14 December 2008

My best friend is leaving.

Because I won't think about it, I woke crying in my dreams. It's Sunday, 5.55am. Many friends have populated my play and left the scene. I know all about it. But I also dreamed of soap. I can still smell it, I'm
infused with its smell. It's a very particular soap which I bought recently for my mother-in-law, at 'A Fleur de Bio', a shop near me. It's downstairs prettily wrapped in leaves and raffia, in a bag of similar presents. Well, it's very obviously not for me is it?

I'm going to have that soap. I'll slice the raffia tie carefully (don't worry about my mother in law, I'll replace the missing soap with Weleda shower cream, oooh the ecstacy of a wash in this, the smoothness of skin after a few months of doing so!). I'll cradle the box, ease out the tongue of the flap, and there it will be. You know when you make pastry, and you gather up all the cuttings and squash them into a ball, and wonder whether you'll get one more small pie out of it? The soap looks just like that. There's nothing nasty in it, you could eat it. And it smells of orange flower. I spent a long time with the owner of the shop choosing the smell that my mother in law would like, would she like jasmine? I did.

'She lived in Algeria, it was a very happy time, something perhaps which reminds her of that?' I said.

'Well, what about orange flower?' Said the owner of the shop, she opened the little box, her own nose rejoiced.

'Oh yes, those little crescent shaped biscuits, dusted in icing sugar, mmm'

She pointed out to me that my mother-in-law's package already contained a 'pâte de savon noir', a black ointment in a glass screw-lidded jar, for washing her face. She wouldn't need two soaps for her face. I agreed of course, and tried to choose something else. But the soap drew me back. Now I realise I bought the soap for me, I just didn't see it at the time, and I never would have done, what extravagance, 10 Euros for a soap, virgin olive oil!

I love those crescent-shaped biscuits. I've only ever eaten one really good one, which I bought from a stall at Feucherolles brocante, years ago. I've never been able to find the stall again, the stallholder mentioned that she was sometimes at Versailles market, I think. I can see the soap now in my mind's eye, a little buttery ball, dusted in icing sugar (it isn't of course) and the orange flower pervades my being, I'm all oil and orange flower. I even catch a glimpse of Lebanese hands squeezing it and patting it together. All this, contained in a soap.

I'm going to anoint myself with that soap. I'm not going to anoint myself just anywhere, I'm going to anoint myself in my boudoir, a name I have given to a minute annexe to our bedroom. When we moved in I didn't know what to do with this annexe, a sink and a cupboard, barely room to turn round and certainly no space to entertain a gentleman in a top hat. The sink was a 'willy sink', low enough to dip your willy in, and jutted out too much into the precious space and with horrid red taps. I've transformed the annexe into a boudoir, one wall a 'glacis' of the kind of blue the sky is as it transforms between night and day, day and night, the other rich, warm pink, all in breathable ecological paint. A touch of gold (less ecological, but uplifting). The sink is for sitting at now, on a little box stool, and it has a vast mirror above it. (It's indescribable really. I should show you a picture of it, but our digital camera lost its vision, suddenly, for no particular reason...and when I think that my Kodak Instamatic, a present at 14 years old, still functions...). The boudoir is a transformation of something ugly, all wrong, which itched at me every night when I turned my head to the right, into a marvel. I croon over it every time I see it, which is often.

The soap will oil and cream in my hands, I will put it down, I will circle the richness in my palms, and I will bring my palms to my face, and I will do what I have to do to make sure this is an anointment, not a simple wash.