Monday, June 16, 2014

key

You/she had told me to go to your/her house and collect a house key from you so we could do a lesson. It was quite late in the evening but I was let in, made to wait in a reception room while various members of the family went to and fro; I had to explain to several of them why I was there at that time of day, she knows you are here? then please wait. I waited. At some point a little girl came in, said "hello, my name is Shanti, who are you?" I explained to her that F had asked me to come to collect a key and she perhaps should be made aware that I was in the house. "ok, I'll go fetch her", she said and disappeared. The house was getting busier with more and more people, family members and staff of some sort or another, going up and down the stairs and casting long glances at me. A young man in a suit with a tag on a lanyard asked me, like so many of them before, whether he could help, I repeated my story and he bid me to come upstairs with him to the next level -but he couldn't take me to the top floor, where F should be, as that wasn't allowed. I'd have to stay there. I said perhaps I should phone her; he said it might not be a good idea, I should not bother F and just wait to be called ... I completed the sentence, "... because it is nearly midnight". I still took out my phone but the screen was smudged and sliding my finger to open it didn't work. I tried to clean it but now the screen had gone white, the 'slide to open' words still waving across but not responding. I thought of restarting it but it would take too long and the young man seemed to be getting impatient. I started explaining to him in more detail but then stopped, what, none of it made any sense and I needed to wake up....

Thursday, June 12, 2014

dream with tiger

Woke up, she’d left the room. I felt a stab of the old loneliness, I knew she wasn’t going to come back. The tiger had come into the room. Came and lied next to me, nuzzling its head into my hand as if it were a kitten. But it was not a kitten, it was a monster three times as heavy as I was, who could kill me with barely noticing it. It made affectionate cuddling movements with its head and finally fell asleep. I, as quietly as I could, got up and slowly and quietly left the room. Didn’t close the door to avoid waking it up -that door, in any event, wouldn’t have lasted that animal a second. Out in the corridor, rain was seeping through the roof everywhere. There were bits of broken masonry everywhere. I needed the loo but the bathroom was destroyed. I was alone in a wrecked house with a tiger. I felt desperately, desperately lonely.