Today and Yesterday and Tomorrow

A boy wakes me in the night, afraid of monsters.

His breathing rattle rattles.

I lay down in the bed beside him

And point out the night-shapes

Of towels and blankets and other boys.

The window panes press in on us

But his lungs are louder. The cabinet

Stops us seeing each other’s faces:

I lift my arm so he can tell I’m still alive.

He coughs and struggles, perhaps asleep,

Perhaps not. I think of dialling 999

But something of the darkness stops me.

In the morning, the boy tells me goodbye.

A man I nearly know dies in transit. I strip

100 sheets from 100 beds, thinking of nothing.

Bumblebee

I saw my first bumblebee of the season today, by the canal in Reading. It looked pretty sleepy. I had forgotten how beautiful they are. Perhaps by autumn I will have forgotten the beauty of conkers?

I don't want to go to stupid cambridge.

I have a place this september. I'm being so ungrateful about it.

I'm tired of fresh starts. I've had eight jobs and lived in six places in the past year. I don't want to move, and make new friends, and buy more blu-tack for the stuff I stick on my walls. And I don't want to have to file things.

Mulch

Today on the way to Longleat (sp?) I saw some mulch for sale. Me and Vicky once spent much of our free time sitting by the pool and saying 'mulch'. We'd create silences just so we could break them with 'mulch'. We'd lie in bed and not go to sleep, just to say 'mulch'. It was the funniest thing, the word mulch, that summer. We'd laugh every time we said it. It was how we said it, perhaps, and the pointlessness of both the word and mulch itself.

I graduated.

I think I might stay.

I don't know what happened. Somewhere along the way I got used to being a matron in a boarding school. In just two weeks. How surreal. The rediculous number of hours and I feel calm and in control and even happy and mostly quite relaxed. I feel like staying. I can't say I feel like this every day, but I have only been here a couple of weeks, and I have felt it consistently for perhaps 48 hours, and it feels warm. For the first time since coming here, I've felt able to work on my novel.

The boys are pretty much like boys anywhere. Money doesn't make any difference, but lack of free time and parental contact does, I think. They become much more adult and self reliant. The twelve year olds talk to me about insurance and university league tables. The seven year olds don't want help with anything, if they can help it. My time here has expanded my world view.

So I moved in to a boarding school yesterday.

It's nothing like Harry Potter. I'm scared and homesick, and I'm 21. I'm not sure why people subject seven year olds to that.