[music starts. ambient sound from different places mix in the scene] Jenny Adamthwaite: (thin, as if heard on a transistor radio) The Pact, by Jenny Adamthwaite. The bear is always here now. At first she just passed her occasionally, first in the morning usually, or sometimes late in the afternoon when a nap would have been a good idea. Now she lives in the corner of the room, whichever room, curled in a big dark heap of fur. She's soft, cuddly even, but her teeth remind you that she's a bear, and when she speaks it's a growl, heard not in the room but somewhere in the pit of his stomach, an uneasy echo like the kind of feeling you have when you've forgotten to do something important but you don't remember what it is. The end. He's comfortable with her. He doesn't resent her, but he hates what she means, the feeling of losing himself to her piece by piece. He would rather she could just swallow him whole, so he could become a memory instead of fighting them. The flats over the road are wrong, he thinks, as the kettle shuts off and he pours water into the mug. They're from somewhere different, somewhere he's lived, maybe. What's that place called where it's busy all the time and all the tourist things happen? No matter. He turns his attention back to the tea. His muscles know how to do this. Outside the landscape shifts, at once a familiar grey street of the neighbourhood and a fragment of a place he knew when he was a boy. Or maybe it's just somewhere he's seen on a documentary. The gulls circle overhead and their cries carry the memory of a holiday with Martha, chips dropped in the sand and her laugh as she rolled pink seafoam candy out of her hair. He leaves a teabag on the counter. He's making a pile. He has to put them somewhere that isn't the normal bin, so he's collecting them until he remembers where. This is the problem. The edges are blurred and the memories don't stay in their place. They move in circles and as soon as he reaches for them, they disappear beneath the surface and all he's left with are ripples. You see, says the bear as he stirs the tea, you can have more of the bits that make sense if you give me just a little bit more. He remembers his childhood so vividly that he sometimes wonders if he can trust it. The sound of his father opening a toffee. The exact crinkle of the wrapper as he twisted it in his cracked fingers, blackened with coal dust. He remembers the feeling of safety as he sat beside him at the fireside. "Not so close, lad", he'd say, "you'll be like a side of roast beef". A side of roast beef. Red and juicy, he can see it. It always made him hungry when his father said that. He stares into the tea. There's something missing. It doesn't normally look this way. "Wouldn't you like to remember more of your father?", the Bear growls. "Perhaps you could give me a few names. Nothing important, no one you'll miss. Just the people on the edges, the dentist perhaps, or maybe some other chaps down the cafe. And it's milk you need in the tea." He takes the milk out of the fridge. Didn't it used to come in glass bottles? He always gives in to the bear, sinking deeper into the familiar memories of childhood, or Martha when they were first married. He buries himself in her soft, warm fur, breathing in the memories that take him further and further back. He doesn't remember the names of the books he once loved, or how they ended, and he doesn't remember the names of objects or what you're meant to use them for. Half the things in this house don't make sense to him anymore. The more he loses, the harder it becomes to claw it all back. "We've made a pact", says the bear, as he settles in against her side with his tea. "This is the way it is now. Just you and me until the end". Vera Chok: (muffled) Vera Chok. I'm in an airport, again. I've got a tin of biscuits in my bag that are... thumping is not quite the right word. But they're, they're rattling. Which is surprising, for shortbread. But it's a tin box. And the biscuits are embossed with the Union Jack. And there's a picture of Prince Charles - about to become King Charles - on the tin. Shortbread and tins of biscuits. That's a classic gift from an immigrant. To another immigrant. I'm not traveling to see family, per se. But, I do think that friends are chosen family. So yeah, let's say family. I'm in an airport again, and I'm scared again of border control. Even though the passport I hold is much more acceptable than the one I grew up with, I'm still not white, and that fear in my belly of being stopped and interrogated... I'm not wver really knowing the reason, if the reason, if the reason is the color of my skin or the history of my country, being Muslim. I'm at an airport again, and this marks a spate of travels, a spate of travel that comes after a year of being in a city quite foreign to me in a world quite foreign to me after lockdown. And so even though I'm back to being in an airport again, I do not travel with the ease I used to have. And people say that life is cyclical. Emotions and moods are cyclical. Or, if that's the right word, things that we want and things that we don't want come and go. And nothing is permanent. But I wonder if that's a point of view - in terms of "what's the time frame that we're dealing with?". I don't know whether my future - Whether my next job is going to be as difficult and as undermining as my last, I don't know when race will stop being an issue, if ever. I very much doubt that it will. I - --- Neutrinowatch is generated daily, so this text will change every day. This version was generated on Saturday, 29 June 2024, at 00:06 UTC/GMT