I Live Here Now

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It is true that they seem to be more constant these days, a permanence in their windows, continually painting and working. In the summer the friend who had formed our band and I were out walking one day along the canal and looked down to see the scrubby patch of land behind the pub now fenced off, strewn with sawdust and packed with revellers — outdoor drinking had just been allowed, and the landlords had wasted no time in creating their own Beer Garden out of the muddy bank. Someone is certain it was Patti Smith shuffling into the local Co-op on Friday night, wearing sunglasses and slippers. From the top of Leith Walk the blurry blue outlines of land on the other side of the Firth are like Greek islands.

A ghost house, summoned from the whitewashed walls and thick white tablecloths of London restaurants which must now suffice as places to meet. Instead of talking with new words I swop texts and translations with Crown Letter friends who I have never met in person, we try out words between us, send them back and forth from our screens. And although they walked along the pavement in groups, their shadows passed in separate single procession — a silent puppet play against the wall.

We had laboured and given birth in the hospitals, and kept watch over people close to us on the wards: friends, partners and children, through times of extremity, fear and danger. The front bar was bare, a line of men standing at the counter, but the adjoining lounge bar was spacious, low lit, the decor intact from the eighties. When I get back to the flat I go straight to my window and check up on the windows opposite that I have ignored all weekend. I reached the top of the hill and waited until the sun had passed, and shadows occluded the towers, before I could turn away from it and go down the hill on the other side, back into the city.

And so we embraced and hummed and danced our farewell hugs together as though we were the waltzing figures in the snow in the Soviet film. This being a smallish city, most of us had come into contact with these places in our non musical life. I follow a child cycling straight ahead of me down its narrow white diagonal, back out to the world left behind on the other side. At the bottom of the hill, approaching the sea, I find myself at the edge of a large open park that I never knew was there. A measured voice, careful and without cliché in his choice of words, his narration of this particular story, and a voice in which I hear echoes of my earliest love and attention, no matter if I must now share it with millions of other people listening.

I looked down at where she was digging and noticed that the tarmac next to her was bulging and cracking as small buckthorn saplings forced their way up through the road, splintering the surface. Occasional bursts of sun and shower would descend in the distance, striping the islands at sea before us as we set out on a small path over flat coastal fields. I wondered if it was the dark that had done it, or Christmas, or prolonged unhappiness, and of course the added isolation of the pandemic. I sit and follow the stirring of the tree, the kite, the hat of the girl — going up and back, and repeating again like a swing.

I have not missed it all this time and suddenly I want to be inside it, but inside it thirty years ago, back there. They were trying to explain the long unwieldy detours to people who wanted to cross the road, except they didn’t know the shape of the city so had to be helped by other people who had wanted to cross the road, but like us, been brought to a standstill. I look down on a mess of bedclothes — a mattress fills the space and the floor about is strewn with clothes and boxes, jars and empty wine bottles. There are Holm oaks, sycamore, chestnut — sweet and horse, hornbeam, high poplars, not pollarded thin and straight but allowed to spread thickly — and a huge silvery willow that holds its own space, not planted in a line with other trees but standing solid in the middle of the grass.And Masha’s father, who all his life longed for a “ royale”, a real grand piano, plays music into the empty rooms of the flat. It was strange to see the light shining from behind the triangular shaped gap in the curtain, as if the woman was still inside the room. As my confidence grew, I drew more purposefully and learned to make quick judgements, processing sensory and visual information at speed into marks and lines. The sun was setting in streaks of dirty pink behind the darkening, almost immobile, figure of the sniper, who presided like the ultimate viewpoint, the watcher, a shape of awe and fear, over the proceedings. It was fascinating reading about Liza’s practice and I’m very grateful to her for her descriptions of her drawing process.