— preliminary images of Tine Bek’s work and excerpts from initial phase of writing (2023/4) by Jessica Higgins (CV)
It had been a long year already, which was strange, since years, as they multiply tend not to grow long but short. Older people had warned us about this, even going so far as to cite scientific studies in support of their claims. Indeed, as we, too, aged, we found ourselves asking, not infrequently, where on earth is this year going? and just as each new month approached one of us would invariably utter the words, I can’t believe it’s nearly… We too would seek scientific studies which we could reference in the hope that it might stabilise our loosening grip on the hours. We too would hatch plans to make the most of our dwindling moments in anticipation of that final act where each year is but the space of a minute and children grow inches before our very eyes. We too would mark the calendar, from time to time, with breathy amazement.
And yet, it was turning into a long year and we were growing impulsive. The kitchen walls were half painted around the edges and some of the way up, rooms were half rearranged, promises to neighbours left unkept. In the evenings I told you I was whittling animal figurines and you would come home from your walks with bits of tree you’d found on the ground, but all I had to show were lumps of mossy bark and some vague outlines of life. So, we bought Caesar in the early spring and ate eggs until midsummer. I did do my best to visualise Caesar not as a salad laying unfulfilled promises to the future, but as a Roman brute clucking around the garden. I suggested we change her name to Benedict, which we tried, for a while, but it didn’t stick and on the longest day of the year I stopped eating eggs.
By the sixth you’re back at work and I’m bored of my assignment. I’d enrolled on a data science degree in the autumn after a series of failed applications for research funding, by which I really meant “not working”. You might laugh about it now, but it’ll be you next. I accept a copywriting job because I say we need the money. We keep forgetting to buy more yellow paint. I ask for an extension from the University.
An hour or so into the copywriting job I decide to whittle a snake. I promised I wouldn’t make any new resolutions aside from the yellow kitchen, but I lied. The resolution isn’t to whittle animals in any kind of regular fashion, I’d tried that one before, but I wanted to become a better friend or family member, and so I decided I could make these figurines in dull moments and give them as impromptu presents, just because. When I tell you about this some weeks later, after you ask me whether you should keep bringing home bits of wood for the animals, you point out that I could save us both a lot of effort by simply picking up the phone once in a while, or offering help when the people I love are in need. You have a car, you tell me, not everyone has a car. I’ll show my love how I like, I say. And anyway, everyone around here has cars already. You’re right, you say, I sometimes forget where we are.
I shave and prod at the wood, charting curves and inclinations, trying to channel the contours of a snake-like gesture through my body and into my hands, when, looking across the table and out toward the window, I spy a red car sneaking up the path to the neighbouring house. And, by neighbouring, all I mean is the house closest to ours, separated by a road and, on our side of things, a large patch of someone else’s land cutting across our front door which we use as a garden, taking care not to spread out too much.
You tell me you want to get a chicken and call it Caesar. I’m not looking at you when you speak, so I mumble something like yes, ok, that’s cute. You know, it can sometimes take a moment for things to register. So, a few seconds later I look up and see your face and say, with emphasis, what?
You tell me you want to get a chicken, for eggs, of course, to eat, and as a pet. And, you’d like to call it Caesar. Like the emperor or the salad? Both, you suppose, but your first thought was the salad. You are what you eat, or, you are how you’re eaten, you say. You want to reinvent the phrase and I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that but we get the chicken and we call it Caesar and it makes you smile. You cook us eggs for breakfast a few times a week and start a running calculation of the savings we’re making. You plan to reinvest the proceeds toward improvements to Caesar’s coop and I agree that it would only be fair.
The fields were dry and people were moving out of the city. People have always moved out of the city, so this wasn’t a new thing. Barely worth mentioning, were it not to find a way of explaining that we’d left some time ago and no longer saw ourselves as though in migration, like a flock of birds, that state of movement which can, understandably, contribute to an unusual relationship with the ordinary passing of time, but that we were settled, rooted, not quite as an ancient tree, but our heels were comfortably in the topsoil and our nails already weathered.
So, it makes sense that the year began with the arrival of a man, small and thin. Some time later, a woman, robust and fair. And some time later again, two children of the same height. Twins, we learned. Trouble, the man would tell us with a grin. We had grown used to the timely and untimely deaths of people who lived nearby, some of whom did not leave the city but have always been here, or at the very least, another version of here. And with their death the speedy or stalled dissolution of property, and with that dissolution of property, the inevitable arrival of new versions of them.
Nobody was sure where the man came from at first, but when the woman, and then her children appeared, it turned out that their story was both as common as any of the rumours hushed over the shop counters and strange as the fruits of idle speculation ripened at the fence posts.
I kept my eye on the house all afternoon. Just as you came home I had some interesting thoughts about desire which I forgot to write down. I tell you about the red car and you tell me that they’re making redundancies at work. We sit in our half yellow kitchen and worry the evening away. Happy New Year, I guess.
The next day you leave for work and the university grants my extension. I copywrite and I whittle. The snake begins to look more snake-like. I see the man sitting in front of his house eating a sandwich. I wonder what he’s wondering, look at the snake, and decide to go over there to introduce us. I’ll do the speaking, this time. I tell him my name and he tells me he’s working on the house. We linger for a moment and I say I’ll let him get on then. It was unclear whether he was working on the house in order to live there, or whether he’d been employed to renovate it, maybe even by the horse couple. Were they coming back? I’d like that, I think, and vow to make more effort with them this time. I could make them a wooden horse, or bake, or something.
Eventually you do get made redundant and spend a week indoors and the man’s wife arrives at the house. So they are living there! I shout through the walls. The snake sits half shorn on the side and next to it, the hooves of a horse. You turn to me and mumble, with emphasis, what? and for the first time in our lives one of us says I can’t believe it’s still January.