29 May. I miss my mother. Because without her my life lacks the pleasure she gives, and there is no replacement for that pleasure. New friends and new experiences, as well as alcohol and cigarettes and all that rot, are poor substitutes for a mother’s love. I am not a person inclined to solitude. I can cope with it, and sometimes aim for it, but raised on love as a child, and then carried through on it into adulthood, it comes as a harsh ration to be without it now. I don’t always feel this way. Days and sometimes weeks go by without my feeling any lack of love at all, for curiosity and novelty and adventure are themselves great loves of mine, and between them have the ability to support and nourish me. But moments come – this morning for example – when I would give my right arm for some time with my mum, not to gain anything in particular – news or food or reassurance – but to be thoughtlessly surrounded by her easy and lasting love. It’s invisible, such love. It doesn’t need form, or indicators, or obvious expression – though doubtless my mum wouldn’t mind a few more postcards. It’s invisible and yet I see it and need it and am better for it. A friend once told me about a book called Promise at Dawn by Romain Gary. The book’s main idea is that a child will spend the rest of their life searching for a love that lives up to the one given to them by their mother. With this in mind, I am almost certainly barking up the wrong tree by looking for love in bars and pubs and discos and other such juvenile places. I’d be better off asking Tony and Marietta to put me in touch with any single mothers they know. But say I did ask Tony and Marietta and they did put me in touch and I did enter a relationship with a single mother able to love me as my mother did when I was a child, what then? If history were to repeat itself, I would spend the first stage of the relationship being generally defiant and obnoxious, before escaping abroad at the first opportunity. No, it’s a bad idea. It wouldn’t work. A mother is only able to love like a mother when they have no choice in the matter. As a result, the only mother in a position to love me like my mother is my mother, and I can hardly go out with her.
1 June. Anita invites me to meet her halfway. When I arrive she is drinking pink lemonade and doing paperwork. I order nothing, just sit next to her and lean backwards into the sun with my eyes closed because I feel awful. Minutes pass, and then several more, and just as I begin to make my peace with the fact that we have nothing to say to each other, she asks what I want to do before I depart. It’s daft, and pompous, but all I can do is quote William Blake, because I love the lines and they are as true as anything else.19
‘I kind of meant what do you want to do in Poznań before you leave,’ she says.
I smile, still with my eyes closed, still leaning backwards so my hungover face is in the way of the sun. What do I want to do in Poznań? I want to express my feelings for you, Anita, which are outgrowing, it feels to me, the present shape of our relation. Because we can’t always do what we want, I say: ‘I would like to spend an entire afternoon walking this street, back and forth, until I know it like the back of my hand.’ I smile again, laugh almost, thinking how little I know the back of my hand. ‘And then I want to photograph all of Poznań’s churches, for some are plain and others monstrous, and then I want to visit all of the city’s statues, to learn what Poznań chooses to remember.’
Anita looks at me, or at least I think she does, and says, ‘Well you can do those things alone, so please go ahead.’
And then I let it go, let it out. I take a mental run up – while she sips her pink lemonade – and then say, ‘But in fact the first thing I want to do is ask you something.’ She says nothing. I take a deep breath, a deep cliché breath to buy time and draw composure. I guess this is the end of fear.
‘Anita. What would you say if I said that I often think about kissing you?’
‘I would say stop thinking about it.’
2 June. Down in the courtyard there is a step that gets the sun for a good portion of the day. I go there this morning with green tea and two rolled cigarettes to move on with Laurie Lee. I am reading his As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, which recounts the author’s teenage jaunt from Gloucester to Spain in 1936 or so, on the brink of that country’s civil war. My favourite bit in the book so far is when the author’s landlord in London, having seen a poem of Lee’s in the newspaper, says to him, ‘I didn’t know you had such beautiful thoughts.’ Every few pages or so I pause to watch a tireless ant for some minutes, or to drain the pool of sweat that has formed between my foot and sandal. A dog enters from the street with the intention of pissing on as much of the milieu as it can manage. It is pursued by its owner and best friend. ‘Daisy! … Daisy! … DAISY!’ Daisy pays no attention; I’m quite sure she would answer back if she could: ‘What now, woman? Can’t you see I’m busy?’ More than anything else, it is such moments on the step, or at the kitchen window, when a happy inertia keeps me still and quiet and ponderous, that make me feel at home in Poland, rather than away or apart or merely passing through. Odd that a part suggests inclusion, whereas apart – so nearly the same – means the opposite.
3 June. To the step once more, where I take the sun and read. Laurie isn’t as good today, and nor is his landlord. I resent the sweat that pools between skin and sandal. The tea is bitter (I left the bag in too long) and the courtyard smells weakly of urine. I was here yesterday and felt fine, glorious even, wanting nothing. Today I could stamp on the ants and want everything.
5 June. I enter a room on the sixth floor of the university’s humanities department and there listen to the poetry of Vona Groarke, who I know loosely from my time at Manchester University, where she writes poems about the rain and Gary Neville. I enjoy the reading. It is a bit like being in a yoga or meditation session. There are all these words buzzing around, like soothing gentle flies, landing on shoulders and earlobes before leaving via a window. It is nice to be led out of my own world of words (both said and unsaid) and into someone else’s, someone who makes word-worlds for fun, for a living, for life. I reproach myself between poems. Why don’t I listen to more poetry? I know that it does me good. I know that it removes me and improves me and makes me feel better and calmer. And yet I never make it a recurring thing in my life. Instead, in the gap provided by poetry’s absence, I routinely poison myself until I can’t think or talk in order to spend the next day in a state of subdued idiocy, a lazy moronic torpor, of which no good comes, of which no good can come. Yes – I will drink and smoke until the cows come home (and even after they’ve come home) and will do so knowing that such behaviour will make me worse, make me dull, make me ordinary and idle, but I won’t listen to poetry for twenty minutes twice a week. Gosh no. Hell no. Poetry’s got nothing over petty intoxication. Fool.
After Vona has finished her reading, someone asks about her writing process. She says she’s suspicious of anyone who says they require certain conditions in order to write – ambient music, chai tea, a mistress – which encourages me to raise my hand and remember out loud the words of Mark Twain, who said he was unable to write unless he had a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, a remark I reckon unusually funny, and one that isn’t a million miles from my own thinking on the matter. At the end of the event I speak to the Polish professor that had chaired the reading about whether I could be of use to the department. She asks me to be more specific (which strikes me as impertinent), so I say something about being English and coming from England and being able to speak English (things that were sufficient to get me a job at Cream Tea), and therefore a potentially vital additional to the Department of English Philology. Professor so-and-so clears her throat or stifles a laugh, then encourages me to visit her during office hours, before rushing off down the corridor in pursuit of the poet, having given no indication what those hours were, and where that office was.
6 June. Anita comes over to the flat. We share a beer and revise fruit and numbers and the words for frost and spring. Despite (or perhaps because of) the confidences that were shared the last time we met, when I said that thing about thinking about kissing her, things feel no easier between us. Indeed, I am in a hurry to be rid of her. I feel anxious, quietly beside myself, at ill ease. But why? Why this fearful state? Jenny said that I just need to relax and be myself. But I am myself. How can I be otherwise? Myself is nothing more or less than the sum of my thoughts and words and behaviour at any given moment. To become self-conscious and timid is not to depart from one’s personality, but to show another aspect of it. She says she has to go. She stands, adjusts a few things, buttons a few others, clips this, tucks that, but doesn’t otherwise move. She is unquestionably ready to go but instead of going she just sort of stands there, hands together and chin down. Her inaction might be a gentle, passive invitation to kiss her, or hold her, but then again it might not, so I err on the side of caution and move past her and lead her out of the flat and down the stairs to the building’s entrance. At the threshold, having considered a dozen alternatives, I offer her my hand, as if she were a functionary or a friend’s aunt. She refuses it, thank God, and says goodbye another way.
19 ‘He who binds to himself a joy / Doth the winged life destroy. / But he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise.’