Ours Are the Streets Sunjeev Sahota

More from Transitions one

Out of Tune’ A V Dolven

Exile

In the Descent myths Demeter is separated from Eurydice, Isis from Osiris and Orpheus from Eurydice. The story of Cupid and Psyche is also a tale of separation and sometimes of unity. It warns of the analytical frame of mind that destroys synthesis - analysis kills and synthesis brings to life - that Psyche uses when she looks at her lover through the outward rather than inward eye. Analysis breeding paralysis we might say. This understanding of the myth illustrates Cartesian dualism of eighteenth century’s so called Enlightenment that separated mind from body, subject from object, consciousness from unconscious, humanity from the divine, heart from head - splitting human beings down the middle.                        

  Yet this  psychological characteristic of twenty first century mind is not as immediately apparent as the plight of an immigrant cut off from much he loves and knows.  Where Nikolaj Larsen’s film shows the hope of migrants for the Promised Land, Sanjeev Sahota in novel Ours Are the Streets shows disillusion and despair of a second generation immigrant’s uncertainty with identity and belonging. Yet he takes us under his protagonist’s skin teasing us with an empathy we feel for this outsider - split down the middle, caught in a kind of limbo-land between much he loves and despises - whose action we can’t condone.

    In Ours Are the Streets the feeling of longing and loss, though never self-pitying, is painfully acute. It speaks of an exile more enormous than that from countries or being sandwiched between cultures. The compulsive beauty of Sahota’s flowing prose where the ordinary is bold and highlighted by something extra, but ultimately disappoints, because of the protagonist’s own cultural isolation, is raw reminder that it doesn’t matter how far we’ve travelled. The amount of loneliness or un-belonging we can unburden doesn’t equal the miles.

This is brought home in the film Welcome about a Kurdish boy who has travelled four thousand miles and now wants to swim the Channel, like Leander, to reach his girlfriend who is betrothed to another. And yet, remarks his trainer, he himself cannot even cross the road to reach his estranged wife.

What follows are extracts from Sanjeev Sahota’s haunting novel Ours Are the Streets published this year by Picador.

                                                             

Extracts from

Ours Are the Streets

     Sunjeev Sahota

            Picador,  2011.

Second generation immigrant in two worlds.

We were meant to become part of these streets. They were meant to be ours as much as anyone’s. That’s what you said you worked for, came for. Were it worth it, Abba? Because I sure as hell don’t know. I used to just slam the door and stand with my back to it, wondering, What end? Whose end? When is this fucking end? Because what’s the point, man? What’s the point in dragging your life across entire continents if by the time it’s worth it you’re already at the end? Ameen. (p 70)

‘Honestly, Tauji. We don’t really know what we’re about, I guess. Who we are, what we’re here for’. But that weren’t nothing like what I wanted to say. Even to me it just sounded like the usual crap I’d been hearing for years. I wanted to talk about why I felt fine rooting for Liverpool, in a quiet way, but not England. I wanted to talk about why I found myself defending Muslims against white and whites against Muslims. About why I loved Abba but had still wished him dead. But I couldn’t think of how to say anything I wanted. ‘I mean, we’re the ones stuck in the middle of everything. Like we’re not sure whose side we’re meant to be on, you know?’

(p137)

Acceptance.

A boy in long blue robes were looking at me. He were crouched down at the side of the road, cleaning his teeth with a stick and spitting into the sand. I were expecting him to come begging, but he didn’t. He just spat again into the small frothy puddle of dirt he’d made, then got up and walked off. I think that were the first time I’d been on a busy street and no one had hassled me for money. Maybe it were my own robes and loose turban, my beard and way of standing, but whatever it were no one sempt to take me for a valetiya. I’d changed. (p192)

Isolation and connection.

The nights would feel so cold over there, like the cold wanted to settle in my bones and make me its home. It’s funny, it might’ve been the most isolated place I’ve ever been, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more connected to the world. Not in the packed streets of Sheff or at uni, not in England really, where I always felt that even though there were all the rush and noise you could want, I weren’t actually ever bumping up against life, instead just constantly moving out of its way. (p202)

People don’t even think about that, do they? That there are different types of soldiers. That Faisal were different to Aaqil. But Faisal understood. He knew about love for his people and he knew that were the best thing in the world to feel because then their pain becomes as real to you as yours, and for the first time you realise you’re not on your own. (p236)

Heartbreak.

‘I need to wash, don’t I? The sun’s gonna be up soon.’

‘Right. Well, in that case,’ she went on, putting on a happy voice, ‘shall we pray together? I don’t think I’ve done the early prayer once since Noor was born.’

‘We can’t. Men and women can’t pray together. You just go back to sleep.’

‘That hasn’t stopped us before.’

‘This isn’t before. Didn’t you hear me? Just go back to bed.’ (p286)

Land-a-Hoe Short Story by Annie Webb from Transitions One

Land-a-Hoe

A Short Story by Annie Webb

        

Born on a tiny island at Europe’s most southerly tip where the silhouette of a lighthouse stood darkly against two glassy seas, one tide-driven and the other tideless mingling at an indistinguishable confluence that linked Africa to Europe, the sun - as antidote to a dream that troubled Conchita where a witch pointed a glittery finger and turned her into stone -  touched a point equidistant between east and west, sunrise and sunset, in a glorious blaze of light.

 The mythical story of Eurydice’s double whammy – first to have been bitten by snakes, then, when Orpheus had descended into the underworld and disobediently turned round to look at her, been turned to stone – could like any story her mother taught her, be rewritten.

They lived in a wooden house so small they called it their hut, and Conchita’s father washed up on the island by a storm had made a harbour of her mother but left at the next high tide. On her fourth birthday he made the mistake of bringing a present to her nursery - a jig-saw puzzle with huge wooden pieces suitable for her child’s clumsy fingers, of an spreading olive tree abundant with fruit - only to be escorted out by a carer who said this wasn’t the place for estranged fathers. Conchita’d wondered if estranged was a word for good-looking, but her mother had said sharply before bursting into tears that there was nothing good about her father, he was probably trying to kidnap her. And though the memory of him faded an imprint of his handsome, already gnarled face stayed always in her mind.

To have been born on this island, a mid-point so to speak on a whirlpool that stirred the Atlantic into the Mediterranean in a solar blaze reflecting off ripples of light, was proof to her that some but not all seas, lands, lives and bloodlines dip and re co-mingle in areas mapped as fixed.

And the places that weren’t fixed changed according to light. According to Heraclitus who saw all things in flux presided over by one underlying logos. If you stepped several times into a river at the same spot it would always be the same river but its waters different. When Conchita came to live in La Villa she didn’t abandon that belief altogether but found that some things had to be fixed if fixed was a word for Doing. The plight of the olive industry and Michel would demand that. And the unpredictable, unfixed play of light and shadow so bright and stark on a windy day it could challenge your equilibrium, making an enemy by imbalance of what you needed to find.

           

   The twin peaked mountain of Las Grajas, ornate jackdaw, and Tajo Lagarin, rose  like the ears of a Siamese cat, the double sides of a coin or personality, from the plain stretching from one side of La Villa to Zahara.  Conchita had come to live in a house beside Michel in La Villa for the olive-picking season. Through eucalyptus trees on the plain glistened a turquoise lake, once a river crossing a valley before it was damned, said to contain the purest waters that flowed from the heights of these sierras.

            Though she didn’t know it then mill-owner Alberto lived on the opposite side of the plain at the summit of Zahara in a mill under patchy outcrops of rock where mules had once dragged axles on conical stones over olives. His twin brother Albert, manager of workers constructing the Channel Tunnel, lived at the edge of the Saxon shoreline in southern England. Alberto loved to read his brother’s letters about the Channel’s story fraught with danger and difficulty triumphing in the end.  A tale with a beginning, a middle and an end.

             The danger with the ‘beginning’ lay a Bay of Biscay away from the island Conchita had hailed from, in the twenty-two mile crossing that brought two fully tided seas in the Dover Straight’s La Manche together at its narrowest and most treacherous. Strong tides churned the waves that mixed with brisk winds and heavy fogs buffeted against Shakespeare Cliffs making sea-farers sick if they weren’t already blind like Gloucester. Once when fog had hung heavy and wind-swept over rollicking waters, the Paracas, ignoring the shipping lanes, had brought down the Texaco Caribbean. Its wreck had brought down the Brandenburg. Then later the Nikki - leaving no survivors.

The difficulty with the ‘middle’ had existed since mid-eighteenth century when Desmaret’s, Mathie’s and Mottray’s ideas for crossing the narrow rabid waters had come to nothing. Supposing Napoleon had invaded with fleets of balloons or rafts powered by windmills or paddle-wheels? Supposing he’d already dug out a secret tunnel? But before an attempt was made on Napoleon’s life Queen Victoria had told Gamond, who’d spent years on the Channel’s bottom, that he’d have the blessings of all the ladies who ever suffered sea-sickness, and twice in 1882 and 1975, a tunnel had been bored, even champagne drunk, but abandoned first because of the Great Anti-Tunneller’s objections and next because of a fuel crisis.

              After the danger and the difficulty of the ‘beginning’ and the ‘middle’ Alberto wasn’t entirely satisfied with the ‘conclusion’. The signing of the Treaty of Canterbury in 1986 agreeing to a fixed link between enemies and leading to a plan to construct the channel-to-trick-the-treacherous-waters was, of course, triumphant. Land at last would meet through land, earth not water the medium for unity via a tunnel boring into it, linking one solid thing that was already linked, to another. But for Alberto the triumph –which should soar like Bleriot through the skies - was tinged with regret. Why not build a graceful bridge to span La Manche supported by islands and towers towering like gothic cathedrals visible to all, he wondered before answering his own question. A bridge, like our imaginations or even our feats of engineering, was too filigree frail to combat or ‘overcome’ wrathful storms. Narrow waters too wide. Feat enough to have joined two lands or two people, an effort of the enquiring mind which had in the first place created the dualism it now sought to snuff-out.

           

            Conchita was Alberto’s other fascination. Not in the sense he wanted to ‘have’ her as he’d had the others but as she appeared in the gilt-framed photo taken by Michel that towered as high on his wall as his wish of using her as an ‘icon’. Her dark hair resembling the sinuous curves of the olive branch she leant on, fell in long waves down her back, and her form tumbled like a cascade of water in contrast against the rigid, clawed and clambering olive branch. She smiled, and the crowd-attracting happiness and command in this smile, like the triumph of one who’d knocked over a last skittle -  triumphs after all were conclusions to a story Alberto felt he didn’t have - could be used as a trick to convey the power of personal fulfilment rather than the success of his impersonal profit.

            If Alberto gloated at her ‘moment’ four workers from the   cuadilla in the background watched with leering smiles as she leaned far out with her stick to knock a stubborn olive on to the manta, the net burgeoning with ripe fruits, and while others beat back branches with sticks, grovelled to pick windfalls from circular grassless spaces under trees smoothed over by tremulous rakes, she the perfect role model, reached out the farthest to shake every last olive from the branch.

            At first Alberto didn’t notice how she smiled and performed only for Michel who she called Orpheus, father of songs, because he sang for her with honeyed voice, humming like the wind while he worked. Nor did he know that after work Michel crossed over from his house to hers bearing gifts as luscious as his songs and as wild and as full with movement as the brushstrokes he used to abstract paintings he’d painted from photos. Nor that she’d told Michel she never wanted to be a Eurydice who’d been bitten by snakes then turned to stone.

             But Alberto saw her as his property, and not liking it when he recognised the photographer’s love for his subject, decided to ‘let Michel go’, take back his house - he’d get the sack for being clumsy with the olives, squashing, missing or letting them skip off down the hill like dancing monkeys. And Conchita’d receive her first snake-strike too.

After dealing his blow Alberto did a strange thing and went to England’s south coast to visit his brother where other workers, unlike his, dug deep into the sea-bed through porous layers of clay, reaching to the chalk underneath, wading deeper than gravel, sand or flint to assault then reinforce the soft but waterproof marl. Alongside Albert Alberto seemed to wash his hands of his own workers and watched these instead following the boring machine secured against the walls of the cavern, saw the cutter heads holding the auger against the chalk face whirling on wheels, biting through clay, and marvelled as the men lifted the concrete semi-circular lining segments, one by one, laying them around the soft clay circumference of the tunnel.

As they followed the ‘mole' they might be moles themselves he thought trying to ignore an image of twitching burrowing noses forging passage for the ‘human creature’ in underwater land, with this mole bigger, spanning the length of two football fields and giving existence to dark tunnels, places that those from the olive groves he assumed, couldn’t negotiate.

 With each segment they extended the march of the hole underground, further toward France, ‘overcoming’ the storm by ‘undercoming’ it as it were, low in the bowels of the earth secure from ruthless lashings between the tided seas. And the tunnel, once hollowed out would become the little island’s new limb, reaching across in subterranean darkness to touch a bigger land as if they’d never been joined in the first place before the splitting into continents.

            When he saw one of the workers slip as they often did, he thought of Michel, then Conchita. But did he have an inkling then that she'd slipped too, or a six-sense of how more would all slip, as if the rug had been pulled from under their feet, in order to be found?  

                         

            It was winter two thousand feet up above sea level in the muddy olive groves when Conchita learnt Michel had lost his sanity, and as the foreman waved to tell her, fell like the underground workers into a nest of metaphorical vipers whose outer semblance, as she worked from dawn to three wading and sliding knee deep in rain sodden raw earth, was the high gale that tore at branches and riffled the already sifted earth into circles with its whirlwinds.

            In the Zahara hospital she found Michel cowering in the corner of a room muttering ‘this cannot be'. A marred light streamed unsteadily through the window, a striped orange curtain twitched uneasily in a wind that blew over dry uncut grass from outside, wheedling its way through a small opening in the metal frame, festering with odours from an old plastic mattress that leant against a wall bulging with Polyfilla-filled holes.   No-one knew why Michel was so stricken, as if derangement was a chemical imbalance you could catch like a virus or a horror-movie, or, as his consultant un-technically advised - he was suffering from a combination of what he was powerless to control and what he wasn’t.

            When Conchita tried to imagine what Bedlam looked like in Michel’s mind all she could see was a loop that wasn’t a link and couldn’t be punctured, and feeling so alone she might as well have been turned to stone cried out in frustration to the loop that prevented passage and forbad Michel’s answering,  “Why did you have to be dragged down, unwilling, wrecked hero – a blinded Paracas, Texaco Caribbean, Brandenburg or Nikki - of the underworld? Till now I was no Eurydice needing rescue from Hades”.

            A brooding cloud had invaded all their blues. The ‘ornate bird’ from the mountain terrace plateau-ed now not peaked, and as the bird was flat, the firebird dead, Conchita turned her eyes away from the mountains and lake that’d once contained something in a nutshell. The hills planted with olive trees (because the ‘olive fever’ demanded ever more virgin olive oil) had replaced the ancient almonds and the lines of olives marching in strict linear formation made the hills’ surface look like stitches in an old leather belt, goose-pimples on skin or stubble on an unshaven chin which, she decided, belonged to the land-owner she'd never met: the boss who made the rest of them seem like paltry baskers basking in a crepuscular light or in the dawdling emotion that light evokes in the small person’s ever wanting-to-relish but drained-of-power soul, living in a twilight world which savours the taste of a fermented grape or a marinade olive, but doesn’t profit from it.

        

            So when summoned by Alberto she made her way in fury from La Villa to Zahara, ready to remind him that although olives needed to be gathered before they fermented to acerbity, whereas grapes needed to be left to erupt and slowly ferment, the purpose in preparing both - to achieve the highest quality of oil or wine - was always the same.

            And that of the three substances which could be squeezed from the olive, the oil, the fibrous orujo and the bitter black briny film, the alpechin that floated to the surface of alpechineras ponds, only alpechin couldn’t be used for anything, not even recycling.

And she wouldn’t stop there. She’d point out that this filthy alpechin could never resemble the black nigredo or prima materia of the alchemists, the starting material of the personality, the soul that might be re-worked, modelled as it grew. And the result couldn’t be the gold of individuation, the person who got well, perfect and whole. Alpechin, she’d tell him, was an evil by-product that would not be regenerated. A substance like states of mind that aren’t part of us. A waste resistant to degradation.   

And she’d tell him how alpechin had surfaced, so to speak, in one of his worker’s minds. Black scum rising. Unwashed and unshaven, Michel’s degradation not degradable. And softening as she’d have to, she’d ask him, would he, if he could, help her stop his madness? Short circuit the ever increasing loop?

As it turned out neither telling nor asking were necessary. Thrown off course by seeing a picture of herself on the walls as she walked down the corridor, reaching for olives, and then by a wooden jig-saw olive tree on Alberto’s desk identical to the one she still had given to her by her father long ago, she felt herself looking at his gnarled face in astonishment. Alberto, too pleased to see her likeness to his photo didn’t notice her expression at first. But as she picked up the wooden olive tree, slowly fingering and separating its huge parts, and he said he’d another he’d given to his daughter once, they both fell very silent as shock and truth dawned on them simultaneously. By the time Conchita left three hours later there was no doubt Alberto, her father, would help her in whatever way he could. He had a brother, her uncle, in England.

            Beyond the help of medication or negotiation, Michel looked near to death. As there was only one thing that might save his life the consultant said, there was nothing to lose. So Alberto used his influence to get the controversial treatment, and despite everyone’s horror, Conchita’s shame in agreeing, Michel got the deep dark shock that stopped him from turning to acid on a hard, stony ground. Leads got strapped to his head. The switch flicked on. And after the lightening through his brain had saved him Michel vanished from the mountains along with the father Conchita had just found - was he Charon or Hades or just plain Alberto – and her.

            Before closing his mill behind them she noticed Alberto’s olive tree jig-saw still standing on his desk, and on top of his reading material about the tunnel a book on Jungian psychology: Finding Lost Treasures of the Deep opened at the chapter, Freeing blockages, beginning “What goes up must come down….”. But Michel’s transformation seemed unrelated to psychology. The book was about Bleriot or plumbing her father said both grateful for the catharsis of black humour to expel the blackness of alpechin. Before Jung and the defining of the unconscious and before flight, Heraclitus had said that what went up and what came down were one and the same thing.

            Conchita went with Michel where he could convalesce to an outhouse of Albert’s perched high at the edge of the Saxon shoreline, Conchita’s mother, reluctant at first, persuaded to join them in Albert’s main house where Alberto was staying.  In her version of the Orpheus myth, Conchita recalled, Eurydice had descended to rescue Orpheus so he couldn’t turn her to stone. After a few weeks her mother tending the garden full with yellow irises as bright as blazes of sunshine at midpoints, was joined by her father. At the garden’s edge roots of tamarisk, its fruits the manna from heaven, clawed the soil of the sea-banks to keep them stable. They wondered what the marshy flats below looked like when they were sea and remembered a harbour.

On a dull day along the coast the bobbing grey sea, monotone and simple, became a mantra humming under a mist of more grey, a light drizzle of rain on the skyline, and the whiteness of a domed gazebo (I will gaze) picked out by a single ray from an otherwise hidden sun, dazzled: a full-stop setting the limit of sea-horses and long-shore drifts alike. Brandished like these white domes on green-grey seas, as green as Conchita, not grey, and as smooth as satin unfurling, she was, Michel said as she walked on the beach in her emerald green skirt and olive jacket, his gazebo, setting his gaze anew.  When she put out her foot to trip him they tumbled together on to the pebbles.

            Mickey Man Friday, as Albert’s new hard worker had been nicknamed, said quietly to Albert in his strong accent so his mates couldn’t hear to take the mick, that he’d had a dream of forging new passageways as if dreams like cross-pollination were as easy as enemies becoming friends, then gone underground at the point where the seas were at their narrowest and most powerful, down where it was deep, dark, damp and dirty and there was no-sense-of-water nor solar blazes at midpoints above. An older man who looked like Albert the foreman, the workers said, dug beside him.

Two years later, 1990, Christmas approaching, Mickey/Michel was deep underground when the English and French came together under La Manche, Cozette and Fagg popping their heads through to where lazar and radar waves had guided the ‘moles’ that then got buried. He heard the crowds roar and saw photographers’ flash-lights bounce off the sides of the tunnel along with his own. His was the only picture Conchita saw that captured this ‘moment’. He kept it just for her.

            When disaster came to the tunnel as irony would have it, it came from fire not flood, but Mickey/Michel couldn’t have been that disgruntled worker who’d set fire to concrete linings which, like a micro waved potato or repressed psyche, had exploded because there was no means of letting vapour escape.

For the Channel of communication, whether it linked lover to lover, father to daughter, head to heart or England to France, had been prized open. During the tunnel’s construction from 1987 the Wall had come down, Mandela been released from prison and  Communism in the Soviet Union looked set to collapse. The high speed train rushed and sighed with relief.

Twenty years later, one hundred and one years after Bleriot’s flight Michel and Conchita still walk on what Michel and Alberto helped form from over four-million-cubic-metres of slippery chalk marl, alchemical clay dug out, loaded on to conveyor belts, amassed, spread out, dropped into lagoons, formed into mounds, smoothed down then grassed over with paths for them to walk on, inside and outside the mind. Not as big as the island Conchita’d hailed from, this mound, Kent’s newest land still made Britain bigger by sixty-eight football fields and three Cheops pyramids.

            As if progress had made way for one more Heraclitean pebble of change to be thrown into the one underlying, riverine, cosmos, Samphire Hoe, below the cliff where Gloucester never fell, was solid, underfoot now not underground or in the sky. More solid than the point where light had danced on invisibly mixing seas, this Hoe or grass-covered land, monument to and of earth extracted with huge effort to allow passage and communion between two lands and people, made way for the change-without-fear that levelled nightmares, moving like that train or river, stopping us from turning into stone.

Maiuko's article from Transitions One

     Fire in the Tunnel

     Maiuko

I was born in Mozambique in 1962. From my native land to England via sojourns in Swaziland and Portugal, I have so far lived a life full of experiences and all sorts of transitions, many of these naturally expected, progress following a smooth process of development. Others were not so obvious and of course the “unexpected” brought about anxiety and on occasions panic before I could move on to reflection or denial as part of the self-coping-mechanism.

I would like to share with you a moment of clarity I experienced during one transition under the waters of the Channel:

I was on my way to France with my partner for a romantic weekend in Paris, when instead I found myself trapped within a horror of darkness, smoke billowing all around me. Ours had been the first car inside the Channel Tunnel and we were told to return to it and wind up the windows.  After grasping the situation I deduced these were probably my last hours and  with no expectation of getting out alive began what felt like a regressive never-ending journey through my own life’s story.

That was the first time I found myself reflecting on my life as if that person from the past was someone else, looked at by me. I struggled initially to find order in this process but soon it became very clear. In the beginning I saw myself as a happy child nurtured by love in a family environment, but soon felt sorry for that same child who became a soldier in a civil war of grown-ups‘ politics. I felt empathy every time she moved to a new school or country and had to make sense of self-worth in environments of all sorts of discrimination and non inclusion. I respected the teenager that survived the first stages of self-development every time they were interrupted by unexpected changes, then avoided thinking about all the mistakes that the young lady made every time she “knew best“. I remembered with a smile and a tear when she fell in love for the first time, and felt overwhelmed by concern remembering when later she left her family home, “in search of self“.         

Before I had the chance to go through my experiences after I‘d left home, I came to and realised that I’d been trapped for three hours. The officers informed everyone that the incident had been caused by a passenger who’d found it hard to wait seventeen minutes for a cigarette and attempting to smoke it inside his car had accidentally dropped it under the seat where it caught fire. The rescue team moved all the cars out of the tunnel until the smoke was completely cleared. After a long while, I found myself reversed to where I started; outside the tunnel inside which I had rewound time.

Later, when the rescue team started re-loading, most of the traumatised passengers had given up the idea of travelling under the water. I asked myself should I still get in the Tunnel and go to Paris for my romantic weekend? Would I do it all again?  A moment of clarity confirmed it. Of course I would. It would be worse to be stuck in a tunnel empty of experiences because I’d deprived myself of a second chance or feared moving on into the unknown. Life is for living and I shall continue to embrace all transitions as they arise.

Pavement Pounders and the Folkestone Book Festival

Pavement Pounders and the Folkestone Book Festival

The Folkestone Book Festival have again asked  Pavement Pounders, a local community interest company to devise and lead a guided walk. This year the walk will be loosely based on the theme of innovation – scientific, artistic, metaphorical and concrete – both past and present. From the coming of the railways 150 years ago to the making of The Creative Quarter, innovation has been central to the story of Folkestone.

Explore with us this heritage on our doorstep.

Sunday 4th November and Thursday 8th November

On both dates; meet at The Quarterhouse, Tontine St. 11.30am 

£6.50 / £5.50 friends / £4.50 conc.

Booking and Information  01303 858500, Book Festival Website

On Wednesday 7^th November Pavement Pounders will launch Transitions 2

A journal of crossings , our second edition at Googies café, Rendezvous Street, Folkestone.

Stories, articles or poems concerned with the personal experience of universal themes of crossings, transitions and transformations.

Hear the amazing voice of Afro-jazz singer Maiuko and listen to other contributors to the journal, including author Maggie Harris, Sarah Wheeler, Paul Harris and Gillian White read from their pieces.

ENTRANCE FREE but please buy a copy of the journal!

Drinks and food will be available to buy

Wednesday 7th November  Googies café, Rendezvous St. Folkestone  7.00 pm
 Booking required

Booking and information  01303 858500 http://folkestonebookfest.com/2012/09/wednesday-7th-7-00pm/

Pavement Pounders Community Interest Company have since they were founded in 2010 always  integrated their events with local festivals. They have been leading guided walks for the book festival for three years and devised and led both walks and drawing workshops for last year’s Folkestone Triennial and its fringe. The first edition of their journal “Transitions” was launched during the Triennial. Next year, they will be organizing events for the Folkestone Festival and the Airshow.

Pavement Pounders Contacts

David & Maryanne

01303 227150  *  Mob. 0750-5813297  *  pavementpounders@gmail.com  

Website and Blog       FACEBOOK

Readings at Dragon Cafe

Transitions 2; Our Journal 10/16/2012 0 Comments   Spent yesterday, 15th October at The Dragon Cafe, Borough High Street, home of the Mental Fight Club for readings from our fresh from the printers journal Transitions 2.  http://mentalfightclub.com/ Readings from Sarah Wheeler and Annie Webb Official launch of Transitions 2 at The Folkestone Book Festival 2-10th November http://folkestonebookfest.com/category/wednesday-7/ Photo shows Ben Okri patron of Mental Fight Club reading at the Dragon Cafe

Coral Bay by Annie Webb from Transitions One

Coral Bay

Short Story

They say Coral Bay is named after pink coral pulverized into tiny particles of sand. But to begin with when I looked down into the footprints made by my feet I saw no pink. Then when I looked up through my silhouetted palms spread open against the ether, the cove and headland jutting out into the sea and sky had merged into a single vermilion, an enormous frayed-with-scarlet-on-the-edges salmon pink. This repetitive but fleeting daily light made it hard but not impossible to see the smaller particles. My mistake was not to try, not to try to find this permanent rosy minutiae camouflaged within the ephemeral, not to see that the magnitude that hid it also revealed it: detail the consequence of action.

I, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, had not seen how every fibre of my life would be wrenched first because I had to go underground, second because of my love for you, my spouse, whose expulsion would become irreversible. Yet now the pink that was too much about me, still is, but to better avail.

Gale was spoilt for choice. She had too many consorts. She was always in the pink the people said, and though they weren’t entirely right nor were they altogether wrong.     

Gale who dreamt in disaster-movie proportions of the earth opening and floods of mud like volcanic lava opening up the land, asked Denis to cut a water-melon into edible, seedless pieces. Instead he cut a tiny piece of himself off the side of his hand, and was lucky not to loose it altogether. “Where is the pink coral pulverised into tiny particles of sand?” he asked in order to change the subject.             

Deciding to abandon heaven and descend into the underworld I instructed Ninshubur, my female companion to alert the father-gods if I’d not returned in three days. Ripping my most trusted consort, Tammuz, from my side I wandered through a forest so dense I had to part its branches with my hands, until I came to a trap door beneath which lay a deep hole that fell underground further than anyone could see.

Gale had seven children. The oldest and the youngest were boys. The middle was also a boy. Like many mothers Gale sought to please. If others weren’t happy nor was she and if she wasn’t happy nor were they, so she spread a ribbon of congeniality that looped from one person to another and pulled the ribbon tight into a double knot with a pert little bow at the centre. It didn’t always suit her. Gradually the knot began to loosen as knots do till her auburn-rich hair tumbled out of its fastenings on to shoulders unable to shoulder. Then she cut the ribbon altogether and was left without a husband to help her with the seven children.

Her second child helped instead. She worked for a women-only taxi firm, innovative for this seaside town, driving women carefully from one destination to another. She was also high-flying student of classics and feminine mythology who’d never had to tie her hair with ribbons and could give her mother advice,  ‘To liaise with the potency of the underworld’ she said ‘involves a break-up with the old pattern, a break away from being agreeable and kind and good’. ‘Like Aidan?’ her mother joked.

Aidan, her middle child, had found a  magnifying glass. With it he’d stood back from a piece of grass that enlarged became a huge reed. When the detail swelled he used this glass to set fire to a beetle struggling through huge reed grasses that swayed in the dead stillness of the midday sun.

Later he’d crashed his friend’s bike into a tight copse of olive trees on the edge of a stubbly field. The friend’s father, the villagers said, was very angry.

Gale had been dreaming at the time. Some way inland from the waves that rolled into Coral Bay she’d walked down a street in a hill village that glowed with crepuscular gold. A woman on a wooden chair sitting at a wooden table outside the stucco wall of her house was leafing through some black and white photographs. Surprisingly some were of her middle child taken when he was a baby with tyre-like thighs, lying on sheepskin or sitting in a brown plastic bucket with a bracken leaf over his head. The woman led Gale inside the stucco house where she came to sit at her mother-in-law’s feet. She was sorting through dusty baskets of needle and thread. Cotton reels rolled on the floor. There was a strong stagnant smell about her mother-in-law who had spent her life in denial. Gale thought she could hear her father-in-law, whose bisexual nature it was that her mother-in-law had spent all her life denying, say ‘Good work Gale’ between rasping end-of-life breaths that echoed the shore rolling waves of Coral Bay.

After crashing the bike Aidan’s face was held in a plinth with strange squares in tiers like Mondrian scaffolding. Rods were inserted close to his flesh. ‘You must walk through the streets with us’ Gale insisted ‘even though the rods in your body are causing you pain. You will walk and you will talk’, she said even though she felt a silence as incisive as an outline of stairs built for us to reach each other that we never take. Only walking will cure you the doctor said. But those who saw him limp said how cruel his mother was. He would get better and stop his recklessness she said. He would reach nineteen.

            Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below, was holding a funeral for her husband in her lapi lazuli palace. Determined to witness it I declared myself at the first of the seven gates. Ereshkigal who wasn’t pleased said I must come ‘naked and bowed low’. A judge sat at each of the seven gates. At each one a piece of my regalia, mostly in hues of anticipatory green threaded through with gold, was removed.

  In their three-verandered, white arched house at Coral Bay, Denis, not her husband, hit the top of the triangle between Gale’s legs with his un-metaphorical sword. She’d first come across it in a wood where a profusion of double-winged dragonflies of shot silk sapphire had played in dappled woods and over falls plunging to eddies and roars of churning rivers. “How it glints in the sunlight”, she’d laughed, “How it sees into the riverbed of me, clanking against sunken pebbles and slashing through the tangle of green hair-like weed”.

Suddenly the door to their bedroom creaked open by half an inch. Gale only imagined her mother, dead now for ten months, standing before them as they made love. An eerie but promising light streamed in as the door seemed to burst stretching further open into their room from the landing, ‘within the Scilly Isles is Ben Alligin. Within the south west is the north. Within sun-attracting flat-land islands are mountains which cast shadow’, Gale thought she heard her say. Hers too was a wall that burst open, but Gale, like many daughters would never know exactly which way or how.

In a dream again her father, dead ten years, appeared. ‘I’ve not seen you for precisely one year’ he said and Gale cried bitter tears, for he’d had a stroke and didn’t know who she was. Nor could he remember her child, his granddaughter for whom he’d lavished dollops of vanilla ice-cream on strawberries piled thick in a bowl of cherries standing too high on a table for the child to reach.

When the skies were jay-blue Gale dipped her feet into the azure waters of Coral Bay. They were cool but only just like the dragonflies of shot silk, and their tickling was washed away by hosts of butterflies. Whites turning into horses hooves pummelling the contours of her perishable body. Headfirst she plunged into the foaming waves, headfirst into Uranus’s spume. Her son was not Chronos, nor was she Gaia, and though young lovers stood fondling neck high in the waves they were not immortal either, and knew little of the passion in age. Zeus did not rally with her, but here in Uranus’ water Gale’s splash was subsumed and Aphrodite rose for all. It occurred to her – as if it were surprising others also made love - that everyone bathing except young ones, had given or received the fertile foam from or into their bodies. Strange tokens harvested in private.

But where was the pink coral, her children asked in unison, that was pulverised into tiny particles of sand? Its whereabouts they said was known by the father of the boy whose bike Aidan had smashed through lack of care.

By then Gale had been bought by a piece of kitsch on a market stall. By the sun and the pounding waves on her battered body. By the crunching of dry sun-kissed seed pods under her feet. By goat-bells and bleating kids running sideways on sheer rock.  By dragon-iguanas scurrying under rocks. By almond and apricot trees and tree-shrews running sideways along eucalyptus branches like squirrels.

Why had Gale, irrespective of ants and cockroaches in their Coral Bay kitchen, cut the ribbon she’d so carefully threaded? A long line of tiny ants bore down on the drop of water-melon juice that fell from the fruit Denis had tried to cut, and huge ones on the marbled terrace devoured the insides of a cockroach squashed by his sandaled sole. Matter submits to the given Gale saw with horror and if it is not devoured it rots, ferments or decays.

Ereshkigal’s rage could not be assuaged. She killed me slowly piercing my dead body with needles, hanging my corpse on a peg till it turned to a slab of rotting meat.

 ‘Why did she leave us?’ my stewards and stewardesses had asked Ninshubur as they crowded round the trap door where I’d descended. Ninshubur answered, “To change the house and roads we’ve built with our own blood is comparable to tearing ourselves to pieces. Evil is resistance to the life-urge. If Inanna had submitted to this principle of evil she wouldn’t be Queen of Heaven. She would have let us down. Remember. She would not have approached such dismemberment unless her pain was already severe”.

                        When Gale’s husband, knocked off balance by a taxi roaring round a corner, had dropped the simple white lace blouse he’d bought her into the gutter, it’d been trammelled under crunchy dry seed-pods by his recovering feet. They bore down on the pristine gift, grinding more dirt and seed-dust into the lovely, love-longing threads of lace. From the window Gale’s heart had missed a beat. She would have smoothed his knotted thread-forged brow more entwined than lace, and rubbed balm into the heart of his sleeplessness. But it was too late.  “You’re spoilt for choice” people said to her, and though she could hear his voice, ‘I’ll not fight for you” through a yawn, “nor will I laugh for you”, through a half-sardonic sneer he tried to hide, she saw herself as a bereaved woman, lost, whose husband had drowned at sea while the oblivious sky deepened with setting and swallowed up snippets she’d have told him about her day.

When I hadn’t returned after three days Ninshubur tried to set in motion my instruction to rouse the gods. The stewardesses put on their grass skirts and painted their faces orange like flames. The stewards put on their loin clothes and painted their faces brown like logs, and with loud wails drummed a slow lament round a huge crackling fire. First Ninshubur went to Enlil, the highest god of the sky and the earth, then to Nanna, my father the moon god. Both shook their heads and said they would not meddle in the ways of the underworld. Not until the underworld had become a way in their mythology.

Gale had looked after her seven children seven days a week while her husband made pots. She’d tried not to bother him even if she was tired because he was busy turning pots and painting the ones that weren’t plain terra cotta and the more she did things alone the less she needed him. When she’d told him that, climbing out of the marital bed, he’d smashed a pot, pieces of the baked earth flying forcefully against the white wall leaving sandy red indents.

Only Enki, the god of waters, heard Ninshubur’s plea and the drumming of her companions. He took two little mourners who would save me from the dirt under his fingernails and put them on the table in front of him. “When we offer what we hold dear, what we’ve paid much to gain” he said “we don’t know at first that our loss will be exchanged for what we desire”.

The same group of village men who brushed off the red-brown dust and repainted Gale’s walls stood by her in the kitchen when her husband left. The mortar like loving care that had filled the spaces between each member of the family, wrapping them in safe arms at night, fell out for good.

From some dark tunnel far away Ninshubur heard my voice, ‘Even in this depressed place where I have felt inertia in the heart of matter, a small shoot  unfurls. The state of ‘not caring’ is the strongest of all.  In it I can receive and accept anything, even pain’.

Gale  wished she was a goddess. Then she could have descended to the place where there was no feeling. But unlike Inanna she couldn’t not care. Not at first did the hollow appear, but then sure as a meteor-made cavity one fact would not go away. Gale’s family of nine was eight, the sickening thud of this fact getting louder not quieter as time went by, the idea of returning to how things were popping up over and over again as if ‘how things were’ had been as they should be, and could be reached by taking a single step backwards, though that single tiny step now was wider than the Wide Sargasso Sea.

The two little mourners set out to save me, taking with them the malt bread, the melon, mango and water, the sustenance of life, that Enki had given them. When they found Ereshkigal groaning, they commiserated with her over the pain of childbirth and the death of living things. So grateful was she for their empathy she handed over my corpse almost with regret.

Luckily Gale didn’t need to pack the hollow with shot-silk creatures. They were there already flashing their azure and sapphire on fibrillating double wings as they gravitated upwards out of the yawning chasm.

As I couldn’t be restored to life for nothing a price would have to be paid and a sacrifice made. I had to offer what I held dear, what I’d paid so much to gain. Tammuz was my most beloved consort. He had extolled my body as if it was the earth he walked on. We had been inseparable. Sometimes I couldn’t respect him for losing himself in me, but that wasn’t why he had to go, and as Ereshkigal had looked on me with the eyes of death, so I now on him.  Dreaming of his downfall the unsuspecting Tammuz beheld demons with menacing lion’s paws like talons glinting in the sun. They saw where my eyes fell and pounced on him. Still he wouldn’t believe it.

On the mottled surface of Gale’s marbled terrace the battle was always on against ants and the indefatigable sun, and though weathered the body was as relentless as the sun that sought to crush it like juice from out an orange. Her son was running with his friends again. Denis’ hand had healed and she spun as the universe itself on his sword that rent the veil across the dragonflies that danced through turquoise and robin-egg blue.      

Tammuz sister interpreted his dream and saw it was impossible to flee. She volunteered to sacrifice herself in his place, but I decreed instead they should each spend half the year in the underworld. Enlil and Nanna pleased that a path had been forged as a way in their own overground mythology clapped their hands with Enki.

It was now early evening and the sun was going down behind a headland that jutted out across the Bay. Gale could see it over the trees as she had on the night of the scarlet sunset when Denis had cut himself; when no one could see the particles of pink sand nor the cuts both smaller and greater than desire that pierce the wall between us and the flying creatures of azure. And does not grow over like the wound.

Further along the road Gale found a new path surrounded by flowerless gorse and grass-hoppers jumping from one pebble to another that led down to the Bay. Here, where it was possible to believe past and present could occur simultaneously with only a fine wall between them, it was possible also to feel a presence. Of the goddess herself.

Suddenly the detail of simple familiarity seemed superfluous as an assurance of security. Deviations have already been carved out, beckoning like dragonflies disappearing from an imprint made on solid air deeper and denser than Persian blue from the other side of a fragile membrance. Beckoning like myths that change us forever.

I, Inanna, reinstated to my rightful position, never need descend again. Order is restored. My diamond tiara set with a single central sapphire looks fiery, bright. Ironically it is cold.  Some diamonds are formed when meteorites crash to the ground, others when stars have died and pepper our solar system as star-dust, too tiny for us to see, but the one that sparkles above my forehead, three million years old, was mined from the deepest centre of the earth and born in crushing heat.  As of diamonds fraught with impurity prone to absorb and reflect light, this one glints the best with colour.

                        The strata round this coast Gale learnt were formed in flow-bashed rock, solidified glass once stretched out by lava-flow. In pink-white granite, large crystals formed by slow-cooling magma had shrunk and fractured in searing heat. The forces which compressed the earth’s surface and pushed up mountain ranges through fine folded bands of light and dark rock had split the coarse-grained granite with huge magnesium insertions, ‘impregnating matter’, Gale’s daughter would have said. These were the forces of the powerfully dark but not dolorous dolerites of which one determining one caused others to pale in significance.

                        Gale once ‘spoilt for choice’ still had it all but not all ways. Why was the clear and forceful surge still an impasse against the vermilion sky? Because in its blurring of past and present into an indefinite future, losing yesterday, the sun that set was as painful as the similed sun that didn’t rise. 

Casting her eyes over and away from the azure waters that had turned metallic scarlet and away from the salmon vermilion Gale bent down to take a closer look at a smaller flash of colour that had appeared beside some grey. They were right she saw when they said Coral Bay was named after coral pulverized into tiny particles. Stretching seaward between pebbles, prawn-coloured sand formed distinct lines with grey, simultaneously separate and inseparable, rippling down to the welcome and endless opening of a sour salt sea. The sunset tinted cyclamen all it touched, bending any alternative colour to itself. When her children finally saw the coral they said it was orange not pink.

Though I, the Queen of Heaven, was afraid, I can no longer smoothe over differences as if they did not exist to render them indistinct. No longer can I blur over edges of colours which are definite or keep up the pretence of blissful blendedness.

The lines between the two tone sand moving with flourish would not merge, blur or even overlap. Cutting and sharp, closed to compromise and non-malleable, they told of the discovery of what we desire through what it is painful to do. The white blouse had been sullied. Though the detail had been found, Gale had gone down like Inanna, or at least as closely as any mortal could, to destroy the losing of it again.

Behind her suddenly sprang the man, the geological expert, whose son needed a new bike.  As he advanced Gale slipped on seaward grazing her thigh, shocked to see him brandishing a rusty knife. When he saw her trembling he stopped but only just. His dagger wasn’t the dolerite that’s the strong side of the two-edged sword we walk, the bursting One. She’d already got the bike fixed she told him. Mumbling he turned to leave. When he’d gone she was still shaking, this stark reality, this show of violence, her own descent. In rejecting so called goodness to find it again comfort was turned to unease. The  father of her children, her only ally, to foe.

Yet when she looked back at the rippling lines of variegated sand between the pebbles there was no sign of cruelty in the impeccably separate curves flowing seawards. Only an outward show that that which has been pulverised, that which has delved, dissected, even damaged and destroyed, also delivered.

On his way up the path Gale’s would-be attacker held out his hand to another man who was walking down. But it was Denis and he didn’t claim the hand for shaking. Instead, whether Denis bumped into him or pushed him, the man had fallen and Gale saw him crumpled up on the rocky ground. Denis didn’t wait.  He was striding across the beach towards her and she, grateful, pleased and emboldened all at once was thinking, her descent hadn’t been courageous at all.

Yet if she could find her voice she’d make up for that and tell her daughter (the taxi driver and espouser of break-ups of congenial patterns) that as she was slight she’d been testing for arms strong enough to hold.

    “Because I am no Persian, Roman or Greek goddess, and because a beautiful but indeterminate light touches space too lightly, a sharp and sinuous line must carefully be drawn. Vermillion shoots across the sky with the pain of dead things that cannot die.  They could for Inanna. The delicate double-winged shot silk dragonflies fluttering between joy and confusion fight, like us, to rise. They are the minutiae, the particular, in a greater scheme where I cannot cruise self-made in the rose-tinted, sunsetted harmony of sky without the cutting curve of enfolding arms continually expanding”.

They say Coral Bay is named after pink coral pulverized into tiny particles of sand. But to begin with when I looked down into the footprints made by my feet I saw no pink. Then when I looked up through my silhouetted palms spread open against the ether, the cove and headland jutting out into the sea and sky had merged into a single vermilion, an enormous frayed-with-scarlet-on-the-edges salmon pink. This repetitive but fleeting daily light made it hard but not impossible to see the smaller particles. My mistake was not to try, not to try to find this permanent rosy minutiae camouflaged within the ephemeral, not to see that the magnitude that hid it also revealed it: detail the consequence of action.

I, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, had not seen how every fibre of my life would be wrenched first because I had to go underground, second because of my love for you, my spouse, whose expulsion would become irreversible. Yet now the pink that was too much about me, still is, but to better avail.

Gale was spoilt for choice. She had too many consorts. She was always in the pink the people said, and though they weren’t entirely right nor were they altogether wrong.     

Gale who dreamt in disaster-movie proportions of the earth opening and floods of mud like volcanic lava opening up the land, asked Denis to cut a water-melon into edible, seedless pieces. Instead he cut a tiny piece of himself off the side of his hand, and was lucky not to loose it altogether. “Where is the pink coral pulverised into tiny particles of sand?” he asked in order to change the subject.             

Deciding to abandon heaven and descend into the underworld I instructed Ninshubur, my female companion to alert the father-gods if I’d not returned in three days. Ripping my most trusted consort, Tammuz, from my side I wandered through a forest so dense I had to part its branches with my hands, until I came to a trap door beneath which lay a deep hole that fell underground further than anyone could see.

Gale had seven children. The oldest and the youngest were boys. The middle was also a boy. Like many mothers Gale sought to please. If others weren’t happy nor was she and if she wasn’t happy nor were they, so she spread a ribbon of congeniality that looped from one person to another and pulled the ribbon tight into a double knot with a pert little bow at the centre. It didn’t always suit her. Gradually the knot began to loosen as knots do till her auburn-rich hair tumbled out of its fastenings on to shoulders unable to shoulder. Then she cut the ribbon altogether and was left without a husband to help her with the seven children.

Her second child helped instead. She worked for a women-only taxi firm, innovative for this seaside town, driving women carefully from one destination to another. She was also high-flying student of classics and feminine mythology who’d never had to tie her hair with ribbons and could give her mother advice,  ‘To liaise with the potency of the underworld’ she said ‘involves a break-up with the old pattern, a break away from being agreeable and kind and good’. ‘Like Aidan?’ her mother joked.

Aidan, her middle child, had found a  magnifying glass. With it he’d stood back from a piece of grass that enlarged became a huge reed. When the detail swelled he used this glass to set fire to a beetle struggling through huge reed grasses that swayed in the dead stillness of the midday sun.

Later he’d crashed his friend’s bike into a tight copse of olive trees on the edge of a stubbly field. The friend’s father, the villagers said, was very angry.

Gale had been dreaming at the time. Some way inland from the waves that rolled into Coral Bay she’d walked down a street in a hill village that glowed with crepuscular gold. A woman on a wooden chair sitting at a wooden table outside the stucco wall of her house was leafing through some black and white photographs. Surprisingly some were of her middle child taken when he was a baby with tyre-like thighs, lying on sheepskin or sitting in a brown plastic bucket with a bracken leaf over his head. The woman led Gale inside the stucco house where she came to sit at her mother-in-law’s feet. She was sorting through dusty baskets of needle and thread. Cotton reels rolled on the floor. There was a strong stagnant smell about her mother-in-law who had spent her life in denial. Gale thought she could hear her father-in-law, whose bisexual nature it was that her mother-in-law had spent all her life denying, say ‘Good work Gale’ between rasping end-of-life breaths that echoed the shore rolling waves of Coral Bay.

After crashing the bike Aidan’s face was held in a plinth with strange squares in tiers like Mondrian scaffolding. Rods were inserted close to his flesh. ‘You must walk through the streets with us’ Gale insisted ‘even though the rods in your body are causing you pain. You will walk and you will talk’, she said even though she felt a silence as incisive as an outline of stairs built for us to reach each other that we never take. Only walking will cure you the doctor said. But those who saw him limp said how cruel his mother was. He would get better and stop his recklessness she said. He would reach nineteen.

            Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below, was holding a funeral for her husband in her lapi lazuli palace. Determined to witness it I declared myself at the first of the seven gates. Ereshkigal who wasn’t pleased said I must come ‘naked and bowed low’. A judge sat at each of the seven gates. At each one a piece of my regalia, mostly in hues of anticipatory green threaded through with gold, was removed.

  In their three-verandered, white arched house at Coral Bay, Denis, not her husband, hit the top of the triangle between Gale’s legs with his un-metaphorical sword. She’d first come across it in a wood where a profusion of double-winged dragonflies of shot silk sapphire had played in dappled woods and over falls plunging to eddies and roars of churning rivers. “How it glints in the sunlight”, she’d laughed, “How it sees into the riverbed of me, clanking against sunken pebbles and slashing through the tangle of green hair-like weed”.

Suddenly the door to their bedroom creaked open by half an inch. Gale only imagined her mother, dead now for ten months, standing before them as they made love. An eerie but promising light streamed in as the door seemed to burst stretching further open into their room from the landing, ‘within the Scilly Isles is Ben Alligin. Within the south west is the north. Within sun-attracting flat-land islands are mountains which cast shadow’, Gale thought she heard her say. Hers too was a wall that burst open, but Gale, like many daughters would never know exactly which way or how.

In a dream again her father, dead ten years, appeared. ‘I’ve not seen you for precisely one year’ he said and Gale cried bitter tears, for he’d had a stroke and didn’t know who she was. Nor could he remember her child, his granddaughter for whom he’d lavished dollops of vanilla ice-cream on strawberries piled thick in a bowl of cherries standing too high on a table for the child to reach.

When the skies were jay-blue Gale dipped her feet into the azure waters of Coral Bay. They were cool but only just like the dragonflies of shot silk, and their tickling was washed away by hosts of butterflies. Whites turning into horses hooves pummelling the contours of her perishable body. Headfirst she plunged into the foaming waves, headfirst into Uranus’s spume. Her son was not Chronos, nor was she Gaia, and though young lovers stood fondling neck high in the waves they were not immortal either, and knew little of the passion in age. Zeus did not rally with her, but here in Uranus’ water Gale’s splash was subsumed and Aphrodite rose for all. It occurred to her – as if it were surprising others also made love - that everyone bathing except young ones, had given or received the fertile foam from or into their bodies. Strange tokens harvested in private.

But where was the pink coral, her children asked in unison, that was pulverised into tiny particles of sand? Its whereabouts they said was known by the father of the boy whose bike Aidan had smashed through lack of care.

By then Gale had been bought by a piece of kitsch on a market stall. By the sun and the pounding waves on her battered body. By the crunching of dry sun-kissed seed pods under her feet. By goat-bells and bleating kids running sideways on sheer rock.  By dragon-iguanas scurrying under rocks. By almond and apricot trees and tree-shrews running sideways along eucalyptus branches like squirrels.

Why had Gale, irrespective of ants and cockroaches in their Coral Bay kitchen, cut the ribbon she’d so carefully threaded? A long line of tiny ants bore down on the drop of water-melon juice that fell from the fruit Denis had tried to cut, and huge ones on the marbled terrace devoured the insides of a cockroach squashed by his sandaled sole. Matter submits to the given Gale saw with horror and if it is not devoured it rots, ferments or decays.

Ereshkigal’s rage could not be assuaged. She killed me slowly piercing my dead body with needles, hanging my corpse on a peg till it turned to a slab of rotting meat.

 ‘Why did she leave us?’ my stewards and stewardesses had asked Ninshubur as they crowded round the trap door where I’d descended. Ninshubur answered, “To change the house and roads we’ve built with our own blood is comparable to tearing ourselves to pieces. Evil is resistance to the life-urge. If Inanna had submitted to this principle of evil she wouldn’t be Queen of Heaven. She would have let us down. Remember. She would not have approached such dismemberment unless her pain was already severe”.

                        When Gale’s husband, knocked off balance by a taxi roaring round a corner, had dropped the simple white lace blouse he’d bought her into the gutter, it’d been trammelled under crunchy dry seed-pods by his recovering feet. They bore down on the pristine gift, grinding more dirt and seed-dust into the lovely, love-longing threads of lace. From the window Gale’s heart had missed a beat. She would have smoothed his knotted thread-forged brow more entwined than lace, and rubbed balm into the heart of his sleeplessness. But it was too late.  “You’re spoilt for choice” people said to her, and though she could hear his voice, ‘I’ll not fight for you” through a yawn, “nor will I laugh for you”, through a half-sardonic sneer he tried to hide, she saw herself as a bereaved woman, lost, whose husband had drowned at sea while the oblivious sky deepened with setting and swallowed up snippets she’d have told him about her day.

When I hadn’t returned after three days Ninshubur tried to set in motion my instruction to rouse the gods. The stewardesses put on their grass skirts and painted their faces orange like flames. The stewards put on their loin clothes and painted their faces brown like logs, and with loud wails drummed a slow lament round a huge crackling fire. First Ninshubur went to Enlil, the highest god of the sky and the earth, then to Nanna, my father the moon god. Both shook their heads and said they would not meddle in the ways of the underworld. Not until the underworld had become a way in their mythology.

Gale had looked after her seven children seven days a week while her husband made pots. She’d tried not to bother him even if she was tired because he was busy turning pots and painting the ones that weren’t plain terra cotta and the more she did things alone the less she needed him. When she’d told him that, climbing out of the marital bed, he’d smashed a pot, pieces of the baked earth flying forcefully against the white wall leaving sandy red indents.

Only Enki, the god of waters, heard Ninshubur’s plea and the drumming of her companions. He took two little mourners who would save me from the dirt under his fingernails and put them on the table in front of him. “When we offer what we hold dear, what we’ve paid much to gain” he said “we don’t know at first that our loss will be exchanged for what we desire”.

The same group of village men who brushed off the red-brown dust and repainted Gale’s walls stood by her in the kitchen when her husband left. The mortar like loving care that had filled the spaces between each member of the family, wrapping them in safe arms at night, fell out for good.

From some dark tunnel far away Ninshubur heard my voice, ‘Even in this depressed place where I have felt inertia in the heart of matter, a small shoot  unfurls. The state of ‘not caring’ is the strongest of all.  In it I can receive and accept anything, even pain’.

Gale  wished she was a goddess. Then she could have descended to the place where there was no feeling. But unlike Inanna she couldn’t not care. Not at first did the hollow appear, but then sure as a meteor-made cavity one fact would not go away. Gale’s family of nine was eight, the sickening thud of this fact getting louder not quieter as time went by, the idea of returning to how things were popping up over and over again as if ‘how things were’ had been as they should be, and could be reached by taking a single step backwards, though that single tiny step now was wider than the Wide Sargasso Sea.

The two little mourners set out to save me, taking with them the malt bread, the melon, mango and water, the sustenance of life, that Enki had given them. When they found Ereshkigal groaning, they commiserated with her over the pain of childbirth and the death of living things. So grateful was she for their empathy she handed over my corpse almost with regret.

Luckily Gale didn’t need to pack the hollow with shot-silk creatures. They were there already flashing their azure and sapphire on fibrillating double wings as they gravitated upwards out of the yawning chasm.

As I couldn’t be restored to life for nothing a price would have to be paid and a sacrifice made. I had to offer what I held dear, what I’d paid so much to gain. Tammuz was my most beloved consort. He had extolled my body as if it was the earth he walked on. We had been inseparable. Sometimes I couldn’t respect him for losing himself in me, but that wasn’t why he had to go, and as Ereshkigal had looked on me with the eyes of death, so I now on him.  Dreaming of his downfall the unsuspecting Tammuz beheld demons with menacing lion’s paws like talons glinting in the sun. They saw where my eyes fell and pounced on him. Still he wouldn’t believe it.

On the mottled surface of Gale’s marbled terrace the battle was always on against ants and the indefatigable sun, and though weathered the body was as relentless as the sun that sought to crush it like juice from out an orange. Her son was running with his friends again. Denis’ hand had healed and she spun as the universe itself on his sword that rent the veil across the dragonflies that danced through turquoise and robin-egg blue.      

Tammuz sister interpreted his dream and saw it was impossible to flee. She volunteered to sacrifice herself in his place, but I decreed instead they should each spend half the year in the underworld. Enlil and Nanna pleased that a path had been forged as a way in their own overground mythology clapped their hands with Enki.

It was now early evening and the sun was going down behind a headland that jutted out across the Bay. Gale could see it over the trees as she had on the night of the scarlet sunset when Denis had cut himself; when no one could see the particles of pink sand nor the cuts both smaller and greater than desire that pierce the wall between us and the flying creatures of azure. And does not grow over like the wound.

Further along the road Gale found a new path surrounded by flowerless gorse and grass-hoppers jumping from one pebble to another that led down to the Bay. Here, where it was possible to believe past and present could occur simultaneously with only a fine wall between them, it was possible also to feel a presence. Of the goddess herself.

Suddenly the detail of simple familiarity seemed superfluous as an assurance of security. Deviations have already been carved out, beckoning like dragonflies disappearing from an imprint made on solid air deeper and denser than Persian blue from the other side of a fragile membrance. Beckoning like myths that change us forever.

I, Inanna, reinstated to my rightful position, never need descend again. Order is restored. My diamond tiara set with a single central sapphire looks fiery, bright. Ironically it is cold.  Some diamonds are formed when meteorites crash to the ground, others when stars have died and pepper our solar system as star-dust, too tiny for us to see, but the one that sparkles above my forehead, three million years old, was mined from the deepest centre of the earth and born in crushing heat.  As of diamonds fraught with impurity prone to absorb and reflect light, this one glints the best with colour.

                        The strata round this coast Gale learnt were formed in flow-bashed rock, solidified glass once stretched out by lava-flow. In pink-white granite, large crystals formed by slow-cooling magma had shrunk and fractured in searing heat. The forces which compressed the earth’s surface and pushed up mountain ranges through fine folded bands of light and dark rock had split the coarse-grained granite with huge magnesium insertions, ‘impregnating matter’, Gale’s daughter would have said. These were the forces of the powerfully dark but not dolorous dolerites of which one determining one caused others to pale in significance.

                        Gale once ‘spoilt for choice’ still had it all but not all ways. Why was the clear and forceful surge still an impasse against the vermilion sky? Because in its blurring of past and present into an indefinite future, losing yesterday, the sun that set was as painful as the similed sun that didn’t rise. 

Casting her eyes over and away from the azure waters that had turned metallic scarlet and away from the salmon vermilion Gale bent down to take a closer look at a smaller flash of colour that had appeared beside some grey. They were right she saw when they said Coral Bay was named after coral pulverized into tiny particles. Stretching seaward between pebbles, prawn-coloured sand formed distinct lines with grey, simultaneously separate and inseparable, rippling down to the welcome and endless opening of a sour salt sea. The sunset tinted cyclamen all it touched, bending any alternative colour to itself. When her children finally saw the coral they said it was orange not pink.

Though I, the Queen of Heaven, was afraid, I can no longer smoothe over differences as if they did not exist to render them indistinct. No longer can I blur over edges of colours which are definite or keep up the pretence of blissful blendedness.

The lines between the two tone sand moving with flourish would not merge, blur or even overlap. Cutting and sharp, closed to compromise and non-malleable, they told of the discovery of what we desire through what it is painful to do. The white blouse had been sullied. Though the detail had been found, Gale had gone down like Inanna, or at least as closely as any mortal could, to destroy the losing of it again.

Behind her suddenly sprang the man, the geological expert, whose son needed a new bike.  As he advanced Gale slipped on seaward grazing her thigh, shocked to see him brandishing a rusty knife. When he saw her trembling he stopped but only just. His dagger wasn’t the dolerite that’s the strong side of the two-edged sword we walk, the bursting One. She’d already got the bike fixed she told him. Mumbling he turned to leave. When he’d gone she was still shaking, this stark reality, this show of violence, her own descent. In rejecting so called goodness to find it again comfort was turned to unease. The  father of her children, her only ally, to foe.

Yet when she looked back at the rippling lines of variegated sand between the pebbles there was no sign of cruelty in the impeccably separate curves flowing seawards. Only an outward show that that which has been pulverised, that which has delved, dissected, even damaged and destroyed, also delivered.

On his way up the path Gale’s would-be attacker held out his hand to another man who was walking down. But it was Denis and he didn’t claim the hand for shaking. Instead, whether Denis bumped into him or pushed him, the man had fallen and Gale saw him crumpled up on the rocky ground. Denis didn’t wait.  He was striding across the beach towards her and she, grateful, pleased and emboldened all at once was thinking, her descent hadn’t been courageous at all.

Yet if she could find her voice she’d make up for that and tell her daughter (the taxi driver and espouser of break-ups of congenial patterns) that as she was slight she’d been testing for arms strong enough to hold.

    “Because I am no Persian, Roman or Greek goddess, and because a beautiful but indeterminate light touches space too lightly, a sharp and sinuous line must carefully be drawn. Vermillion shoots across the sky with the pain of dead things that cannot die.  They could for Inanna. The delicate double-winged shot silk dragonflies fluttering between joy and confusion fight, like us, to rise. They are the minutiae, the particular, in a greater scheme where I cannot cruise self-made in the rose-tinted, sunsetted harmony of sky without the cutting curve of enfolding arms continually expanding”.