. Maybe…
The woman let go of her shoulders a little and lowered her head as it some giant rock had toppled off. The red haired man (for he was) took her right hand, like he was feeling faint or tender and together they looked down at the poor creature who was not so very big after all. He had small grey hairs now on his head that I could tell they had never noticed before. It was as if they were impressed by the world again and they looked at me, nodded together and ushered the creature towards me, with his club paws and those amber eyes now watted so high that I could see myself – such a handsome Huck Finn I can tell you and guess what – I knew his name when he looked at me.
So I called out his name and he smiled. You know he did.
‘Columbus, ‘I said. ‘You have sight of your land.’