Sometimes, when I’m with certain people, I’ll talk and talk and talk in the hope of making some sort of soft cushioning that will protects us from silence. I like to pretend to myself that I don’t do this anymore because the reason behind making the noise has changed, but the noise is still there, nonetheless. It’s like I’m one of those cartoon characters running circles so quickly that I build this wall of impermeable dust and debris – but the wall of dust isn’t actually made of dust, it’s made of dead-end anecdotes or a hurdle of questions, or a niche song reference from 1960s Istanbul.
Sometimes, though, the silence can’t be damned against. Maybe because of a sore throat, or a piece of food that needs a proper chew, or a misjudged conversational rhythm. I stop.
I was on a video call with Sally O’Reilly a couple of years ago when she was my tutor at the RCA, talking about the closest thing to a book I had written at the time, and she told me about the brown water that comes out of an old tap before the clean stuff arrives. That the writing, when we get started after a break, is more often than not just dirty sludge we eventually pour away.
So here – after a long time with my mouth shut and the tap off – I present a miscellaneous wall of dust and debris. A portal to another time, from some distant shadows to last weekend. They are notes from a month of maintenance. Daisy chains made from weeds that clung to the ground through the rockety wind of a new year, new body and old habits. A slurry of noise. Dirt.
i
The day after I took those abortion pills - pills that, like a mistimed ellipses, lead to a whole series of narrative eddies - I went for a pedicure. I remember feeling hollowed out, standing unbuoyed on the laminate, pointing to a hot pink shellac polish so arrogant it intimidated me, then watched as it wrapped itself around my cuticle in the way candle wax on a finger at a dinner table does. For the months that followed I grew fond of the colour, persisting on my toenails through appointments and procedures, wobbles and wavers. It outlasted boyfriends and referrals and every scab-picking temptation to interact with a baby in a little hat at a supermarket or on a bus or in a waiting room. My sandals punctuated with hot pink, skirted my field of vision that every day was being filled with smiling sobbing babies and big fat question marks that I wasn’t able to wipe away.
ii
Nail polish is mostly made with a lac resin that comes from the female Kerria Lacca insect. This resin is also used in the making of ballet shoes, picture frames, makeup, music records and jewellery. It’s the resin of glamour and theatricality. Of story telling and getting ready for lights, flashes and eyes. Considered a natural form of plastic, it can last longer – if looked after – than the nail it subsists upon. It gives a lasting impression, too - indenting the hard surface on which it clings.
iii
Hindsight is a bitter sort of sweet, like liquorice or blood orange or grapefruit. It has an allure to it. A tart temptation. In the recollection of that tenuous pregnancy, and the haze of what it hacked up afterwards, my tongue recoils and salivates in equal violence like a snake with venom and a dance. Maybe, what I have, is a sort of nostalgia for the feeling. The way it felt to shed myself and something else simultaneously. To feel my edges expand beyond my own skin. To grow through or in or with something. Like an insect shedding resin. Producing.
iv
While hoovering the stairs last week, stripping hairs from their new home in the hope of achieving some clean edges and corners and seams as the new year became less new and more familiar, I found a shard of the pink varnish that had shed from the edge or corner or seam of my own body and onto the carpet. This moment, on the stairs, hoover in hand, was a second termination. The sentence after an ellipses. The next bit. I looked at it and it looked back at me as if to say –
go on then, do something.
I’d been hoping to keep that last fleck of varnish on my toe until I was ready to let go fully, myself, of this story. In the bitter sweet hope that one day it would be bottled neatly like nail polish, or end like a show on a stage scattered with confetti. But, of course the body sheds, and endings are really mere mythology. Endings are theatre. Endings are plastic - mouldable and meltable.
I turned the hoover back on, and away the fleck of pink flew. New dust.
v
On the cover of the ‘Baby Mine’ edition of a 1920s theatre magazine I bought this weekend called The Play Pictoral, a woman called Miss Iris Hoey lounges on a bed in a pink lace dress the same colour as the pillow behind her and not too dissimilar from the colour I no longer have on my toenails. She looks at me as though I could be her, or as though I have been her, or as though I know her or as though I will. Magpie like, I carried her home with me. A different kind of pink thing to hold onto. Soft.
I have not changed one bit after all. I am clearly still collecting small shards of tenderness.
vi
I want to tangle the netting of my insides with the way I look on the outside. I want to confuse. I want to mark the interval and discomfort with a scarring embellishment. A woman pierces my eyebrow with a titanium bar and asks me if it hurts. I tell her I have grown comfortable inside of my own pain –
well, this is what it is to be a woman.
I think of the mum with her shaved head and the aunt with the hoop in her nose. I think of the looks I get in the early pregnancy ward. I think of the line of hair on my navel and on my lip. I think of Miss Iris Hoey. I think of dirt. I think of the cousins in the lipgloss with the padded bras I inherited in a black bin bag, whose babies will meet me and forget me or love me. I want to dive into it all. This soft, hard, calloused, frightening, fluorescent pink, sticky lipped, velvet, sweating, pink lace mirage. So sickly and sticky it’s uncomfortable. Like a heat that burns and beckons. I am going to become resinous.