Sometimes, a little fresh air is what we need.
“Go and play,” says Nurse as she opens the door to a smallish chicken coop and puts a boot in my ass.
I don’t want to. There’s melancholy out here, a little niff of freedom. It comes in on the clouds over the rooftop, wafts down to where I sit on an arctic concrete wall. And worse, no sooner am I out here than I’m woodpeckering my head to the brainless thump of basketball on tarmac.
But my artist friends seem quite content: Basquiat’s chalking F*ks on the cinder block, and our man Pollock (he just can’t help himself) is loop-di-looping willies wherever he can find flat surface. The ‘basketball court’ is a delirium of male genitalia.
Still, it’s a lovely day in February, just a smattering of sleet, and I, in this charming quarter-acre wood, am looking for treasure. That means I’m taking my fingers and raking them through the icy gravel of this flower bed, groping for some amulet. A leaf … a shoot … a bulb of the great amorphophallus.
“Wait ‘til spring. It’s pretty out here in spring,” says someone gesturing up at the single tree which arches over this grim piazza like a skinny old man. This person looks proud – an old-timer, a revolving-doorer who knows the lay of the land, the seasonal rhythms of the place. They, unlike me, have moved in.
The tree is a gum ball; the ground is littered with its hostile sheddings. I’d know those bristled balls anywhere. I have them, actually, in my own back yard which, as the crow flies, is barely a mile from here. ‘There’ and ‘here’ share the same ecosystem. That’s to say, neither feels like home. At least in this ‘here’ someone cooks my dinner.
They try to get us out in this bone yard once a day, but sometimes, it’s just too sunny, the sky too achingly blue. They don’t want a rumpus on their hands. So Nurse throws on her Canada Goose and out we go in all weathers but good ones.
“Where’s your sweatshirt?” she says to a phantasm of a girl over in the corner who is literally shivering herself to nothingness. I have on my sweatshirt, but I’d be warmer without it. I just like it because earlier, in Art Class, I gussied it up a bit. I wrote CONKERS! across the front.
“You spelled it wrong,” said someone, barely glancing up from coloring in one of Dumbo’s ears. Others were less nonchalant. They (unlike Captain Obvious) seemed a little energized by my willfulness. They popped around my drawing board like corn kernels in hot oil.
“I’m sorry, Nurse. It was naughty of me,” I said to her face that was frowning in an unpleasantly familiar way. And from there, it was a lightning-quick hop-step to Putney Low School – another place which ground my agency into the dirt, what agency I had. I don’t mean the ‘dirt’ of this America country (rich and petey and hollering for impatiens), but the dirt that packed the floor of our dank, butt-ridden smokehole. (Note to self: ‘smoke-ridden butt-hole’ also works here). But we loved it there, down deep beneath the sewer pipes of the Fifth Form bathrooms, and would have picked that slick, spidery dungeon over a chalk-choked classroom any day.
“Well, I don’t do maths,” I’d say with a whats-it-to-ya shrug, arriving – like Roadrunner – at the mouth of our cave. But none of us went to maths. And even if we did, we were sent PDQ to the hall. We did our sums out there, which meant we didn’t do them, but slid down the wall to the floor and thought about our spotty boyfriends for an hour. Or better, we huffed at the cuffs of our sweaters that we’d had the forethought (before we were blessedly cast out) to drench in hallucinogenic Tippex thinner. We were, in a word, delinquent.
Our uniform at the Putney Low School for Girls was purple. Stitched on the breast pockets of our blazers were the words Fortiter et Recte (that’s jiggery-pokery for boldly and rightly). Which was rich because we weren’t allowed to be bold or right, and ‘they’ were allowed to be both. No, there was never any arguing with the draconian, soul-destroying authority of those old baggages.
So: “Nurse, I’d like to go in. Can I go in, please?” She doesn’t say yes and she doesn’t say no. I have, apparently, ceased to exist; become one with the birdlime. It’s not that I’ve lost my agency, it’s just that the idea I ever had any was yet another quirk of my derangement.
AB - 25.11.22
Your writing is so rich and clever. I'm always excited to see a new Field Note.