henrybrook.com

I can’t reason with the wind. I can hear it in the trees, the cedar comes tapping at my study window. It wants answers and I have none.

to notice the little bush pushing through in a back corner of the enclosure. Too much rushing around to turn the branches and see the fruit. Saw them first in Mark’s garden forty years back, pocketfuls and a palm of sugar, hiding from his baffled father in the high curtain of a willow. Time in hand then, time to daydream. But roaming the garden after the day’s work is done we find them, an unexpected prize.

room, trying to measure out the steels and the angles and all the other stripped-back habitat arcana, and then for a second I drifted and thought of the colour under the tarp, what I was seeing, the coral pools and electric sky and the way it makes all the other colours so much brighter when I stumble down from the loft and into the gravel yard. And I thought of Anne of Green Gables and the way she notices the colour changes, how she calls them out, disarming, inventive, unashamed. And if you can’t see it too you’re not living. I wouldn’t mock one word of that book. All great characters in the stories we crave speak the truths we hold in.

to read fiction, I keep unpicking the threads of it, pulling back the curtain. Part of it is when you find something really good it’s hard to shake the style of it, so my own words are corrupted for a few weeks. But I write so little these days that hardly matters, I’ve gone all-out Bukowski on the not-writing, and then some. He quit for ten years and started up again in his 40s, I don’t know when my machine’s going to start ticking again. The long stuff terrifies me. Every word like sweating blood, like Colm Toibin said, and the lines used to just roll out onto the paper. And part is I’ve wised up, as Roth told the journalist, it’s too easy to drift and see it as contrived. It has to be special, like Pushkin, or Bellow (and only a few with him) before I can slip into the dream of it. I read in snatches, or I read poems, a quick hit, a glimpse of something like staring at a face flash by on a bus but don’t stick around for it to go sour on you.

And all those books I read as a young man, the burnouts and the alkies, the beats and other wanderers, most were books to read before you can get on a plane and do it yourself. Go see it, do it, you don’t need to read about it. When I was 15 I read Henry Miller, when I was 20 I was living it. Film works better for entertainment now, for me. I watch French gangster films and sci-fi when I find myself with a few evening hours alone, they’re not as clever or thought-out as the books but they’re getting close, with teams of writers and art designers, they outrank the books as entertainments, to my eyes.

There’s still magic, old seams of rose gold hidden in the exhausted mines.

and the whole house fills with dust from the lime mortar crumbling away. Walls and boards are peeled back, the rooms take a battering, just the promise of new shapes and coverings to come.

three flights and a walk up the hill to the cathedral, the tour ends at another gallery. You have to go home and try to write. You have to unpick Alexander’s knot, leave your sword in its scabbard.

to catch the Rothko you missed, then to wander the Picos and drink cider, watch the sea etching the Costa da Morte. Money’s tighter than ever, but time’s tighter.

he says. I haven’t spoken with another living, breathing thing for ten days. Nothing helps. Not even Rilke.

I can’t take a tear, that would kill me. Let’s ride out, I try, I’ll buy.

I’ve never been this bad, he says.

I could tell him the 30 fronts I’m fighting and how I wake up a-tremble every dawn, made worse by that feeling I’m letting everyone I care about down. I could tell him lots of things but it won’t make a difference.

Let’s ride out and sink a few. Don’t shame the sunlight.

And he takes the bait.

earn their keep from the flow and those who ferry about. Riverman makes a buck helping out at the narrowboat yard, he knows engines. And he can live on five pounds a day, alongside barter and a few veg boxes. He’s alone, even catless, and you can’t get any lonelier. He has time to read Mervyn Peake and David Jones, books he borrows from my not-yet shelves, myself being starved of time, though compared to many my afternoons are endless and indolent. If only my scribbled daydreams stood worth recording.

no warning, just a scratch in my chest but that night I pulled the covers tight, shivered and hacked in the fever-tossed sheets. Next day I was wheezing, lungs bubbling and ticking, too hot or too cold, hypothalamus shot. I’d been working hard and long on the pages, exhausted, a bad batch of words had infected me. That night I dreamed of log cabin hideaways and clearings in the firs, wolves padding nearby and a last match to strike for salvation. And then today I surfaced for a walk in the woods, came upon a tree uprooted. My kid shot up there and froze on the descent. I had to make my way up the trunk to the rescue, legs wobbling, old boots worn glass-smooth from wear, from too many long roads and wrong turns. But I got her down. And we climbed out of the valley, light spilling from everything, air clean and fresh after the fug.