Written By : Jude Jones
I know the seams of my village like those of an old lover. That is, with the intimacy of devotional repetition: of coming home only at those languorous moments in life when everything droops like a web beneath the weight of anticipation or loathing, or when everything is fluid and sheer potentiality so that there’s nothing solid to grasp.
In French, the word revenant – a phantom – is derived from the verb revenir, “to come back.” So, a revenant is somebody who comes back, who keeps coming back, and there is in that history a fractal essence of what it feels like to journey homewards: phantasmal; like the crossing of a threshold between times, between an already-gone past and a persistent present without ever fully going from the one to the next.
This summer, I returned to the seams. I’d spent the year in Paris pursuing writing and teaching, then had my heart broken and slunk back furtive to the mundane familiarity of life in the seams. Of life in a village of a couple hundred rather than the millions of Paris, where people lived in plump clusters of cottages and council homes, each set separated from the next by pot-holed roads that cracked in constellations and rain-licked fields whose muddy putrescenes evoked a more primordial way of life, one ruled by old gods and fertility prayers, fat madonnas buried in the ground and ecstatic dervishes around warm and crackling fires.
Yet the village is threadbare. A social club whose dark-oak walls and dank carpet floors have witnessed litres of golden lager full down gullets and children mope past unwatching parents in its murmuring belly for generations.
And a pub of the same air. A village shop now converted into an ugly little home because there was never enough thoroughfare to quite keep it open. And a sullen, protestant-looking church named for the St Bartholomew, whose blue-faced clock beholds from its hilltop the village’s comings and goings like it was itself among the choir of saints with its namesake Bartholomew, who was flayed and martyred in older days for being too steadfast in his beliefs.
Homecoming was queer in an old-world way. From the pure-bred metropolitanism of Paris to the humble insularity of rural life, where most men are kings and the whole world is painted in the verdant greens of farm fields and aching hills. I took up a bar job nearby to fatten bulimic pockets, suffered the bravado of the self-coronated who wore their paunch like old aristocracy and spat in arcadian tones. About their properties and travels and horses, then about minutiae like acutely underfilled drinks or inattentive service, then about women and power.
Faces wandered in. The man, recently divorced, from above the bar who once worked in palliative care and spoke of death with a Nietzschean conviction.
The dying taught me how to live, he said, they taught me how to really see the world. He gifted me a book, sanguinary and macabre; I gifted him another, about a man with bloodlust and aspirations of sainthood. When he handed it back, his number was scrawled on a Post-it note, one of the few touches of romance I’ve ever felt afforded at home.
And so the summer first drooped, then flowed. At its end, I left again for the cities; this time London, with its sly promises of connectivity and careerism. I floated back out, wraith-like, but not knowing when I’ll return.
And I sit thinking about it. About ghosts. The ghosts I used to play with in the corridors behind the woods, which in the wartime had been a hospital but which was bombed in the war. I used to chase there ghosts – through those halls, through the forests. Through spaces of in-betweenness. And I sometimes, caught in the chase, used to tumble on unsteady terrain, fall swiftly and graze knees. Then turn and watch the blood roll down the stained white flesh of my legs as if it was taunting those pursued unliving, as if it was a mocking annunciation of pure life.
I would, I remember, touch my pinky finger to the blood and then up to my mouth to taste what that aliveness was. It tasted like copper pennies, which I bit between young teeth to taste the taste too the head of the queen.
So in my first week in queen’s-territory London I grazed my knees. Crimson scabs on scarring flesh that prove I’m all alive.