Night Songs

Twelve minutes to 2am. The ox-hours (the haunted time between 2 - 4am) are about to begin.
There are footsteps in this house of bedsits. I'm not sure whose they are, out there on the landing, but I look beneath the crack of the door, and see only a strip of darkness. Who is walking out there in this night of stairs?
And out in the streets, the wordless vocalisations of drunkards. Nonsensical utterances, primal strings of sounds woithout consonants. Vowel disorder. When I was younger - well, eighteen or so - I would hear these shouts at night and think; you always hear them, but you never see who shouts. I envisage shadowy figures, always in the street adjacent to the one you are in, shouting proclamations in their own inexpressible language... and others replying from other more distant streets.
You never saw the shouters in the night.
Never on your road.
I can hear the fridge though. Humming away. A night-time sound. Strangely peaceful. I never hear it during the day.
Five minutes till the ox-hours.
Sat in St Annes Well Park this afternoon, watched a group of people play boules. Balls clicking metallic on dirt. Sun on silver. A man approaches them, though I do not see him arrive. He tslks about the history of the area, and his conversation is littered with words I recognise. Throwaway streetnames; Brunswick, Palmeira, Montpelier... He says we're not in Brighton, or Hove, but what was once Brunswick. Twilight town, a halfway home.
I rearrange my room when I return. Get it ready for the summer. Find my lost prescription behind my cupboard. Have no idea how it got there. I suppose it must have slipped from a chair diagonally, fell irrationally across books, crawled over a pile of clothes to nestle in the nook between wood and wall. Enchanted prescription. A fairy-thing.
Two minutes into the ox-hours.
The middle of the night
and dawn is so close here.