The absence of the Witch

The absence of the Witch does not

Invalidate the spell–– 

Emily Dickinson

You built a community with your bare hands, furnished it with flickering lights and lumpy sofas I lost and found myself in. When the bricks began to shift

I was halfway out the door.

You put stars in my eyes drum n’ bass in my ears. My feet flew to the beat but I was too smitten to listen to your words

***

My copy of Deryn Rees-Jones’s What It’s Like to Be Alive is located and dated: London, Paula Rego Exhibit, Tate, Oct 2021

You are alive. So is she: Rego.

I’m haunted by her Dog Woman series and this book has a set of poems with that same name, inspired by those same paintings. It’s in the section of poems from Burying the Wren, about the death of the poet’s husband.

I stop at “Shaved Fennel with Blood Oranges, Pomegranate, Peccorino”.

I read and I’m there in the kitchen of your house in Tottenham cooking and I run to the kitchen – mine, a couple of miles south in Hackney – and search in the cupboard for where I know I saved the recipe that came in the vegetable box in a little book but the cupboards are new, my kitchen is new, and where is the recipe

Where here and now there is searching sadness then and there were echoes of silence your slow breathing in the room above and cooking dinner I had no radio or podcast to listen to because it was your home not mine so I opted to chop and think in the quiet and as I assemble slowly carefully from the instructions on the food box I think how odd to be cooking for you alone when you were the one who taught me to cook in community

Afterwards I kept making that dish for months out of my head: tomato sauce with a splash of red wine (you aren’t drinking so I sip the thimbleful of wine as I cook and substitute vinegar and you say it’s too vinegary. Not a complaint. Useful feedback. You chew slowly. You were always a slow eater) herbs couscous lentils. And long-stemmed broccoli.

You who showed me how to cook vegan food for the small masses to skip free veggies and bread and the odd sweet treat and slice with dull-edged knives in makeshift squatted kitchens and put it all into a big misshapen pot, a caldron, and heat and stir and serve dozens of women. We were all witches back then.

Six weeks earlier we sat in your garden. I remember the date: Sunday 1 August. You’re getting ready for a gig in Dalston, the one I shun out of fear of the invisible. Instead I stand outside in the dark with the dog and a friend and listen for hints of your sounds. Inside the youthful dancers fill you with so much joy and you get the luuuurgy: your faux deep voice drags it out. But before the music and the dancing and the lurgy you make broccoli with potatoes and Linda McCartney sausages and we eat them together outside on the round table. You’re wilting and I sit leafing through a book from your shelf while you cook for me and I can’t help but feel this is how it should be.

***

There was a time when women’s passionate friendships were at the centre of feminism.

There was a time when to be bare armed after dark on a London summer’s eve was a luxury. Before the grass turned yellow and we had to leave water out at night for the foxes.

The foxes have always been here. One night they danced for us. It was London Fields. The eve of my 40th birthday. I was dressed in pink. The butches played rounders and I lounged on the green grass and you ran around like our femme prince charming. There was a tent and food on soggy plates and warm wine from boxes. Later we sat four of us on the grass in our short sleeves waiting for midnight on the longest day of the year. The foxes twirled like ghosts around the trees.

The next day you rode up on your motorbike, swept me off my feet onto the back and gave me a spin around Newington Green, my floral skirt doing a Marilyn, before speeding up to Church Street where we ate Thai food and sipped cocktails with tiny red and orange umbrellas. Your gift was a lifetime of fire and glamour and wisdom that still send shivers down my spine.  

Maybe in the end that’s what feminism is: like you, a magical mysterious force that spins friendship that lasts so much longer than anything else we think we know

For Caroline Smart, 14 October 1965–22 October 2021

Pen in Fist is a newsletter on writing and activism – by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.