The Hill was made of Clockwork

The hill was made of clockwork, and as far from the sea as you could get. An infinity of ever descending mechanisms lay beneath the paving stones, the houses, the cramped obscurity of off-licenses and pubs and the Chinese takeaway on the corner. An intricacy of cogs, and tiny ticking hearts, like footsteps - or insects. Tubes and gears, pipework. Ventilation-shaft dreams.
The hill is made of clockwork, but I don't know whose time it tells any more.

It was rare I spent any time in the bathroom on the first floor (or second if you counted the basement level) aside from to use the toilet - and only because it was the closest to my room. The bath remained unused. The shower remained dry. I remember on certain kinds of rainy days, I would open the sash windows a few inches. Watch the water puddle down the road opposite the house - Wylds Lane? Victoria Road? I can't remember it's name. The clockwork would reach up to me here, through the house, entwined with floor boards, find me on these dead Sundays watching rain fall from flat white skies when I had no money or inclination to go out.

The hill remains with me - that slow ascent up through those places I see most in those half-memories and daydreams that flux through these days. I think of the Chinese takeaway on the corner - just up the road from the house - and I remember it with a feeling of odd serenity - the girl who worked there with her perfect, unreadable eyes. Vegetable Chow-Mein. The television in the corner, and outside the night gathering and rising.
Above a mountain of stars, the air ice-cold and tasting of silver.
I was 25.
I looked away for a second, turned back, and I'm 40.

That clockwork is a mirror, a tide, an undertow.
Something pulling the days down under the hill.

I breathe a different summer, taste the ghosts of sunlight behind the sky.
If I concentrate I can hear the sea.