A brick-sized block of grey stone washed ashore on which was carved
the word SAY. My dad picked it up at low tide and two months later found
another, and another saying LES. We worked out that rather than a
command – like Rilke’s flow – it was the name of an old firm, sayles,
which sold refined sugar, with plantations in the Caribbean and a factory
in Chiswick. As capital flows, accumulates and breaks its bounds, so too
had sayles broken into various subsidiaries. Slipped, dissolved and
loosed. You find all kinds of things at low tide. One time, a black retriever
came wagging up to me with a jawbone in its mouth. What can’t be
disposed of otherwise – what can’t be broken down – is taken by the river,
spat out or lodged in mud. The SAY brick took pride of place on our chest
of drawers – masonry, defaced by time, made part of the furniture. My
dad decided to give it to you, in part because you’re an artist and he
thought it looked like art, but also, which is maybe the same, because it
suggested reason in madness, and made him – made us – less afraid. Last
week, there was an acid attack. Two cousins, assumed to be Muslim,
having torn off their clothes, lay naked on the kerb, calling for help.
Passers-by crossed the road. Things break, not flow; it is impossible,
however lovely, to see the whole of humanity as a single helix rotating
for ever in the midst of universal time. Flow, break, flow. That’s how
things go. Is it? What are you trying to say? After the operation, they
stapled shut his stomach. As the scars healed, it became harder to discuss.
He drank as if he had no body – nothing said, admitted to or broken.
Flow, break, flow. Gather up the fragments. Now he is back to saying
The country’s full. Why are they all men? Four months ago, in a flimsy
hospital gown, the fight had almost left him. In a tone you’d use to
distract a child, the nurse told my mum about her holiday to Sumatra in
the early 90s. He likes custard, she replied. We told him when to cough
and when to breathe. He clasped a button that controlled the morphine.
Bleep. Bleep. What did the blue and green lines mean? The sudden dips?
What was the nurse’s name? I chose not to keep notes. Thoughtful as
moss or black coffee, or as the screen of a dead phone. That’s what eyes
look like when you really look at them. Inanimate. Moss, though, is
alive enough to harvest carbon dioxide, to grow. Yesterday I googled
thoughtful as moss, thinking it was from a Seamus Heaney poem, but
only found a description of the poet grown long-haired and thoughtful;
a wood-kerne escaped from the massacre. At school, we learnt that
wood-kernes were armed peasants who fought against the British
in Ireland. I imagined them (and him) as thoughtful kernels, seeds that
had escaped death by being spat out. I am nothing so solid or durable.
What are you trying to say? For years I made patterns in the air, not
knowing what to say, then you came and pointed out the paintwork
cracked and bubbling on the wall beside my bed which, though it stank,
I hadn’t noticed. The streetlight sparked on beads of damp. Your skin
smelt bready, warm. I couldn’t say how bare my life had been. The
stillness in the room was like the stillness in the air between the heaves of
storm. We flowed into and out of each other, saying – what? Saying.
Not yet together, we were incapable of breaking. Cradled in pure being.
The paint flaked, exposing streaks of poxy wall. I remembered a church
where the saints’ faces had been scratched away, taking on a new
expression: alien, afraid. Some days I must look alien to him. Scary.
One poet said the devil was neither blate nor scaur, incapable of being
scared. I sleep scared most nights but feel no more holy. Once I
pronounced ‘oven’ often like my mum does, and a friend laughed. The
cracks appeared beneath me. In the years before we met, though I wrote,
I was too scared – too scarred – to speak. Flow, flow, flow. I wanted to
be carried along, not spat out or upon. That SAY brick picked from
the riverbed proved that broken things still flow. What are you trying to
say? When you asked me that I closed my laptop, offended. Why?
It never mattered what I said. Whether you speak up or scarcely whisper,
you speak with all you are. To the eye of a being of incomparably
longer life – to God or the devil – the human race would appear as one
continuous vibration, in the same way a sparkler twirled at night looks like
a circle. In darker days I couldn’t say that to my dad, slumped in front of
the TV with a mug of instant coffee. Saying it now only makes me think
of times I’ve held a sparkler – the hiss and flare, the after-smell –
which runs counter to that whole vision. One morning, gagging on his
breathing tube, he started to text my mum, but before he could press send
his phone died. He couldn’t remember what he tried to say. I can’t
remember what I tried to say. Flow, break, flow. You hear me, though?
