Notebook

Fragments, essays and field notes

  • Car crash romance

    There were three chairs lined up against the wall in the school chaplain’s office. He’d taken me out of a lesson to talk about something.

    “Take a seat,” he said.

    I chose the middle one.

    “It’s funny — everyone always picks that one.”

    Then he said: “So, tell me about these poems you’ve been writing.”

    Shit. Someone had told.

    I was 15 and struggling with a break-up with my first love. For reasons unclear to everyone except the wounded boy at the keyboard, I had started publishing poems about the ordeal on MySpace, where anyone from my state school in Bolton could read them.

    The chaplain asked me to explain the meaning of a poem I’d titled “Car Crash Romance”. My finest work to this day. It was about heartbreak, betrayal and death. I don’t know how he managed to keep a straight face as I explained that the catastrophic car crash was a metaphor for the whole thing.

    If stanza is Italian for room, please get me out of this one.

    “I’m sorry,” I said, my face burning. “I’ll delete them all.”

    “Well, you don’t have to do that,” he said. “I’m concerned about you more than anything else. I just want you to know I’m here if you want to talk. My door is always open.”

    I deleted the poems when I got home, determined to avoid the limelight of the middle seat for the rest of my school career. Then I closed my laptop, got into bed and stared at the ceiling.

    I was embarrassed. Ashamed. I decided I would never write about this kind of shit again.

  • Shepherd’s pie

    For reasons I may never go into, I’ve been back and forth to my parents’ house in Greater Manchester for the past year or so, living there for months at a time. Every time I returned to the vicarage, they’d cook my favourite: sheppy.

    I can taste it now. Mum or Dad peeling the potatoes. Baked beans mixed into the mince — unorthodox, but right. The Pyrex dish waiting for the oven to do the Lord’s work. My plate garnished with pickled beetroot and lashings of HP sauce. Two people quietly making room for me again. Me, eating sheppy with the same useless gratitude, unable to say much beyond how good it always is.

  • Tunnels

    Tunnels

    I heard the tunnels knocking after midnight. “The Northern line is the loudest,” I said. I always say that. There were only one or two other people in our carriage; the country was still in lockdown.

    We sat opposite each other, speaking loudly through our masks. When the masks fell we’d fix them back in place. Our eyes did most of the talking when the trembling tracks filled the carriage. Your eyes were like doves.

    You spoke of how you’d check your work again once you got home. If you noticed a mistake, you’d log back in and correct it. Those words gave me comfort, coming from you. Your conversation was sweetness itself.

    I find consolation in how newspapers work, news websites even more so. In print, the second edition provides an opportunity to correct mistakes. Online, a story can be republished with tweaks. Every given moment, we’re given another chance.

    You rose for your stop, said goodnight. Safe travels. You went down into some other draughty corridor, to home, to sleep.

    This post includes references to the Song of Songs 5-6