Signals from the Wireless Summer

Deep, deep in the summer now.

Early morning, whilst still in bed, you can taste the heat, that metallic composite of car-metal and sea air. The seagulls start before dawn, their cacophony-chorus of untranslatable, somehow prehistoric shrieks and calls cutting across the heavy air. Newspaper stories of nesting seagulls, aggressively defending their young when nests are placed in unlikely and ill advised places. Cats scared to go outside, postmen approaching certain houses in trepidation. Rumours in Peachehaven of seagulls warring against people, revenge attacks for a number of air-rifle shootings. No-one safe from the summer madness.

I watch a cat from her balcony, silkily drifting under car-shadow and pavement desert.

There's a gunman loose somewhere in the north of this country. A once obscure place, Rothbury, now a locus of fear and questions. Newspaper articles and television interviews. The gunman gone to ground in a myth of caves and woods and heathland. Letters sent to the police, a 21st century Jack the Ripper. Abandoned campsites found, rumours of accomplices and victims. The summer travels on.

War in South Africa. The world cup coming to an end. Sat in my bedsit on drifting afternoons, shouts of victory or despair from the pubs. So many people in Brighton not from England, there has been little in the way of dissipation of excitement. I profess to friends a vague interest in the outcome of the world cup, and I am never interested in football. Sat in the Pavilion Gardens the other day, two Meditterenean looking girls holding a flag of the ir country. Battle-cries. Herald held high. Praying for knights armed with a ball and feet. No hands allowed. An armless war.
Except for the goalkeeper of course.

Things settle. Redundancy in. Housing benefit in next week so I can pay the rent arrears. Kindly Mr Ahmend the landlord, who has been unfailingly understanding about it all. The calm of his office around the corner from here, huge first floor room with paintings of aircraft on the walls, and the shadows of trees on the street outside cool and consolatory that fall against glass and onto the wooden floorboards of his room.

Summer disquiet. Like this every year, can never relax over summers. Anti-Sad, summer affective disorder. To try and rest in summer is like trying to sleep amongst the machines of night-factories in some industrial county in an obscure region of Mexico. Mexico, never seen, only dreamt of, drug wars and heat, deserts and miles and miles of emptiness.
Wait for the autumnal communion, the September suburbs of October town. Like on a too-long train journey, craning my neck against the window, watching the rails and the distance, wishing your destination would hurry. Destinations never come, the traveller only arrives.

At night when I fall into sleep, the seagulls are still not quiet, and instead of the shouts and cries of football supporters, the ragged arguments of heat and alcohol, of taxi drivers and passers by.
And the summer continues, and this deep in summer there can be no memory of what was or what is to be. No spring, no autumn, and winter not even a rumour, a sharp edged fairytale of ice and black-illimitable nights. The idea of night falling at 4pm is ridiculous, a natural apocalypse that happens every year and destroys nothing.

When I sleep, I dream of train stations and meetings in the hushed interiors of cafes that seem more like the quiet air of cathedrals, or disused buildings on old airbases, no longer used, decommisioned in the summer wars.