“Relationship? What relationship? You were just renting a room.” Gaslighting hadn’t reached Somerset in 1995 but even if it had I’m not sure I’d have named it, I was that shocked. In his kitchen, the uneven floor and books falling over, the dog looking up at me, I’d made the mistake of naming that other thing, heartbreak, betrayal, cruelty. He looked at me and I looked at him and only one of us was brazening it out. I went to stay with my friend at Longleat, a yurt dry and mossy hidden from the tourists where I slept to the roar of lions. My friend was building a stone circle for Lord Bath. He’d built the one at Glastonbury festival, he’d built the one in the garden I had left. He told me he doesn’t love you as firm and solid as the stones he handled. I tripped as I went from yurt to kitchen fire and almost fell in it, had the impression of flying straight as an arrow, both feet off the forest floor, toward the iron frame that held the cooking pots suspended in his outdoor home. Pigtails didn’t love me. It was true. I returned to the farmhouse on the Somerset Levels with its wonky kitchen and uneven floor and unfair advantage and said goodbye to the dog. I packed my bags. I don’t remember the goodbye. He was probably whining on about unconditional love. Still itching, still with hurt snaking from ankle to hip, I drove my pink camper to a cottage buried deep in a dripping wood where a folk band lived who were kind, who I knew, who let me stay. In their bathroom I cut off my hair with kitchen scissors, and with a razor shaved it down to the skin. When I looked in the mirror I cried. In the sitting room was a crowd making plans for a Rainbow Gathering*. They had a coach like the ones used for school trips to Box Hill, thirty children racing for the back row, someone being sick only this one had all the seats ripped out and sofas put in. Curtains were hung on the many windows, a kitchen had been installed and there were no children or anyone racing anywhere. There was a bed, large and messy, where me and my agonised spine and shaved head were installed as we waved goodbye to the folk band friends, the cottage in the dripping wood and set off for Czechoslovakia.
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What is going on? This felt so trippy.