Thursday 20 September 2012

Once


Once, as a child, I was lost.

I don’t remember my exact age. Time has never been kind to my memories and my recall of events – dates, details – has always been a vague and untrustworthy thing. But I remember a sibling in the baby seat of the shopping trolley and as I was old enough to walk and wander by myself this must have been my brother and I must have been in the region of five.

It was in a supermarket. I was following my father and I turned away, just for a moment. What caught my five year old attention in the vegetable aisle of Safeway I do not know, but for a moment I turned away and I slipped into another place where I was lost.

I didn’t know I was lost until I turned back; mind still elsewhere, dreaming the day gone, and I put my hand into my father’s and then, at a jolt from him, dragged my gaze along that hand and the arm and looked up into the face of a man who was most definitely not my father.

He must, I think, have been a nice enough man. His puzzled smile is kind in my mind; his amused ‘hello?’ is gentle.

He almost certainly did not deserve the look of horror I bestowed on him, or for me to scrabble, cringing, away; heart tripping with mortified shame at having touched a stranger so casually with a trust that did not belong to him, and with the panic of being alone, alone – no parents, no sisters to be seen and the sudden, absolute, nightmarish conviction that they would not be found again, ever, and my throat clamped down with fear –

And there, down the next aisle, was my father; one hand on the trolley, frowning down at a packet of pasta. I rushed to him and clung, to his confusion. Bemused, he asked me what was wrong and so I learned he hadn’t even known that – for a moment – I had been lost.

Five things I like (and a bonus)


1) Ethnic supermarkets 

The ones you wander round in a happy bemusement of childish glee, picking up products and wondering what they are.

There will be packets covered in a language you do not speak, with pictures that seem to have no relation to food at all - or which you hope don’t. A small child may feature, or a cartoon panda. Or a small child dressed up as a cartoon panda. Is it panda flavoured? Small child flavoured? How do they know what small children taste like?

You will buy it and it will sit in the cupboard until you unearth it again and learn from the one piece of information you can understand, the sell by date, that whatever the child-panda food is it is now sadly past its prime. It doesn’t matter. You have consumed all the possibilities it contained. You can throw it away now.


2) Proper second hand bookshops

It should have nooks and crannies and precarious, avalanche ready piles of paperbacks leaning against the one shelf you are trying to get to. It should have the smell of books; their yellowed pages and crumbling, Penguin-orange spines and the dry, faintly-vanilla dust scent of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of much loved words.

It should have at least one cat and if possible the owner should have a beard. Even if they’re female.


3) Snow

Or the moment, first thing in the morning, when you step into freshly fallen snow.

Or the moment right before you step into the snow, the moment just before your foot places down.

The virgin moment just before you raise your foot and take that first explorer’s step.


4) Reading something new

Reading a poem or piece of prose and coming across the first, startling line or turn of phrase that hits right underneath your heart and makes you want to gasp. That makes you want to stroke the page and lift your fingertips to your mouth afterwards as if you could taste the words.

They would taste dark and roughly sweet.

They would taste clean and fresh and prickle your tongue with their lightness.

You want to find someone now and press your mouth to theirs and open up so they can lick the tang of the words from your tongue and savour your amazement with you.


5) Inspiration

The flash when inspiration strikes and the words start filling your head and you hurry home, cupping the words carefully, in dry-throated terror that they will spill and trickle out from between your fingers and leak away before you can capture them safely.

All the way back you are holding back part of your breath and the people on the bus only see your far-away look and don’t realise that you are a tightrope walker, a circus act; balancing wonder and performing miracles above their heads.


And a bonus 6) You

I like you.

(Keep it secret, but really you are my favourite.)