The Woman Who Was Right

The airport is bursting at the seams, the rush of humanity like an ocean. Thousands of droplets washing across Heathrow Terminal 5 may seem impersonal, yet there is a story in each one. Tamara is observing the tide from her tall stool by a champagne bar. Queues to Starbucks and Pret were insufferably long. She didn’t want alcohol but was forced to get a very small and expensive glass just to keep the bartender less annoyed. All she wanted was black coffee. 

The Woman Who Was Wrong

Tonya will always remember their first meeting. She wasn’t in a bar waiting for a date, she wasn’t on a train for a what-are-the-chances encounter, she wasn’t in a fancy department store, trying perfume. Their eyes didn’t meet across the crowded floor, there was no instant chemistry. When she looked back and thought about their first meeting, her reaction was “this is not how you meet the love of your life”. She wished she’d looked better, she wished her lips were glossy, her hair in effortless fluffy curls, her figure, still excellent after three children, –  in shapely jeans. Tonya wished she could return to a moment in time and think: “This is how I met the Love of My Life”. She wished that even now. She thinks it would somehow affect what happened later.

The Woman Who Had Everything

Lily wakes up, as she often does, in the middle of the night. She knows what time it is even without looking at her bedside alarm clock. Insomnia made her an expert on telling the time. Darkness outside her window is Turkish coffee thick. It must be before 3 am. She makes a few guesses whether it’s 02:38 or 02:51 before she finally reaches for her phone. It is 02:47. She carefully slides to the edge of the bed and slips off trying not to wake Jasper. She fails, as usual. Not normally a light sleeper, he is attuned to her nightly problem. He sits up in bed rubbing his face, shaking his head. 

The Woman Who Had Nothing

When it’s her turn to go in, Mira is relieved. She is  a doer, not a waiter or a hang-arounder. 

Relieved to leave behind the slightly creepy guy in a clearly new pair of shoes rehearsing interview answers, saying bye-bye to an older lady she’s offered some tips to, thanking again a younger girl, who’d brought her a cup of tea. Mira is looking forward to the action. 

She gets up and marches into the room and takes a seat opposite three kindly English faces. She tries to calm herself down with her breathing (she’s been practising) and is surprised to feel how sweaty her palms are.

She shifts in her chair, hoping her makeup isn’t running. The new foundation, super pricey at 12 pounds, may have been a mistake and might be oilier than it looked in the shop.

The kindly faces are all bespectacled, pale and middle-aged. Mira is so nervous that she has difficulties telling them apart, even though one of them is meant to be Beth, the friend of Chloe, her manager at Tesco who promised to put in a word. 

Mira needs this M&S job: more regular hours, better pay, nicer environment, closer to her flat. It should make it so much easier to look after her two kids. 

The kindly faces are leafing through her paperwork and application.

“Ukrainian, are you?” one of them says, smiling in what they hope to be both a professional and compassionate way. 

Mira nods, tensely. She doesn’t want to be a charity case. On the other hand, she wants this job. Would it help to be a charity case? She peers at their faces.

The woman, who is probably Beth, smiles at her encouragingly and adds in a comforting way: “It’s just terrible what’s happening, isn’t it?..”

Про Таню Терен

Усе в ній є поєднанням тонкого і незламного. Вона нагадує статуетку з титану. Архипенко працював з титаном чи іншим твердим сплавом? Не знаю, але вона саме така – з чітким обрисом, найтоншими зап’ястями і талією, і водночас з твердістю і визначеністю поставленої мети, які виражені в самому її фізичному тілі і притягують до неї магнітом. Але також в її очах – кольору вишень у червні, в самому кінці сезону ягід, коли сонце пече дедалі сильніше і нагадує, що скоро гарячий липень, а за ним – ще гарячіший серпень.

But what about: Introduction

When all of this started happening, I thought very little of it. It was funny at first, so weird, so unreal, it seemed strange that it was happening, yet it gave you a heady, “I am standing on the edge” sort of feeling, say, on a window sill of a skyscraper, except not only you were standing on the edge, the very edge was crumbling under your feet, the skyscraper which was made out of cement has gone all soft and wobbly, and you were slipping off the edge and falling but it didn’t really matter because forces of gravitation had stopped working, too, right after the cement of the skyscraper had gone wobbly. But even the heady wobbly part did not last long. Every day of this time of things going off course was increasingly bizarre. That did not make me think more of it, or be afraid of what was coming. But it did make me think of every clandestine aspect of human nature, of every secret, kept, hidden, buried under layers of propriety and normality and acceptability. “But what about that?” – I thought.

Light Bugs

We meet on a late summer evening. The air is warm and clear and the breath of autumn is still faraway. Yet you can be certain it is coming, and soon. I turn up at a music festival, having agreed to see my friends there. The scene is a crowded outdoor event with mostly teenagers in attendance. It is dusty and noisy but also romantic, because of the sunset and peculiarly retro style of music. The music pouring from several barns of this villages (or are they storage facilities on this town’s outskirts?). Most people are already beer-tipsy. I can see them sneaking off behind portable loos to smoke something.

Cables

He has a cameraman’s posture: back – wide and straight, arms – lose and strong, bottom – pert and angled upwards, ready to support the load of a tripod or a lights’ kit. He is a straw blonde, messy hair sticking up and sideways. His eyes are dark-blue, eyebrows – dark straw, eyelids – puffy, cheekbones – broad and vaguely Mongol. He has cameraman’s hands: rough-skinned yet nimble fingers, palms already muddy, he is untangling a stubborn cable.

Коли я жила у Франції

Коли я жила у Франції, найбільше мене вражала всюди-присутність стосунків на стороні. Вони були поширені там настільки ж, наскільки були поширені кисень та червоне вино. Стосунки на стороні були у всіх, навіть у тих, з ким у людей у постійних стосунках, були стосунки на стороні. Іншими словами, якби перша людина зі стосунками на стороні подивилася б наліво, на людину на стороні, а та людина, у свою чергу, також подивилася б на ліво, на наступну людину, а та – на наступну, то врешті-решт, усі люди опинилися б у гігантському колі, де на найпершу людину дивилася б остання людина.

When I was a motivational speaker

When I was a motivational speaker, it happened to be at a tough, you could even say depressing, time in my life. I was struggling. To support myself, to get a job as an academic – thinking about all those years sunk into writing and defending a PhD (on early medieval family and society, in case you are wondering) made me cringe every time I walked into a boardroom where a group of trainees would be sitting, looking listless and bored. I would have been hired by their corporate bosses to talk about mental and emotional health and importance of feeling happy and fulfilled in a workplace. Every single face in every single boardroom was like a black hole – reflecting nothing, absorbing light, desperate. Board rooms had no fresh air and often – no natural light. It always struck me that discussing happiness in that kind of place was ironic. Or a paradox.