The Land Beyond the Tracks

I left Andy's house about 9:30pm, crossed the footbridge at Hove Station and into those lands beyond the tracks. The petrol station I spent five years working in is here, and the lost paradise of the flat at Wilbury Crescent of course. A dark and secret suburbia. You feel far from the sea here, and it shouldn't feel quite as dream-like and hypnotic as it does.
Maybe its because I associate these streets with night-time - from walking to and from the petrol station either early in the morning or late at night, from stumbling back drunk to Wilbury Crescent in the small hours. Even those twilight walks to Tescos / petrol station up Dyke Road (not the one I worked in). Everything about here is night and secrecy and forgotten places, far from Brighton's sometimes quite juvenile need for attention.
It is best to walk at night here then, particularly in the autumn and winter of a year.

I cut through the small industrial estate that led up to the petrol station, noticing with my usual disappointment the 'Furniture Warehouse' that stands at the back of the station. For most of the time when I worked here it was a waste ground. When I walked back late at night, I would always cast a sideways glance in. There was a chair half lost amongst the grasses and the weeds, looking like it had only been recently vacated. I used to call this place the 'Glowering Wasteland', though why I can't remember now.
I moved onto the Old Shoreham Road, to my left the yellow light of the petrol station, obscured by the 'Oddbins Off Licence'. I wondered if Mike was still working there.
I headed right, along the Old Shoreham Road up to Seven Dials.
I was always fond of walking the Old Shoreham Road at night. The houses here are set back from the road behind walks, hidden behind bushes. Large houses, though not old. The houses of slightly well-off people. The houses are too new really to be of any real architectural interest. Just your typical suburban houses, swathed in shadows, and their back gardens hidden shut gates and bushes.
Across the other side of the Old Shoreham Road is far more interesting. A stone wall keeps in what seems to be a tangled overgrown cluster of trees. The grounds of a Catholic school. I remember over the late summer and early autumn of 2006, there was a plastic bag caught amongst the branches of the trees. I first noticed it in those black and lightless hours of 6am early mornings. Drawing nearer this walled off wood, and noticing this whiteness hanging from the branches. In the silence and the cold, it was all too easy to imagine this plastic bag as some kind of mask. A gaping malevolence, skull-like features, that blank and fascinating Halloween like gaze. As I walked by, I imagined this accidental mask watching me, and when I was doing the late shift at the petrol station, I would remember the mask, imagine it waiting for me in the dark.
Over a period of months, the plastic bag lost its mask like qualities, and just became a piece of litter caught amongst the branches. At some point over the winter of 2006 / 2007, the plastic bag vanished.
After the walled in wood, there is one of those always intriguing electricity sub-stations, festooned with the usual 'danger of death' signs. One time there was some work being done here, and new signs warned of 'deep excavations'. I imagined Victorian archaeologists lost in some kind of electricity-sewer system below the road, investigating the depths of some labyrinthine pre-human Shoreham tomb.
After the substation there is Hove Recreation ground. The Rec. The Wreck. Large and empty, I have never set foot onto it. It seems a place as dreary and as strangely entrancing as Hove Lagoon. Reminds me of Sundays in provincial towns where there is no sea, and the skies are grey and drizzly, but there is some recompense in the dreaming stillness of such places.
It is dark too along the Old Shoreham Road at night. maybe the street lamps are placed further apart, but as soon as you turn into Seven Dials, the difference in light always strikes me, all bright and clinical and scouring. An exaggeration of course, but I always prefer that secret darkness down the Old Shoreham Road.
It took me about an hour altogether. I remember thinking as I fell asleep that I miss the regular walks back along that road after nightfall, in that land that lies beyond the tracks.