Section 2, 2

Zig-zag doesn’t have ravenous eyes, he has pointy eyes. Slick, skittering, pokey little beads that nip about, and sometimes, when he is stressed, are squeezed together like pin ends.

I am one of the few people in the world who have ever dressed as an eyeball. A few days after Fern I had our tete- a-tete in the Storey tasting garden, she came to me with a proposal: the Storey gallery needed volunteers for an art project called THEY FOLLOW YOU ABOUT THE ROOM - volunteers would dress up as giant eyeballs and follow visitors about the building.

I felt like an idiot dressed as a giant eyeball, long stringy eyes-lashes dripping down, skinny legs in black tights poking out the bottom, but I do remember that Fern’s legs looked amazing in her costume.

I enjoyed being an eyeball; I followed one fellah all the way across the road into the bookshop, but John from the gallery said that was going too far
One evening I was still dressed as a giant eyeball and I spotted Fern on her way home and I followed her. She knew it was me, and played along and I got on the bus behind her (I had to stand at the front because of the costume) and we went all the way out to her little terraced house in Wharton and her husband was out on a university away day so she invited me in. The kids playing cricket in the street stopped their game to watch the giant eyeball with bony legs follow Fern into her house. Inside, she made me take the eye costume off and I’d forgotten I had no shirt underneath, and we laughed and she looked at my bare chest for a time and she smiled in a wistful way, then pressed her palm against my belly and said, a fissure of shyness in her voice, ‘they don’t spoil you at that lino factory,’ before going into the kitchen and returning with one of her husband’s shirts.

I thought about nothing but Fern McCaulay for days and the place she’d touched tingled as if her warm palm was still there, like a phantom limb. The tingling continued, but everything else went cold, and I never found out why. She got my poem, I know she got my poem, but nothing came back.

FIND ZIG-ZAG PLEASE

THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING

(How can she say that about me? How can she? Have a look at her blog and see what you think. Here)