By the time I left the house, we were somewhat on the way to twilight. Warmth had left the day and the gray pale skies were darkening in a way that was remniscant of very late summer. Looked at from another way, so late in summer, it seems almost autumn. This resonance of early autumnnal mystery would accompany me through this walk.
I cut down onto the seafront, walked along there to the Pier. I stopped at the Pier because I needed to use the toilet, and also wanted a coffee, but the coffee shop was closed. The pier was full of too-loud fruit machines and arcade games and people from Eastern Europe on the minimum wage working in horrific conditions. The noise there would drive you mad... but I quite like the Pier anyway.
Disappointed that the coffee shop was closed I headed on, cut up onto St James Street, a place I never go to, ostensibly because I have no reason to. The street has an unpleasant, oddly corrupt atmosphere to it. It always seems to be about 2:00 in the morning here... the shops have a ramshackle decaying air about them, the supermarkets look past their use by date. I walk along the street eager to be away from it. Someone on the other side of the road screams and waves his arms about.
I am glad when St James Street vanishes behind me. Back when I lived this way, I would walk back along the parallel road of Edward Street late at night. Quieter and more shadowy, but it felt somehow safer, less mad.
I am approaching Kemptown. I know where I am going, where I shall pass by. Chesham Street and the ground floor flat I shared with Flo for two years from 2001 - 2003. These nocturnal pilgrimages into my own past are becoming a ritual of mine, a fascination whose mechanics I cannot quite understand. This pilgrimage is more poignant than others though. I have not been back since Flo took his own life back in March.
As I approach the Kemptown area I become aware of a certain quality to something. To what I am not exactly sure. Something to do with the breeze, and the shadows the full and fecund trees make on the ground? The silence of the closed Sunday night shops 'Kemptown Fish'n'chips' dark and wrong and should-be-open. I remember back in a probable autumn of 2002, the teenage girl there talking to me about Myra Hindley 'If she ever gets released, she won't last a second... She'll be murdered. She should be murdered'. I puzzled over her vindictiveness as I ate my cod and chips in my room at Flo's place.
Tomato ketchup, chips. Tobacco for roll-ups afterwards. The door to the en-suite bathroom swung open.
A pile of magazines by the toilet.
I am hungry.
I swing past Chesham Street, but only glance up there to the old flat. I need food first, and it is still too early to go up Chesham Street and meet Em. I drop down into streets I am unfamiliar with. A rich area, but oddly shadowy and quiet. Trees and street lamps. I am pleased to see a local shop open. In the dark road, I am pleased to see the light-spill on the pavement, a nocturnal archetype. Often in these coastal towns the night-dark is blue. In London the night goes through various shades of grey until full-night is reached.
Not here though. or in Worcestershire.
(I shall be back there next weekend)
I am putting off walking past Flo's flat. I head up onto the road whose name I can't recall, and that turns into Edward Street. I come up somewhere near the petrol station that is there. I remember the knobbly brick wall, those late night excursions for cigarettes and cans of coke, crisps and chocolate.
There is Flo's place. On the corner.
I am not sure what I feel. There are no lights on. I presume that it is still empty. The curtains seem to be open, and a big patch of darkness obscures the details of anything that may be inside. The window seems watchful and empty, as if something else has swelled up to fill the absence there. I think of the silence inside; the hallway into the living room, those two steps I always tripped up, my room with those wooden floorboards, the living room with the door out onto the garden, the tiny kitchen at the back. Flo's square frying pan, the television perched on top of a sideboard. The garden. The bench that collapsed when I sat on it one summer.
I imagine the house producing silence, kneading a velvet honey-thick substance over the air and the wall, through the darkness which is now unlit by light bulb. There is no sign of Flo here, but the place feels haunted anyway. I don't know how anyone could come and live here, but they will of course. They will come in with their objects and their belongings and their lives and their memories and their routines, and they'll cover up what the house is now, this brooding space, between one occupant and the next, and this is how it should be, of course. The people who move in there will not have known him, and won't even know what happened. The years will pass, and those who did know him will grow old, and still remember him, and I shall probably return one night, sometime in the future.
Some other pilgrimage pencilled in.
Perhaps I shall be in my 40s then.
Time passes.
A short while later I sit on an uncomfortable fence waiting for Em. I have just passed by two teenage boys. One of them was on a bike, the other sitting on the steps of a house. Some girls across the street were jeering at them about 'the nice mobile phone you've got there... do yoiu want it back?'. One of the teenage boys jeered back. I can't remember what he said. An old woman turned up and glared at him. 'What's your name?' she ordered, then repeated myself. 'You know my name', he said back. He seemed mildly unsure of himself. 'You're still here then?' the old woman asked him.
'Yeah. I'm still here'.
I am glad when Em turns up and we walk slowly back to her flat along the seafront. The ocean is black and restless, and beyond the reach of the lamps.
There is a boat on the horizon though, brightly lit and shining. I think of it moving, cruising over the dreamy and unmeasured depths of an unimaginable sea.
I sleep well that night.
