I observe the darkness creeping back, swallowing up 8:30pm, 8:00pm, earlier, earlier. An intimate tide, subtle and unimpeachable. That old line blossoming in night-swells occurs to me. I walk streets where the lamp light is subtly altered, where the skies are older and the days - for now only a tiny bit - shorter.
I hit the promenade just after twilight. On the horizon, the downed lights of ships, drifting to France. A skinhead waits under a sea-lamp, throwing a ball to a delighted dog. I turn right, walk past the beach huts, past the swimming pool, deeper into these lands I don't know so well at night, then further, -past that seafront bar I never go into (Babylon Lounge?) past even Mrs Bumbles cafe. The waters are deep here. If all goes well, this might be my walk home in just over three weeks. This time is impossible. Where does it belong - Summer? Winter? Some liminal and obviously nameless season?
We're between everything here.
I start to pick up signals from last autumn. Before now, last autumn was facts only, faceless figures indistinct and vague - I started a new job, I visited Worcester with Emily in October, we spent a night in a hotel in London, I worried about my job in November - but now there are resonances. Everything revolves around the end of October, that weekend in Worcester with Emily. It is pale blue, and laced with a liquid like a breeze. A reddened sky behind redbrick and imagined houses. This is the peak, and after the peak is the black-and-white of November, like some wartime photograph. Autumn ends with London, with a carousel promising Christmas, that Sunday walk by the canal and everything old and eternal and new and forever. Before the Worcester peak there is strange October and sun-gold September, a painting that I thought reminded me of January, and only now, a year later, I see that painting (I don't know where it is, hidden behind some cupboard in this fading bedsit) is -was- the interior landscape of the time it was painted in. A geography of the chrono-somal, an industry of impossible, barely dreamt of blue Twin Peaks skies.
The dark streets between the seafront and what may be the new flat. Semi-detached and detached houses. Narrow strips of night-gardens and the lamps are dimmer. Streets curve unexpectedly in alarming ways. There are cats and no people. I would lay with these shadows here, this suburban jungle, slip under their leaves and tides and felines, their garages and front gardens, some of which seem altars to a secret, kinder disrepair.
The streets are neat, almost as if they have been hoovered.
I do not pause outside the hopeful new place. The possibility of a future neighbour shuffles over the irregular stones.
Another maze of streets. Poets Corner. Somewhere about me, somewhere in one of these streets is where a publisher called Alan Class printed his comics. His comics, with titles like Sinister Tales, Creepy Worlds and Secrets of the Unknown reprinted American comic strips of the 1950s and 1960s. The comics were printed on cheap paper, were not available everywhere and are not widely remembered. I remember them though. The newsagent up in Scotland, the one in Forres, always had them. I didn't like them much at the time. Would only buy them if I was desperate or experimental.
I still have them in the dressing table next to the mattress. I could reach across, open the doors, and pull out one and read the name of the road I might have passed.
I don't though. I never remember.
I wind up passing by the garage on the Old Shoreham Road. Mike is working behind the till. It starts to feel like summer as I pass by the dark country of Hove Park. The street lamps are tall and inscrutable, motorway-sinister and watchful as crows. Andy texts me, tells me his flat is disintegrating around him. It is not long before I am home, listening to the sound of the couple next door talking. Em texts me. I text her back. I flick through a magazine. I turn on the laptop.
I watch the waters, waiting for that serpent under the waves, that longed for shadow, and breathe the signals from the days that are nearly here.
