Where were we.
My first therapist told me my peaceful nature was a front. That I was a gasket under tremendous pressure waiting to blow, who knew what might happen when it did. I frowned. So what, I’m a dormant axe-murderer. Well, it had happened. My old man had provoked me and I had blown. Full St Helens. Walked for 7 miles by night down a muddied track with all my luggage to the highway and got out of there.
Never in my life had I seen you so furious, he said later.
But redemption had come knocking, a door had creaked open.
Violence was all.
The flower bloomed and faded.
The sun rose and sank.
The lover loved and went.
Virginia Wolf, Orlando
*
In the pampa spring is afoot.
If it were voices instead of colours, wrote Rilke, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. The wisteria are little chandeliers that dangle dripping wet, the colours are pixel sharp, the mists that lick the edges of the park come earlier and make tracks before breakfast. The fires in the hearths are needed still, my mother has a saxon sense of temperature and is constantly brrrr-ing.
I’ve never known a person more obsessed with what their parents think of them, my girlfriend told me once. Was I becoming one of those dudes with only one source material, like Tim Dowling’s wife, my output these days could be broken down to my father’s rage and my mother’s ipad. I should write about immigration I thought, staring up at the ceiling in the dark.
After dousing my father with a rage that was frankly forty years in the making, I spent a month in Buenos Aires, riding round supping malbec, attending mass, renting apartments in strange parts of the city I hardly knew. An emancipation my soul was after.
I got severely ill for a fortnight, coughing up blood and everything. Psychosomatic, my old man announced, a punishment for your behaviour. La queja, he referred to the whole episode as.
Your ‘complaint’.
These fights were par for the course. One year I spent 48 hours in the southern hemisphere and left. Woken up on my second morning, before even a good morning he’d bellowed Domingo all your life you have been a depressive. I packed my shit and that afternoon went to the bus station, left him with a note, in tears on the terrace getting consoled by Analía.
After this latest fracas it went through my mind. Ten years ago I would’ve KLM’d it back across the pond. But pops was too old for that now. He started these fights and didn’t know how to end them. The whisper was louder than the shout I figured. If you don’t rise to it, se queda sin balas, my cousin had said.
He runs out of bullets.
I made my way back to the plains.
Do not think that I come to bring peace, but a sword.
All was peas n carrots. I almost told you not to come back, pops tells me. Why. You know what I’m like. Me tengo que sacar la narriz. Cut off my nose to spite my face. So there we were more or less. The harmony my mother had been pleading for, like the new life around us, began to bloom once more.
I wanted a new story.
Had no desire to go back to Europe like how was Argentina yea I slept for three weeks on some childhood bullshit and had a massive fight with my dad. Through the door the loom clanks begins to thread new yarn.
*
My mood is light.
My body clock is still at ten am but I am up with the mists and the dogs throttle me. I whittle soundscapes, turn my writing into podcasts, spend hours zoning in trying to find the right effect, the right decibel, the right take, splice splice. At night we get our Barry Norman on, check films over dinner.
My mother’s mood worries me a little.
You can see it on her face. She is a lady of action and high octane and some days the desert of grass and long lunches wear her down. She has been painting karst mountains in the cuarto Chino but needs something more all-consuming. We go walking by the gallinero, she tells me about the hole that opened up in the aftermath of finishing her book. Let’s ask chat GPT for a new subject I say. Why not just get it to write the whole book then, she sighs.
Cummon mother. Yes yes darling.
The days curdle onward and her frown turns upside down. I love being with them. We walk out by the lake, third wheeling it as the love birds whisper sweet nothings on the bench cut from the felled elm. Don’t know how many more high fives we’ll all get together and everything feels in its right place.
Just hanging out fam.
By the time she says goodbye she is five years younger.
*
Peace reigns supreme.
Stay he says. My heart is in Hackney papa. I can only stay because I want to. If it’s to placate you shit will get real again. Don’t agree to something you don’t agree to, said an old Greek guy. You must be here to witness my final years, he says. Oh yea? Get on your knees then. I try to say grace one lunch and ten seconds in he’s all like che I’m hungry.
Some days I feel the impending doom of some enormous cataclysm. I can’t work out what. Something deep in the bowels of the earth, coming up to shatter the peace. Like the Balrog stirring, something to do with the state of the world. If the apocalypse is nigh, being in the middle of nowhere in the most southerly country on earth is no bad shout.
He tells me my face is rounding like a lollipop. Stop forcing 4 course meals on me five times a day then! I bow out of the lunch thing, tap a cold empanada or three from the fridge in the afternoons. Proverbs 17:1 knocks it out the park. Better a dry crust eaten in peace than a house filled with feasting and conflict.
We watch the Other Boleyn Girl.
Do you think being a King would be lonely, I ask.
He side-eyes me deadly seriously.
It is.
He is one bad decision away from an enormous portrait of himself in 15th century garb emblazoned in the hall.
Oh wait.
The sun rises and sinks. The flowers bloom and fade. I hang with the pooches, drink beer under the moon, the wheelbarrows in the courtyard loiter like two hoodlums thrown out of the club.
After 16 years and one too many fights, Analía threatens to quit. Que se vaya. Let her leave then, he shouts. There is a three day stand off but her mind is made up. Rubén her husband lights a cigarette in the dusk and commiserates. I will find a job somewhere, I can’t leave her alone. Una lastima, a sadness, he says. His eyes are wet with tears, he makes his excuses and walks off to the galpón. Two days later I recount the scene to pops and he wells up to.
Waterworks all round.
On the third morning papa calls her to the library and they talk and he says please don’t leave, stay a little longer and she relents. I write her a letter, the house needs you to leave happy, not under a dark cloud. The house would be too sad. All teeters back to normal. There is something very destructive in me, pops concedes once the air has cleared. Like he cannot bear too much peace. Cut off your nose to spite your face.
The days go on.
I fear leaving pops here but he has his spring for company.
The bible is God’s word but nature is written in his language. Most of the time he just sits there staring out. You must admit even if I don’t communicate with God I communicate with the works of his hands, I concede that I have rarely seen a happier old man.
Eventually I bounce.
I am past my visa. 100 days. I crash and burn with a girl called Barbara in Buenos Aires on my last night. Hungover on the flight I feel a pride bubble. The winter of 2026, stuck to my guns. If you leave now you will find no peace. Go towards your fear and look behind it. The gold is in the witch’s mouth.
Where two or more of you are gathered in my name I am with you.
*
Back in Hackney I walk the Downs, I can’t get used to it. I miss the pampa and the dogs and pops forcing me to scratch his head. I stay up til 3am to watch Messi play his last game. Feel the city morphing around me, into the spaces in between, before I know it’ll be like I’d never been away. Why do we get used to everything.
To painted train lines/
chrome over red brick reflective/
like a gemstone in a cesspit/
Jehst gives belief to a skeptic.
It takes three days to come good, tunes in my ear, threading through traffic, the urban static of a darkening afternoon, plane leaves coat the pavement. I take a selfie, swallow a pothole, catch the Salman Rushdie doc at the Curzon Bloomsbury. Get a text from a mate. What you under G. Not much.
Bout you.
Just hanging out fam.
