Suitcase

My mind has been curiously blank this past week, a fat white expanse of plane-smoothed chalk mattely pin-pricking thoughtful pupils and coating curious palms with calc dust. Which might be calming, perhaps, if not for the unsettling half-heard sound of a thought or two, not one of those little caltrop-shaped ones that might drop out of the subsidence cracks if you shake your skull just so, but staggering, towering, silent ones like walking a corridor of ice and realising that for hours you have been staring at a mammoth, ear-splitting in its frozen forever.

Tomorrow I am on a plane for a week in England, breaking out the brand-new visa, to celebrate Pluvialis' birthday. We are going to see Hamlet. I will breathe English autumn, and drink terrible English coffee, banking around dodgem emotional corners with glee.

I'll send a postcard.

Ten things I found out this week

1. The most money you can make on Plants vs. Zombies is $999,900.

2. Nicole Richie's second novel has been published, and it apparently contains the lines:

It felt incredibly loud and hot in the club. The pulsing bass lines could be physically felt in every pair of panties ...

3. I did actually break my nose.

4. Advent is a big deal in Germany.

5. Some women call their lala 'sixpence'.

6. I don't call it either of these things.

7. The German vernacular for fellatio is Presidentensex.

8. Gotye's Like Drawing Blood is all award-winning and blah-de-blah, but the underappreciated gem of the album is 'Night Drive'.

9. My day can be made by the gift of a Kaiser's Einkaufswagen chip keyring with the Berlin bear on one side.

10. I really can't believe the whole Jonathan Franzen thing.

Ovenproof

Today I have poached damsons with spoonsful of sugar, sliced celeriac into unnecessarily pretty slices for stock, put the bedding out to air in the sunshine, wandered the floorboards with my soles close, pressing my feet to the wood as if traces will someday be found in the grain, in the chocolatey-swirl knots. Berlin is outlandishly dusty as though it is the moon, fine greyish white dandery film covering everything, shiny cameos of book or tea cup lifted off the bedside table. Bladerunner bought two dozen brace or so of different safety pins for various rarified long-distance running purposes, and I find them about the place, wheedled in between the sofa cushions, in the kitchen drawers and one deep in the grey sheepskin rug, hibernating like a ladybird.

Last night I drank tequila and danced, and wondered.

Meanwhile

Some days I do nothing but talk myself off ledges; dusty, cracked and narrow with stonework slipping like shale, peeling windowframes at my shoulderblades and the balls of my feet jacked to 90 degrees, madness lying disinterestedly between the paving slabs on the street below. Ledge-logic shears away from the face of stability in gritty, burning scatters of brimstone like fireworks that got mocked a lot at school.

Hostage-negotiator voice. Outside the mental door in a bulletproof vest and the marriage-on-the-rocks eyes. Give her the pizza and tell her that we're working on the helicopter.