She is a small framed woman, about 80 years of age, mockingbird footprints cast over her shimmering eyes. Madness has roosted in her once onyx bob, now discoloured with smatterings of ash and mercury. Her distorted and bent pale face can be seen reflected back through the mirror as she straightens her hair and the collar of the brilliant white uniform bearing the logo of Apple Lodge Residential Hospital.
-An excerpt from my short story on Snow White, in progress.
A Short Story
In Harlem it was Hispanic and Caribbean kids, their faces smiling broadly on an unusually hot September afternoon spent playing in the spray of taxi-cab yellow fire hydrants. In Vancouver there were the prostitutes, tears streaming down their chins and breasts, clutching red roses, the gifts of young do-gooders. Prints from a never-sleeping city in the far east, like stones and glass blocks stacked high and wide, adorned with year-round festive lights, crowns and jewels advertising and flashing in the Hong Kong midnight. In Tehran, the eyes peering out into the lens of my Canon from blackened veiled faces, some content, some afraid, some defiant.
Film strips impregnated with moments, memories and faces. My world has become infinitely smaller recently, confined to the threadbare burgundy, lumpy and stained navy, new and firm brown sofas in the lives and comfort of the moments, memories and homes of friends.
It’s the catch-22 of being a freelance photojournalist: needing the funds to travel to make the money to do what you really love over and over again. It was all coming along so well when my means to travel hung a sign on its door – ‘Shop for Sale’. More boards would inevitably come to hide the vacated face of a once thriving local family food shop, and the only decent one around selling things made by the grandmotherly woman at the back rather than a factory machine in nameless Europe. Yet another victim of the economy-bites-the-dust on a nondescript East London street losing it’s identity and history.
And my own history and identity – my work, my own tangible scraps of memories, hopes, dreams and passions – boxed up and kept for a time we’re all hoping and praying for. Kept in a climate-controlled aluminium-clad box for as long as the royalties will keep on paying.
It’s been two months of shuffling around friends’ living rooms, always trying not to wear my welcome thin. I spend most of my days in libraries or wandering up those boarded-up streets snapping photos of my urban nightmare. But looking out the window here and seeing the flowers cropping up, I’m really thankful it’s spring. I can’t imagine hauling my one rucksack through the London winter.
I’ve never been in one place long but always had a place to return to. I use to get my sense of who I was from my freedom to keep moving. Now, that feeling has been obliterated by my inability to just stay in one place. I feel like the recently unemployed city businessman walking around the streets near Bank, suited and carrying a case but with no real destination or purpose. Just going through the motions of existing and trying not to forget what it means to be alive.
Coming here earlier today a homeless guy stopped me to ask for some change. He’d seen my camera and must’ve assumed I was a tourist or had money of some sort. He said that he’d worked for a local paper in his hometown up north taking photos until it went bust. I wonder if that’s how he ended up wearing mismatched and frayed gloves, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on top of a tired sleeping bag pan-handling at Euston. Surely a guy like that could do some work for the Big Issue or something, right?
I’m clean, not begging, living on the edge but not on the street. The world doesn’t know that all I lay claim to is tucked away in storage or in my rucksack. I wonder if people looked into my eyes like those veiled eyes in Tehran, would they see what is otherwise hidden from plain sight? Would they give a shit? Or will I just end up moving from hostel to hostel for the rest of my life or as one of these nameless inconvenient tramps passed up by thousands of high and mighty Londoners? Turns out I’m the poster boy of homeless London after all.
For more info on the hidden homeless see http://www.crisis.org.uk/pages/about-hidden-homelessness.html. BBC Three is currently recruiting for people to contribute towards a new documentary on the issue of sofa surfing so stay tuned for that to come out (https://www.facebook.com/groups/346516022042076/).
Nearly all the way through January now and I’ve got somewhat ambitious plans for this new year. Chiefly, it seems as though it will be a year for learning and growing. Thus the reason I’ve questioned if it’s actually the year of the owl for me, inspiring wisdom and such. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve got owls on the brain as you’ll see in my other post today, a piece of short fiction I wrote for my creative writing course.
As I’ve said a few times on this blog (and will leave you to trawl through previous posts to find where!) I have always enjoyed writing and I struggle to do enough of it. When I do I usually have something on my mind to rant about. Thus my journey in writing from a young child writing imaginative fiction to a high school student writing angsty poems and ranting in the school paper and now an adult blogging occasionally. I’m not sure if it’s only me (and suspect it’s more of us than I’ll ever know) but at 34 I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up- and I was comforted in this experience at church this weekend when the vicar acknowledged this as felt by many and that it’s okay as we’re always growing up. One thing is certain though: writing is always something I come back to.
So armed with this conviction I set off to re-ignite my creativity in writing and to challenge myself with writing fiction rather than editorial and so signed up for an 11-week Creative Writing class. Two weeks in, I admit that the discipline is a struggle and while I do manage to sit down for a chunk of time once a week I know that I will need to cultivate more time and space in my life to truly become the writer that I think I might be. I received my copy of ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg today as recommended by my tutor to be a must-have book for every writer, and having read the first couple chapters today and getting choked up I am so grateful for this course and the input into my life.
I can see that with some of the message of this book coupled with the practicalities of the course, I am going to be well and truly confronted with who I am or more specifically who I am masking. The author is a practitioner of Zen meditation and pitches writing as an act of meditation and embracing one’s true self. As someone who has connected through writing in so many ways holistically- spiritually, emotionally, physically- I felt a sense of liberty in just reading her words and realise that I’m in for more than just a few lessons on how to write haiku or short stories.
I plan on posting some of my writing here under the category ‘The Writing Pad’ so if you’re into that kind of thing please feel free to feedback. This is about learning and growing as a writer and most importantly as an individual. Some of my writing may be disturbing and dark, some bright and silly. I hope you’ll enjoy going on this journey with me.
I imagine an owl, sitting on a beam in the corner of the bakery’s roof as the sun sleepily rises. It watches a honey bee crawling on a periwinkle wild flower that grows between slabs of pavement, the seed having been dropped out of the pocket of a passing guerilla gardener earlier that spring.
A woman stands in the bakery, sleepily looking out through the glass, her faded apron tied tightly about her. She stirs carelessly as batter drips off the side of her pink mixing bowl onto the edge of her shiny red flats and the grey floor below. Behind her, rows of books with the occasional floury fingerprint and dogged edges, one missing which sits open nearby, its place marked with an old creased photo of an infant’s first day home from hospital.
She thinks for the thousandth time of the glass placed carelessly too close to the edge of the side table and the hot and hostile words which spilled out as it fell, like sharp red wine which had stood open and neglected on the shelf for too long.
She sets the bowl down and wipes the edge of her shiny red shoe, recalling the resolve with which she had then put on her shoes, which had seemed lighter to walk in and away. She smiles as she turns and presses down the edges of the photograph, feeling a deeply seeded sense of wisdom and a satisfaction that a growing daughter had been given new wings to dance on the wild flowers that still grow in spite of hard grey paving slabs.
Walking to work this morning, the sky was a great s t r e t c h of cloudless blue.
I knew that there must be some light out there ……………………..
I came to enjoy the game of searching for (pockets of light) in the darkness, reflections of the sun that was surely out there somewhere.
Through crevices between houses, along the backside of gardens overgrown with weeds and thorns, dancing in the windows. Eventually I caught glimpses as the buildings spaced out yet still it ducked and dived from my sight.
As I approached the open square, the intensity around me began to increase and build.
Finally, as I broke through my surroundings, there it stood as it had all along.
It hadn’t changed.
Only my own position had.
I wrote this piece not as a way of ‘preaching it’ to my atheist or ‘unbelieving’ friends but as, well, a good kick in the bum for my ‘believing’ or ‘orthodox’ friends- or more specifically to those who are pretty certain they know what truth is and can recognise what it isn’t.
I use to make such claims and probably still am enlightened arrogant enough to do so now on occasion (well, don’t we all?). I recall a conversation I had recently with someone who reminded me of the good old (?) Christian proverb (not the kind in the bible… the kind that someone made up and it’s followed us around doggedly for aeons) that just a bit of untruth makes the whole thing a lie. I think most people put it a bit more whimsically than that but the exact phrase now escapes me, but you get the gist. I use to wield that one around myself but as it was reiterated to me I thought, now wait, that’s not exactly right.
I’m in a place in life now where I believe that God does dwell, as the psalmist claims, everywhere, in everything- even in the worst of places, Sheol (death). Yes there’s a load of rubbish in this life but there are gems buried in deep within the dust and debris. I believe that were we to demonstrate to people where God was already at work in the world and in their own lives, more people would want to know him.
As we journey though the urban landscape of our lives, the light may not be blinding us. It may be that we seldom, if ever see the sun. But often times we perceive it in its reflection in the glass and we wouldn’t recognise the shape of shadows if it was absent. People may be closer to the light than we give them, or Christ, credit for.
Look for the glimmers of light and help others recognise them. It can be a fun game.
