It feels like I shouldn't be here - that I should have caught a train somewhere, perhaps this afternoon, but have not, and returned to a place that now belongs to someone -something- else.
It came on quick this evening, as I crouched on the floor over my laptop, a sudden feeling of something shifting, almost an audible click in the air.
I looked about me. There was a curious air of serene but untrustworthy expectancy. Everything seemed still and watchful. Memories of bright and dusty late August sunlight. Dust-swirls in old summer rooms-
I remember now. 'Sun-dappled'. That phrase was what, -well, it didn't trigger this feeling off exactly- but certainly focused it. It was from a story I was flicking through I hadn't read for years, by Terry Dowling, called 'Scaring the Train'. The scene comes a couple of pages in. The protagonists, two childhood friends in Australia in 1962 spend their summers performing train-scares; '...it was anything from running to a spot on the track moments before the locomotive reached it, to doing an oh-shock-horror!, freeze-frame, hands up, wide-eyed terror reaction or a classy matador flourish before leaping aside'.
The scene I was reading comes as the two friends watch the results of one such prank from a safe distance that was set up in advance. They are looking through their binoculars at the distant railway track after the train has left. The track is about a mile away. They sight a 'solitary figure standing by the tracks at this end of the cutting'. This figure seems to see them looking and waves at them. They drop their binoculars and look at each other before looking back again:
'(the figure) ...was gone, of course, which completed the fright perfectly, had us scanning the intervening fields, noticing the pockets of shade like our own, patches of tree-shadow, the gloom in wind-dancing, sun-dappled copses, sockets of darkness where other watchers might now be watching us.'
A marvellously evocative passage and one which goes some way to explaining what I mentioned in the Songs from Hanging Rock post yesterday as summer being the season most apt to produce a resonance of supernatural terror.
Anyhow, it was this quote that led to my bedsit-nerves. I'm not sure why. It certainly had me 'scanning the intervening fields' of these bedsit-lands anyway.
I can make a pretty reasonable guess as to why the bedsit lately seems to have developed this nervy agitated air, that is I hope to leave here for somewhere better come the end of summer, and when you've decided to leave a house or a flat or a home, it begins to adopt a feeling of belonging, again, to someone else. Begins to reconfigure itself into the space it was when you first encountered it. Empty of possessions and (your own) memories, a blank space in which anything might happen, or anything might have had happened.
That feeling, I must have mentioned somewhere before, of having moved house, and having to return as night falls to the old house, for one last task that has to be done. The old house belongs to something else then... a liminal space between tenants, haunted and edgy.
Dusk is progressing now, and the bedsit is beginning to lose that edge of curious panic as night starts to swell.
