Tragedy v farce…

I was sitting over by the window taking a break from a Dylan Thomas poem I was working on.

I’d been layer-painting this poem since the start of the pandemic, in whites then greens then golds then more whites then reds and now finally greens. By coincidence I’d layered the words curlews and curlew into it months ago, not words I’d ever even thought about before these years or this poem.

In it Dylan Thomas conjures all the desire and longing there’s ever been in all the people who’ve ever lived and died and turned to dust and in us still living who’ll die in our turn and in all the people after us who’ll ever live and die. Then he imagines that longing as a fire in the dark that’ll never stop burning and he tosses curlew imagery into the sky all through the poem.

I’d been working from first word towards last. I was on the second last word, fires. After it there’d only be the word still still to do. These last words were and would be green and I was thinking about the notion of green fire, what happened when those two words came together, when the word scarlet lit up the spine of a book on the bookshelf next to my head.

What book was that?

The Scarlet Letter.

I took it off the shelf.

It was a paperback as old as me and still pristine. Nobody’d yet read this book, including me. I’d bought it in a Saturday market from a second hand bookstall more than forty years ago and it had been on my shelves in all the places I’d lived since, unopened.

I opened it.

10p in pencil on the inside cover. Underneath that, someone had written in red biro the words To you, in admiration, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A joke, clearly.

Anyway it had ended up very unread and on a second hand stall so whoever gave whoever this book, they didn’t get or didn’t like or didn’t want the joke.

I knew a little about the story; it’s a classic novel. Maybe that’s why I’d never read it. Maybe I thought I knew it all already.

What if, next time, I painted a novel rather than a poem?

Maybe by the time I’d finished painting something as long as this novel we’d all be well into whatever the next stage of this time in our lives would shape up to be, through the tragedy, past the farce.

First page:

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

Sad-colour. Church clothes. Men and women, some bare-headed, so, something scandalous happening. Heavy door. Spikes.

I glanced down the page.

Utopia. Cemetery. Prison.

I turned the page.

Rose-bush. History.

Pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader.

Oh, that’s good.

Would I go first word to last or last word to first?

Going start to finish in transferring a text into oils has a weighty heft, is physically conclusive, can be satisfying. It can also feel too fixed and closed and completed. Going finish to start can feel precipitous, unsafe. But the finished work can be liberated by the knowledge that the finished surface you meet with your eyes is a beginning, not an end. Partly, though, in the process, it’s like you’re reversing along a motorway at a crazy speed while all the other cars are going fast forwards round you.

Whichever way, it’s all about the building up of the layers.

Something dimensional happens, a bit like the thing that happens between words themselves, their physical realization and the physical objects we call books.

I checked its last page:

our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: – ‘ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.’

Gules.

Gules is a red colour to do with heraldry. It’s a word Shakespeare uses for blood, or the colour of blood. He uses it in Hamlet and that word sable with it too, when he’s describing a warrior first hidden in the dark inside of the Trojan horse, then outside covered in the blood of the families he murders. The warrior is called Pyrrhus. As in pyrrhic victory.

If I started with the end of the book, then, I’d surface with rose colour overlaid with sad-coloured (I’d have to decide what sad-coloured means since no colour is inherently sad). Whereas if I started at the start we’d surface in a bright heraldic blood red.

I was just about to look up on my phone to see if I was imagining that the name Pyrrhus also happens to mean red, particularly the burning red colour of a fire, when

knock knock.

Front door.

Dog, barking.

A Pelf twin was on the welcome mat.

This face was full of resolve. It was Lea. There was a quite large holdall at their feet.

Going somewhere nice? I said.

I didn’t know where else to go, Lea said.

Lockdown. It’s tough, I said. I’m so sorry. But there are still ways to get out of the country. Or a, what’s it called. Staycation.

No, I mean I’m homeless. He’s thrown me out.

Who has? I said.

Lea raised their eyebrows at me.

Apparently I’m not a proper girl, they said. And I’ll never be the son and heir he wanted. And various other clichés. Well. He’s right.

I thought he’d already thrown you out, I said.

I was living in the workroom above the garage. Banished. To make me see sense. But because it didn’t make me see sense he wants me banished from the garage now too. I sully his Audi.

Oh dear, I said. Where’s your mother in all this? What does she think?

Isn’t she here with you? Lea said.

No, I said.

Oh, Lea said.

Uncomfortable pause.

Lea Pelf stood saying nothing.

Then:

my sister says you were really nice to her when she came round.

Yes, she did come round, I said.

Lea shifted from foot to foot.

Don’t know where else to go.

You’ve got friends, I said.

Nobody uncomplicated enough, Lea said.

Work colleagues, I said. You must have money. With your high-flying eye tee eye gee job.

I don’t have colleagues as such. I work from home. Well, I did. Then I worked from garage. I’m a drone, really, it’s not high-flying. I’m only a junior level human eye.

What’s that mean? I said.

I scan stuff for several companies to check for things that digiscans might have missed or misread, to make sure nobody can sue them. Human eye pays peanuts at junior level.

So you must be legally trained, I said.

No. They just send us a download of the list of things to watch out for.

If we see anything on the list in any of the content we forward it to the lawyers and their own human eyes. I’m supposed to be doing it right now.

I’ve got to meet the daily.

Daily what?

Ratio.

Lea wrapped their arms round themself, cold. Where’s your coat? I said.

At home. In the garage, Lea said. I just. Got on a train and came here.

There must be warm places you can go and sit and work, I said. What about the library? Oh, oh no.

I’d forgotten the library was luxury flats now.

I’ve actually got a friend who lives in the old reading room, Lea said.

Amazing architecture. Vaulted ceiling.

There you go. You could go there, I said.

Well, not a friend. A boss really. I don’t really know him. God, if they thought at work that I’d nowhere to work. They’ll be checking my ratios right now. The machines watch us, I was going to say like hawks but it’s worse, they watch us like machines. They report back every twenty minutes about what and how much, and we get flagged and rated daily.

Cafes, I said. They’re nice and warm. Those burners outside. Hotel lounges, free wifi, bit of glamour. Are hotel lounges letting people in again now?

You seem so cool, like a goddess, Lea said.

I what? I said.

You seem like you really get it, Lea said.

Lea was bright red in the face.

Uh, I said. You can’t stay here. You can’t even come in here.

It was kind of you to let Eden in, Lea said.

I was forced to, I said. By her emotional state.

Sandy, you’re so great. You stood up to my father about my emotional state. You told him loud and clear down the phone. You weren’t intimidated. You were magnificent. You said it and he had to listen. You’re a catalyst. You’re an avatar. You’ve transformed our mother into a live person. She was like dead till now. You’re what our family’s needed all this time. You’re amazing.

Please, I said. Lea. Stop it.

I think you’re the reason he threw me out, Lea said.

Don’t try manipulative narrative with me, I said, I’m wise to it.

You are wise, Lea said. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody as wise as you before.

You’ve spent less than twenty minutes in my company, I said.

It doesn’t take more than a moment to know, Lea said.

That’s madness, I said.

But Lea was looking at their phone. Colour drained from their face.

Oh God, they said.

What? I said.

It’s work. I told you. I’ve been marked down twice now for absent ratio. Oh God.

Lea sat down on my doorstep and unzipped the holdall, took out a laptop.

Just let me sign in and ghost out some ratio for a minute, they said.

It started to rain. Lea got a white shirt out of their bag and draped it over their head and over the laptop.

The rain got really really heavy. Tap tap tap. The shirt was transparent with rain now. I could see Lea clearly under it.

Look, I said. You can do this in my hall. Here. Sit there. Don’t come near me. Over there. On the stairs. No, leave the door open.

Thanks, they said. Unbelievable kindness. I know the pressure you’re under, Sand. You’re the real thing. Have you got a hairdryer?

No. Well, yes, I said, but you can’t have it.

Lea, dripping rain on to the old parquet, hung the wet shirt over the banister, sat down on the third step up and keyboarded. I put on a mask. I sat right back in the hall by the kitchen door. The cold spring air came through the house and kept me wary.

Twenty minutes passed.

I checked my phone.

Nothing hospital-based.

No Viola.

Rain fell into the house and darkened the floor by the door.

I checked it again.

Nothing hospital-based.

No Viola.

You know, Lea said as they tippy tapped. You should really have a website.

I don’t want a website, I said.

There’s stuff about you online, about your pictures, the art thing. You paint words on top of each other. That’s cool. The pictures are kind of amazing. They look like they’re three dimensional. Like a club sandwich.

See? There’s more than enough about me online already, I said.

But you’re not utilizing it, Lea said. I can put you in touch with a couple of influencers. It’ll cost you. Money well spent.

Just as a matter of interest, Lea, I said. What can you find out about people online if, like you, you know where to look?

God, yeah. Anything, Lea said. Everything.

Like what? I said.

What do you need? Lea said. Work address? Home address? Webmail?

Medical details? Passport stuff. Number of children. Educational level.

Children’s educational level. Gross annual income in any currency. Credit card purchases. What categories you’re in re financials and lifestyle.

Hobbies. Interests. Voting intentions. Religious and political alliances. What you watch. What you browse. What you eat. How much alcohol you drink at home. Syntactical patterning. Sexual proclivities.

Can it really tell you about syntactical patterning? I said.

Devices, Lea said. They’re key. To everything. On everyone. Alive or dead.

They went back to tippy tapping.

Knock knock at the open front door.

The dog started to bark again.

It was the other Pelf twin on the doorstep under an umbrella.

Is the dog shut in the kitchen? she said.

Yes, I said.

Why are you wearing that mask? she said.

Because there’s a pandemic, I said.

There’s more to life than just this boring pandemic. Masks really upset me. Seeing people wear them has a negative effect on my mental health.

Aren’t you going to take it off? Now that you’ve seen it’s just me?

No, I said. What can I do for you, Eden?

I came because I thought you might like to see this, she said.

She held out what looked like a school jotter. Rain hit its blue cover and left large splotches next to her name.

I had to come because I was feeling really really bad, she said. That I got that girl’s name wrong the other day. I said it was Emily. It wasn’t Emily, it was Elsie. It really upset me to get it so wrong, I’ve actually had trouble sleeping. So I started looking through all my things from when I was younger. Oh, hi Lea.

Hi, Lea said without looking up.

I went through everything, I thought maybe it’d been thrown out when they converted the loft, I was dreading finding out that it wasn’t there, she said. But it was! It was back behind the divide in the unconverted rafters, it was at the bottom of a black plastic bag behind the paint tins. How do the things that mattered more than anything else, the things that meant so much to us at the time, end up in the plastic bag tucked at the back of the paint tins in the unconverted bit of the loft? Eye dee kay. That means I don’t know.

She opened the jotter.

Large round schoolchild handwriting. Circles over the i’s. Drawings.

Cuttings printed off the internet and sellotaped in. Faded printouts of photos.

She got to the middle pages and folded out two much larger pages decorated to look like wings, as if the project book itself was a winged thing. She smiled an open-mouthed smile at me.

Lea stood up and stretched.

I just want to nip back to the garage and collect something, they said. I won’t be long.

You can’t come back here, I said.

Ede, have you got the car? Lea said.

Eden handed Lea a car key and pointed to where the car was parked down the street. I looked at the name of the school on the jotter. It was a school in a city nearly two hundred miles away.

Brr, Eden said as she watched Lea run. Cold today.

She stepped into the house. I backed further down the hall.

Please don’t come into the house, I said.

But Lea was in the house, she said. Were you telling them a story?

Because if you were then I want one too. It’s okay, I’m well. I’m completely fine. We can go in your book lounge and sit miles away from each other like last time.

How about you maybe leave your project book with me and I’ll read it and we can talk about it when I give it back to you the next time I see you, I said.

You could read it right now, she said.

I’m busy right now, I said.

Lea’s taken the car, she said. I’ll have to wait for them to come back.

You can’t wait here, I said.

Where else would I go? she said.

There are cafes, I said.

It’s way too cold and wet to sit outside a cafe, she said. I’ll die.

If Lea’s gone home maybe you should too, I said.

They’ll be back. They’ve left their stuff, she said.

The wet shirt, the open holdall spilling out clothes and computer gear, were still at the bottom of the stairs. Eden meanwhile was already wandering about flicking her wet hair behind her shoulders in the front room.

Oh for fuck sake, I said.

I crossed behind her and opened the window then came and sat in the stiff breeze as far away from her as possible.

The Scarlet Letter, she was saying as she sat down. That sounds good.

She’d picked it up off the arm of the sofa.

What’s it about? she said.

I’ve never read it, I said. But I know it’s about a woman who has to wear a, a letter, on her chest, I think because she’s had a child with someone she’s not married to.

God. I hope it wasn’t a long letter, that’d be really annoying hanging off your clothes all the time, Eden said.

No, not a letter from someone. A letter of the alphabet. The letter A.

Bright red. A for adulteress, I said.

Romantic, Eden said. Like a laundress, or an air hostess, or a seamstress. Adulteress. Someone from the past who works with adults.

No, well, I said, adulteress is –

Oh em gee! Eden said. It’s signed! By its author!

Uh, I said. Please don’t bend the page back like that.

Is it worth a lot? Eden said. I know, right? Like this is, to me.

She put The Scarlet Letter down and picked up her jotter again. She opened it. Then she started reading out loud:

once there were two girls called Frannie and Elsie. They had different surnames and this is because they were cousins. They were bored one boring summer and one of them it isn’t clear which one from the extensive reading I did for this project but I suspect it was the older taller one because the drawings are very good and quite mature so probably the older one did the drawings of fairies and she stuck hat pins through them so it looked like they were really standing up on a tree log in the grass and taking a sun bath then the girls from Cottingley took photographs of them as if they were really there and exist and they became known as the Cottingley Fairies when their Fame spread. Kodak was fooled Kodak was a major photographery company and knew about photographs and even they could not tell they were faked. Either the photographs or the fairies. A man called Arthur Doyle was fooled he famously wrote about the British hero Sherlock Holmes and he wanted fairies and mysterious things to be real because his stories were full of them so more people would believe his stories were true thus he did a lot of publicity for the fairies which were beautiful and lifelike with beautiful wings even though they were fake he said that the British People wanted to think about the wings of fairies and not be stuck any more in a muddy rut of war. This is because it was in a

time when there was a first world war happening in 1920 and people were upset that their world views were changing and farmers were upset that their fields were being churned into mud and sometimes the farmers that are farming those fields even today in the faraway country of the ee you which we are now leaving where those wars were fought still find pieces of dead bones when they are planting crops for Knock knock.

Dog, barking.

Eden looking terrified.

Okay! I call through to the dog. Enough!

The dog stopped barking.

Oh, Eden said.

She was next to the window and could see who was at the door. She gave me a long sorrowful look.

I went to the front door. Martina Inglis’s eyes above the mask. The lines round them were new but they met my own eyes with the same old challenge.

Want to come out somewhere with me in my fast car?

Where? I said.

It’s a secret, she said.

She had a pair of ice skates hanging by their laces tied together round her neck.

Is it ice skating? I said.

Your local icerink, she said, is not yet accepting members of the public but they recognized my name, I used to be a quite well known medal winner and the manager’s the same age as us so I rang him up, my name rang a bell for him and he did me the favour. An icerink to ourselves. I can’t wait to show you my moves. God, Sand, it’s amazing to see you in person.

Isn’t it amazing? I feel ecstatic, I feel wild and free, I feel young again. This is the furthest from home I’ve been for a year. So this is where you live.

Where did she sleep? Which lampshade did the bird knock into with its wings? I’m looking forward to seeing the actual lampshade.

Mum, Eden said. What are you doing here?

Oh, Martina Inglis said. Eden.

Yeah, Eden said. Me.

What are you doing here? Martina Inglis said taking off her mask and putting it in her coat pocket.

I’m reading to her from my Cottingley Fairies project, Eden said. At least she’s interested in my life. You haven’t answered me. Why are you here?

I’m here to take my old university friend skating, Martina Inglis said.

I can’t skate, I said. Why don’t you take your daughter?

Martina Inglis ignored me.

Who’s looking after Amelie? she said to Eden.

Dad is, Eden said. Plain to see you’re not.

Though it’s your afternoon to.

I left them arguing between the front door and the hall. I slipped into the front room, picked up The Scarlet Letter and slipped it back into its place on the shelf. Then I went to the kitchen, washed my hands. I phoned Viola’s mobile and left a message saying I’d get tested before I’d come in again and asked her to give my father my love.

I got the dog and the lead.

Don’t wait for me to come back, I said. Please just both leave as soon as you can. Close the front window and make sure the door’s locked behind you, will you?

The dog and I got into my car, dog in the passenger seat. They were still arguing at the door when we drove off.

My father’s dog’s name, by the way, was Shep.

I presume Shep’s short for Shepherd and something to do with sheepdogs.

My father has always called all his dogs Shep. This Shep was his fifth.

He names them after an old country and western song about dogs and their fidelity. In the song the dog saves his owner from drowning when he’s a boy. To the rescue he came. Then the day comes when the local dog-doctor tells the owner he can’t do no more for him, Jim, and Jim’s supposed to shoot Shep to put him out of his misery. He picks up his gun and aims it at Shep’s faithful head. But he just can’t do it. He wants to run. He wishes they’d shoot him instead. Anyway, Shep does die in the end though it’s not clear how, and the song assures us that if dogs have a heaven then Shep’s at home there and it’s a wonderful afterlife.

I sang what I could remember of it as we drove.

You’re an old story in a new form, I said to my father’s dog when I got to the end of the song.

She and I exchanged a look.

Shep, I said. I know hallucination’s one of the symptoms with this virus. I’m ill, aren’t I? I’m hallucinating Pelfs. I’m inventing the opposite of isolation precisely so that I won’t mind isolation.

Yes?

Shep looked back at me with an unhurried unworried eye.

Like I’m hallucinating a government, I said, running this country so successfully, with such calculated ineptness that we’ve one of the top death tolls per capita in the world. Of course it can’t be real. Why didn’t I think of that? No wonder it feels so surreal. I’m just – making it up.

Shep eyed the dashboard indifferently.

Or was everything pre-covid the hallucination, and this is the revelation of real realities? I said.

Shep yawned.

I caught the yawn and yawned too.

When we got near my father’s house she began to bark and jump about in her seat. When we got to the house she was overjoyed, leapt round and round in circles the size of her own body on the seat, circles that shook the car. When I let her out she jumped the front gate, arthritic hips and all.

She stood with her head pressed against the front door till I opened it.

She went through the house checking all the rooms looking for him. She checked both gardens. She came back in and settled under the kitchen table, waited there with her eyes all resignation and duty as if that’s what the story of life was, a patient matter of waiting and then the person you’re waiting for comes home.

With any luck, I said. Eh?

I patted her head and scruffed her neck.

I’m sorry I’ve been so unfriendly, I said. My problem, not yours. I’ll do better from now on.

I gave her half the tin of beans I heated up for myself. I’m not sure that was completely wise, but no grief came of it, at least none that I knew about, and it felt a companionable thing to do. Then she and I sat in the room that smelt most like my father and watched some TV together.

What we watched was politicians arguing with each other while people drowned in the narrow patch of sea between here and the rest of Europe.

The politicians were making themselves huge, as bloated as barrage balloons, possibly because they wanted to suggest the people in the water were comparatively negligible, too small even to be real people, so that the

argument would shift from being about people’s lives and deaths and become instead about which of the barrage balloon politicians would win an argument.

I was shouting at the screen so loud that my father’s dog started to howl. So I switched it off.

Is there such a thing, Shep, as evil? I asked her.

Oh yes, Shep said.

What does it look like? I said.

Well, it’s very everyday, really, Shep said. And you’re all capable of it.

You humans. As well as good.

Are creatures other than humans capable of these things too? I said.

That’s an interesting question, Shep said with one paw dandling over the other off the couch in a very poised but casual way. The difference is the point at which time and language meet. Networks of abstract and real meaning, plus how you humans can and do hold concepts and notions about real pasts and imagined futures in your use of verbal language, all this allowing you to weigh sequence and consequence, experience and different possibilities, all of which gives you an inbuilt philosophical impetus, experiential grounding and, yes, means that for you there’s a question of forethought, imagination and choice when it comes to how you act. Let’s start with evil. But how to define evil? Hmm. Take cruelty, let’s call one aspect of it the conscious choice or decision to cause pain to another living being, the forethought at the core of this definition. A decision made, abstractly and / or physically, to be cruel, by a being who has a choice to be or not to be it. Now, we’re different. It’s not that we don’t have an understanding of experience. We do, of course, and we learn. And it’s not that we don’t have our own conception of what’s right and wrong, as well as the cultural inheritance of what you tell us you think is right and wrong, at least the more tamed of us who end up having to listen to you about such things. It’s more that –

I woke up.

Shep’s sleeping head was on my knee.

My phone was buzzing next to Shep’s head.

Not the hospital or Viola. Unknown number.

Yes? I said.

Hi, the real or imagined Lea said. It’s Lea. Will you be back soon?

Only, Eden wants to put Amelie to bed and she’s not sure where’d be best.

Is Amelie at my house now too? I said. When are you leaving?

Our father brought her over, Lea said. Eden was freaking out about being separated from her all day.

So why didn’t she just go home? I said. Is your father there now too?

He’s here, Lea said, but I’m not letting him into the house. He’s outside in his car. He can sleep out there. See how he likes it. There’s no way he’s getting in here.

Why? I said.

This isn’t his space, Lea said. In your absence I’m deciding who’s in and who’s out. Here he’s out. Where are you, by the way?

I’m at eh my friend Shep’s house, I said. It’s quite cold tonight. It’ll be cold out there, I mean for your father, in the car.

If he’s cold he can easily drive home, Lea said.

He could drive you all home, I said.

Anyway the car’s got an excellent heating system. It’s a big car. I can hear him, he’s still arguing like a madman out there, Lea said.

With whom? I said.

Get you, grammar queen. I love that about you. Nobody says that stuff any more. Yeah, him and my mother are having their usual rant. I think the claustrophobia makes it more exciting. There’s nowhere to go in your house. Oh yeah and we had trouble getting your oven to work. Does it work? And have you got a toaster for the morning? We ate without you, I hope you don’t mind. We had a takeaway. He ate his in the car. We phoned that curry place you’ve got the flyer for on the cupboard door in your galley kitchen.

It’s a kitchen kitchen, I said.

We all thought it was a quite good curry, except Eden, she couldn’t taste it, and I don’t know what he thought. But I think it’s done us all good to get away. Get out of the same house. It’s ages since we’ve all been together in a place we don’t know already. Change of scene.

Actually I need you all to get out of my house, I said.

When are you coming back? I know our mother wants to talk to you.

She was wandering round the house picking things up and putting them down like it’s a sacred site or something. And Eden wants to talk to you about how she was bullied by some really horrible girls when she was at school.

Oh dear. Poor Eden, I said.

And where’s the key to the shed? they said. So I can take some photos of your pictures and your working process for the website?

Listen, I said. Your mother and father and sister and you, you too, all of you. None of you will find any answers in my house, or in me. I’m not the story here. You’re not the story. Do you hear me? We’re not the story. In any case, a story is never an answer. A story is always a question.

Yeah but you can’t say that. You don’t know, Lea said.

I know some things. I’m older than you, I said.

Can I ask you politely not to be ageist? Lea said.

These are fragile times, I said. Go out to the car. Make up with your father. Invite him and your mother in. Open one of the bottles of wine in my uh galley. Open them all, if you like, and toast each other, wish each other well. If you don’t, one day you’ll wish you had. And then, all of you. Go home. Please.

Silence.

Then Lea said,

with respect, Sandy, it’s nice of you and all, and I know you believe you’re some kind of storytelling symbolic avatar in our family or whatever.

But you don’t have the right to tell the story of me in that patronizing way, however well-meaning you think you are. Or to second guess what I think about my journey or my story or how I should narrate to other people my own quite massive and yes really pretty wild narrative of what it’s been like to be me, and I think when I say this I’m speaking for my whole family, and how they’d feel themselves about each of their own truths, whether you designate their truths lesser stories or not. Except my father. His is definitely not a story I countenance because he hasn’t countenanced mine.

I think I’m an avatar, do I? I said.

Symbolic, Lea said.

Right, I said. I’ll tell you what this symbolic avatar thinks.

Yeah, thing is you’ve been telling us nothing but what you think since we met, to be honest, and it’s getting a bit wearing, Lea said. And I think, if you’ll accept some respectful advice, your problem here might be connected to the fact that you don’t know or haven’t yet admitted who or what you are.

Any problem here, I said, might stem from the fact that I’ve been dropped feet first against my will and at a really dangerous time into some English seaside resort theatrical farce where I’ve no choice but to –

Yeah but you can’t call one of the most landlocked places in England a seaside resort, Lea said. I’d never be seen dead ordering fish in a restaurant here. If restaurants were open again and serving fish.

Message from me, I said. To all of you. Get the fuck out of my house.

Right now.

Look, I’m really sorry if I’ve offended you, Sandy, Lea said. It’s late now, and Amelie’s just got off to sleep, to be honest it’s been hell for Ede, Amelie’s been grouching all day, she always is when she’s left with our father, and we live a long drive away and anyway as you well know because we’ve already discussed it I’ve got nowhere else to live right now.

Moreover the only reason we’re all still here is because we’ve been waiting all night for you to come back. And now you say you’re not coming back. I mean, you could’ve told us earlier. It’s quite impolite of you that you didn’t.

Christ almighty, I said. Me. Impolite. You’re all in my house against my –

No, I told you, my parents are outside in my father’s car, Lea said.

– and your being in there means I can’t be, because I can’t be near anyone in case I contract something that then might hurt my very unwell father –

Ah, okay. That explains your father fixation, Lea said.

My what? I said.

Hi, Lea said. It’s me.

Yeah, I know who you are, I said, and I know who I am too, and that accusation of a father fixation is sheer transference. If you’d any idea who I am other than your own fictions about me you’d know that actually I have a mother fixation. But that’s not a part of this story.

No. It’s me, it’s Eden, the real / imagined Eden said. Where are you?

I’ve got so much to tell you. Amelie’s here. She’s longing to meet you. She wants you to tell her a story. She’s very keen to get into your shed and play with the paints.

Oh Christ, I said. That’s all I need.

Maybe when you get back you’ll show us where the key is. And Rory’s on his way.

Who’s Rory? I said.

My partner. Amelie’s father. I know he’d love to meet you too, he’s been abroad on business for my dad, he landed half an hour ago, he’s on the Heathrow Express.

He’ll have to quarantine, I said. Don’t let him into my house.

Oh, he’ll be fine, en bee dee, Sandy. That means no big deal. We never get ill in our family. And we all know each other so no precautions necessary. My father wants to talk to you too. Not about your and my mother’s relationship or anything, don’t worry, it’s a work thing, he reckons he’s had one of his visions and that this is a neighbourhood ripe for pelfing, and he’s always right about these things, he’s got a sixth sense. He wants to ask you about it.

Ripe for pelfing, I said.

I don’t know if you know, Eden said. Apart from the new PPE

manufacture initiative and the daily running of Insectex he’s also a really well known property developer.

I don’t actually own the house that your whole family’s just taken over, I said. I only rent it.

Uh huh, we know, Eden said, we’ve already been in touch with the guy who owns most of your street. But my father thinks you might be able to talk generally, be a horse’s mouth he says though God knows what that’s supposed to mean, and tell him things about what it’s like, you know, the ups and downs of living in the neighbourhood.

The neighbourhood.

Steve, who has a full-sized skeleton from his days as a medic and kept it in the passenger seat of his van till people walking past complained their children were scared of it and that it gave them virus nightmares. So Steve moved it into his house instead and now it gazes out of the front window sporting seasonal accoutrements, a boater and a bow tie for summer, a Santa hat and tinsel at Christmas. Children now regularly congregate outside Steve’s house laughing and pointing and taking selfies with it behind them.

Carlo, the bus driver and part-time lecturer in creative writing for people who take the courses he runs for no money in the summer months at the botanical gardens.

Marie and Jaharanah, who work in the care system and are looking older than I’ve ever seen them, grimmer and grimmer, more and more worn down, the lights in their house are on day and night and even though they’ve been working endless shifts they still deliver food every day in their beaten-up Mini to people who can’t leave the house and have been delivering the occasional bag of groceries to me too since my father, and I don’t even know how they know.

Madison and Ashley, the youngest of our neighbours. All I know about them is that they’re a couple and they always wave and say a friendly hi though we haven’t met properly yet.

Eden, meanwhile, had clearly been talking about something traumatic that happened to her when she was at school.

I think it was envy. They were all envious of me, she was saying.

Character forming, I said.

I know, right? she said. I knew you’d understand.

When are you all leaving? I said. And how do you know I rent my house? That’s private information.

Well duh. It’s online, Eden said.

Which reminds me, hi, it’s Lea again, Lea said taking back control of the phone. That website you commissioned me to do.

I didn’t commission you to do anything, I said.

Yeah you did. I brought my other computer back this afternoon, I can do it easily now, Lea said. If you can tell me how to open the shed. I’ve already taken some images of the outside of it, and some of your living spaces I thought’d be relevant, some alcoves, trinkets on your bedside table, things in the bathroom etc. But if you can gather photos or screengrabs of your past works so we can include them all in a timeline, and can you do a career timeline separately with CV stuff on it, that’d be good, also contacts etc, and you’ll need to write a brief biog or I can do it for you from what’s on the net already.

I don’t want a website, I said. I don’t give you or any of your family permission to go into my studio, I don’t give you permission to take any images of anything to do with my life or work, and I don’t give you permission to construct a website for me.

Yeah but you really can’t be an artist without a website, Lea said. What are you laughing at?

I hung up in the middle of Lea explaining to me how much I owed (mates’ rates) for the time they’d already spent on building the website.

I patted my father’s dog’s head.

I went up and remade my father’s bed so I could sleep in it.

So what if they got into the studio?

En bee dee.

So what if Amelie played with the paints?

I’d want to, if I were her.

So what if something or someone happened to mess with or ruin a picture I’d been working on for over a year?

The poem wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.

There’d always be more paint.

I could start again.

Imagine better.

Here was Martina Inglis in my head, old self and young self both at once spinning like a health and safety hazard on ice, dressed in white, blades for feet, little shavings of the ice flying away from them as she spins, arms high above her head like the neck of a swan. On either side of her, bookending her: Eden Pelf sitting on the cold surface and placing a tiny shard of ice that one of her mother’s spins has flicked in her direction on her tongue, hesitantly, experimentally, see if she can taste it; Lea Pelf crosslegged and passionate, watching their mother spin but secretly altogether elsewhere, engrossed in the glare of the ice and in their own hand on that ice pressed hard against it as if to try, with determination, real resolve, how long they can bear to press themself up against a regulated coldness indifferent to warmth,

but what did I know?

I knew nothing really, about anything or anybody.

I was making it up as I went along, like we all are.