Invisible Tigers

After a curry and pint with Em at the Wetherspoons next to work, a slow walk back home along the seafront. The heatwave continues, but really, it isn't a heatwave, just a sudden surge in to something that actually resembles summer. It wasn't just the heat, but the hazy light too, and the way that still sea vanished into a white and hidden horizon.
Jugglers and joggers, the oddly melancholy smell of barbecues, happy dogs chasing balls, buskers, skaters, cyclists... the usual cavalcade of people along Hove Lawns. The other side of Sackville Road was more interesting. There is more an air of slight decay and wasteground industry. The unreal nature of that slowly fading sky above the crumbling cracks in the walls of buildings gave everything the air of some foreign country on the edge of Africa. Tunisia perhaps - or at least my memories of the two weeks I spent there twenty years ago. The slow air, that beguiling touch of some coming apocalypse, a languorous judgement day.
By the London gangland looking gym, a patch of wasteground fascinates me. A low wall looks down onto it. I imagine dropping down into the long and weedy grass, running down the path that lines the centre of it. I remember seeing a syringe a couple of summers go. An addict place, hidden between the ever busy boulevard and the road to Portslade, to Shoreham, and all those tiny no-places between, sinister names like Fishersgate, Southwick, Aldrington... Near the centre of the wasteground field, a square of ground, the size of a large garden shed perhaps, is surrounded by a tall fence topped with vicious looking razor wire. The fence seems to protect nothing, keeping the onlooker safe from the emptiness contained inside. I imagine there must be an obscured entrance to some kind of underground works, an entry into Brighton's vast and Victorian sewers. It looks like a cage, and makes the emptiness of the air there look dangerous. Breath of some tiger with perfect camouflage, a fur made of the sea, and eyes the colour of razor wire in sunburnt twilight.
We walked further down, towards the industrial zone. Shoreham power station chimney. Intimations of that kingdom of quarry machines and fenced off contamination sites, a place out of John Burnside's 'Glister' perhaps. Head up onto New Church Road. A quiet tree lines street, and I feel some part of the past trying to nudge its way through, but I can't quite work out what - where - when it is - Worcester? Ickenham? Forres? Being in my twenties? Adolescence? Childhood? There is something lost and beautiful on the air, and I remember when summers - when the very beginnings of summers - would promise some kind of revelation. June, July, August... these months would surely prove something would be revealed, something occult and magickal and forever - a mystery at least, seven magpies, a secret never to be told.
I'll leave the windows of my room open, hope to breathe in those things that are not even rumoured any more as I sleep.
Maybe they'll slip through my dreams with the sure and elegant deadliness of invisible tigers.