Inspiration from Graffiti

By: Sumangali Morhall
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:41:45
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Amongst the misspelled graffiti on the side of a house are some new words, sprayed carefully in tsilver: "Do something different, please." The neatness and politeness disarm me. Now I’m smiling.

"Maybe you’re right," I say, as if to the anonymous author, making a detour behind city railings.

A handsome crow is adamant about something on the lawn of a park, but nobody’s listening. He eyes me jealously and makes off with some small prize - bounces twice and transforms into a glossy fan sweeping under a tree.

I’m puzzled; did I only sleep for one night? Spring is already in her dressing room, trying on new jewels.

Crocuses take up their brilliance in unseemly mire and mouldering beech husks. They ring with hope; detached in dignity from their unlikely home. How brave to be so vulnerable, playing out fleeting roles, fearless of weather or the soles of boots.

One bee is lumbering, battling to keep his own weight above the unearthly ligh of snowdrops. Nature returns my adoration with the stoic gaze of diligence. She has already placed fistfuls of tiny red trumpets onto stems. I listen, but I do not have ears for them; I hear only the fountain, and two beaks pecking on wood.

A bronze boy is lost in eternal fascination with a bronze butterfly, unaware that pigeons are paddling unstockinged in his pond. They’re courting and gossiping with each other, voices soft and hollow like clay pots.

A child, almost crazed with contagious joy, runs ahead of her father and of her own feet, in boots as wide and tall as they are long, and a flailing coat.

Why not? Who needs reasons in the company of Spring?

* * *

"Why you going there?" frowns the cab driver when I ask him for a seaside town.

"I’ve got a physio appointment." I reply.

"Waste of time," he says, eyes strangely enlarged in a convex mirror, "you want to find yourself a healer."

Now he has my attention – cabbies usually stick to topics like weather and sport don’t they? Careering across the estuary, he recounts with passionate sincerity the stories of his faith-healing brother-in-law. I’m rapt, not really by the content of his words, but by their intense delivery. What an unusual topic of unsought conversation. I interrupt only to point out a black pet rabbit cleaning its ears in the display of a cycle shop.

After my appointment I recall my adopted motto for the day, and mentally file my chores under "pending." Ducking down through some ornate topiary, I find the sea.

An Italianate ice cream parlour looks out towards England from a peeling 1950’s facade. Ladies sit inside in coats and hats. The pier beckons me more urgently than ice cream; rusting in an endless saline assault, while its abandoned summer palace waits in vain for brass bands and tea dances.

Searching for England’s furthest shore, I lose her in grey bands of sea and sky. It’s always grey, but not like the city - steely and vibrant as if daubed in a hurry on blue. The sea is brown and milky like Milo, swelling and drawing with imagined sweetness on black clumps of slack weed.

A little girl is blowing a whistle constantly to a mile of grey shale, while her mother picks across larger stones. There are no longer amusement rides, or slot machines, or candyfloss: only fishermen crouching under their caps. I wonder if they’re really here for fish, or to greet the air, and sky, and sea... as I am.

I’d forgotten "I" was there at all; maybe that’s something different too, and something good.

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