Hove Station after Midnight

I was due to meet Em at a quarter past midnight, which led to a great deal of gloomy anxiety over the day. The thought of those recent Sunday night walks where everything seemed edgy and disquieting played on my mind, and my already overactive imagination quite willingly distorted Hove Station (where I was meeting Em) into a locus of dark crime and unsolved murders. My mind raked up memories of (or made up) newspaper stories from the Argus; man's eyes gouged out in attack by Tesco's Express, Hove train station after midnight a meeting ground for mysterious muggers guild…

I sat in the living room, watching it get dark with a superstitious portentousness. The television began to slide into post-watershed violence. The lights strung across the Mews came on, their usual dull yellow glow the colour of all my memories of the late 1970s.

To offset my swelling sense of post-twilight agoraphobia, I took to the kitchen to open a bottle of London Pride ale to dull sharpened nerves. This made me feel full-up (this was just after dinner) and soporifically lethargic. I went back to the kitchen and found a bottle of port instead. This was much better, aside from nearly falling asleep on the sofa during Border Force UK on the television.

I left the house at a quarter to midnight, and immediately noticed that the suburban streets of Hove were not filled with gangs of knife wielding ‘yardies’ but with middle aged men heading home from the pub, and quiet groups of one or two people leaving restaurants. This general sense of ‘un-menace’ continued - thanks no doubt in part to the fact that I was slightly drunk too.

Hove Station was abandoned. No staff, no ticket guards, no passengers. Emptied of people the station itself began to seem somehow alive. In the bright yellow light of the station concourse I looked at the arrivals and departures screen, but could make no sense of it, so waited outside and watched the taxi rank and the dark road sloping slightly down to the distance. A couple were talking next to me, eventually parting, him in the direction of the closed-for-the-night Tesco Express, and she vanished somewhere around the line of taxis. Another man soon turned up and proceeded to enter the empty station concourse. He had with him a tiny, oddly hairless dog. While the man disappeared into the station, the dog stayed with me, nervous and friendly, while I waited for Em’s train to arrive.