Amanda Bell

This Floating World

“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by.”  – Basho

It is a year now since travel stopped, and with it the activities that punctuate our days. This coincides with the cessation of a cycle that for decades has dictated my biological clock. Confined to a small and crowded footprint, untethered from physical rhythms, the mind drifts, snatches on to flotsam. Hours and weeks bleed into one another, undifferentiated. Mediated by a screen, interactions meld till the boundaries between the real and virtual blur, disconnected from haptic prompts. And in the neural network, free-floating memories forge connections across space and time.

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For three generations my family has holidayed in the west of Ireland, but the year I turn six my parents feel the lure of strawberries and early potatoes, and break with tradition to stay in a County Wexford farmhouse. We have been promised fresh produce and home-cooked meals, but the proprietress has meningitis, and catering falls to younger members of the household. At tea-time every evening we are served baked beans and sausages, and every night the leftovers are surreptitiously fed to our dog, who sleeps in the car. So every morning my car-proud father scrapes piles of partially-digested sausages from the seats of his yellow Ford Cortina. Perhaps this shall be his abiding memory of the holiday. My own memory though, will be of my feet: how they feel the uneven path gradually soften with fine sand as we near the pier; how sandhoppers bump off my ankles as I walk past seaweed on the tideline, clasping my bamboo fishing net; the tickle of translucent shrimp; and the rapid tug of a dab as it shoots out from beneath my sole in the warm shallows.

receding tide—
green crabs surge out
from the harbour wall

Three decades on, my parents join me and my family in a farmhouse in southwest France. The owners live next door, and in a strange analogue to our Wexford summer, the proprietor has been taken ill and is hospitalised some distance away in Bordeaux. There is no internet, and poor radio reception. To hear the after-dinner news you must stalk out into the darkness of the yard holding a portable radio aloft. We learn – from unforgettable underfoot squelching – that toads gather in the porch at night. In spite of these forays, we miss the news of the fuel price protests, until signs began to appear at petrol station forecourts. We abandon lunchtime wine tastings in small vineyards, and become used to the acrid burn of siphoned petrol as we strive to fill containers with enough fuel to make the return trip to Roscoff ferry port. We return from one such expedition to find our landlady weeping with her adult children. Her husband is dying, the roads have been blockaded by strikers, and she is unable to visit him to say goodbye. Unwilling to intrude on the family’s grief, and alarmed by the speed at which the situation is escalating, we pack up our little convoy and head north.

the scent of diesel—
blackened sunflowers bow their heads
the heft of seed

At each junction, we encounter combine harvesters forming blockades. Speeding along rough by-roads, connected to a travel helpline on one phone, and relaying messages to the car behind on the other, we eventually join the autoroute, possibly the last car to do so before the whole system is cut off. The lanes stay empty for six hundred kilometres. It feels post-apocalyptic, and it will be 2020 before I see such a sight again.

a distant whistle—
stubbing out a cigarette
I climb on board

The first time I travel the length of France it is by train, going in the opposite direction. I am alone. In carriages by day and couchettes by night, I continue down through Spain, board a ferry to Tangier, and continue by rail and bus through Marrakech, until I wash up on a seaside café terrace in Agadir.

solitary diner—
slipping sardine heads
to feral cats

It is dusk. Plumes of smoke from a cigarette smouldering in my ashtray mingle with steam from a glass of mint tea, in which dark crystals of sugar dissolve in billows. It is Ramadan; even so I am wary when a man approaches and strikes up conversation, drawn by the volume of Racine’s plays that I am reading. He has spent a week here learning his lines for a production of Bérénice in Paris, and is leaving tonight. As a man travelling alone, he tells me, this is a country where anything is possible, but that he prefers to keep to himself. We talk until it is time for him to fetch his bags and begin his journey home.

deserted slipway
a pair of herring gulls
comparing trinkets

Returning to my hotel, I find that he has left a newspaper article for me at reception. It is a discussion of chance encounters in Arab cafés. Part of an interview with a playwright who died the previous year, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic.

street bustle fading—
the muezzin's call to prayer
reverberates

Fifteen years later I return to Agadir by plane, with my husband and small children. We have arranged to stay in a riad in Essaouira, a three-and-a-half hour drive away, and have prebooked a transfer from Al-Massira airport, but there is no one to greet us. As the crowds disperse, we find ourselves alone in the dust of the Arrivals Hall.

night air cooling—
empty baggage carousels
shudder to a halt

As I search for emergency phone numbers, a man appears carrying a card with my name scrawled on it. He ushers us out to the carpark and slings our bags into the boot of a dilapidated car. There is a muttered exchange with a policeman behind the raised lid of the car boot, then he gets in and sparks the ignition; sulphurous black smoke plumes from the exhaust pipe. We make it out of the carpark and on to the main road, but the acceleration gradually weakens, and soon we veer off the ring road, puttering to a halt in a deserted industrial zone. Grabbing his mobile phone off the dashboard, the driver jumps out and disappears.

stony verges—
a fruit knife in my pocket
its cool handle

Small groups of men stand around braziers. They wear dun-coloured woollen djellabas, with the hoods pulled up against the cold night air. There is a heated discussion in Arabic as they gesticulate towards our smoking car, then one of them breaks away from the group and transfers our luggage into his own vehicle. He, too, refuses to speak, but jerks his head at us to go with him. This car is newer, and cleaner. It is also much faster. Maintaining the silence, he speeds towards the coast road, heading north. His phone rings repeatedly. Each time, he picks it up and rejects the call. The speedometer is sliding higher and higher. He leans across to shut the phone in the glove compartment, but is distracted by its continued ringing, and weaves across both lanes of the road, oblivious to blind bends or oncoming traffic. When lights come up behind us, he pushes the engine to go even faster, but the pursuer, honking relentlessly, draws parallel, then overtakes and cuts in front, forcing us to pull over onto the verge. The official taxi has finally found us.

squeaky leather seats—
a pine air freshener
sways at every bend

A couple of hours later, we park outside the gates of the old city; a hooded figure rises out of the wooden wheelbarrow in which he has been lying. He piles our luggage into his barrow, and takes off through the winding streets towards the medina. We have little choice but to follow.

uneven cobblestones—
from darkened doorways
pungent smoke

I am always struck on arrival at a new destination by its smell – that waft of jet fumes and fragrant dust that hits you as soon as the plane opens its doors, at once familiar yet unique. In the Crimea, it is the lingering scent of roses and pine resin. I am with my grandmother. She has always loved travel, and when the last of her companions becomes too frail to accompany her, she turns to her eldest grandchild. I have been to France, where I speak the language, and Crete, which has a ready welcome for foreigners, but am unprepared for the culture shock of the USSR, which is rapidly unravelling.

queueing for black bread—
at every street corner
tannoys crackling

We see flags at half-mast outside the Kremlin, and crowds in lively discussion over newspapers. Dependent on tour guides who are both elusive and uncommunicative, we have no idea of what is going on in the world beyond, other than what we can guess from television images in hotel bars.

shots of vodka—
who is pulled out of his coffin
on the fuzzy screen?

From Moscow, we travel to Yalta, where black pines sweep down to the seashore from hills shrouded in a pale blue mist. As we stroll the seafront promenade, gold-toothed merchants are selling pickled cucumbers from wooden barrels, and pyramids of strawberries seep dark juices onto trestle tables. We snack on slices of honeycomb encrusted with squashed bees, and I buy an amber brooch in the shape of a spider. I still have it today, its rigid legs entangled in a spool of thread.

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Note: “receding tide” first appeared in Frogpond, Spring/Summer 2019.

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About the Author

Amanda Bell is an Irish poet and writer. Her most recent book, Riptide, is a collection of poetry, haibun and haiku, published by Doire Press (September 2021). She is an assistant editor of The Haibun Journal and judge of the haibun category in the British Haiku Society’s Awards for 2022. Find more at www.clearasabellwritingservices.ie.