I buy a ticket and take the train. “I am a rock, I am an island,” is singing somewhere at the back of my head. If I’d never loved I never would have cried. Simon & Garfunkel: the inseparable duo who separated, the proof of human division, of communication break down. I am a rock, I convince myself, and a rock feels no pain, so it is better to be a rock, after all. I travel abroad and I am anonymous, independent. I travel abroad and the closest thing to home is the little purple passport in my back pocket.

A few weeks on, the same story: I buy a ticket, take the train – from Cardiff, this time. There are scatterings of Welsh-speaking softness on the platform, people here and there with a lilt of homeland about them. I listen in, briefly, but choose a different carriage to the silver-tongued Celts. I have no need of home, of attachment, of hiraeth, I tell myself. And an island never cries.

I get off the train, haul my blue suitcase over the bridge. The suitcase has a faded brown leather tag on it, with my grandparents’ name and address handwritten on it. Return to sender: the suitcase and I are going home.

Lemon sole, chicken soup, crème catalan. I produce tokens from my rucksack: a yellow eggcup and a flowery china mug for tea. There are really beautiful buckets of roses on the landing.

After the operation she has lost a stone and a half. Her smile and her eyes are the same crinkly marmalade though.

We eat together. They normally divide the labour up, and Emi does the potatoes and the bread and butter. Now though, after the op, Emi has had to take on all the food-furnishing. The family are sending Waitrose food hampers up so that they have plenty of ready meals and fresh fruit and veg, to make mealtimes easier. Of the food hamper items, the lemon sole and crème catalan rule supreme. It's great that she's eating now. Each mouthful disappears like a stealthy cat around a corner, but the mouthfuls are thin as petals and her appetite is wilting. We start the crossword, but she wants to go back to bed. Emi and I chaperone her up the stairs and it is the most important thing I have done all month, all year maybe. We are supposed to stand behind her in case she falls but it is not our bodies which protect her from falling.

I come back down the stairs slowly , trying not to let feelings form like thin skin atop boiled milk. I am not a rock, nor an island. Simon and Garfunkel were wrong, totally wrong. When I get to the bottom of the stairs, thinking about the food hamper, the cards, roses, visits, presents, my grandfather looks up from the crossword. “to support another, six letters. What d’you think that is?”

It’s family, I want to say. It’s love, Emi. It’s you.

sainsberries and bustivals

The sweet-sweating physicality of it, the way the words run their way around your head without stopping for breath, the way their imprint leaves its inky footprint on your thought-tracks like print from a newspaper, the trace of which will just not leave your fingers.
~~
She would not leave my mind. The bus was heaving with shopping, earphones rollicking as the back of the bus bumps and grinds with modernity. I see streetwise kids spitting music like it’s white fire or fruitstones - the heavy beat of R&B on their phones is a pallid imitation of the real thing: women kids men rapping on the street at Carnival, colours swaying and rubbing, exploding. She got on the bus quickly, heaved her Guantanamo orange Sainsbury’s bags on top of mine on the luggage rack and sat down.

“I’m so sorry, would you like me to move my bags?”

She smiles, her nose gem sparkles at me in the electric light. She has a soft voice that reminds me of sundried apricots, and her skin is the warm brown of light muscovado sugar caramelized. “Nah, darlin’, don’t worry, it’s fine. I just wanna keep my guitar next to me.”

Curious, I sneak a peek at her Sainsbury’s bag. Gluten-free Fairtrade chocolate stars and organic muesli. Her handbag is made of gold-sprayed Coke can ringpulls. I always thought that recycling ringpulls, one of the brash symbols of consumerism, would result in tackiness. Not so: her handbag looks pretty damn fine. She has fashion-friendly sandals and full makeup on, but when she picks up her designer phone it’s to tell someone that she’s been, “In India. Yeah. What’ve I been doin’? You know me, darlin’, pretty much huggin’ trees the whole time. Yeah. Just been to the Southbank actually. Hmm? I was busking. Yeah, thought I might catch some inspiration.”

She is a paradoxical mix of urban and nature-loving, of eco-friendly and consumerist. Here she is, looking like the hottest woman around for miles, on the latest mobile phone with her non-reusable Sainsbury’s bags, yet she is also a tree-hugging busker with a tendency for ethical eating. I love her, because her environmentalism is a positive part of her life, intertwined with having fun and making clothes and music. I love her, because her love of life radiates through her. Her urban and eco, her fashion and ethics, are not conflicting spheres ( I realize): here is someone who loves life, and who also wants to protect it. Who seeks harmony in every sense of the word.

A mother gets on, hauling a baby in one arm and a pushchair in the other. The young woman and I shift our stuff quickly, so she can get on.

Behind me, a South African woman chuckles: “Ladies,” she giggles, “would you ever see men carrying such baggage? Never! Never! We always do the shopping, we always pick up the clothes from the launderette! We always carry the load! Men never carry anything!”

The young sugarbrown woman winks at me. “I don’t do nobody’s laundry, babe!” she exclaims, and we all giggle. I feel sorry for the man hunched up behind us, reading the Telegraph. He is pretty defenceless against our sexism. He is carrying nothing.

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.