Volcanic Ash Part 1

150,000 British people will have a story to tell … I heard them everywhere, in the chaotic airports, as I passed on the street, in the bars …

Landing in San Javier on the 10th filled with apprehension, going back so close to the place I called home for nearly 3 years of my life, a place I tried to put roots down in. When I heard my sister had made her way back down to the white coast I just wanted to go back, to see, to touch, to feel the place I felt I belonged for so long.

Heading to Orihuela, I spent the first few days in sunshine lit bars, catching up on tales of the life she has led since I packed my backs and returned to the UK … messages from my old friends laying dormant in my phone and on my facebook as I tried to get the courage to head closer to Torrevieja … so scared of seeing Andrew, so frightened of facing the hurt, the feelings that once flowed like water but that I have frozen out like ice.

There coming again, the words, the words that my family seem to say so much, the spitefulness, the shouting, the throwing of fists, like many before her my sister has the anger inside of her … like always my face is the face of someone who deserves to feel the rage, like always I am the agonistic, the irritation that brings the rage … I just want to go home … suitcases in street, the feel of her force … the tears that come so easily.

I’m in a taxi heading back towards San Javier, the drink is blurring my feelings I can make no sense of the situation … the airport is closed, a military base it does not stay open overnight, I am asking the driver to take me to a 24hr bar I will sit and drown my sorrows before catching an early flight. I walk into a bar in La Santiago de Riberia, strangers are taking pity on me, the rag a tag girl with the suitcase, offering me a place to stay for the night, my fear is becoming confused with what is the more frightening prospect being stuck in a bar with Morrocan drug dealers or staying with British strangers … I go with the people from home, they are good people, helping me anyway they can. Next day I am unable to get a flight as the Volcano has brought Europe to a standstill, I don’t know what to do, my desire to leave the country and head back home is all encompassing.

The strangers put me up for one more night, their kindness is killing me, I find a lift with yet more strangers into France, they are heading back to Germany and offer to take me as far as Perpignan, from there I plan on getting a train to Paris and then from Paris to Calais and then from there the ferry crossing to the UK … we set out at four in the morning, I am tired but glad to finally be on my way … finally the journey home is starting and I can escape Spain. It’s raining, the rain feels like it is an echo of my mood, we are close to Valencia and I can see the bend in the road, we are going too fast just for a split second I think please god, the car is skidding, we are hitting the barrier … thank god nobody is hurt …the car is not so lucky.

To be continued …

The Almost Baby

Years ago, almost 7 in fact, there was nearly a baby.

Sometimes I wonder how my body conceived, not only did I take my birth control regular as clockwork, I also abused my body with a constant supply of illegal drugs and my closest friend the bottle, but mother nature has a funny way of working and I managed to fall pregnant.

The father – God… the father – was (sadly still is…) my itch, my itch that cannot be scratched, the person of my nightmares, the person of my dreams, the one who holds the power to bring my world crashing down and then raise me to the heights of heaven in a one minute conversation. I hated him, I hate him, I was obsessed by him, I am obsessed by him. He is, to put it crudely, my very own non-curable STD.

He has been my endless infatuation … he has never been my love. I have been his constant whipping girl … I have never been his love.

But the baby … the baby was different, it was pure, it didn’t know that it had been conceived by two of the most egotistical, fucked up beings that it would ever have the misfortune to know.

I found out (I am told) that the baby existed a bit later then women normally do, as the realisation dawned on so did the peace, I remember feeling tired, so tired all the time, and I remember feeling I had a secret that I didn’t want to share, I wanted to keep it all for myself.

Until the blackness arrived … until the blackness of what I really was started running through my veins like heroin, until I started looking in the mirror and seeing the outline of a bump and looking around me and seeing how my life really was. The genes, which created me, the genes of the people who destroyed me, were running through me into this new life form. How could I – the hated girl with the black eyes and paranoid-fuelled temper – pretend to myself that I was capable of being a parent any better then the ones I had had myself? Would it have been possible for me, the girl whose only sense of directions points the wrong way, the girl who could outrun the fastest cheetah to not run away from that baby … to not destroy that baby.

I didn’t have the kindness … I didn’t have the wickedness … to try …

He was meant to come with me the day they took the baby away from my body, in the end he didn’t bother, I remember his words …I should be there …I remember thinking what am I doing. I went alone.

There were protesters outside I was too numb to take in what they were saying, it seemed ironic to me at the time that most of them were men. I sat and waited for my name to be called in a waiting room full of couples, all ages, some looking tearful others so certain. I nearly got up to leave six times in ten minutes.

Your not supposed to see the scan they tell you to turn your head away but my eyes fixated on the screen, I needed to see the baby, I needed something to crucify myself with.

I cried when I left that day, sitting in my car in the carpark protesters still in sight, my body feeling empty, my evilness all consuming, I cried like someone who wanted to shed every tear that could possibly exist.

Sometimes I wonder who I was crying for … sometimes I wonder for whom I am still crying for.