The 4'0'Clock End of Winter

Church-quiet of the bookshop. More like a cathedral; stretches over four floors, and even if it is only Waterstones, with a Costa Coffee on the fourth floor, there is a hush here like the kind rumoured to be found in old libraries.
Hadn't meant to end up here. Only left the bedsit because I wanted to buy the Sunday papers. A grey and gloomy day. Rain and fluid skies. Couldn't wait to get back in again, but then I thought; 2666 nearly finished, and the twilight light of my narrow room. End up here.
A headache that has been following me since Friday. Some side-effect of giving up smoking, not helped by the 95% vodka that a friend had inadvertantly smuggled back from Poland. Want something light and easy to read, even a fantasy. Transparent writing, something the polar opposite of the complex genius of 2666. End up with 'The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories' by Bruno Schulz, so have failed miserably in my quest for light reading it seems. Am sure that Ligotti recommended it in an interview somewhere. Flick through it in the bookshop, am struck by the few passages I read. I judge books I flick through in bookshops on two things; atmosphere and resonance. A nebulous means of judgment perhaps, but it never seems to fail me.

Walk back to the bedsit again, and finish 2666. I close the last page, and put it on my shelf and think; winter is over now.
The book has defined this winter. I bought it on the day of the first snow back in December, that oddly triumphant afternoon where Andy, Joe and myself tracked to Preston Manor through the novel delight of the snow. It accompanied me down to Perranporth for Christmas, read in the light of fading December afternoons. I remember reading it in the launderette, about Oscar Fate in the third part, and his trip to Mexico. It accompanied me through January, read in breaks at the call centre. Then those first uncertain coffees down the beach in the February Summer, so shortlived. The book came to represent all the darkness of that winter, and now, safely back on the shelf, that shadowy season has been done away with.
So, no matter how cold, and no matter that, for me, spring always begins on March 1st, a week away, this is no longer winter.

I watch a seagull on the window of one of the houses opposite, pecking at the glass, hopeful for food. I always think of them as witness to the secrets of Brighton, observers of the hidden and the unremembered; drunken kisses under streetlight, lone walks through bleak afternoons. Hidden patches of summer. Ghosts and echoes.
The sky is grey, reminds me inexplicably of Charlotte Bronte. My window is open and I can hear the sounds of the city; cars and children. Indistinct voices.
Footsteps clattering up the street.

4'0'clock in the afternoon.
Two months ago it would have been black.
Winter is over.