My car has a mind of its own...

...and it looks like it shares my reluctance to go back to the laneway. Today — now that I've had time and distance from it — for the first time since I left, I had decided to drive back there. Not to sleep! Just to park up under the trees and to sit in the car and think for a while. It's a bit of a trek back there these days, particularly in this heat, but this morning I was determined to go, was even looking forward to it in a way, and drove off at about nine. But driving down the highstreet (still only a mile or so from home) I stalled, and when I turned the key in the ignition and desperately tried to start it nothing happened. I panicked because I didn't even have my mobile on me, but even if I had I wasn't sure what I could have done. Luckily, some workmen who were repairing the road further up had seen and came to push it over to the kerb for me. One told me to open the bonnet, that he'd take a quick look. When I did it was clear, even to me, that the car had run out of water and had completely overheated. After it had cooled down a bit, and following a lot of serious frowning, he prodded a large, molten gash on the rubber water pipe at the front, and it split. Watching the steam gush out of it I expected the worst.

Apart from clean it I haven't done anything about getting the car checked over or serviced yet (not even keep the water topped up, evidently). Everything is out at the end of the month: the MOT/tax/insurance etc., and so I was hoping it might hold out until then, but standing there watching gusts of sizzling, white steam coming up it seemed as though my luck might not hold out that long. Fortunately though the gash in the rubber tubing was quite close to the end and so after topping me up with warm water they told me where the nearest garage was, and when I got there a mechanic simply cut that portion off with a Stanley knife, stretched the rest of the rubber pipe around and then secured it back in place again. No more steam, no expensive water pipes to buy, doesn't look like it is a gasket problem either. Phew!

I decided in the end though not to chance driving all the way back up to the laneway in this heat so turned around and drove very slowly home, almost relieved. So, yet again my trip back to the laneway has been postponed. I will go soon though. I just hope this isn't the beginning of the end for the car though, and that I can drive back there in it. We've been through too much together for it to give up the ghost just yet. Maybe it just needs a longer rest...maybe in this weather we both do.

Because, this heat is taking everything out of me but words right now. And the only worrying thing about that is that I am not that worried about it at all. I lie in bed at night staring defiantly up at the rows of small squares on the wall calendar up on the opposite wall, counting the squares and doing rough calculations of dates in my head until I am almost cross-eyed, convincing myself that I have plenty of time to write this book, despite the long line of smudged red crosses that have already been marked off. When my stomach flips in panic, I simply switch off the light and fall into deep, dreamless sleeps, certain of plenty of tomorrows full of fresh resolve. There is no way I am not going to get this book finished! There is no way I am going to waste this opportunity and end up homeless again! So it will be done! It just might mean a whole lot more sweat than blood or tears while this heatwave lasts.

I might also need to choose my background music more carefully. All last week, to counter the radio of the builders out in their shorts on scaffolding on the house across the road, I played Chopin's Nocturnes on autorewind in the background. Hours and hours and hours of it, but all it led to, apart from a dedication and an acknowledgement, which I may or may not eventually use in the book, was scribbled verses and random lines of poetry, which is not what I should be doing! So today I plan to work with earplugs and to will myself not to be distracted by builders or letterwriting, or pencils that suddenly need sharpening...or anything else. Today I will break the back of at least one scene, whatever it takes! I won't let it wrestle away from me, will strap myself to this chair if necessary. Writing about yourself is tough though...not at all an easy thing...But slowly, bit by bit onto the page, in hushed, stuttered sentences, day by day, my story is emerging.

Boiling hot days like these...

There were boiling hot days like these when I first slept out in the car. Not quite as hot, and I was down on the coast then, in and around Brighton, so warm, salty breezes coming in off the sea cooled things down a bit. But sometimes, when it had been there collecting heat all day, the car's metal could burn bare skin and the interior was full of exhausting, nauseating, oven-hot heat, unbearable, the kind you have to physically force yourself to get in to: my hair would frizz, my body stick to the seats, grimy sweat from walking about all day would slide in greasy streams and collect in hot pools underneath me, and the inside of my head throbbed with constant headaches from breathing the hot, dry air full of car fumes. My car doesn't have heating or air conditioning, the part, whatever it is, is broken, and the knob just swings around when you turn it, so I gulped down bottles and bottles of the tap water I kept under the seat, always more than luke-warm by then, and with nowhere to shower and nowhere to cool off, dreaded another day of it, and another night of willing myself, exhausted, to sleep across the heated car seats after it. Hot days as extreme as the cold ones, and in ways just as bad.

I'm not doing that anymore, I'm here in a room with the window wide open and the curtains knotted to let in a breeze, but some people still are. In this sizzling heat, there are plenty of people out there sleeping in their cars, people trying to make themselves invisible, finding a way to get through. But even I, sleeping out there in August and the beginnings of that false promise of an Indian summer we had last year, before the cold came, and more recently during those first shockingly hot days of May, don't know how they do it on a day like today.

Seeing my book listed on Amazon

Earlier I saw my book listed on Amazon! It isn't even nearly written yet, and yet there it was! A very, very strange experience seeing it there. I felt sad, rather than surprised or exhillerated though, seeing it there (was almost going to type just then it felt like coming across your own obituary in a newspaper — that same, I imagine, kind of shocking strangeness — but maybe that is the wrong analogy. Extremely weird though that first glance...left me winded. Seeing the title there for the first time: 'Abandoned', alongside Anya Peters, was a bit unsettling too. It even said how many pages it is: 320! and the date it will be published. Three hundred and twenty pages and none of them written yet! Except mostly in my head — where they have been written over and over most of my life in a way. But that is nowhere near the same as having them written down properly on paper, and then typed up — not in the form they will be in in a book that is sold on Amazon anyway.

After the initial shock, I sat there eating Creamcrakers just staring at the listing on the screen, snapping one after the other of the dry crackers and chewing mindlessly. There it was: 320 pages, and even a precise date: 'published May 8, 2007', as if it was there someplace already! There exactly as though it already exists somewhere! Already bound and ready to box. By the time I came to, and got up and walked towards the door to go off for a walk I almost thought 'Oh good, that sounds like a good book, I'm looking forward to reading that...' — that's the kind of feeling I had anyway — and then I stopped in my tracks and my heart slumped in my chest and I said to myself, 'that's me who has to write that!' and in a state of panic, thinking of all those blank pages I have yet to scribble, picked up my notebook and pen and went straight back towards the room. Was so panicked though that I haven't been able to write a word since. My mouth is dry and my heart is hammering and I keep thinking, 'what if I can't do it at all?' What if this feeling of: 'Oh my God, what have I signed to do...?' never leaves me...? Hopefully once the panic subsides the dread of that will keep me glued to this chair furiously filling 320 blank pages. But first things first...now is the time to give in to these waves and waves of panic...