The Dark of, Perhaps, 8'0'Clock

Autumn - like all times, can be approached an infinity of ways, different maps to reach the heart of different sections of the same city. Sometimes autumn is a countryside, and sometimes it only seems to exist ion childhood memories, or perhaps in memories of times before I was born.
This is the window onto the autumn I see now.
It is one of those evenings in autumn that follows a short period of time without seeing anyone else. This solitude is not unpleasant though does induce a kind of semi-hallucinogenic languor. I feel these white and crisp-cool mornings leading to afternoons where the sky takes time to look only vaguely troubled. In this image I see the figure of a man - not myself - though his memories and experiences are mine, he is not me. So often is the case in these reveries that the viewpoint is a first-person narrative, it seems almost startling that this is not. The man is shadowy and unclear, and though he is not me - his histories and feelings are. He spends his day in the rooms of a flat - on the second or third floor. The rest of the flat - or house - is empty, though I have the feeling that the others in the flat - or house - have only left temporarily. Perhaps only a matter of days. On this day it is a Friday, and the man in this old and empty house has spent the day drifting from room to room, smelling the attic-heavy air of autumn afternoons, and daydreaming in that always crepuscular and nostalgic October light. The tall narrow house he lives in, bordered by other tall, narrowed houses, is set on a street - perhaps on a hill - in an old and mostly ill-frequented part of a city. This is one of those cities - like London - that does not have an outside. this city is all internal. There are trees in the street that grow too close to the windows of the house, bathing all rooms in a kind of soporific dusk. The man can sit and watch the leaves fall, and has done so, through a haze of cigarette smoke and cups of tea. Night falls slowly, like treacle - and this image now jumps forward to the full and promising dark of, perhaps, 8'0'clock. The man needs to leave the house - perhaps for more cigarettes - perhaps for milk for those cups of tea that will take him to midnight and into the small hours. Ah, the small hours of October, those ox-hours of spirits and city winds that seem to sound more like black hills in distant countries than brick and stone and angle. These hours are not here though, not in this reverie.
The crispy cold freshness of the air. That cold clarity that tastes like polished glass, and that always-autumn smell of smoke, somewhere in the distance. He walks to the late night store that will sell him cigarettes, through empty streets lined by tall trees obscuring tall and narrow houses like his own. He comes to the shop - set in a small parade of other shops, and pauses. There is a fish'n'chips shop -open, a hairdressers -closed (the ghostly chairs, the sinister sinks) and there is a convenience store. He pauses and looks at his destination for a while. Below the awning of the shop is a selection of groceries. Beyond, the yellow flurescent light hums above tins of baked beans, ageing newspapers (that mornings stories, already old) cans of Coke, chocolate biscuits, cigarettes and, of course, pints of cheap milk. Between the tobacco advertisments on the window, the man glimpses the proprietor, a middle aged Asian man that he knows as Mr Ahmin. This has always puzzled him. He has never spoken to mr Ahmin, except to order cigarettes along with his pints of milk for cups of tea, but somehow knows his name. The wind gets up a bit, pushes up a flurry of leaves across the road. Under the street lamps they look like mice, or perhaps, more sinisterly, like rats.
I don't know where this image of autumn comes from, probably a mixture of daydreams and memory. I should like to think it is some kind of premonition of an autumn to come, but I am afraid it may instead be a yearning, for the autumns of this decade -and the last, most of them anyway- seem too quick and juddering. Nervous passages, stuttering paragraphs, where there should be libraries, stretching with unhurried movements into, what at least seems to be, forever.