Heat

'After work, I'd stay in town, drifting... anything to avoid going back to that ugly little bed-sit... I would walk the streets till I was tired enough to go back and drop straight into oblivion the moment my head hit the pillow...'
-John Burnside 'Living Nowhere'

After I had finished work, and to avoid the bedsit more than anything else, I took a walk to Brighton Marina. Up George Street and its air of slightly desperate and decaying decadence, memories of 2002 when I moved to Kemptown for a couple of years... Pass by Flo's old place of course. The first time I've seen it in daylight since he died back in March. Gap in the curtains of what was his bedroom. Some kind of tartan covering, a plant, snake-like and tropical in my memory. That deeper darkness behind though. Layers and layers of caught-up silence. It still feels like no-one lives there.
Bought four A4 canvases at the Marina then headed home along the seafront. The seafront was packed with people, holidaymakers mostly. I was glad to be back on Western Road. Almost. Bare-chested men with beer bellies and sunburnt faces, trumpet players on stilts, a gaggle of children clustered round a skinhead father.
I've got the curtains drawn against the summer outside, and in the yellow 3:46pm twilight of the bedsit, I wait patiently for nightfall.