Dislodging Bits of Time

Another restless day.
At the Marina with Em when darkness fell. Twilight at least. Creeping up around the boats and the bricks, and the wooden slats on the walkways. An old style darkness. Lost autumns.
A man sits on the steps of a closed shop, his head in his hands.
The wind blows, ceaseless.

Walk back along the darkening seafront. Sinister old Dukes Mound, street lamps amongst the trees and bushes, looking like they've gone feral, hunting for men amongst the rumours and the labyrinthine paths.
The crazy gold course closed. At night, a Stephen King place. Thinking of clowns in the tunnel, a hand popping up out of the holes. Plenty of places for shadows to scuttle, and the wind, still blowing. Still restless.

A cup of tea on the seafront, sheltering from the wind in beige lamp light, between boats and smoke-houses, the kiosks where they sell fish and crab sticks, jellied eels and mussels. Suddenly remembering something.
An inland place.
Early 1989, back in Ickenham and I was sixteen years old. There was some road-widening scheme in place at a major roundabout near where I lived. This necessitated a building site, where builders actually seemed to live, in mobile caravans amongst the bulldozers and the breeze blocks. During the day it was a building site, full of activity and industry. I don't really remember it during the day, but I remember it at night. Despite the fact it was next to Western Road, one of the busiest ways in and out of London, the building site was silent, a deep, reverential and sinister hush. The lights of the mobile caravan-style homes gave no indication to the builders I imagined living inside. In the shadows, machines lay discarded and malevolent and hypnotising. The angles of a bulldozer frozen with the ancient feel of a dinosaur skeleton in the natural history museum. As I walked by, I would entertain myself with stories; the builders who lived there being travelling cannibals, a tribe of neo-flesh eaters who would travel from building site to building site, anthropophagous manual labourers who would leave bones buried in concrete, never to be found.
The air of the sea front was somehow the same, the exact feel, the precise taste of a building site from twenty two years ago.
I think it was the wind that did it. The wind sometimes seems to dislodge bits of time, brings back memories the way that a windy day always seems to carry with it the sounds of children in playgrounds.

Sunday night now and back in the bedsit, as unrestful as the wind outside.
The single light bulb casts a fever glow over everything; the discoloured  patches on the wall, the chair I never use on top of the wardrobe, covered with papers. A box that once held something. I can't think what now though, an Argos cast off, a department store lamp that only worked for three months.
I hear the humming of the lap top and the fridge, and someone moves, somewhere in this house. The sound of movements that seem to be generated from the walls. A stone tape perhaps.
Maybe the wind disturbs the memories in houses too, and houses, I suppose, are ghosts of their own building sites.