dust into art: Alistair Cowley

a true story...maybe

"It seems more like yesterday than half a lifetime ago. Those long timeless summers of youth when there was tangible space between the ticks of the clock and the world was new and endlessly real. Everything seemed possible, even probable. How easily we laughed and cried, safe in the arrogance of our own uniqueness. It seemed that we were the first and the world had been invented for us alone. In that now long lost country grown ups had always been grown up and old people always old and we were to be forever young. Caught in the amber of our adolescence and believing so much that only later would turn to ash in our hands. I sometimes think that the wisdom that age bestows on us is not so much about learning truth, as it is uncovering all the lies.Anyway this particular summer turned out to be the last one spent in the land of my childhood. Like we had done since time immemorial my family fled from the hurlyburly of London to a dream of the sea. For the last two weeks in August we stayed, as we always did, at my auntie's cliff top guest house down on the coast. You could hear the waves crashing on the rocks below over dinner and at night from the window above my bed I could see the lights of the ferries on the horizon, heading to and from the continent. It was nothing fancy, nothing in our lives was ever anything fancy, we were a big working class family on a small working class income. But it was something and it was better than nothing and so we made the most of it, the little that we had. And yet by the end of the first week the excitement of being somewhere that wasn't home had started to pale with me. I had trodden all the already familiar paths and explored all the places I had discovered many summers ago and found nothing new. The rockpools full of scuttling things and the amusement arcades full of bright ringing things that had soaked up my days only the year before, now seemed trite and pointless to me. I was at a loss to understand why that which use to absorb me now only bored me. Time had slowed to a ponderous crawl and the days ahead stretched out endlessly before me.

And then everything changed as everything does. I met a girl or rather she met me. I will not share her name with you, I'll keep that one thing for myself. Her family arrived to stay at the caravan site over the road from the guest house. There was the shell of an old army jeep at the bottom end of the field where we use to hang out and the first time I laid eyes on her was when she, with her little brother in tow, came over and said hello. Her hair was the palest yellow and her eyes were the brightest blue I had ever seen. Her manner was bashful but friendly and her slightly goofy smile was made small by her own awareness of her slight overbite. Stood there in her daisy pattern blue dress, her eyes twinkling like the ferry lights on the night horizon, she was without a doubt the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and when she spoke to me I felt transported to a foreign land I had never known of before. Our attempts at friendship were faltering and full of false starts hindered by our shared shyness. With the ebbtide of puberty washing through me I was charged up, not so much with boyish lust but hopeless romance. Her name was just a sigh away and my heart soared like a seabird over cliffs at the touch of her lovely gaze. My unrequited love for her tormented me at night, alone in my bed, with the waves pounding ceaselessly below and she, like an angel from above, perched on the pedestal of my dreams. I longed to hold her in my arms more than I had ever longed for anything before or, now I think about it, since. It felt like I would have to climb a mountain to achieve my goal and I was well aware that I wasn't even sure if I had even reached the foothills yet. Her smile filled me with power but it left me powerless. Time that had dragged it's heels only a few days before now hitched up it's skirt and briskly trotted towards the week's close. Some days her parents would go off in their Ford Anglia with her and her brother, no doubt to visit a castle or stately home of some sort and I would be left to kick around the campsite waiting for their eventual return and a hope that she would come and find me, which she always did. Her little brother was a nice kid but he was always there, buzzing around us like wasps around a lemonade bottle at a picnic. We were never alone and I could sense that maybe, just maybe she felt this too, but she was too kind hearted to tell him to bugger off. If I had had any style he would have cramped it. As it was his constant presence made what was hard, impossible. I was getting nowhere fast. On the next to last night the lot of us ended up sitting in a circle playing a spin-the-bottle dare game. She was sat directly opposite to me exchanging shy glances. I loved the way she put her hands to her mouth when she laughed, hell by then I adored every aspect of her. "Run around the house twice," and "Sniff his smelly feet," were the level of dare being banded around until the bottle pointed at me. One of my sisters, who knew I was sweet on this girl dared me to kiss her. I looked over at her and our eyes locked and I knew with a certainty that thrilled me that she wanted me to. But I couldn't, not like this. On a dare and there in front of everyone. So I didn't and the moment and my best chance were gone taking my last hope with them.

The next morning I was wandering aimlessly around the site when I came upon a tangle of nylon chord caught in the fence, a single taunt strand thrusting up into the heavens but to where I could not see. I started hauling it down hand over hand, but after ten minutes I still couldn't see what it was attached to way up in the sky. I was about to give up when wondrously, unexpectedly she appeared at my side. Even better, for once she was sans sibling. Her family were off for the day on an outing that she had somehow talked her way out of and so the day belonged to us alone. She took great interest in the mystery of the nylon chord and together we started the long arduous task of reeling it in. We pulled and pulled until our arms burned with the exertion and our fingers were raw but still there was nothing above in the sky to see. Sometimes her hand would brush against my own and a thrill would jump through my body like an electric shock. Then just as our task seemed unending a small black dot appeared in the clouds that in time became a kite. By now we were both worn out but determined to see this to it's conclusion. It seemed to take forever but slowly it got closer and with one more joint renewal of our efforts we brought down the errant kite. It was the most ugly looking homemade kite, constructed from denim, garden canes and packing tape, that we had ever seen. All that work and this shabby piece of junk was our reward. We giggled ourselves silly over our folly and as is the way of such things, the hardest of things became instead the easiest of things. One moment we were strangers and the very next we were together as one, talking and laughing and touching each other. Both bursting with joy and relief that finally we had crossed that bridge and were joined. We had one evening together, my first love and I and we spent it kissing and cuddling on the dunes, basking in an intimate glow of our own making. Finally a stillness descended over us, her head leant safe on my shoulder, my arms encircled her soft warm body. As we lay there time stood still, the earth ceased to turn on it's axis. Then something unexplainable happened. We slowly became aware of soft high voices singing. After awhile we noticed fleeting forms cresting the foamy brine. Cod, haddock, bass, flounder, horse mackerel, grey mullet, turbot, halibut and dab, the fishes were singing to us! I know this sounds strange, but we just sat there, as one, without a trace of amazement and just listened. I think what we had found in each other that evening, made everything else appear commonplace and the idea that we should be serenaded, in our moment of love, by these elusive and silver creatures of the deep, seemed somehow totally natural. And sing they did. Beautiful songs of love and sadness, of longing and fulfilment, of life and death and hope and desire. Then cuddled close, my first true love and I drifted away on a waking dream. The last thing I remember was the smell of her hair in my nostrils and her whispered words of love in my ear. Those again are mine and mine alone to know.

Later on I walked her back to her caravan and we lingered awhile saying our goodnights. The next morning we left for home and there was only time for a shy and hurried farewell and a promise to write that neither of us kept to. I don't know why, I missed her terribly and even now I can close my eyes and recall her in every exquisite detail. In the years since then I have often had vivid dreams of that night on the beach with her close beside me, watching the sparkling beauty of the creatures as they spun and danced in the salty spray, turning their scaly flanks to catch the moonlight, while the stars burned holes in the heavens above. When I wake from these dreams I find I can remember the words to one or other of the songs we heard that magical evening. Now finally I have them all and it somehow seems right that I should gather them together in this book for all to see. Who knows someday, somewhere, a certain girl now grown to a woman, might find this book in some dusty old shop and turning the pages she would know she's heard these words before, a lifetime ago. And maybe she'll recall a shared blue summer evening at the edge of the world, when everything was ours and the fishes sang."

The Woman stops reading and closes the book, she has no need to read on. The sticker on the front says "Oxfam 50p" and she digs a coin from her purse to pay for it. Her mind is racing but her heart feels calm. The old lady behind the counter smiles sweetly and looks at the book.

"Do you like poems dear?" she asks.

"Yes." She replys. "In fact I've written quite a few myself down the years."

"Oh really," The old lady smiles slipping the book into a bag and handing it to her. "And what are these poems about ?"

She clutches the book to her chest and smiles.

"Oh about dreams and hopes and first loves and a warm summer night when I was still but a girl and I heard some fishes sing."

Friday 22 March 2013

Alistair Cowley

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