I Live Here Now

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I had to keep reminding myself that it was really there before me, suddenly envisaged at the end of this dark grey stony town, sunk in the shade at the edge of the sea firth. A few people walk across the circus and every few hours there is a burst of noise and cheer from children playing in the school ground across the road. It makes me appreciate and be present in my environment and enables me to create a more ‘true’ account of how it feels for me to be in a particular place.

I found this flat deeply reassuring when I lived in Moscow as a student, and loved the many times when we sat about until it was late and they said to stay the night, and made up the narrow hard bed in the far room under the shelves of Mandelstam and Gumilev, where I slept and dreamed much more deeply than at our student hostel, anticipating the languorous next day of slowly getting up and drinking tea, and more and more conversation. Nadia, me, my children — to and fro and round about with the person opposite and the person by your side and then moving as a four, on to the next line.

Planning trips, looking for tickets, for timetables, was the regular punctuation of my life, but it was also a distraction and an anxiety. If anything they seem to be more their written selves, in place, taking their cue from the way I described them. Like the last time I said goodbye to my adoptive Russian family, after their long awaited and only visit to London.

Many of the larger lumps had taken flight, descended to the pavement, and there were bare gaps where once there had been bouncy hillocks of green.The women had come out of their facing doors and we stood together in the hallway under the strip light, the hallway where I had watched the people in their white papery suits standing, pausing a moment in their gruesome work, the hallway through which the woman had been carried out in the early hours of the day before.