(Not pictured: Audrey Griffin fulminating round the next corner)
“I love you, Bee. I’m trying. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Bernadette Fox to her daughter during a car-trip while they listen to, and discuss, Abbey Road by The Beatles in Where’d You Go, Bernadette
I’d been pottering around earlier scratching my head over the significance of today’s date. It kept staring back at me throughout the morning. Checking my phone, flicking through my diary, composing a letter. There’s something about today. It took till lunchtime to twig it.
I was in a similarly listless state that morning, landing in late to a Mexican heave of relief across speechless faces. What? Surely being late isn’t a crisis that merits this reaction.
The news was haemorrhaging across the city. Russell Square. Tavistock Square. Edgeware Road. They meant little to me before. Now they’re universally known place-names synonymous with death and destruction.
The eeriness trickled southwards over the bridge as the day wore on. Peckham. Camberwell. Brixton. All reverent wake houses with business not as usual, heads shaking in disbelief.
A few posts back I mourned my own wee corner of London. Friday evenings down The Hermit’s Cave where we…
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Smack bang in the middle of a belly laugh, interrupting myself to correct a detail in her version of the re-telling of a yarn involving some hi jinx the pair us got up to; pausing to get the odd passing in-joke it might take me a second to remember. Short-hand chat, one finishing the other’s victories or injuries, euphemisms we forget that others can’t ever remember. Fighting passionately over the most trivial things (whether it’s better to wash dishes with or without detergent (it was a stressful time); I AM better at reading maps; you did NOT say that etc.); flitting to the most indulgent excesses of praise volunteered for on behalf of the other (“you’re amazing at y”, “you’re fucking brilliant at x”). Giggling at how we both bagged coloured-in versions of dreams, the outlines of which we had devoted hours to drawing (“he’ll be quiet but he’ll get you”; “you’ll have four, three girls, one boy”). Wondering. Reading the silence. Interpreting wrongly. Righting it with a hug. Not going home just yet. Yet knowing that’s where we each belong now. Too far from one another. Too many missed laughs between us; too few opportunities to be ridiculous; and always feeling all the lighter for it. The raging range of destinations that only a session with a best mate can lead to.
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In response to a ten minute writing prompt from me feathered aul mucker, Wee Blue Birdie, with the topic “Where would you rather be right now?” Feel free to grab and get gabbling with it.
department of speculation 