Dunkelflaute

There is a woman in my village called Moira who pulls a little dog around on a lead. The dog is joyous. Moira is not. Nothing pleases her and so, over the years, I have adopted a bonhomie which I know she finds irritating. 

She has three grown-up children, none of whom speak to her. This does not surprise me, because Moira is inherently sour, and she often asks me pointedly how my son is doing. She has never met him, but I once told her that he occasionally smoked weed and in her mind, this makes me a bad mother. My son speaks to me though.

We usually cross paths in the rec. Today, she is wearing a lilac knitted beret and a grey raincoat. The dog greets me affectionately. The first words out of her mouth are, “I hate this weather.” Moira hates all weather, but today, her urge to be miserable overrides any notion of illustrative meaning, because there is no weather. There hasn't been any weather for days. It is grey, mild, and listless. The Union flag hangs limp outside the village hall, and if any autumn leaves fall, they are doing so out of boredom. The Germans call this climactic vacuum dunkelflaute, which means dark and windless. 

As I sidestepped her, claiming that I needed to buy my newspaper before they sold out, (provocative, because Moira hates my newspaper), she casually mentioned that she was writing her memoirs. My internal response was, what the fuck do you have to write about? but my external reaction was more banal. I wished her well with it and she sloped off, groping for a doggy bag. 

But it got me thinking. Moira is not a person who has ever woken up in the morning and thought “Oooooh!, Noooooo!” She is not a person who has wobbled into the kitchen looking for the cleansing fire of a drink just to take the edge off the moronic display you put on the night before. The thought splits me in two directions. Am I a loose canon, or is Moira boring? Surely both propositions can be true at the same time? All I know, and all that I ever knew, is that my memoirs would sell and Moira's would not - unless she is going to reveal why her children don't speak to her.

My life is like one of those doodle books, the ones where the pages are mostly blank but for a squiggle, or an eye, or the top of a Christmas tree ornament. The idea is that you fill in the rest of the picture. My doodle book remains undrawn, because those squiggles are memories, or the threads of memories, which I would soonest forget. I certainly don’t wish to draw upon them. 

Perhaps this absence of wind encourages introspection, like a ball rolling across a floor of its own volition. Because when I got home, it dawned on me that I was very lonely, but too stubborn to admit it. I am not a joiner. You will not find me knitting with the WI, or organising a pub quiz, because I don’t have any friends to make a team. But during this past year, unemployed and certainly at the end of every road I’ve ever trodden, I have not left my village. My only conversations have been with myself, the staff in the Co-op and my (stoned) son. 

In short, just what the hell has happened to me? I am not constitutionally miserable like Moira. A low mood dissipates with a good Netflix drama or a decent book. I am essentially a gregarious person with a singleton’s heart. I had a difficult relationship with my late father, who left when I was very young. Much is said of young boys growing up without dads, and every word of that makes sense, but not much is said about girls. As a consequence of the domestic abandonment followed by forty years of sporadic and semi-detached involvement, I have never understood what to do with a man. 

I do not pretend that I want one now, but surely closing myself from all possibility of it is not a healthy way to live. I like men, but they always want more than I am willing to give, particularly in matters of sex. I am too old for it now, and I would have to wash my bed linen with more frequency than I’ve become accustomed to. I also snore, and my orgasms have more often than not been misinterpreted as a display of ecstasy rather than a ploy to hurry things along. 

So, no. I don’t want a man who wants sex as a primary objective. But I would quite like a man for the odd day out, the occasional meal, the impulsive drive in the country, and as a distraction from the anxiety which has settled in my solar plexus in latter years and won’t seem to budge. In this, my health and my mental state are also plunged in dunkelflaute. I need a whisper of wind. 

An hour after seeing Moira in her lilac beret, I was waiting at the bus stop. I had straightened my hair, applied a little make up and found some jeans which appeared to have shrunk since the last time I wore them. It felt good to make an effort, the sort of things one does without thought before going to work for the day. I had no particular plan in mind. It was merely that something about this day had made me crave those little moments of solidarity and humour that connect you to the living. It is not a question of involving myself meaningfully, but more like a moth that lies dormant and only occasionally seeks the light. 

I sat next to a woman who rolled her eyes at a group of teenagers who interspersed every word with “like.” I rolled my eyes back and she made a shoot me now gesture by tapping her head against the window. These are little things, but I have missed them. I am careful not to speak too much, though. A consequence of spending too much time alone is that one forgets how to talk properly. I have always had a propensity to say what I think, and it has worsened with loneliness. There is a natural tempo to a random conversation with a stranger which can be lost without daily practice: a compulsion to blurt everything out in one go. 

This too will pass. 

The city is looking grimmer than ever. Half the shops are closed and every continent has sent its most efficient beggars to live in their empty doorways. I spent some time glancing into shops and glancing out again. They sold nothing I couldn’t live without and money is tight. After a while of this desultory retail-mooch, I went into a pub. I am not a night owl, so the atmosphere of a pub in the daytime suits me. I can read the paper, sip a wine, and watch people. Invariably, you will end up in a conversation with somebody, because that’s what pubs are for. In the daytime hours, most people who drink in pubs are lonely, and that’s a fact, but it doesn’t mean they’re sad. They just need some company so they don’t slip into cognisant madness.

And here is where I met Martin. Straight away, I discerned that he was not a predatory male anymore than I am a predatory female. He simply asked if he could sit at my table, and I moved my paper to accommodate him. He was rather nice-looking. His hair was grey and there was plenty of it. His eyes were blue and creased at the corners, suggestive of good humour, and he had a tall frame with a comforting little paunch. A man’s man, I would say. A cricket and rugby bloke, straightforward, or so I thought, with a deep voice but with one noticeable fault. He never seemed to pronounce the ’S’ at the end of a word. It just trailed off. In this regard, you could say he was singular. 

Anyhow, we got along, but then, I get along with most people until they want to come home with me. But it’s fair to say we liked each other, so when he asked me if I wanted to go for a meal later on, I agreed. Why not? I was too old to swoon and too set in my ways to care much about the outcome. It is important to live in the moment, and when he said it would be on him, it clinched the deal. Like I say, I’m a bit skint. 

I went home, looked through my sparse wardrobe and selected an outfit which did the least to betray the recent lifebelt around my waist. He had chosen a small Italian restaurant at the top of Union Street which I had been in once before on Valentine’s Day, on my own, having bought myself a large bunch of flowers. The waiters assumed I had been abandoned, but they were wrong. I had abandoned myself. 

Martin was in the restaurant when I arrived, perfectly on time. He rose, and pulled out my chair. There was a bottle of red on the table and he looked rather dapper and well-ironed. It felt nice in the candle-light - such a long time since a man had bought me dinner. He told me to order anything I wanted, money no object, but I’ve never been a gold digger. A prawn cocktail and a carbonara is good enough for me. Martin, on the other hand, was more free with his choices, and more wine followed. He was clearly a man of means, but I didn’t ask him what he did for a living because it’s a question I hate. He would tell me in his own good time. 

He told me he was bachelor and I believed that about him. I have never been married either, so I don’t automatically assume that someone else is. He was engaging, respectful and free with his money. We deftly negotiated our way around flashpoint issues and settled on what felt comfortable - things like, “Who sang Paper Roses?” As the evening unfolded, he told me he was a professional gambler and he had a couple of adult sons from two different relationships and that he lived in a small, low-maintenance flat just off the City Road. Oh, it was all nice, it really was, but that missing ’S’ was really starting to work me up. He had no problem with it at the beginning or the middle of the word, but at the end of a word he made a small exhalation of breath, like a smooth-rolling train that quietly runs out of steam. 

As he drank more he revealed more, and his appetite was endless. He ran the waiter ragged with his endless additions. I thought it remarkable he stayed so relatively slim, and when I mentioned that, his demeanour changed. He got chippy, and I realised that he was thin-skinned. He tried to brush it off, but the mood had altered. 

Look, it was not one thing in particular but more a growing realisation that I did not like him very much. Of course, a lonely person often doesn’t like people very much because it’s a grand excuse, a classic evasion, but at some point during dessert I decided to visit the ladies room with a view to escaping through the toilet window. I just wanted to go home and talk to my (stoned) son. 

There is a reason why pubs and restaurants don’t have big toilet windows, and I am clearly one of them. Of course, there was no hope. A ferret would have struggled to get through the cracked pane which would inevitably lead to a hard landing of empty beer kegs and bottle bins. But even so, I looked at it for a while. And as I was looking, there was an urgent rap on the door followed by someone calling out,

“Madam! Madam!” 

Had I blacked out? Suffered a stroke? Slipped through a portal? 

I opened the door to find a young waiter looking at me with whey-faced relief.

“Was I in here a long time?” I asked.

“No, Madam. Please, there’s no rush.”

How strange, I thought. I checked my appearance in the mirror and stole myself to face Martin and that awkward moment when he pays the bill and I can go home, after giving him the wrong number. 

But of course, (because this is no-one's idea of a cliff-hanger), Martin was not there. Hence the knock on the door from the waiter. Hence the whey-face. There is an enormous bill to be paid, and there is no way that Martin paid it. In fact, Martin played me to the tune of £202.01. My contribution to that sum was £25.00. 

The waiters looked crestfallen, as though they bore the responsibility for another man’s bad behaviour. They said I could have a glass of wine on the house and incongruously offered me a little plate of biscuits to go with it. And as I sat there, calculating that my finances would only allow bread and soup for the rest of the week at least, I felt a great swell of mirth which erupted into the kind of laughing I haven’t done in years. The real, genuine belly laugh I remember from my youth. Because let me be truthful. If I could have escaped that restaurant leaving Martin to pay the bill, I would have done, but he bested me, and so he wins the chutzpah derby. 

And it had been so good to get out, and now I’m laughing ’til the tears are rolling, and the waiters are laughing and the chef comes out and he’s laughing, and all the other guests are laughing and I’m just thinking, yes, this is me, this is a page in my doodle pad, only this time I wasn’t the arsehole. 

*****

The dunkelflaute remained for days, but mine lifted that night. Life is a hard road for all of us, but you have to laugh at it. You have to laugh at yourself and all your errant imaginings and self-imposed purdah. 

A couple of weeks later, in early December, the bollards outside the village shop were dressed with WI knitted sleeves of Santa Claus, elves, Christmas puddings, angels and the like, but there was one missing, right by the entrance - a reindeer with a red nose.

On the way back through the rec, there was Moira wearing a jaunty Tam O’Shanter and a red raincoat. Her face was still dunkelflaute. “I hate this weather,” she says. 

“How are you?” I ask.

“Some bastard nicked my reindeer.”

Well of course. Of course it would be Moira’s. Who else’s could it possibly have been? The dog looks up at me with circular brown eyes, begging me to invite him to spend Christmas with me and my (stoned) son. Moira has aged another year on account of the outrage. 

“You could look at it another way, Moira,” I say. She rolls her eyes and does this funny thing with her lips, a tight pursing which is reminiscent of a cat's arse.

“You could take it as a compliment.”

“How’s your son?” she asks.