Sarah Wardle

My fiancé has coined a word for Saturday recuperation which describes what much of the world does to allay its tension. From schoolchildren to the orthodox this is a time to reboot, rest, restore and relax, but none of these words quite suit in the way his term translates, acknowledging the week’s angst which the process encapsulates, as we purge the Sturm und Drang.

When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re playing Native New Yorker’, I racked my brain and was filled with shame. Was this the divorced father and one-night stand, or was this someone who had heard me sing in hospital when I was bored out of my mind, or was this a teenage flame rekindling? And then I was relieved to realise it was not a blast from the past, but you who heard me play that record in the Seventies when we were small, who shared with me and knew my childhood home, pets, dad and mum, yet lost your own mother, aged so young.

This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on a board, announcing the king had died, how life stalled for a moment. This evening I got the call I’d long dreaded, telling me you were dead. ‘We are not a grandchild,’ Thatcher might have said. My kingdom has lost its last queen. I grow tall into the footsteps of each late centenarian grandmother, may start taking the Telegraph. I cry, then hear both of them laugh with an obstinacy that skipped a generation, realise I’m now their only resurrection, have crossed the chess board, no longer a pawn.

The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount, our contracts state death will foreclose. Eventually our assets will diminish sans heart and eyes, brain and breath. There falls a repayment of the spirit, the sum we bequeath, pounds of flesh. When we are lying on our deathbeds asking ourselves what we have to show for our time, will voices in our heads say life’s last debt is pay as you go? In this age of global recession the contemporary view of the soul is one of temporary possession owned by each only as a loan.

On these long, fruitful days, the Rioja which captures the sun of other Julys, is relaxing us, as is the summer, into this unwinding and earthy wine, into sex on the hoof, on the sofa, the Persian rug on the sitting room floor, in the hall, the kitchen by the cooker, up against the fridge, by the cupboard door, so I turn down the steaks as they sizzle and prevent potatoes boiling over, just as we turn up the heat, then simmer, get down to some sugar-icing drizzle, as if the baby we’re trying to make were spontaneous as a lemon cake.

Here the homeless queue for motherly nuns to dish out meat and veg, for showers, clothes, central heating, company, conversation, medical attention, to use computers to apply for jobs, to borrow blankets against the cold, suits for interviews, an address for housing waiting lists: economic migrants, demobbed soldiers, the divorced, mad, alcoholic, unemployed, unlucky from Africa, Greece, Ireland, Manchester, shop doorways and Westminster Cathedral’s steps.

(for Aidan Williams) After a difficult week at work, when I was trying too hard on a short fuse, I suddenly knew that all the hurt would have a certain way of being released, Googled stables in the centre of town and telephoned, but not to book a ride, just to have five minutes with any one of the ponies, and as he fed I cried deeply from a well I thought was dry, and while I hugged, breathed fully of his sweat, heard him intently chomping on the hay, told him I loved him and kissed his neck, I knew calm like that with you this afternoon, my head on your heartbeat, animal and true.