Andy calls these word paintings. I like that. I’ve lit the fire. It burns at my back. I’m crouched on the settle, knees high, I hear its breathing, I’d forgotten how lovely it is. The armchairs face each other across the coffee table, cushions arranged by the last person there, the one to my right has them piled against an arm by my son who’ll have sat with his legs sideways dangling, a cat on him purring, all chores released from because who can disturb that. The sofa opposite is as if I have lain longways yesterday. The lamps on either side have odd shades, one dented yellow the other pleated white. It’s easy to forget those squat wooden tables on which they sit aren’t tables at all but props for a coffin to be placed in a nave and had a body in wood placed upon them, people crying. A pale beam divides the ceiling, on this side to my left hangs a small portrait from the Ellie Heads painted by my friend, she used me as her modal, we met when I’d shaved my hair away. Lower on the wall, drawings of the skeleton of a horse. A long window, broad sill, shutters open to the still dark of early morning, and there is my childhood playhouse, old plastic and red, rescued from London where it would have been thrown away. A table that used to be in the kitchen sits before it, moved there for my son’s keyboard and decks, left idle while he’s away. Beyond it the cat tower fluffy and ugly, comfortable and cheap. On the far wall, pictures arrange haphazardly above a sideboard of collected things; a close-up photograph of a dragonfly, a screen print by the boy with whom I ran away to India, I think it’s the hill of Golgotha but unless he reads this I’ll never know. There’s a pen and ink drawing of the hallway in France, a painting of my back by the pool, reading, done many years ago, a strange vulture beast sketched by my niece, her porcelain spoons on the polished wood below clink pleasingly when I touch them. There’s a charcoal of Samson curled twice, and a distorted by night water body swimming in rainbow costume. It hangs behind the bust of my father, today he wears his tight curled lambswool winter hat and a rosette from the pier at Glastonbury declaring him a winner. There are sketches of my brother and I looking exactly like my children. There are the nails that fell out of me, a photograph of my great aunt, square in tartan, there is a Nick Cave Polaroid given me by Andy, it has a black panther in it. And a Pink Floyd vinyl album cover leans at the back, a pig flying over Battersea Power Station, wish you were here. It goes on, this collection, to the wall on my right, the architectural drawings of a brutalist building, a deer and a lion getting married in a wood, a bell jar and the valentines card I made for my Pa when I was five that I thought he’d tossed aside uncaring but discovered years later that he’d kept. The broad wide floor is empty, swept clean, this room of many doors, to hall, garden, office, snug, kitchen and stairs is a gallery of thoughts. And at my back, propped against the dusty black wall, obscured by the wood burner flue, a thin plank of wood declares that God Is In The House.
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I could offer it as a weird literary service, me being the weird bit, I’ve realised it’s my idea of fun. Also, I’ll have an earl grey, thanks.
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