‘’So how can you tell me you’re lonely and say for you that the sun don’t shine?’
This old Roger Whittaker song has my circling my brain of late. Teasing at the corners as fire licks paper. I have found this particularly perverse as I seem to have entered the God realm of late. Other terms for this would be heaven or perhaps Narnia. My life seems infused with magic. I am the Hall & Oates Busby Berkely extraganza of 500 days of Summer. I have the Midas touch. Squirrels appear at my window and bound along by me as I walk to work. Stags cross my path and deer twitch their ears as I approach, so close I can make out their unique freckles. I work in a castle with a familiar named Alan. He is a peacock. He is the first conversation I have before I breach the castle walls in the morning. He pretends I don’t exist. I dig that about him. Then there are gardeners who offer to bring me sweetpeas, volunteers who bake cakes and a whole raft of other castle folk who seem delighted to have made my acquaintance. I am so heart-openingly grateful for this period of my life, I get a bit misty as I walk to and from work. It’s just all such a dream. The dream is even more highly defined by the fact I spent the previous three months toiling like I’ve never toiled before as a waitress in a hotel. In my last role, I racked up 55 hour weeks and started at 8am to finish at 2am. I had to clean out dirty pots of ketchup and mayonnaise from messy diners. I polished things. I mopped things. I dealt with misogynistic pygmy managers. I was told to stand up straighter and be more formal with guests. I kept smiling and seem to now be offered my reward. Yet still, Whittaker’s folk song calls back to me, reminding me of a time my little soprano voice rose to harmonise with fellow angels at the first year of my catholic high school existence…
I arrived a little early at Welshpool station tonight. It is not so much a station as a platform surrounded by Welsh hills. It is very pretty so the time tends to pass quicker than at an average wait spot. I take a seat in the sheltered area in the centre of the platform as have no jacket and am wearing a summer dress. It feels a little cool as the evening sets in so I draw my red cardigan around me. Three characters begin the night’s performance. They are discussing freedom and travel.
‘I’ve done all of it, Aberystwyth, Scotland, Essex’ says the lady.
‘How old do you think she is?’ asks the baby faced boy pointing at his young friend. ‘She’s just 15, don’t look it though.’ She has a doll’s face and could be younger still. Her painted cupid lips and long asymmetric hair sprout from a child’s neck and floral corset.
‘Be careful’ says the lady. ‘My mate got carried out by three guys, nothing you could do.’
‘A bloke should never hit a girl,’ says the doll.
‘I was out, back hander by my fella. Out for six and a half minutes. Been raped, abducted, beaten daily by my ex-husband, he sold me. I’m only twenty eight. I’ve seen everything, I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do,’ says the lady, with the black gums.
‘Just enjoy life when you’re young innit, you’re only young once’ says the baby.
‘I need a Ritalin to calm me down. I’ve just taken speed’ says the doll.
‘Poor man’s coke. Hahaha,’ says the baby.
The lady interjects, ‘I’ve never been a speedfreak. Never one for the uppers’
‘Well I do like my ketamine’ buzzes the doll.
‘I can get anything, when it comes to crystal meth, anything, but it don’t do nothing for me,’ tells the lady.’
‘I can get an ounce for 160,’ says baby.
‘I can get it for 90. Here’s my number. 07896 721, hold on, that’s my old number. I’ve got nine phones. This is my number. Call me in an hour. I’ll have charged my phone by then. Lucy Grybow.’
The baby stops her here. ‘How do you spell it? I have learning difficulties, dyspraxia, my bother has mild autism. He has Aspergers. He gets Ritalin all the time.’
At this point, Mr Fascinated lumbers slowly over. ‘So what’s all this about drugs then? You reckon they should be legalized? What would you do if I gave you a thousand pounds? How much do you charge for prostituting? You chose this life of begging didn’t you? I have my job. I earn my money but I get screwed, the house, the council tax, the gas, the electricity, the water. You’re free!’
Baby pipes up, ‘Yeah, it’s a lifestyle choice innit. I wanna be free. I wanna travel the world.’
Mr Fascinated turns his attentions away from the lady. ‘You’d need money for that.’
‘No, I wouldn’t, I’d be like those people from a thousand years ago, living off nature.’
Mr Fascinated loses interest, ‘It’s so depressing how late this train is.’
He picks up interest once more and lays into the lady.
‘What do you make a day? If you average that twenty to forty, that’s thirty quid. What do you need to live on? Twenty? Well, if you saved ten pounds a day, in thirty days, one month, you’ve have three hundred pounds, in three months, nine hundred, so why don’t you do that? You choose it. It’s your decision. So begging on the streets, homeless, can’t be that bad.’
Becky, the lady, doesn’t stop to think about this. ‘Fair play. You’re right. It’s not that bad. I don’t have the discipline to save my money like that.’
All the while Roger Whittaker’s Streets of London plays on loop, reminding me of how extraordinarily lucky I am not to visit that realm any more, as I did as a doll faced 15 year old, snorting speed at Wilmslow train station with a McDonalds straw.
I return home to see a package from a dear friend in Hong Kong. ‘Bless you’ says the card. The very words that Becky had said when I passed her a tiny sum of money. The picture on the postcard in the package is of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light. It reads that devotion to this Buddha strengthens compassion and orients the mind to rebirth in his paradisal realm. In the stunning art, this Buddha holds an alms bowl with an unfolding lotus flower.
Bless you all, whichever realm you are in right now. Tis all an illusion anyhow, right?
xxxxx
