It hadn’t been easy in Hackney, so she decided to rework the first section into something approaching sound poetry. More in tune with Dick Higgins than Pam Ayres she recalled his Snowflakes and then the words appeared quite quickly on the page. This performed approach to language would surely communicate to the 120 pensioners at the Brighton Posh Club, sitting around large tables with tea and sandwiches expecting a cabaret (in the dilapidated ballroom of the King Alfred Leisure Centre). It was her choice to do this, to experience this challenge, and modify her complex material for an audience of elders. She was second on the bill, after a nervous and thin-voiced singer called Anthea, and a flurry of sixties hits from the silent DJ. But what about the hat? Yes or no? Suddenly the compere, Alfie Normal, is here to introduce her. They’d arrived late and, at the last moment, decided against adding black PVC thigh boots to their scarlet sequined boy soldier outfit.
Alfie walks off the stage and she steps onto it. She’s in this now and the words are coming, speaking, spoken, projected, like this, like now, she is, talking them out. Tailoring her text to this audience was the right decision and also a regret. In this moment, she longs for a more abstract pattern of words that will give space for her stammer. More like:
Like the A-S-H,
The A S H you tough light weight timber
You s-stand tall yet die back
Cut you down to size for tool handle making
Turned on a lathe ash handles stored under your desk in a cardboard box for years waiting for the theatre doors, for years for doors, no building, no doors
And the O-A-K,
The O A K is you is you are
Here always here to be iconic and join the supply chain for hard wood floors
Come, come quickly, join our logo, our crest, my helmet, your bank, their menu
The O A K of old England and royalty
And name of pub The Royal Oak (in Holloway Harlesden Hackney)
But but
YOU, you are the other one, E-L-M, the E L M,
The tree I know to be the one I look at
And see
When I am six seven eight nine
With forces of not-breathing wheezing
Do not wake your sister
To breathe and be out there
Even in the dark – but you’re afraid of the dark
To be with you over there standing tall
Up and over
Smothered by surrounding streets of suburban houses
With windows glazed over and looking
While my eyes
Are searching
To be with you
You were the one for me
You were the one I see
The one I went to see
The E-L-M, not the A-S-H or the O-A-K
The tree I go to see
To be with you
You to be
To be
To see seeing being
Allowing giving me
Here with me
Hearing me
Healing me
You are in me
Be with me
You and me
Stay with me
Be here with me
Now she’s back here in Brighton and returns to the script. Her stammer recedes:
And then the beetle comes
Here from over the seas
Moves in, shacks up, creates disease
Under your bark is where it starts
So now long time, long time
You are gone, all gone
25 million dead, destroyed
And I miss you bay bay
I never got to say goodbye bay bay
I wanna be with you
Be here with me
Here with me
She hopes they will remember these last few words as lyrics in the dance track by Duke Dumont that will come later. He, coincidentally, born as Adam Diment in the same grim suburb where she communed with elm trees.
She moves her hand slowly towards the hat with a gesture that says watch me now, knowing that in this one action she will disappoint herself and entertain the people who, she imagines, desire only to be entertained. Yes or no.
‘This is not how it ends’ she says quietly. ‘Not like this.’
The Naming 