London Underground II

She glanced at the man who got on at Goodge Street. City type shoes and handsome face cast into a bored over-boiled sort of mask, mouth turned down, humbug-sucking. He looked heart-stopped, or else had pulled out the stops from his heart & drizzled it dry, draining it away for the six-figure sum he earned at work, the funds he ‘managed’. Yep. He was definitely one of those cityslick sinners who sunk whole companies with their sneaky share trading. She already had the measure of him. He'd snatched the pearl from the purse of his own oyster heart, and sold it for stocks and shares a long time ago.

Of course, within a few seconds he had pulled out the Times. His predictability sickened her, sank in the pit of her stomach. Businessmen will always look like this, and the world will go round and they thrive on money and society showers them with status, though their morals rise and fall with the share price.

Those bigshot Merchant Wankers, Rachel thought, viciously twisting her tongue around a cherry stem. She had taken to knotting cherry stalks in her mouth, as a distraction from her perennial chewing gum habit. A stem snapped in her mouth. She dropped it into her hot cupped palm and stashed it in her pocket. She kept the successfully knotted stalks in her left pocket, and the disappointments in her right. She liked the the unevenly blunt jangle of the pockets against her thighs; she liked the idea that beneath the boring denim exterior she carried unpredictable hand-delves of colour.

The doors slid open like a sleek dress, revealing London's shimmering skin. Rachel hurried down the platform, suffused with desire for the shining world around her. She marched along the dirty yellow line at the edge of the platform, using it to navigate past flumes of saris, badly fitting pink shirts , a man’s skinny bottom wiggling unconvincingly in cream denim, women bedecked with gold jewellery and jangling hipsways.

Rachel kept moving – yet the sudden sneaking suspicion of a voice, of a complication, made her turn back. The train doors slammed shut and a swift surprise in the form of an almost- broken nose hit her, hard.

“Oh, shit, I'm so – so – “ Her brown eyes flashed and swelled indignantly, golden flashes of fury like sparks bursting from the brown earth.The bespoke suited man soothed his shoulder where she had collided with it. He smiled and held out a stroke of luck in the palm of his hands.

“You left this on the train, I thought you might want it.” The knotted cherry stem glimmered on his fingers.

43 bus journey

Naath Laaandaan. Get the '43 winding around Tavistock Terrace, Alexandra Road - the automated lady voice seduces me with the sound of memory itself, smoothing the bus short and stopping before a tube station - a park with exercise bikes - a church fete dubbed 'feel good festival' - a shrubless scrubland ironically bearing the words 'Islington was in finals for Britain in Bloom'. The sign shines in earnest, seemingly unaware of its own self-ridicule, and I realise that this concrete cornucopia is the place that I call home.

jellyfish

A stinging spike like a burn in the back of the neck, no, in the back, like an icecream cone of steel in the stick of the spine.

It happened in the sea by the rockcombed beach. We were swimming with the moss tangled around our feet, stars of seaweed blossomed at the bottom of the sea or sky as we swam in circles around the grotesque, inflatable green crocodile. We'd bought it from a dusty shop nearby, selling tat & packed with French families.

I felt the sting in the small of the spine. It bit and the pain held on, like a furious lover's parting shot. I turned my hand to my back in an admonishing slap and found soft mollusc wobble...I screamed; the jellyfish inflated to a suffocating balloon, formed a suction around the patch of skin and pulled...

I shrieked and shoved. The jellyfish lump parted like that jumped-up lover leaving, through the briny ocean of memories. Gone. I swam back to what I knew with a lump in the small of my back, wounded by the whispers of the deep.

hiraeth

I sit here in the small of the back of London, crouched, tense in the hollow at the base of its Underground spine, only stopping through. In just twenty hours, I have seen the vivid, thorny green of my home: the wild garden, the grapes, the cream and the raspberries. Here I lived, living, live? Impossible to translate into present the beauty of the past: walking through Alisa's room is like walking through a ruin: it seems like relics, and it's difficult not to drift back in time. I come back home - home- home - and brim with love and sadness in the dark sweet night. Mum is writing a piece about lodgers, about the last great lodger - Alisa - like the great Roman ruler at the end of an empire. Soon she'll sell this place, and then we'll have to leave it behind, our great home, our great lives here. The photographer comes and we stand on the stairs, in her room, in the garden, and swap smiles that are so real . And so, in one big burst of love we reduce the moments of the past, the years, our house in Green Eggs And Ham to a few flat photographs. Yet we all live on; I joke that mum's stolen my novel, reduced my debut drama to some piece in the Home pages, but I'm secretly not afraid - there will be far more tales to tell along the way - in which Alis, Mum and Shaz will doubtless make quite a few appearances...

Bath

The green grey landscape, turquoise baths with golden Roman columns and silver rusty springs filling pools with antiquated coindrops of water, fountain money... outside the rain strikes like slim silver, threads silver steam so it's rising from the blue green pool like Time: eternally escaping...leaving only tiny water droplets, the residue of memory, in our palms.

frockshock

Nothing fits my fretting state, so I trip
into a chintzy charity shop and quickly strip
off my own tear-stained stock, only to slip
my fingers into silk rosed topshop frock and quip
to myself that it’s far too baggy for my newfound
state,that even if I bought it I would hate
the bump of fabric at the front,
the little rosy tucks,
the cotton crib at the pit
of the stomach, a reminder of the blip
that forces me to peel the dress from skin and slip
it on the hanger, return it to the plummy woman
at the till, lower my pregnant glance and quickstep out of
the shop of hand-me-downs, eyes bursting at the seams:
from this gold-daisied dress I glimpsed or guessed
the shape of things that might have been.

The Red Academic

Property is theft anyway - at least, that's what I tell myself when stealing from my flatmates' shelves in the fridge...

"If property is theft then intellectual property is just stealing from the communal body of knowledge. My only hope is if ideas cannot be owned by anyone, if ideas exist purely as selfless facets of human wisdom rather than claimed & copyrighted snippets of someone's thoughts. Losing copyright over intellectual property would mean that no-one would strive for originality, to say something new, because they could not derive personal glory or fame for it - if good, it would be shamelessly repackaged and plagiarised. That way originality would no longer be the pinnacle of human achievement. This would leave people free to learn for learning's sake, not for fame, and search for what is 'right' or what seems truthful, rather than what is original. Too often people say something purely because it's new, exciting, unusual - with little regard for the truth of their statement.Surely pointless to distract readers from the pursuit of human truths, in search of novelty?"