Sunday morning, twenty minutes before midday. Awake for a couple of hours. Only a short trip to Sainsburys for the Sunday Times (an article about Mervyn Peake was not as interesting as promised).
A grey and drizzly day. Em is in London, and Andy, despite plans set last week for a country walk, is not answering his phone, his phone set to voice mail, leading me to ponder on a day in the bedsit.
Perhaps I should wrap myself in unseasonal scarves and coats, and make a pilgrimage to those Brighton and Hove sites that seem as desolate as the day -Hove Lagoon, the Marina, Preston Park...?
There is a slight breeze out there. The window rattles in the frame, slightly anyway, and the humming of the fridge is the only thing I can hear.
I had a cup of tea around Em's last night, but the strange exhaustion of the past week, culminating in the apocalyptic tiredness of yesterday necessitated me staying in last night. I had intended to get to sleep early, but the novelty of being in the bedsit, with my accompanying assortment of DVDs led me to staying awake till the small hours.
When I did eventually attempt to sleep, it took me a while. Perhaps I had slept too long in the afternoon. In my half-asleep state, the bedsit, or rather, the building the bedsit is located in, took on a startling and haunted air. By 'haunted' I suppose I mean a feeling, a curious air of desolation and disquiet, an uncanny atmosphere of unrest. It felt alien and strange to even be attempting to sleep in such a place, as if I had all my belongings in, perhaps, Brighton train station, and I was attempting to sleep in the cold wind that always blows through that un-private agoraphobic space.
My state of imagination was not helped by watching 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' just before attempting to sleep, and the power that film holds was only strengthened by the fact that I was not really watching it, but glancing at it every now and again in between half-hearted reading and flicking through magazines, and that awful habit of mine of rifling through Internet pages, not finding anything interesting but doing it anyway.
A halfway state of mind.
I have watched 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' numerous times, an Australian film, it relays the events of three schoolgirls who disappear in the eponymous locale of the title under mysterious and never explained circumstances. I am no film reviewer -or indeed any kind of reviewer - any attempts I have made at such endeavours usually lead to a quick abandonment - so I shall not go into any great detail. However, nothing much happens in the film. It has all the lucidity of a half remembered dream, pareidoliac faces on cliff faces and rocks, vast blue skies, almost cosmically, mundanely, terrifying, and a tight sense of panic falling in over everything. Despite nothing paranormal actually happening in the film, it is probably the finest cinematic evocation of the supernatural.
One image struck me as being particularly haunting last night. I probably won't even be able to find the scene again. It wasn't really even a scene, just one of the numerous landscape shots that liberally pepper the film. In the background there is one of the labyrinthine passages of rock in which the schoolgirls vanished, and in the foreground wild grasses and weeds, blowing in the wind. A little further back, there are some trees - or bushes, and under their leaves that deep, almost sea-green darkness you only get in the height of hot summers.
The wind rustling through the leaves, that sense of tragic mystery running through an unknowable geography...
Out of all the seasons, I have always felt summer to be the one that provides the most opportunity for supernatural terror. I am not sure why. Perhaps in summer, we penetrate that darkness more that in other seasons we leave unthought of - the deep wood, the remote lake, the lost field. In summer too, the very greenness of the leaves generates more shadow, a midday darkness in the height of the year.
Then there is the music to the film. As I went (or tried) to sleep last night, a certain passage of the film's music kept coming back to me, a heavy piano-led piece. I had always found it creepy, but last night, on the verge of sleep that wouldn't quite come, the music - or my memory of that music - was both fascinating and terrifying. As I lay there, it finally struck me why that passage was so haunting, because it seemed to be music actually from a dream. I have had, very rarely it must be said, examples of remembering music from a dream when I awake. The music that is remembered is always of an oddly spectral quality, verging on the literally nightmarish. Impossible to explain, this remembered music would bring to mind curious images; clattering stairways in Victorian schoolhouses, empty playgrounds under gray and stormy skies, ferris wheels at dusk, a sudden awareness of a previously unthought-of attic on a sunny windy afternoon, a winding road through a mountain under grey and leaden skies...
As I lay there thinking about all of this -and haunted music and haunted songs- that feeling of post-nightmare panic came over me (even if I hadn't actually been to sleep yet). You know the feeling that you get immediately after waking from a nightmare, an imminent terror at some encroaching supernatural incursion which is definitely going to happen. It never does of course, luckily, but there is that feeling that it is. We're all insane in the small hours. I can't remember who wrote that, but that line always stays with me. Alone in the night, our daytime-rationale proves somewhat less than useful.
I fell asleep and nothing happened of course. It's now Sunday lunchtime (12:37 in the afternoon) but about this House of Bedsits there still lingers something from last night. A sense, not of disquiet, but of a certain kind of desolation that is almost comforting. I turn my head to glance out of the window behind me, at the depthless grey skies, a triumph of gloom and Sunday made manifest.
I think about the stairs in this building, a spiral spine angling through the centre of this building.
The window continues to rattle in the window frame, and I can hear, barely, that curious crying of seagulls, as resonant and haunting in their own way as those songs from Hanging Rock.
Andy has just called, and I shall be meeting him this afternoon, in little over an hour. Our country walk abandoned due to the rain, but it does seem I shall be escaping the desolate air of this bedsit after all.
