the lovely bones
First, bits of news;
Past Events
Yesterday I ended up in Marks&Spencer shopping for pretty tights, and came away with two pairs of fishnets. Even though they were respectively marked at £4, they scanned in as costing £1 and 1p respectively, which caused the teller to look very confused and to take away the 1p tights.
Teller [apologetically]: I'm sorry, you can't buy these. They are free.
N: Oh. Can I have them then?
T: No.
Which seemed a bit mean but I wasn't about to argue with people who had sold me the other pair for £1 so I skipped off and away.
Did half a day's work [having spent the first half at the GPs] and then in the evening met up with an assortment of lovely and pleasant folk in a nice swish pub on Abbey Rd. On leaving Z and I were united in feelings of sorriness for me and my painful hip, so he gave me a lift back on his motorbike. I had on a skirt and fishnets and sandals and a pink shoulderbag which is not quite the best biker-chick look but it wasn't very far and we weren't on main roads.
Back at home we attempted to watch The 25th Hour, which Z stoically saw all the way through and I slept through about half. I knew it was a mistake to pull out the sofa bed - nowadays as soon as I get even slightly comfortable I am guaranteed to be out like a light. I am starting to think that the only way I will be able to watch a movie from start to finish is from a bed of nails.
Travel
Tomorrow, I'm going to Germany for a few days to visit Jasna. I'm flying in to Leipzig and I have my passport and I'm all EUROd up which is all hugely exciting. I have unearthed a German phrasebook which ought to come in useful and I'm going to forget the fact that I intensely dislike German and instead I'm going to concentrate on lovely flea markets and spending time with my friend.
*********************************************************
Today I spent most of the day at Royal Free Hospital where I had my hip X-rayed. Like most people, I dislike hospitals - its sickly colours, its smells of disinfectant and sadness.
But it was made fairly bearable through having a good book to read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, part of last week's charity shop loot. It was so soo so good. I was absorbed almost from the first paragraph and it saw me through all the waiting rooms and all the examinations.
While waiting for the x-rays we all had to change into hospital gowns. I sat on the chair with my trousers and jacket and backpack neatly folded on my knees wrapped in a garment that it was impossible to tie without flashing the lower half of my anatomy.
The bare skin of my legs made me feel sad and exposed. I was acutely aware of the bruises on my legs, six, seven of them, like dirty thumbprints. Acutely aware too of the gaze of the man across the room, and of my pink sneakers on the linoleum floor [incongrous somehow in the gloom of the hospital, they made me feel melancholy and vulnerable and younger than I was]. Stripped of trousers I felt fragile and open as though my bare skin and choice of footwear revealed something intimate and important about me.
And then it was time to go into the X-ray room and sit up on the bed while the radiologist searched for things, and then be interrogated on whether or not I was pregnant, when was my last menstrual period, when did I last have sex. Her voice was husky and with a West Indies accent, I found it hard to make out the words, the instructions.
There was more waiting. I'm used to that in hospitals. I was sitting up on the table, waiting for the radiologist to come back and do things with the machine and staring at my legs, at the way the hospital gown I'd wrapped around myself was parted to mid-thigh. I was feeling loose, partially disconnected from myself and floating up and away from the room and my body into a more pleasant realm, pretending that I was on a beach instead that the garment was not a gown but a summer dress, that the yellow eye of the X-ray was summer sun. I transfigured the linoleum into sand, knocked down walls.
And then it was time to lie back and I was still floating, still semi-detached from myself as though my body was not quite my own, but a character in a movie I was watching, an extra from Six Feet Under.
But as the machine hovered over my abdomen, and made a series of noises and clicks I was turning dizzying cartwheels, hurtling down from the ceiling and into myself, diving into my body as though it were a sea. Rushing with the tumult of bloodcells, through the rollercoasters of arteries and veins, towards my own skeleton. Towards the smooth, stark, graceful bowl of my pelvis and the arcs of my hips - cold and silent and serene, unfazed by the chaos of the body around them.
Past Events
Yesterday I ended up in Marks&Spencer shopping for pretty tights, and came away with two pairs of fishnets. Even though they were respectively marked at £4, they scanned in as costing £1 and 1p respectively, which caused the teller to look very confused and to take away the 1p tights.
Teller [apologetically]: I'm sorry, you can't buy these. They are free.
N: Oh. Can I have them then?
T: No.
Which seemed a bit mean but I wasn't about to argue with people who had sold me the other pair for £1 so I skipped off and away.
Did half a day's work [having spent the first half at the GPs] and then in the evening met up with an assortment of lovely and pleasant folk in a nice swish pub on Abbey Rd. On leaving Z and I were united in feelings of sorriness for me and my painful hip, so he gave me a lift back on his motorbike. I had on a skirt and fishnets and sandals and a pink shoulderbag which is not quite the best biker-chick look but it wasn't very far and we weren't on main roads.
Back at home we attempted to watch The 25th Hour, which Z stoically saw all the way through and I slept through about half. I knew it was a mistake to pull out the sofa bed - nowadays as soon as I get even slightly comfortable I am guaranteed to be out like a light. I am starting to think that the only way I will be able to watch a movie from start to finish is from a bed of nails.
Travel
Tomorrow, I'm going to Germany for a few days to visit Jasna. I'm flying in to Leipzig and I have my passport and I'm all EUROd up which is all hugely exciting. I have unearthed a German phrasebook which ought to come in useful and I'm going to forget the fact that I intensely dislike German and instead I'm going to concentrate on lovely flea markets and spending time with my friend.
*********************************************************
Today I spent most of the day at Royal Free Hospital where I had my hip X-rayed. Like most people, I dislike hospitals - its sickly colours, its smells of disinfectant and sadness.
But it was made fairly bearable through having a good book to read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, part of last week's charity shop loot. It was so soo so good. I was absorbed almost from the first paragraph and it saw me through all the waiting rooms and all the examinations.
While waiting for the x-rays we all had to change into hospital gowns. I sat on the chair with my trousers and jacket and backpack neatly folded on my knees wrapped in a garment that it was impossible to tie without flashing the lower half of my anatomy.
The bare skin of my legs made me feel sad and exposed. I was acutely aware of the bruises on my legs, six, seven of them, like dirty thumbprints. Acutely aware too of the gaze of the man across the room, and of my pink sneakers on the linoleum floor [incongrous somehow in the gloom of the hospital, they made me feel melancholy and vulnerable and younger than I was]. Stripped of trousers I felt fragile and open as though my bare skin and choice of footwear revealed something intimate and important about me.
And then it was time to go into the X-ray room and sit up on the bed while the radiologist searched for things, and then be interrogated on whether or not I was pregnant, when was my last menstrual period, when did I last have sex. Her voice was husky and with a West Indies accent, I found it hard to make out the words, the instructions.
There was more waiting. I'm used to that in hospitals. I was sitting up on the table, waiting for the radiologist to come back and do things with the machine and staring at my legs, at the way the hospital gown I'd wrapped around myself was parted to mid-thigh. I was feeling loose, partially disconnected from myself and floating up and away from the room and my body into a more pleasant realm, pretending that I was on a beach instead that the garment was not a gown but a summer dress, that the yellow eye of the X-ray was summer sun. I transfigured the linoleum into sand, knocked down walls.
And then it was time to lie back and I was still floating, still semi-detached from myself as though my body was not quite my own, but a character in a movie I was watching, an extra from Six Feet Under.
But as the machine hovered over my abdomen, and made a series of noises and clicks I was turning dizzying cartwheels, hurtling down from the ceiling and into myself, diving into my body as though it were a sea. Rushing with the tumult of bloodcells, through the rollercoasters of arteries and veins, towards my own skeleton. Towards the smooth, stark, graceful bowl of my pelvis and the arcs of my hips - cold and silent and serene, unfazed by the chaos of the body around them.