Moment frozen, for some reason. In the kitchen, comfy yellow light, and I have to go outside. I'm sat on one of the chairs and Andy is bustling about.
Yes, I've had that too, the cat-flap rustling, and it sounds exactly like someone coming up the stairs. When I've been alone in the flat, the noise has so perturbed me that I have approached the landing cautiously, glanced down, and nothing of course. The frosted glass of the front door. Twilight fragments and angles of the Mews outside.
The steep and narrow stairs lead straight up and into a hallway that splits the flat in two. On the left hand side the living room and my room, and the right Andy's room, the bathroom and the kitchen. For some reason this stairway corridor reminds me of a light blue, the shade of a rainy pre-twilight daydream.
Something about living in an old place though. Something undefined and indescribable. A feeling of falling perhaps, a not unpleasant sensation of sinking through water. All those imagined years, all those imagined histories.
What is now the workshops below us - the carpenters and furniture makers - was at one time stables, these flats above used as accommodation for the coach men. Old black and white photographs from the 1800s, grainy things showing the church and the Mews, in a bleak landscape devoid of anything but snow-bleach fields and a threatening, burdened distance.
Something about living in an old place though. Something undefined and indescribable. A feeling of falling perhaps, a not unpleasant sensation of sinking through water. All those imagined years, all those imagined histories.
What is now the workshops below us - the carpenters and furniture makers - was at one time stables, these flats above used as accommodation for the coach men. Old black and white photographs from the 1800s, grainy things showing the church and the Mews, in a bleak landscape devoid of anything but snow-bleach fields and a threatening, burdened distance.
Came back this afternoon, with a narrow coffin-white cabinet I found on the streets last night. Andy tells me how he stayed up late last night -2:30am - but was woken this morning at 9:00am, by the door of my room rattling. He goes on to say that as he lay there listening, he became convinced that there was the sound of footsteps in my room, of someone shuffling about. I switch the light on in my room, wait for the light bulb to warm up. Bleak uncomfortable shadows. 'Exactly like someone moving about'.
I'm alone in the house now, and there is that feeling about it, an expectancy in the architecture, in the cold flow of the kitchen and the stairs. A radio turned on low in another room, but when you open the door, you remember there is no radio there.
The door rattles in the frame. Rumours of a door opening.
I wait for the sound of footsteps even though I am alone here.
