Writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget - Sonali Deraniyagala.
This must be about what lies behind that exposes the eponymous.

In Equatorial Africa by a waterfall, swimming and basking in the razor glint of the rainforest’s sun. That is the colouring - in poster from the in fad book I chose. I see myself in it of course and it hangs facing where I wake up. But I have no family, friend, lover, daughter, foetus or loved building photographs, even were there somewhere to pit them but that makes me more determined than ever to keep them in my head: a straightforward relationship that with life.

Right girl, we’re sorted. Remember, please, that every human action is if not caused then is intimately linked by preceding events in the world, including events in your brain. The day’s non-meat sandwiches put in shoulder-bag: check, white, sugarless, espresso coffee in flask which I must wash out tonight: check. Be sure, this place can blaze as easily as did at lowest cost too Grenfell Tower. I’d lose stuff I mustn’t. I can’t start over again, no. I don’t have the physical or mental energy. Come on: you know the drill. No earrings, necklace or watch, cheap throwaway like me phone, no perfume to seduce or feel good in, no watch, £5.00 in coins and no credit plastic definite. ‘Morning.’ I know very much that I am luckier than many. This three-floor witnessed better days house with the girls and the kids in here with them is okay, I mean that. Except, I didn’t like it when one confided in me that most mornings she opens her door and a banana falls from the handle, no I didn’t and the racism appalled me. This opened my eyes and I am back to being wary. That “morning” had spiralled: struck outwards and inwards and had tailed off in as much, before I stifled back: ‘Morning.’ I needed more air, for my lungs were bloated acrylic and chalk paint dense. All done, let’s get going, best to present an open smile but not an idiot’s. My nose is running, and I saw my eyes are bloodshot in the reflection of the car wing mirror, as its freezing in the room has it’s the poor and powerless constant dilemma of use money to eat or on heating - we have our independent electric key for the compulsory high tariff below the stairs meter - until the Ark weather improves.

I do need to find money for books. I gotta know in depth and width about the outbreaks, the incidences and the results of pandemics for my dissertation. My thesis will cover how it affected the production of literature, other than poetry, as that has already received so much academic attention. I’ll need time to do close readings and contextual studies of literary and experimental world novels in the ten years after World War One, stopping before the additional further destruction figured in the Wall Street crash of 1929. I had heard about the terrible death tolls from the so-named pandemic Spanish flu and what a pandemic is in fact and we have had recurring ones in Africa and Brazil whose names I can’t recall. It’s for sure that every winter brings different, stronger strains of flu – Australian this time – and with all this poverty and nineteenth century living conditions, I know that there have been contemporary outbreaks of cholera in inner city Birmingham and London and no InstaGram of them I’m sure. All those $ thousands ‘in the national interest’ spent on turning and upkeeping Russian double agents is dire and diabolical when the health care system is buckling, the social care provisions are more than stretched, the whole apparatus of education is questioned for relevance and so on in a very long list.

Yeah, mental associations both ways, no surprise: I’m thought of by residents here and on my course as different, more than mouthy but berserk by the former and with odd opinions by the latter, if I get going and answer and ask direct questions in the lecture hall and seminar rooms, which I am trying to stop. Actually, I am by nature fractious but with a cause and with glorious, hyper-irony hindsight had a supportive circle of friends and family before my changes, the change I’ll call it and no not say more, a network where we could question roles and assumptions we lived by and not be physically bludgeoned. Yet, here in the open, tolerant West that right is not available to people with my recent story and present circumstances. Am I bipolar, what is passive-aggressive? Will anyone ever kiss my lips? Well anyone ever draw patterns with their hands over my body? Can I ever welcome moonlight caresses on the shore?

Out and step right on over the long-here slung out in bundled up bursting black bags that will add to that aquatic death-giving ocean wall of plastic detritus from greedy, lazy western civilization- indifferent to wrong garbage collection day here doesn’t help: it looks like a sad, stage-set of the chucked out broken chairs we sat on in the summer months ago and, like the poor, the used condoms and syringes that the rich and the people traffickers in unison pay their placemen in the mass media, the politicians, the police and teachers and lecturers to spin the neologism ‘the poor are always with us’ smudged into the faceless ground takeaway pizza or Kentucky Fried leftovers and rancid stink milk yuk blobs of curdled clotted oozed out of cartons like the discarded semen in the condoms ironically on thrown away kids’ clothes where I live this version of me. Were the black bags body bags, no, no, that was before I came to this haven, focus girl. Were they instead bales of hay it would be reassuring somehow of unceasing process, a cyclic harmony we can rarely identify in the urban.

You know, I used to enjoy aimless wandering, as my father put it, but today I am counseled by others and by my experiences to leave it but that’s sad and I miss the new and the familiar those wanderings offer. Their smells and scents, the work I witnessed and the words of wisdom given by the old together educated me and wandering without a fixed destination were my company, even during the awful, endless sieges and the troubles after I had left the country for the university, training to teach the language that I loved, amidst our biggest city. I am sure it can’t be as dangerous here in the West.

Perhaps this longing is just a temporary thing brought about by those flowers, the freesias I just bought for my room instead of eating. Mothers and wives here have these flowers in hallways this time of year. Remembering at the wrong moment hurts and makes me dither too and I must be strong and concentrated. Yes, I have fully fastened the remaining togs on the duffle coat that still looks presentable. Now, pull it up and sulk inside the mendacious uniform hoodie. I wear this for another reason, just round here but not at the university campus. These guys who hang out in our paint peeling, ratty porch to keep a bit drier do stealing, as well I know from the stories here and might carry a knife but it’s not as endemic as it is in London. There, oh yes, ‘carry a knife will ya for ya own protection.’ Don’t be complacent girl. Swansea and neighbouring Port Talbot are ranked in the UK Top Ten for registered drug addiction. I know a lot of the stuff is brought down from London or Liverpool by gangs who use savage violence to enforce their empires and camp out, cuckooing, in the flats of vulnerable people in the cantons of Sketty Park and Dyfatty high-rises interspersed with cubes of social housing. It is best to smile and then say you are late getting somewhere and rush away, away. I have noticed that personal space in the UK is much less than I am used to but here in the refuge and with these guys when you meet in the streets it is much closer and clingy, touchy. Still, such housing is supposed to give evidence of a utopian shared solidarity and the pleasure of community, I suppose like it might be more so too here in the refuge but the physical closeness isn’t that disposed to lifting up your head or thinking. I learnt during my journey here to read the trafficking oppressor’s and the journeyman bureaucrats ‘body signals and whatever the language you knew outstretched hands coming to you weren’t coming to give you a hug, alas.

You know, that was so full of pristine possibility of a much better life that Amaia told me as we waited for our necessary you can guess why and you are right monthly hospital clinic check-up no woman no cry our responsibility. Four million children live in poverty in the UK, which is 30% of all children. She said that student nurses from the uni are unpaid, like interns, during their Monday to Friday hospital placements but when they do the same work at the weekend they are coming through a private employment agency and are paid. Amaia said she found out helpers, the support staff we have little direct contact with in hospital, in green uniforms, get £40 and upwards a day and we’re going to apply. I am in the moment and this is going to be great. ‘Can I help you? National Health Service University Board online application Helpline here: ‘Oh, but you have to have a bank account or your salary can’t be paid. You need an address where you have lived permanently for a minimum of two years. We need references from two employers where you have worked full-time. Have you lived in the United Kingdom for five years and have documents that verify it, such as household bills in your name or a National Insurance record of your and your employer’s contributions? You will have to pay for an enhanced security check before your application is processed. If you get recruited, it will be refunded later but you will have to pay for it at first yes you are right. Hello, are you still there?’

‘Please, thank you,’ are you serious when I would prefer to hear the straight ‘who do you think you are coming over here to take our jobs?’ Hey, we do jobs you won’t and for wages you wouldn’t accept or our long hours. Your airplanes dropped the bombs, ships and submarines launched $80 million a shot Cruise missiles that destroyed our cities’ to save us’. You have your cosy life on our backs that we register personally in scars, broken ribs and aborted foetus and your vilification. I’m the collateral damage. Get used to us because it is Spring and in the better weather more of us are coming to a place near you soon and we’ll take your lumpy, obese husbands and wet sons with our Exotica [sic]. So I imagine her at the end of the NHS Helpline with a Costa take away latte and a vegetarian Subway: gentian blue eyes, hazelnut brown hair and compulsively chewing her painted nails as the hypocrisy of her being a complicit clog in the oppression that must erupt somewhere if she is human.

Those hanging gardens across the road look as if they slope upwards to the toolsheds behind the why don’t they topple down houses. Their hue is a glorious gate of paradise at the Baptistery in Firenze bronze, the poster on my other wall in my bedroom, which can mesmerize me when the street light glow catches Heathfield Terrace. It is April and in this season there’s a default steel grey light seeping out of the low cloud cover, cold enough though. There are some merry, chirping birds overhead, as I walk past the tiny, non-conformist chapel converted into a house here towards the Uplands end of Carlton Terrace.

Hilary Creek, of the wildly successful anarchist Angry Brigade, who sent letter and parcel bombs in the Royal Mail was here. They put a bomb under a government minister’s car in Westminster. They say that she hid out here after her release from prison. She came to study, as am I, at Swansea University, so the story goes and the press and the photographers camped outside to snare her where she only sort of officially lived but was much more here squatting on the floor with friends and could be an anonymous, everyday student, like I try.

It’s something, even if an urban myth. I bet they don’t discuss that as an example of an alternative narrative of resistance and violent direct action in schools and university or home or the workplace and they should see it as a genuine political protest and attempt to improve life, though I saw on Wikipedia that she was very much a product of the conformist middle class. I’d say that with the way things have been with the austerity cuts and the lone-wolf terrorist, the endemic shootings in the U.S.A. all these gun and knife murders in the U.K. we should definitely take time to consider the causes: the hushed-up voices that become self - and us - harming in these polemical madnesses.

Steady girl, if I cross the potholed road too obviously too soon they deem it suspicious. I’ve had it with their institutionalised pushback - leering their pocked, scrambled egg faces into mine. Having a giggle can swiftly swing from one thing to another. You know, there’s a Rehab Centre around the corner and they squabble here unseen. Here we go – I’ve seen that narrow girl in the stained, porridge grey tracksuit before and she knows it and she likes to mimic you but without any love in it. I went with her once to a charity shop when we thought we might move out and share a bedsit. I can’t understand these droves of charity shops: people donate them unwanted clothes and furniture and the shop sells them at prices way above what the needy can find out of their state benefits – odd. She cups her hands to her face to mock like she has seen in what she thinks was a Twilight movie but was her nightmare. I think back to when we were together. There’s a shared lounge and its good when we watch Scandi thriller box-sets such as The Bridge until some guy’s gut comes through the window in the blind-spot from the CCTV, carrying cans and already fully loaded. Tensions rise through jealousies and we’ve had the TV wrecked, the DVDs disappear and the plastic leather sofa slashed. This is run by a charity and we are here because of the violence of men but we don’t hate them. They aren’t supposed to even know where this place is because some brave lad will come round, drunk and abusive. It will then kick off and its police and ambulance and terrors at night. You’ll be evicted and go to the bottom of the council’s list and there are worse, much worse places you’ll be then.

I’ve trudged not traipsed once, mortified by witnessing a fight at the refuge, up those steep, concrete step-ladder steps by the side up the thirty metre grass bank. You can get to the university that way but it’s too much if you’re carrying anything. If you get to the top the reward is an unblocked view over the sand-dune bay stretching from the restored behind the marina the other town side behind Meridian Tower on the waterfront modern heritage Observatory to the West Pier all around the curve to tiny figures you know are fishing at Mumbles headland. Those distant, caramelised mountains are Devon, which is England; I looked it up in Google Earth, as I had no idea. I like to know these things – it is comforting, like lavender bushes, or like fish and chips for the others. I don’t mean to be snobbish but I don’t have to drift down and lose all fulfilling agency in my life by sliding off the scale and this defiance is me, how crucially I can judge and live with myself after the recent past and I hope this is temporary, transitional. My honesty, my authenticity, in renegade below the pulse of decent people Carlton Terrace, which used to be composed of prosperous three-storey in situ professional families’ easy maid and servant living. Now it slurps, gargles, spits out onto refined Walter Road. I mean its change is evidenced when you see the smiling faces and the edgier clothes… fashionistas in shades of desert sky black holes and blueberry pie or are they barista in the hipster cafes and bars of the Uplands. Many are living away from home, with money from the bank of mum and dad to guarantee their student loans, if they have yet got up from bed and faced down that hangover from Student Night Wednesday in the bars and clubs of 50 pence shots in Wind Street.

Before turning, sharply through the Singleton Park gates, you have a timber and whitewashed building that must have been an old coaching inn – this is Sketty, which was a separate village back then I’m sure and retains a feeling of entitlement behind its high walls, flowering rhododendrons, rose gardens, pink and blue carnation bordered crazy stone path, with bird tables and patios or conservatoire for summer wine. I bet, or know as have been paid by some clients here, that inside there is a wood fire in a hearth with blow your mind William Morris type wallpaper and ceramic figurines and stained glass windows lining the staircase up to the master-bedroom. There are Blue Plaques on some houses: famous artists, composers and poets who congregated in their youth and boys of summer days spent in the Kardomah coffee-house in town talking of Michelangelo, Sibelius and girls.

Everywoman Jane, slightly nuanced her steps left then right doesn’t want to show any weakness. There’s a sudden inexplicable whirlpool of cloud and mist, dense like when you use your nail to slide off the skin of a fresh fig in a pause from the dinghy in the sea journey and someone’s practising piano, no that’s jazz piano, originally music for us the downtrodden. It’s learnt mantra like survival skills I use which have come from the garrulous punches and I have to do this whatever kicks and pricks I got if I looked back or my fingers couldn’t keep up with the assembly line speed and then when He said ‘you’re pretty’ and moved her to another town and the streets -‘don’t look at me/ hear me / bitch’ but the blows weren’t any more to the face –‘got to protect the goods, babe, and do as you’re told or your folks back home will get a visit you know/ so bitch up.’ It’s better to be the leaden lemming, the robot, the guileless hand of nascent globalization we disingenuously endure. /// fight back I coach my tears to tell me I am worthy when I fight back. I turn involuntarily and against my good health and good aptitude to things I should say ‘no ‘to when I feel like this too damn fucking usually oh god. I am weak and hopeless ‘I fought the law and the law won’ says the song and that’s a police one not an ambulance siren I’ve learnt but the gangs don’t flicker an eyelid whichever, whenever. Two kids pushing a pram into dullness open their mouths and shut them as already what do they have to talk about.

She realised that she had got a bit worked up. So, after lolling in St. James Crescent in Uplands proper, she had walked further on. That was how she got into Singleton Park at the top entrance in the leeway of the picture-perfect image of a parish church St. Paul’s and Bishop Gore School, where her idolised novelist Martin Amis had walked to from the Upland’s Grove and those shoulder high rough-hewn stones can’t be from here, not sure if they are actually stones, rather to my mind like amputated stumps of limbs from bombs and IUDs. Maybe they’re an art installation produced for one of the town’s serial failed UK City of Culture bids. They are too obviously Stonehenge cum King Arthur and Merlin the Wizard Camelot tourist theme-park for me and I think of what Banksy achieved in his first blur then abolish the boundary in his theme park from hell in Weston-Super-Mare. Yeah, that’s better. I’ve walked down towards the sea and I like how the golden Labrador puppy colour of the wooden benches have dead people’s names and after a while I realised something I liked about both the stones and the bench in that they had not been scratched or defaced and that gives you something extra in a terrain that seems to let people be alone with their more positive thoughts whatever their histories. I must make more of the fact that I have my own room in the shelter. I let myself do unthinkable things here: of my birth and home-town and growing up adventures like everyone else and thinking how cool it would be to get a job in McDonald’s or even to live in a town with a McDonald’s or a Starbucks and to have a Facebook and Amazon and Google accounts but without the protest marches, the sly agent-provocateurs, the police batons clubbing us and then the politicians’ speeches and then then a sky full of falling bombs to save us and that came just after we had been given the tight to vote with more than one candidate to choose from. So, meek as I can be when alone,

I visualise a person who is relaxed, enjoying that downward vista through oaks and sweet horse chestnuts, a bourgeois gentility mot the heavy noise of the street for a change once. I am only habituated to the other. There’s been no recent war fought inside this country to flee… merely Permanent War and class war. It has started to drizzle that soft rain that peculiarly in Wales insinuates from inside to outside. That Suicide Awareness and Support Centre drop-in has opened without any fanfare. It’s important and placed of course next to the Alcohol and Drug Misuse Rehab Centre. Look, I still feel I must rush past. There’s always people from the Shelter and guys they hang with and they watch you and know you aren’t in your room and those locks are easy to kick open and a radio or a laptop buys a fix and no one sees who stole it and it’s taken me so much pain to get so little but it’s a start – a rich country, a rich suburb and this. The waves retain my lover and the traffickers in their wraparound sunglasses wouldn’t let us mourn.

Mike feels charged at the site of the two National Eisteddfods, the original and the enlarged Gorsedd Bardic stone circle that in him unites the local and the international in his aberration of unfairness, injustice and unnecessary suffering he has tried to make important to the others he lectures. Those are our hieroglyphics, emblems, icons, songs and plays and the harp recitals. He knew somehow but not yet in what form that the conversation with Evi was not over. Anyway, not now Mike, focus on what is in front and you will deliver in ten minutes.

You enter through a side entrance to pay the uni course tuition fees. I accept it: I will have to go on the streets to quickly get that money. Cities are montages of the similar and the dissimilar, the visible and the invisible that is there any way with its taboos, its prejudices and its clubbiness and I have been inside the Premier League footballers’ millionaire apartments in the Meridian Tower and those almost Mondrian coloured square boxes invisible behind Clyne Castle – look at Google Street Maps Street Views. It is my choice and in that respect it is a breathing progress being able to say that, a choice I insist that is. I should pay my fees in my red minidress, fishnets and hooker’s thigh-high boots. I am out of what I have read in the papers is named ‘modern-day slavery’ that I experienced after the 48 hour passage that shipped us onwards in a windowless coffin truck after we rafted in an open dinghy across the Med and English Channel. In the slave-trade, it was the Middle Passage that killed the most.

I see the good and the great whose families prospered through that trade sometimes here on the university campus in that gothic-like pile over there where I have been freelancing a couple of times as a black clad waitress told to wear a low top, a miniskirt and high heels for them in some Charity Fundraiser. You are in an unnecessary to say way expected to make the potbellied, bad breath lechers think that yeah it’s the dream of every hot twenty-four year old to sleep with them and have unprotected sex. Beware, if I have to do that, I want money, lots and yours is mine glowed in recognition inside.

That gothic, ivy clad and lychee soft Main Admin Block is, to be honest, really impressive with plinth stone lions and a visual standout giving status and gravitas to this University of Wales as it was, though it isn’t either a medieval building or educational establishment. There’s a Book Launch under its Versailles chandeliers this evening, it’s advertised over there in the window of the sad gaiety of the renovated MyUni Hub Stables Block. Who is it? Oh, she’s a good novelist and short story writer and has opinions. I’ll go but leave before the Book Signing, as I don’t have non- allocated money for the universal pressure of buying the books that goes on after the talk. They say it’s how you develop a network.

It had been in the Glynn Vivian Museum’s oddly transparent goldfish bowl confronting through a floor to ceiling glass bowl ignored by passers-by, though you can abstractly glance over opposite and flick through its past uses to the new-fangled ART College’s ALEX annex in and not in this bar-restaurant intimate space we had a protected anonymity they relished.

‘Perrier with ice, not crushed. Lemon with the zest and a chilled tumbler not a wine-glass, what will you have Mikey?'

'I’ll have a double grappa.'

‘Mmm, okay, give me too a calvados cocktail, Lucy. Your sunflowers in the vase are lovely, they make me think of Van Goth [and you opposite me] Provence and summer walks in the dappled hill-villages.'

‘Let’s go round the Kahlo and Giacometti Exhibition again after lunch, their coalescence brings me energy, that Latin flair and indifference.’

‘Yes. I want that. Listen a moment, please. I think it best we keep to tradition while we finalise the preparations. They are proceeding at a pace. I will move out of my house. Oh, don’t look like that. Just with my parents over there. We’ll see each other as usual. We’ll phone each other and talk as long as we like every night before we go to sleep but I’ll be there at night.’

‘Right, right.’

I adore you.

‘We are marrying for sure. Mum and dad stick to the old ways, Mike. They still even take their lunch-time stuffed peppers and tomatoes to the baker’s furnace. I give some money there each weekend for this.’

‘I know about that sort of thing. If I am there at a meal-time, my mam sends me up to get my dad from the betting-shop but you have told your parents about us and that is a start.’

‘Yes, yes, of course, they like you.’

You will leave. I will be miserable. I don’t want you to go.

Nonetheless, the eyes are central in a long-lasting look. There, there it is, the tell-tale absorption, the bunching up and unbunching of the immaculate pony tail when she is plotting; some say she’s deceiving. Mike sees no blemish on the olive skin of her family’s two generation of hard working Mediterranean extraction.

She is Evi, forty- one years old this Spring Bank Holiday. She is surrounded in her homes, including the still preserved parents’ bedroom of hers, by dozens of framed photographs of herself: on dressing-table, mantelpiece and lounge walls and there on her Facebook page and other similar accounts. ‘She’s so wonderful.’ She was within a pinch of peach, skinless chicken of average height and favoured a slightly wedged shoe in and out of work. ‘I feel it helps my poise and composure, without the intimidation of stilettos or sex- kitten heels’ but she needed little persuasion to answer the door of her second house on the hillside in her leopard skin Manolo or Jimmy Choo and nothing else but don’t be the voyeur before the demure, contoured version of her reasserted its coarse textured primal urges as letting him lead her to the bedroom or wherever they would do it the first time each tapering off evening as primrose and cornflower tints set off sloping roofs of the terrace mews and fruit tree pine fresh resin skylines of the soccer mom suburb she adored leisurely.

‘Can I, dare I, shock them though, get a tattoo?’ was what she withheld from saying now, given the seriousness wrinkled up nose I suppose turn in the conversation but in the still there flash of alcoholic adrenaline she wanted one. It wouldn’t be vulgar, it had to be one etched, not chiselled, inscribed in indigo, a gothic script, maybe a quatrain from an ancient Roman Catullus poem like the bitterest and the sweetest, from her downy navel downwards, though she knew how it would start.

Then, at this stage prior to committing to it, she ponders were if she too scrawny to draw attention to it on her four-week sun at its maximum height break in the pink Versace furnished silks and satins and bougainvillea and essential balcony pot geranium villa on the ‘it has to be on the unspooled filmic aloof side of Megaluf, with three guest bedrooms for family and friends.’

After all, her father was paying, just as he had for her Eaterie Bistro Taverna and the moral quenching Body Shops she owned and the Sunday afternoons she took out Gareth from the Orphanage she financially supported and she was the local Secretary of Amnesty International and cried every night day for her Multiple Sclerosis brother. And the water had to be the swimming pool blue of her troublesome, gifted, poet lover. ‘A man answered your front door.’ ‘What? I don’t understand. What, where do you mean? Darling, I am not like you. When do you think we will be able to take a pill and be more intelligent, like I heard them discussing on the radio? It will happen soon, they say but be a bit costly but worth it for me I’m sure so as we can talk together.’

He let out air and feared the answer that he knew would be elusive.

‘My dumbness can be trying… Sorry. I need a shaman. I need the you when you tell me to look up at the roof, the sky. That Michael, I don’t want this harsh Michael who is looking daggers at me. I don’t want you to be like that with me, baby.'

The sobbing sound like jazz soloing scalped their past together in the town besides the dolphin playing sea.

‘None of us can be sure of anything, Evi.'

She stretched out her hand and sought his and had to pull his fingers out of the clenched fist before she could touch his palm.

His name was The Poet and he was in a way a shared similar age-related reference perhaps. ‘I measure life in experiences not in years and in what I have done for others.’

Then, he’d explained one early day in bed that he had once had a thing about mathematics and the rational but weaned himself away from them. He wanted to be credulous and imaginative and make connections that others wouldn’t. He didn’t mind asking her to change the light bulb.

‘I don’t earn much at the university. It’s part-time, okay. I can live on it here when I budget. If you want us to go to chic restaurants, eat seafood with spaghetti. Have panna cotta and drink you Chablis and me Nuits St. George, then that is up to you. I can’t afford it.’

‘It’s fine, I understand, we don’t need to discuss it again. We’ll be together soon.’

‘I went to your parents [oh, Holy fuck] to surprise you and start getting to properly know them. They didn’t know who I was, Evi.’

‘They are old, forgetful. Let’s plan next weekend, can we go up to London, we haven’t been for months. I can book a play online now on the iPhone, let’s choose… ’blah, blah dribble.

She lied, it was all lies, them/ us. He couldn’t trust her. He hadn’t moved to the big city as he said he would if not intimate with her: post-traumatic shock or a wimp staying in his comfort zone; in his job lecturing he was with people and might facilitate skills of not being docile but knowing and being confident enough to question authority. He did want to hit out but how do you strike an idea you disagree with in a person you love. I threw the coffee distinctly wide of her shoulder. She screamed and I yelled at her ‘I choose my woman; you don’t choose anything for me, ever.’

When he started, after a few months gap, to again meet Evi it was like resuming an old habit. They drank espresso coffee he knew had been so voraciously for generations been imported through the Adriatic port of Trieste by native Italians, a once Austrian city which has a calypso touch like statute of its former resident the great Modernist writer James Joyce. Or, if mot the coffee, then they restrained it to a shared bottle of an everyday earthy Argentinian or loganberry Chilean red or meadow-sweet New Zealand white wine or his nectar Brains SA beer, like dear friends.

He learnt over timeless sojourns he sleepwalked through that Evi and George were ‘trying for a baby.’ There had been scientific developments she whispered but it wasn’t going well between them and it had dawned on them that it was impossible and there was a shooting star moment.

They were refused adoption as both edging forty. They had then she told me been eagerly and dumbly coerced into making a £1,500 non-returnable hush-hush cash down payment to gain possession of a trafficked child, paying a large financial supplement on top of the basic for it to be white-skinned. Then, Evi said, she worried through sleepless nights it might have some inherited but not yet visible defects or illness they hid from her and she knew she couldn’t cope with on-going stress like that. She told him that all at once and then out it had tumbled as every much too in an impregnated termination scare would happen.

‘I will pay you to find a healthy, good-looking woman.'

‘I read that Neapolitan saga novelist Elena Ferrante’s article too about buying an uterus.'

'You're not listening. I mean for real. Get her pregnant and...’

'What?'

‘Listen, will you. I will fund you to write full-time, I’ll give her a generous salary and an annual bonus. I’ll monitor the pregnancy. I must see the ultrasound photographs. I have thought it through carefully and this is do-able. I will pay whatever you both want.'

'My God, Evi.'

‘It would be our baby. We can be together, bring it up well, you’d be a great dad.’

Michael was silent.

‘I know I get aches I didn’t use to have. This is my last option. I want kids and I don’t want to bring up a toddler in my fifties.’

He noticed a granular aspect of her skin I had not seen before.

‘So, let’s get this done, Mike. You can do it. It’s easy for you. You must do it. I spent so much money on you, you know. If you don’t I …’

She studied and rubbed a stray strand of hair held in her hands. She raised it to her nose and smelt them in bed.

So, here we are inevitably at the beginning of the university third term and in my lecture that girl with the hunched shoulders is on my mind. She looks dedicated but she doesn’t seem to mix and I’ve received a formal email from the university about a Humanities student’s application to the Hardship Fund and I’m pretty certain it is hers. I can place the passport-size attached photocopied another day in paradise terror struck is it safe to have my picture taken for an Official Form ‘I came in a boat to Sweden I must say as the Border Police send you back to your place of entry in Fortress Europe and that’s the best place to be.

I read her application and even with that grant she’ll do well to complete Year Two. Mike has rounded on himself. ‘Freedom is taken not given, right.’ Look, I am not the same as that guy who could only manage to get through the day by having or demanding or flailing if not getting 24/7 sex. I try to conceive of passion from the perspective of her too and less gladiatorial, keen to do away with the oppression and the need to be on top that I couldn’t experience satisfactorily in other parts of my life however successful they might have been deemed.

I want to do not react. Am I freer, is this transferable any happier across gender, class, ethnicity, social structure? Pick up the phone.

‘Hey, Evi, hi, we can discuss the surrogate baby, call me back, please, okay err, it’s Mike.’ Look at the sea and the waves.

This will be for Mike as much as her, for isn’t it so that you must respect life? He thought here in this concrete instance life and morality sometimes achieve more if separated and as an author storytelling is a way of seeing and showing connections. South Wales and its valleys were subjected to the excavation of coal, the development of tinplate industries and docks that was forced on us for the few to accumulate vast profits that allowed migrant capitalists such as the Cornish Vivians to used part of their profits they made by underpaying their workers to build the house referred to in this story as the gothic pile and the old stables actually part of the Vivian home as indeed the whole of Singleton Park was their park.

The crucial connection is that like the girl in this story much of the workforce of the nineteenth century were also outsiders who came here from Ireland or the west Country or from further in the hope of a better life and met intensely difficult pockets of prejudice and violence but had an ‘advantage’ shall we say in their numbers and over time made their communities.

Leila, let’s give her a name, is on her own even within the Shelter and we should admire her spunky defiance and she has a character that we can learn from as these migrant flights are in their millions and are one of the defining trends across the globe and cannot be solved through the contingencies of one person but need to be embraced by all of us through openness and getting our hands and minds dirty with the struggle and that is what in Leila’s story the character Mike decides he can do. I am imaging the life of a Leila and ask you to do so similarly.

As for myself, I have come here recently, returned after decades, and for around a year lived in the same street and also in a homeless shelter but throughout, though bewildered at the abrupt change, I felt in the few lucid unflustered moments there was going to be in the future something better as I am educated and experienced as a teacher. That core, unarticulated conviction I have to now say after unsuccessful job searches, was without me yet knowing, and is in 2018 solely built on my connectedness to this town.

In parallel, I am increasingly finding that being with people with whom I share nothing with was morose and tore at me like piranhas that feasted not on my flesh but my memories. Then, it was self-immolation day after night and as I began not able to tolerate the messiness of other people and found I had diabetes, then cancer, then the strokes it was really hard-going as the heaviest burden becomes the time lost through tiredness and loss of strength even to carry a shopping bag and the illnesses themselves with their real and anticipated pains and all the hospital visits and stays. I don’t like being with people any more. It’s too messy.

It’s a bit of an admission and the ‘any more’ points to how negotiating this where it really matters is how the past continues inside me and my history there in family, friends, lovers and the city or the town as it was when I grew up and I think my immediate challenge is to avoid the poles, the extremes.

When you are young and a teenager it’s about going places and doing things as you play football or cricket with school teams and start your wanderings drinking and then the jump into being a couple with a girlfriend which can temporarily cocoon you.

So, I reiterate what came at the beginning of this: ‘Writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget,’ Sonali Deraniyagala.

I am truly sorry Maria for what subsequently happened but it is in her that I have begun to reimagine the world in another person’s point of view. My flesh, my blood is traded for profit through the violence that seems the only recognition of my bodily presence – no other interest. It is the wielding of force that lies behind the artefacts of civilisation that you can see in a museum.

I agree with this statement, "There’s no refugee crisis, but only human crisis… In dealing with refugees we’ve lost our very basic values," said by Ai Weiwei, in response to current humanitarian disasters… over 300 figures, squeezed within the confines of a temporary shelter of an inflatable dinghy, undertake a journey ‘far out into the unnavigated’, fleeing violence and danger.

You'll most likely know Ai Weiwei thanks to his innovative and provocative works, one thing you may not know is that he himself is a refugee. Over the last two years Ai has focused his work entirely on the tragic condition of refugees and advocating their human rights. Since very recent 2015, the influx of refugees into Europe from Syria and beyond has escalated, being described as 'a slaughterhouse, a complete meltdown of humanity, the apex of horror'. Law of the Journey is an epic statement on the this, the artist’s expression of empathy and moral concern in the midst of the carnage and then there is the misery of the forced migrations of the Rohinda from Myanmar to Bangladesh or the continuing events on the West Bank.

We must have an opinion on these and Leila when she says of her husband: The exponential, vinyl, concentric pools of teal, turquoise, mother- of- pearl, depthless watery surface reflected optimism. There was charm, enigma in this simpering, suturing, vast openness tautologically tight out there to the thundering haze of a blue, melting, June horizon. In the liquid, burning off the ether pure light, a speed-boat in porcelain water drained away us.

He was jaunty enough, sucking the upper lip into the lower, as he did when happy, along with rubbing his face to see if the two-day growth was there. “It scores my lips and flesh, baby,’ I reproached him but we had no speedboat but a dingy crammed to capsizing and that speedboat circled us like a vulture after we had left the shoreline and like in slow motion came in fast to us and the dinghy was like a bucking, rodeo horse and guys dropped overboard and then I saw guys on the speedboat thrusting boathooks into us or smacking children with oars and thirty, forty more were pulled off and our guides jumped ship onto the speedboat.

It turned and we were left bobbing and shipping out water to get back our equilibrium but that hasn’t happened yet and I can’t yet cry for him.

The grand, vaulted, aristocratic hall in Prague's National Gallery features a montrously big inflatable boat with larger than life figures of refugees. Also, there are a selection of Ai's other works including Laundromat (2016), a subversive portrait of dispossession and displacement. Flowers, (2013–2015), is Weiwei’s, specific attempt at a commemorative self-portrait in times of confinement. Ceiling (2009), is devoted to the 5,000 plus school children who lost their lives during a massive earthquake in China’s Sichuan province in 2008. In Wales, scores of children died in their primary school when a colliery’s slag-heap became an avalanche of mud and covered the school in the Rhondda Valley thirty miles or so from Swansea.