voices faces voices

There are stories everywhere in Brussels. Especially in the cabines, little shops where you can make a phone call or use the internet. I haven't seen any recently in the UK, but here there are many of them. I suppose here there are still people who don't have a land line or a computer at home. In the windows - usually dingy and cracked - hand-written or home-printed A4 sheets laconically list places and prices. It's like the Dow Jones of the poor world. Kinshasa is up two cents against Dakar.
Behind these cabines there is often a back room where the family hang out, drink tea and watch TV. I was once ushered into one to wait while my friend checked her emails. There was a huge wide-screen TV and a vast sofa, so close together that I had to edge between and then the sofa bumping the back of my knees made me fall into it whether I liked it or not. I happily watched MTV for ten minutes. People round here do often furnish their corridors. I suppose sometimes a sofa is bought and can never be got any further in than the hall, and so it goes.

Locally there is an up-market cabine painted the colour of strawberry ice-cream, run by a grizzled man of Middle Eastern appearance. He is softly spoken to the point that I can never understand him when he says how much I owe him (hardly anything, as a rule; they ask a euro per hour). He doesn't meet my eye and has an attitude of mild impatience as I shuffle coins trying to work out if he said 'vingt' or 'quatre-vingt'. They also sell penny sweets and cigarettes, and he once shyly gave me a free bubble gum, which I have kept to remind me that people are loveable. I often notice him sketching on a note-pad, and it struck me only recently that the rather well-executed ceramic bust on the shelf may be a self-portrait. It makes me wonder what he thinks of this place he runs. Mothers with bawling children bawling down the phone themselves to a husband or mother who knows where; the more clued-up Skyping for hours, chatting away on head-sets to friend after friend who replace each other, laughing, on the video tab. When my partner dumped me out of the blue I got the email in this very cabine and cried down the phone to my friend a moment later. If you have any kind of sense of story, it must be an incredible place to work. But I wonder why he always seems so sad, so collapsed inside himself.

cocoon

I feel a bit guilty that mine isn't a chirpy, funny-thing-I-saw-this-morning kind of blog; but I don't want it to be. I know that blogs ought to be either entertaining or informative, if they are to attract readers, but to be honest, I don't really want anyone to read my blog. I certainly don't want people to comment. I mean, they can if they want, but I don't want to talk to other people on it. I don't like dialogue; that's why I'm a writer. I get to think about what I want to say, say it, and a year later it appears (hopefully) as a book. It's not something people are expected to respond to. They can read it or not read it and like it or not like, but I'd really prefer not to have a response. Okay, nice letters from nine year olds never go amiss, but I would rather write as if there is no audience. Maybe I want to have just enough awareness of an audience so that it keeps me bothering to update the blog.
When I started this blog, there was a political crisis in Belgium; everyone with an opinion had started blogging about it, and I wanted to start blogging with no opinion about it, with the bare minimum of awareness of what was going on. Living abroad is like being shipwrecked on a desert island; you'll have a different experience if you are a biologist specialising in the ecology of the region, than you will if you don't know a sea cucumber from a sea cow. But I'm not sure one experience is better, and maybe the island needs both. I am used to being in places and not knowing what's going on, and sometimes I think I know more important things about the place as a result.
We walked through St. Josse today. I know it's poor, I can see it's multi-cultural, and I expect there's a relatively high crime rate. There was a house for sale at 65 thousand euros; I was pretty tempted. Three floors, two of which are rented out. One of the rented out floors has a window missing – frame and all. The other rented out floor has a door to the balcony missing – frame and all. It's closed against the outside world by plastic sheeting taped in place. The street contains a few second hand clothes shops, a cheap barber shop, a grocer's and a couple of cafes full of men speaking non-European languages. It sort of reminds me of Dickens. I suppose I'd find nineteenth century Cockney as impenetrable as Turkish.
Right across the street was a charming example of an Art Nouveau architect's house. That old-gold and cream colour, like on the Horta house (there must be a name for that colour, it can't be peach, which is what it seems to look like); restored and shining like an antique brooch in a box of junk. Lots of things close down for August; especially small businesses in the suburbs. So I've lost my favourite writing café – the Portugese one with the madly smiling sunflower faced-doll in the window. And the Arab pastry café opposite the church has shut, too. I don't think anyone is expected to do anything in August, And so to Ikea.

The Reptile House

Thinking of buildings being like monsters; I got a sort-of poem from my automatic writing today. It's a bit crap, but I'm really tired. I was hanging out with two composers till late last night and they wouldn't stop talking about programming languages. I was so bored I actually started reading the dictionary at one point; there was no other book to hand. It was storming outside, throwing down handfuls of rain like gravel, and then there was storm light on the houses afterwards. The house where we were had the most enthusiastic yet inefficient toilet flush in the world; it made a huge noise, and the water whirpooled round and round for ages... while the paper floated determinedly in the middle of the vortex. Science could probably explain this.


The Reptile House

She sees it nightly, outlined in ink;
wind shakes the jungle gates,
the clink of iron in her dreams.

Last time they went, they didn't speak;
didn't look into each other's faces.

Instead, they watched the plants,
thermometers, the dust.
They watched, with care, the possibility of life

as if it were a book they longed to read.

Brussels dream time

The rain is lipping off the cafe parasols on Rue Neuve and I wish the Marivaux was still derelict.
Last year or the year before the rain fell from the ruined arch like a monster's wet dripping mouth. Brussels gives me buildings like gargoyles, half-deserted places, the nineteenth century shipwrecked on the twentieth. Days when the rain meets the concrete and pummels it back into a malleable medium; something you can sculpt a story out of. Round here, abandonment isn't just something that happens to old things. There are malls no younger than me, where the spirit of business has moved out, leaving just the shells of shops. They hum musak to themselves as you walk through them heading for somewhere else. They're charming. Peaceful.

When novelty dries up the first urge is to abandon ship. Move out. But you've got to make your own novelty. Bored with atoms? Crack them open and see what's inside. Bored with writing? Ditto.

A bird in the foot is worth two in the hand

There is a bird's foot lying on the pavement outside my house. It has been there several weeks. At first I thought it was a twig. Every time I walked past I would look at it from the corner of my eye and eventually I agreed with myself it was a foot.
Sometimes I find it a little further along the street in one direction or another, but it is always within a few metres of the spot where I first saw it, months ago. I expect this is because it was kicked into a new position, although I concede it might have walked.

A lot of people walk past it every day, and none of them have kicked it into the gutter, picked it up to throw it into the bin, or buried it.

It does not appear to be decomposing.
It does seem to get thinner. Whiter.

Where is the rest of the bird?

I really don't need you to tell me that I've failed

Synopsis of empty time:

publication fear jazz writing love happy sad book writing Granada insecurity barbecue Italy money writing fail review summer anger fat fan fish death writing funeral book Brussels launch children trains bookshops friends phone bill remittance washing Cinquantenaire envelopes sewing box diet fail haircut? Denmark writing love birthday anguish yoga parents play tax writing fail gig jam HA HA HA shopping writing burgers love wisdom tooth Mesquita writing

I keep thinking of houses I've spent time in - not even lived in, just visited - and wanting to cry because I'll never go back there. I've left too many houses behind. I remember that one in Italy that was open to the cicadas and the night and the spotlights in the garden. The pieces of pottery she showed us, Roman jars hauled up from the sea bed yesterday, bubbled with casts of sea creatures, limescale. The quiet emptiness of the inside, with the modern art and modern sofa. Everything around the hearth of the outside world. The garden. Spotless and quiet and new. And sitting outside eating pasta and smelling the lemon that's supposed to get rid of mosquitos.
Does trying hard count?
I don't know any more - or don't think I know - what good writing is. I've seen it and it's not like mine. I don't know what I'm doing. I throw handfuls of clay together and I think it's a vase until I see a real vase. I'm a monkey playing with a typewriter. I have lost everything.