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I'm little, red headed mess, more hair than mass or sense. All I really want to do is make something magical and show the world and have it be proud of me.

Wednesday 25 March 2009

"Natalie's Voice"

Crackle, croak, wheeze; ahem.

I'm laughing. I'm laughing hard at Bowie in space. My raw throat protests at my hysteria and fizzles out and dies, and my breath comes out like the ghost of my previous laughter. I sound like I'm having an obtuse panic attack, with the occasional squeaky scream coming out when I push hard enough, but it hurts like hell. I sound like one of the women in the black and white films, the ones whose true love just got shot in the head trying to protect her, and she leans over his dead and bleeding body and cries "Why, oh, why couldn't you have taken me instead?" but she's crying so hard that no noise is coming out except little squeaks where she yearns for her lover to resurrect, or a woman on the news whose whole family's been wiped out and somehow, she thinks its her fault. If people could hear me, they'd cry with pathos.

I have no voice, and any who no one to speak to. So, I'll speak my thoughts to you, dear blog.

Ooop, here comes a ramble. Why is there no one here? Why do they always leave me? Do they care more about yoga, dance competitions, Kenya and China more than me? I don't think my family have all been together in about two months. It's sad, so sad. There could be great, best-selling books about this, the girl with no family and no voice, but somehow still manages to stay witty. It'll be called: "Natalie's Voice" and underneath it can say "one girls journey to find her voice." Epicness - I like. OOH, and it can include a collection of all my blogs as well, and the shiny bit with the pictures in the middle that every one flicks to in autobiographies to see the full, extended gawkiness of their favorite celebrities adolesence. Since when did that lady on Loose Women - my favorite show for when I'm ill, except maybe the Wright Suff, especially when Richard Bacons standing in - become Waterloo Roads favorite geography teacher (better than Mrs. Currie?? Well I never.)? I'm getting excited because me and my friends are planning on a trip to go and see Muse live - anyones welcome to come - I LUUUURRRVVEE MUSE - oh, the art of Facebook Chat, especially when you have no voice. Gossip Girl is two minutes late and I'm watching some losers complain about their "builder from hell" and its annoying me. I want my throat to stop hurting. I want a letter. I never get letters, unless it's my birthday, which has just passed, but even then they're cards, not proper letters that I enviously watch my parents open after coming in from yoga, or the garden, where he spent the day gardening, crazy calamities. My parents are annoying. My Mamie spends her days teaching yoga, coming home, reading about it, goes to two one hour classes and then goes to her room to meditate. My Dad leaves his home on the river at six am to lecture music technology at mid-Kent uni and comes home at eight pm. At the weekends he's mostly in Germany or Rome. Which is, oh, well its just embarrassing. My sister lives in Nando's beckenham, where she works, and when she comes home she goes up to her room to stitch serial killer writing onto the adverts found in Vogue (long-term art project, don't ask). That's my immediate family, don't get my started on the rest. I want to be able to get to sleep. I've built up an immunity to my meds and I'm spending gradually more and more time trying to find patterns in the stars outside my window. All I can see are moles. Moles, moles, moles.

Monday 23 March 2009

The Tramp.

Tandra's just left me to get on the train to Hayes while I await the one to East Grinstead. It'll be here in thirty three minutes.

A blond man with a graying beard sits in his usual space by WH Smith, bartering and heckling for our spare change. It's a shame for him that the people of London are too tight to pay for his drugs. He's thin and he's tanned, and he may well of been good looking twenty-odd years back, but now he's just the Charing Cross Tramp. I get up from my seat by the Swatch stall and walk over to buy More magazine; I've finished on my Look and my Heat. I almost walk past him and he asks me for my change. I start to dig around in my pockets when our eyes meet. Does he recognise me: Isn't this the man who used to call me Princess?

The man who tore up my life and I never got over it, the man who keeps me awake all night, every night through my nightmares, the scars on my hip.

All that effort I made, trying to block out the painful memories over years, and its worth nothing; Now, standing there at the station, I ran away, paid 20p to lock myself in the toilet and cried so hard that someone came and knocked on my door to ask if I was okay. I said no, and when they asked whats wrong, I made up some spew about how I'd been dumped, as its perfectly viable and they probably can't be bothered to follow-up on that because it's just not that interesting.



But if I told them the truth... well, that doesn't bare thinking about.



Here are the parts I can remember:

His names Paul, and he his children are called Lisa and David. He used to live in Eltham, on Crookston Road. He was the manager for Mercedes Benz in Beckenham and Bromley Hill. He never could get over his hey-day in the eighties when he dated half the cast of Eastenders cast including the one whose nose fell off, who introduced him to the hard stuff. He settles down with a wife whose name I can't remember and has his children. They get divorced because of the drugs. He falls in love with a young woman named Carmel.

That was the past.

It all gets a bit hazy from there, but here are the things I can remember:
  • A two-year-old girl called Nicole.
  • A new house in langley park. It had thin walls.
  • Happiness.
  • Screaming though the thin walls.
  • Sleeping through the screaming.
  • Hard drugs down the toilet.
  • Waking up alone; seven years old.
  • Blood on the kitchen floor.
  • Something shiny in the blood.
  • A nice police woman called Mairead, who let me hug her.

Crap, I'm shaking. I run through the station to where my train awaits me. I curl up on my own, put on my sad song playlist and cry solid.

I get home about half twelve in the morning and go up to my room, not telling anyone why I'm crying or what I've seen.

Saturday 21 March 2009

My Best Friend, Bruce Forsythe.

All I need are the simple things:


  • A vintage bike
  • Some loose skinny fit Gap jeans
  • That This Charming Girl vintage locket I ordered TWO WEEKS AGO, and on recorded delivery aswell.
  • Some new inks
  • Some sweet-tune Tm-N music
  • Thick-rimmed dork glasses
  • A hug?

See?

I've been really sad this week. I don't remember why. I told Ellen and I got a hug and we listened to Surf medley and little Joanna all the way the 352 can take us. She's sympathetic and doesn't mock, or patronize me, which is why I choose to tell her insteard of say, RUBEY-ELIZABETH MANDELL. Like my Mum always told me, sometimes your best friend can be your worst enemy. It's not that I don't love her, its not that she doesn't read my blog, which she doesn't, even though I check her Myspace at least once a week, its just that her open arms are weak. God, I sound like my Mother.

Oh well, it's probably just her getting revenge for all those times I've told her she looks like Bruce Forsythe, which she does. (:p.)

Tallulah, Tallulah, Tallulah.

I watch two red lines set themselves on my knuckles as I ask Lui to type and we wait for our Sloppy Guiseppe to cook itself in Mothers crappy oven. It says it takes ten minutes on 200 degrees celsius; its been in for four and I can smell burning, though that might just be where I burnt myself.

!!READY!!

It's yummie.

Me and Lui are wondering, to what extent can an artiste go to before its just sad? This comes about as this morning, we went to Pret for breakfast, because we're snobby like that. I bring my observation book, simply because I need all seventy-one pages filled before the first of April, and theres a nice tree with blossom on it visible from the upstairs window boothe. After finishing my pain au chocolat and tea, I get out my obs, charcoal and gum and set out to draw the blossom when the girl with no metabolism looks up from her diet Coke and tells me that this art thing is taking over my life, and we hardly ever talk anymore; she makes us sound like we're married, which would be illeagal in so many ways, unless we migrated somewhere else, but even then I don't think they'd be all that big on same-sex marriages. Says the girl who writes songs on my window seat, for the sake of her poetic license and is totally only dating her boyfriend because he can play two chords (most probably A and E) and calls her by Tallulah, which only he and her parents can, and the rest of us are forbidden. Thats it, she's gone.

Just because I'm telling the truth, which only she's allowed to do. I do it in a rambly way that just kind of drifts with my train of thought, while she just does it in a down-right mean way. I'm totally not feeliong the love for Tallulah Alice Wright atm.

Its such a nice name for someone so spiteful.

Monday 16 March 2009

Its Not About The Size Of The Boat; Its All About The Motion In The Ocean.

The suns out, once again, and I rise out of my bed like Persephone.

I climb onto my windowsill and knock down all of my empty china tresury boxes and kick the five pairs of sunglasses down onto my bed. I grab my phone from the bedside table, hitting the lamp on my way and crouch, looking out at the identical little tan-brick houses behind my own. I press 5 and wait to be connected to Rubey, but she's probably sleeping behind her floor-sweeping mauve black-out curtains.

In five months time it will be Summer. I can see myself, sitting in my new New Look dress almost-new low-rise grey converse, my Rochelles and my namesake necklace, on the kitchen counter, probably waiting for Rubey's train to arrive and my little pink bubble of a radio blaring out my Motion In The Ocean album and me singing along and dancing, admittedly mostly to Trannie, and the sun hitting the signal-ariel and hitting the silver bit on the washing machine.

Ahh, Summer.

Walking in the sun, thats what I most look forward to. Losing myself behind my Vannesas in the crowd of broadstairs beach, rooting myself in the seabed and watching the world go by. Going home at dusk with Valerie and Caroline and staying with them at their Mum's new house there. Lying back on the pebbles on Brighton beach, feeling the stones digging into my Topshop dress before getting too uncomfortable and walking up the pier and getting perved on by the mentalists of Brighton and outer Hove. Going to Leeds to stay with Rubey and walking across the bridge that she seems to be obsessed with and standing there for ages, getting bemused by the lights of the clear, flowing river. Walking for hours until our legs ache and we have to stop and slope into the nearest Debenhams cafe before she asks me if I know where we are, even if I don't live there and she does. Going to Southend and making Elly Wood flirt with the bird-nest-hair man called Sydeny who operates The Cow Jumped Over The Moon ride that we go on over and over just because of Sydeny, just because its better to watch someone useless at flirting flirt than say, Ellen.

Oh, memories memories, can you form memories that are yet to happen?

Sunday 15 March 2009

Blossom.

Do you remember my little poetic nonsense about the snow? Well, I'm going to do one about the blossom now. It was a note on my phone that I'm typing up now. Please note that I was sitting at Beckenham Road tram stop, otherwise it might not make sense.

The sun hits the live rails like an eletric current and blinds me through my UV protective sunglasses and the blossom falls on the track like confetti, celebrating the return of Spring. I look up at the great never ending sky, fully lined by the soft white petals and the striking shattered glass of the shelter, I bet the yobs who roam the Beckenham area will never know the beauty of what they made on that drunken night.

Sunday 8 March 2009

The Factory.

So, I think to myself as we park up behind the modern building, this is where stars are made. This is where they pick up the potential-filled children of all London boroughs and simmer them in their own talent before dropping them onto the red carpet. And guess what? They want to do this to me, too. It's rather comforting. The people here are nice, and don't boast that they taught the likes of Amy Winehouse, Adele and Kate Nash. Someone walking his dog looks at us as me and my Mother drive past them, singing at the top of our voices to The Saturdays (Why me, Why now?, If you were wondering), and I smile and wave at him. He doesn't have the courtesy to do it back. I get out of the car, pink suede portfolio under my right arm and walk through the car park. The glittery stickers I used to spell out my name on my portfolio blind me as they hit the sun and me and my Mother walk inside. My names on the list, which I feared so it wouldn't be, and me and my new-found-friend Ruby walk towards the art department.
Don't lets tempt fate, but I surprisingly did magnificently.

Sunday 1 March 2009

All That I Am, All That I Dream.

Bestfriends and basslines. I think that I might be in love.

Myspace is streaming The Mid-Nineties as I wait in anticipation for April. In April Tm-N's album comes out and BY April I will have heard back from the BRITs school. So, uh, fingers crossed. The familiar bassline of Red Jeans crackles as it comes out of the computers crappy speakers, but it still sounds beautiful. Which reminds me; whatever has happenned to Joe Hughes? I don't know. They say that our Father figures reflect who we love, as they are our only source of manly authority, and therefore the ones we look up to. I've always thought this a load of crap, but here, yet again, I find myself falling for another Northern bass player.