SUMMER IS ICUMEN IN
1: Tennis Balls On a number of occasions in the winter, I looked at the black beyond my sloping window and thought, "I wish I could go and play tennis." But after the clocks changed, I acknowledged this venture was still impossible, since I'd have to amass a racket and a ball, and a cycle helmet, so I could reach the warehouse doors without tiring myself out. But Mum found all these things under the stairs. The ball was reluctant to bounce and she didn't think I could find another in our small town, but Dad was convinced I could get them on Amazon. A sixty-five-year old shouldn't have known more about online shopping than I did, but sure enough, I could get a can for 49p plus £3.95 P&P. I played the clarinet and was annoyed at the difficulty I had finding places to breathe. I was going to flippantly change my Facebook status to "Metal Zed can't be bothered breathing", but my relatives had been befriending me and I didn't want them worrying. My brother came to stay. He'd kept himself entertained on the train with his iPhone. It had an 8GB hard drive, making it 163 times bigger than the computer that had stood me in good stead until 1999 and larger, too, than the one I'd used until 2002. The doorbell rang at 8.30pm. "I wonder if it's my tennis balls?" It was impossible, but I envisioned them bouncing arhythmically on the door step, glowing, ripe to be plucked from the air. It was my half brother and he sat with us for the next hour. I couldn't remember the five of us ever doing this. I had little to say though, since the conversation centred on ridiculous health and safety policies, something I'd had mercifully little trouble with, and I didn't like to complain anyway. My bed, my enemy, manacled me for some time after I woke, but when I found the will to switch on my phone, it was 6.45. The prospect of getting to work at this hour distressed me, but I remembered, I didn't have to, I could read instead. So I put on Demolition Hammer quietly and finished Bill Bryson's "The Lost Continent". This inspired me to try "On The Road" again, which I'd started a few years ago, but had put down after the first chapter for reasons I couldn't recall. As I placed "The Lost Continent" beside my computer, reminding myself to add it to the "books I'd read list", novel paragraphs swelled in my mind, but my chair was covered in bulging envelopes of German vocabulary, so I stuck to my original plan. The introduction quoted, "the ones that never yearn" while the text said, "the ones who never yawn", but these amounted to the same thing. I yearned too much, but I discovered why I'd stopped reading last time: I had to go, with or without my tennis balls, and I had to write. I had wasted too much of the last ten years. Pre-occupied with my reflection and finding this in my words, rather than my faded hair dye and the lines carved in my forehead, I looked at my website every week and beheld the gaping gaps between the stories, where dashed-off juvenilia had been razed. But I wanted a city, not the ideal Estonian landscape where a man lives four miles from his nearest neighbour. I had to get down to the scrapheap of my harddrive and reconstruct and I had to make the most of the sun. The Beats never made lists of books they'd read and flashcards to help them learn the names of albums they owned. I brushed my teeth till the foam turned brick. When I finished my exercise, my brother was in the shower, so I went to eat and found water dripping through the ceiling. Like Neil in "The Young Ones", I cast around helplessly for a receptacle, settled for a plate, and caught the last seven drips. I decided to delay my shower until my Dad could patch the ceiling.
I spoke to Georgina on Skype while I waited. Clouds exploded in the sky. I tried to speak to Ibid, but her words were robotic and then she disappeared altogether.
I was always thinking of sentences I needed to add to my novel, only to find I'd already done so. I didn't give my younger self much credit. I was perpetually amazed that my naive twenty four year old self had toured the Baltic and enjoyed far more popularity with the opposite sex than I did now. I'd seen a programme called "Why Reading Matters", which claimed Shakespeare was brilliant because some of his phrases, such as "they godded him" made people's minds react in unusual ways. But they perked up in a different manner upon seeing the phrase "they printed him", the bizarreness of which I preferred. It hadn't said why the first manner was preferable to the second, or why either was useful, but I was using it as an excuse to let words evacuate their natural habitat.
Every evening my parents and I took it approximately in turn to invent terms, rarely bothering to ascribe meaning to them. I preferred monosyllabic ones which I thought should exist, such as "soam" and "prange". The current word was "nutricable" and the trick was to recall them for the next twenty four hours. Mum thought this was good for us. I thought it was tying up valuable brain cells.
Despite the clouds, Mum and I went for a walk. An evil landrover passed and a stumpy-legged brown dog chased it for a while, then joined us, briefly, when it vanished into the dust. Another dog had befriended us last time we'd come here. We reached a path we'd never taken. "We should go down there one day," Mum said. "Why not today?" I asked and we followed it down to a house by an unknown river and a crumbling shack soon to be torn down and replaced. A sign banned us from a clearing. The water was eerily peaceful. Satanic rituals? There was a choice a bridge and an upward-winding path. We took the path because we had to choose somehow and there might have been a troll beneath the bridge. We found a house with a wind turbine and several cars parked outside, but no road leading to it. A grassy indentation promised an idyllic primary-school-sports-day hollow and another offered a route to the sun, but we found a way to our original destination, thus turning the expedition into a partial-loop.
Walks were always better when you didn't have to turn round. The brown dog was gone too. But one of my socks, a favourite, had developed a hole in its sole and when I got home my slippers braised my feet.
"Olbinth" was the word of the day. Dad suggested we give it a meaning. I thought it was part of a heavy-duty woodwork tool, prone to breaking, whose purpose was unintelligible to the non-enthusiast. Mum thought it was an architectural feature. Dad maintained it was the technical name for the sort of misstep that occurs when one of your legs decides it's shorter than the other and you sway sideways. Too many of these was a sure sign of olbinthitis. We watched "Lewis" and I felt obliged to call "Swile!" every time the program's name appeared on the screen. I was highly disappointed to learn that Sergeant Hathaway wasn't asexual or gay, as had previously been suggested. I dreamed I was at Cambridge University, only it was in Edinburgh and had York's campus. I was studying Maths, Physics, Cake and Orange Squash, only I was perilously behind with everything except Maths. I went to Bloodlust metal night then left early to attend an Orange Squash seminar, where six people struggled to ask me relevant questions for an hour. My tennis balls arrived and bubbled together when I shook the package. It was the first time I'd acquired Tennis Balls In A Can.com and when I pulled the tab, I was assaulted with a blastreek of neon.
The sky was off-white, though, and the trees were stale. The fridge had stopped working and even with the freezer on its weakest setting, after a night, the cheese spread had frozen solid.
I was still very fond of my middle name - what could be more metal than a three-letter word that managed to contain both a 'Z' and an umlaut? - but I felt as detached from it as my never-loved first. Zoe was tall and quiet and did things with her hair. Was becoming Zoe, narrowing the gap between my work life and private life, necessary to grow up? We watched "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency". I tried to read Kafka's journal, but got too inspired. My brother coined the word "crispinate". "Balls" had become our favourite curse word independently and we both had balls Tuesdays. I dreamed Ragnarök festival happened in South Korea before the German edition and Victoria reported that it was disappointing. But after fourteen months, my brother helped me remove "get computer sound fixed" from my task list, and it was bright but windy at 6.15, so, so incognito even my Dad didn't recognise me, I made my way to the promised door.
I knew I had long found something deeply satisfying in this pursuit, but after four hundred dull sessions on the exercise bike, I knew my patience for sport had grown thin. But, despite the rapid blisters on my hand and the cold air gouging my mouth, the joy was still mine. The camp sideways readjustment prances, to the scrunch of asphalt. "Come back you little bastard *pounce* ma-hack!" I would return.
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