Thirteen Years Back and Now

New summers become old summers. Sat in my room I feel the heat shift, the bright light waver, clocks turn back.
I could be back in Worcester again, in those two summers I spent there, walking back along the canal in the August of 1997. I had been down to visit Mina, sometime in August, locked in deep summer, then the train back to Worcester, taking a short cut along the canal to the house back on London Road. Passing the Commandery, Harrys Wines, up the slope of London Road hill.
There was only Alistair, Paul and myself in the house that summer. Stretched out onto four storeys, rambling corridors, a ragged garden, the taste of dust and dreaminess in all the rooms. Paul worked as a computer programmer and Alistair, over the summer anyway before university started again, worked in the Kays factory, where everyone seemed to work, at least that summer.
Alistair would get home early afternoon, and sit in the playroom and write songs on his guitar. I could see him through the corrugated perspex of the playroom roof from my room. beyond the playroom, the long garden, and the long dead and rusted car by the shed where the next summer I was to find a book of poems written by a schoolgirl in Kuala Lumpa.
Across the road to the shops 'Pause for Thought' to get dinner, usually a cheap pizza, and the evenings often spent in the garden listening to the Cranes and And Also The Trees.
I would stay awake long into the small hours drifting and night-dreaming in the labyrinthine house. Paul on the floor above me, and Alistair in the room below. We would wait for everyone else to come back, for the second year to start. Those empty rooms waiting for occupants.
Thirteen years ago.
I'm going to have a quick shower, then meet Alistair (amongst others) at the Meeting Place Cafe on the seafront. The heat is the same as back then, that feeling of being lost deep in summer, a jungle of light and languorousness.
Next door, the Portugese woman is playing some music. I can't tell what though. Sounds like something old, a jazz outfit fronted by someone who sounds like Nick Cave. Summer soundtrack, sums up these timeless days perfectly.
A slight breeze rustles a plastic bag in my room, the sounds of people on the street below, laughing. Some kind of plane in the sky. Taxis. Children.
The summer coninues.