Patsy Silver & The Love Jewels
The reoccurring woman, a poem on the train, & a story in the bath.
There’s this lady that keeps showing up in all my stories. Always older, always holding up her tiny dog for people to look at. In one story, she is Patsy Silver; an imaged Northern Soul singer who comes on a breakfast TV show with her chihuahua to look back on her life, a slideshow of young stardom playing out behind her: Pouting into microphones on blue and black stages and lying across a velvet sofa in a photographer’s studio, all covered in roses.
In another story, she’s in this list of women spotted in Thailand by a lonely tourist on the verge of mental breakdown: Beautiful women: a blonde hen in a purple dress and jelly shoes, an elderly lady with perfect skinny eyebrows holding up her Pomeranian like Simba, two sisters sat on red stools peeling vegetables at the roadside. Legs and heels.
Every time our Patsy shows up, she is in the background, for just a few moments, being watched by some other character going through some sort of sadness.
When I wrote both the Patsy cameo stories, I’d just moved to Belfast to be closer to a Dublin-based fiction workshop with The Stinging Fly. Was living in a shed that had been fitted with a shower and had a Union Jack flag flying opposite my window, and had started this online art history course called JEWELS OF LOVE. I had joked before, to loadsa people, that I was moving to Ireland to Find Love and, to be fair to the new numbers I have saved on my phone, I did find: Accordion Player, Hawaian Shirt, Moustache and Chris The Bouncer. But my most romantic experiences in Northern Ireland, easily, were in those stories the jewellery historian Beatrix told me through grainy Zoom calls, streamed to my Belfast shed for JEWELS OF LOVE, her chihuahua Ruby lying on her lap the whole time.
I didn’t notice the mysterious case of the reoccurring woman until I shared a screenshot of Beatrix and Ruby with the writers on my workshop. Ahhh, it’s like the woman from your stories! one of them said. And I remembered the lady I met in Thailand who held up her chihuahua for me to photograph in 2016, or that year I spent working in a clothes shop and obsessively watching Youtube videos, on shift, of Malinda Herman singing love songs to her tiny dog. And the joke is, I’ve never even been into little dogs, handbag cruisers, CHIHUAHUAS! I grew up with big, crazy, lummoxy dogs and have stayed a big dog fanatic my whole life. But these glamorous women and their small pets have me under some kind of magic dust. And I hope Patsy Silver - guardian angel, bad omen, love of my life, whoever she is - keeps on showing up in my stories to defeat all kinds of sadness.
A poem I wrote on the train
My mum has this thing she always says when she talks about teenage girls: I MISS bad makeup! and I know she means she misses the kind of so-called bad looks and distinct subcultures that have faded since the rise of the internet. But I think she also feels bitter that everyone else had to get it wrong for so many generations, when now you can just watch a makeup tutorial aged 13 and look fab haha. So I wrote this poem called Bad Makeup on the train from Dublin to Belfast, after a hangover day at work that saw me throw up in the National College of Art and Design toilets 3 times. It made my eyes stream to the point my eyelashes turned into these mad cartoon spiders, reminding me of the crazy way a lady who used to work at the Gloucester Train Station Onestop used to do her mascara. (And as a founding member of young Bad Makeup, I'm allowed to say that 💅)
Something I read and loved this week
This week I started reading Lorrie Moore’s first book, Self Help, in the bubble bath and I skipped straight to the story: How To Talk To Your Mother (Notes). I got this book after listening to, and loving, a short story called Community Life from her second collection, Birds of America, on The New Yorker fiction podcast.
Self Help loosely takes inspiration from self help books, acting as a kinda poetic guidebook to the female experience. How To Talk To Your Mother (Notes) is written in reverse, it’s a beautiful and sometimes painful portrait of a mum and daughter relationship and reading it made me want to go back to the start and read it again.
See ya next week xxx