Well, look at that: the month of March has once again popped up on our calendars, marking a whole year of searching for face masks, sterilising our wrinkly mitts, stepping off pavements when we see someone approach and silently screaming great arias of boredom, anger, frustration, fear and loss at the sleeping cat.
This time last year I had a €200 gift voucher for a city-centre department store and I went into town and bought myself a green velvet jacket in a sale. The jacket had had a hundred quid knocked off its price; however, it was still, for me, expensive.
I hummed and hawed, walked around the shop floor a bit, then skedaddled back and blew my entire voucher on it. The lady wrapped the jacket in tissue paper and put it in a bag with a ribbon on it. I was thrilled.
I went home, put the jacket in my wardrobe. I was planning on wearing it at the book launch for my first novel, which was scheduled to take place in Hodges Figgis on March 18th.
I fully intended to gad about in my patriotically green velvet jacket with my mates before the launch, and afterwards I was resigned to spilling some white wine on the lapel and maybe getting a sticky beer stain on the elbow from leaning across a noisy pub table.
And who knows, later again, when most people had gone home to resume watching Brexit coverage and to hurl abuse at their televisions, my jacket and I might have leaned against the wall of some pleasant hostelry, tired but awake.
And maybe some wearingly loquacious soul might have stood next to me, looked up at the night sky, dropped ash on my shoulder and told me about the tenth dimension, a dimension where everything possible and imaginable, all the myriad outcomes of our as yet unlived lives, exists. It’s a barely comprehensible state, beyond the limitations of our understanding, a higher, calmer, more contemplative plane.
“And we’re all already there,” my friend might insist, their spittle softly landing on my shoulder, “all of us, in all our many, many jackets, gazing back at our futures.”
Fresh cod and chips
And because of the night that was in it, my green jacket and I would probably have taken a taxi home. I might even have asked the driver to drop me off at the chipper down the road. I’d surely have ordered fresh cod and chips because, let’s face it, I would’ve been so busy on that red-letter day, having my hair cut, browsing the bookshop and trying on slimming underwear, that I wouldn’t have eaten since breakfast.
And if, on that night of nights, I’d had the fish and chips, then the wine-stained, beer-sticky, ash-and-spittle-sprinkled green velvet jacket, already exhausted from flinging its arms around friends and acquaintances all night, would have smelt of vinegar too.
And because I’m a messy old girl who can’t be arsed to hang things up after midnight, it would surely have ended up crumpled and pungent on my bedroom floor.
The next morning I might have debated taking it to the dry-cleaner’s and decided instead to rub off the worst bits, put it back on, go for a walk, buy myself a takeaway coffee and something carby, and because it’d be hard to let go of the excitement of the night before, I might even have boarded a Dart back into the pulsing city, and then…
The jacket’s still in the wardrobe. Pristine. Po-faced. Arms by its sides. Haughty. Imperious. It won.
It’s waiting for me to throw in the towel altogether and return it to the ribboned bag, to put it back in the tissue paper casket from whence it came one long year ago.
Hum and haw
It takes me a ridiculously long time to write a novel; years. I hum and haw, walk towards an idea, walk away again, wander around, look at options – blue shoes? a yellow skirt? – and finally come back again to my starting point and blow my entire 200 bucks on the one vaguely promising item.
I’ve started a new book. I’m clocking up the words, ticking off the days, looking out the window, waiting for something. I’m no longer really sure for what.
I should put the jacket in one of those protective zippy bags, hang it back up in the morgue of unworn clothes that is my wardrobe. Otherwise, by the time I finish this next book, it’ll be just a filigree, a lacy leftover from the satiated moths.