Sinister: hiding

[chippy eileen]

sinister list, i have missed you.
it has been nine months since my last confession.

i remember standing in a chip shop in east langerston,
the small village in yorkshire where i was brought up,
and watching the fish floating in the vat of oil. i
talked to you about a gypsy i once met, and how she
told me that life moved in spirals.
and then i left town.  i left for somewhere bigger,
and more exciting.  i left for a lot of reasons.  one
of them was an embarassing crush on my ex-boyfriend. 
an ex-boyfriend who now had ex-boyfriends of his own. 

and now..  now i'm standing in a chip shop in east
langerston, the small village in yorkshire where i was
brought up.  i'm watching the fish float in a vat of
oil.  margaret, my adopted mother, is 'taking a rest'
upstairs, something she has to do on a regular basis
right now.  frank, my adopted father, is in the pub. 
the new pub.  east langerston now has two pubs, a chip
shop and a woman who goes from house to house, cutting
and combing the hair of old ladies.

i used to stand here and listen to my belle and
sebastian records on a little radio.  these days, the
chip shop has a television.  margaret watches a lot of
television at the moment. she says the noise comforts
her.  i think it helped to contribute to her
break-down, but have not yet found a way to say this.

the television plays hits from mtv.  the customers
complain if i switch it off.  they have become used to
it.  it is familiar.  i am the unfamiliar element in
this chip shop.  gone for six months, returning to
feel more like a stranger here than ever.

if i show you an ink polaroid, you must promise not to
laugh.

this is me, in sheffield, with my girlfriend.  she's
the one on the right, with her arm around me.
we were together for three months.  i left her last
week.

i am asked to turn up the television.  a girl who is
too young to be this drunk wants to hear the song. 
atomic kitten look like the girls everyone was scared
of at school, only older, with babies of their own
now.  i suppose those girls, the ones that were the
bullies, now have babies of their own too, and they
clutch their babies close to them, scared that
somebody will hurt the child in the way their mothers
hurt the rest of us.

the women on the television are singing about it being
okay that their lover has left.  i wonder if this is
ever true.
i don't recognise the drunken girl in the chip shop,
and she doesn't look at me as she dances around,
humming the words of a song that i hope she is too
young to understand and stroking her stomach.  

 i am an unimportant audience.. this is not a
performance for me.  this song says everything she'd
like to be able to say right now.  it bores me, but it
comforts her.  and she'll need comfort, as her belly
grows.  when i hand her pie over, i am suprised to
find my eyes are moist at the corners.  she looks at
me as if i am insane.

you're not here, but its okay

maggie.  her name was maggie.  my girlfriend.  and,
looking back, i admired her, and wanted to love her. 
she has long, black hair and she lectures at the
college where i spent two weeks.  
media studies.  i didn't want to study media really, i
was quite happy just listening to records, but an 'a'
level in english literature would have felt lonely on
its own.  
maggie's first lecture was about musical television. 
i can't remember much of what she said.  i just
remember that she stood in the middle of the little
room and sang to us.  i don't think it had anything to
do with the lecture, i  think she'd just decided
singing 'somewhere over the rainbow' to a class of
young adults might be a fun thing to do.  

sometimes i wonder if it was because she had forgotten
her lecture notes.  i told myself i had fallen in love
right then.  i left a note on her desk, telling her
where i lived and giving her my telephone number.  and
then i left college.
two weeks later, i got a letter saying i should go to
the administrators and explain my absence.  when i got
there, she was waiting outside the room.  she told me
i shouldn't have left.  and she took me to the nearest
pub.
two months later, sick of visiting me in my mouldy
room, she asked me to move in with her.  and i did it.
 and i told myself it would feel right, because there
had to be a reason i'd never managed to have sex with
a man, and when she played the velvet underground, and
lit an incense burner above her silk sheets, it seemd
like i'd found the reason.  i remember, the words
about shiney boots of leather echoing around my head,
as maggie taught me a lot about life.  but something
was wrong.

but you must forgive me, sinister list, because this
is not what i meant to tell you.  maybe i'll tell you
the rest of this story another day.

the chip shop closed half an hour ago.  i am listening
to my songs as i type.  somebody is staggering home
from the Bull, attempting to sing 'love me tender'
with the aid of several pints of beer.  it covers up
the words of what i'm trying to listen to, but it
feels real.  another performance.  a public one, but
the emotion behind it is private.  and i am trying not
to cry again.

my cds lie, unpacked, in the corner.  i have been
looking forward to playing my old records, the ones i
couldn't take with me.  i can hear margaret's
television through the wall, she is watching a violent
film, something about vampires, and i can hear keys in
the back door downstairs.
i will leave the cds, and the records.  once, i would
have hidden within them, but now the hiding is not so
easy.  too many of them are old friends, with stories
to tell.  stories where people are broken.  there is
not a suitable hiding place right now.  guilt is too
hard to escape.  i can't tell my parents why i'm
unhappy.  i don't want to explain that i'm upset
because i couldn't make myself be gay.  it isn't
something they would want to hear.  and they have
their own problems.

sinister list, i wanted to give you a performance like
maggie's, that first day in class.  i wanted to tell
you that way up high, there was a land that i'd
dreamed of.  but it all comes out like an mtv song. 
distant, unreal, impossible to connect with.  somebody
else's life.

i will send this tomorrow.  now, i shall go and make
frank a cup of coffee.  it sounds like he could do
with it.  and we'll play his records, the ones i
remember from my childhood.  and we'll try and hide in
cliff richard.  perhaps we'll hide together.

i think that if you can hide together, you might be
able to find each other again.

eileen

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