Open Window

(before the pub)
Agree to meet, Aldrington Station at 7pm. Breezy night. Not even completely sure where the station is. Though I've used the station before, passed by it dozens of times more, I've never gone specifically to the station.
New autumn streets, and the layout looks altered, a new geography ordered by a dark day full of troubling horizons and premonitions that were not explicit in their warnings.
Dark tunnel under the tracks. Where were we meant to meet? In front of the station? On the platform itself? In the ticket office? Under the tunnel first of all. A sudden bustle of rugby players disturbs me, just returned from some nearby rec. One of them says something, and I am unsure if I am being threatened. They pass by. Under the tunnel, and I am led out onto a dark suburban street, and there is no-one here. Where is the station? Spy a narrow path, half-hidden. Narrow thing, lit by tall white lamps. Tangled gardens of raggedy buildings on one side, and a hight fence on the other. Reach out and touch both. Narrow paths like I said. Only 7:00pm and it feels deep in the night. Wind picks up, and the path-lamps and the breeze of branches cast wet shadows on the ground. Oh, this is good, a ghost story station, something that might be dreamt of. Path leads me to the platform. Will Mark be catching the train to here? Walk down the platform, look for a ticket office, but there is none... just the two platforms. Impossible station. I retrace my steps to that dark tunnel, find another path sloping upwards, walk up and find myself of the other platform. This is a place that has no outside, just an interior. Retrace my steps, pass by a woman who regards me with a kind of vulpine suspicion. Swear the shadows cast by lights get more fluid, flickery, flickery, flickery. A ticker-tape river, an autumn place. Ah. In the spill of light to this station that doesn't exist, I see Jo, all shadow and orange street light folds. Dark roads stretch back to New Church Road. Mark arrives - he had trouble finding a place to park. No-one came by train.

(after the pub)
Wake up in the night, a four pint sheen of discomfort. A glass of water, and too hot, I open my window, open the curtains to the 4am darkness, and lie back down on my bed. Open window air, and the rain starts, and both seep into my dreams. I am stood in my own room with my sister, and we are at the window, and I say to her at certain times in the afternoon, you can hear the ghost of a baby crying below, and we listen and there is the sound of a baby crying. I know it is not a ghost, but I do not tell my sister this, because I do not know what it is that is crying. Another dream. Opening the door of my room, and I see the open window, and there is a hand sneaking through the window - my room is on the first floor. There is a figure out there, seeming to float, a skinhead thug, leaning against a stack of cars or pallets, some passage-detritus between the dream-room, and the dream-coffee shop next door. You'd better let me in the figure might have said because I'm new to this town and I'll fuck you up so badly. Then another dream. In Andy's old flat down Cromwell Road, and a gang of teenagers pass by, raucous, vaguely threatening, and the rain starts, heavy, heavy, heavy, and the rain becomes a storm, and this becomes a flood, and Cromwell Street is buried under metres of fast flowing water. Sweeps those teenagers away. Somehow we watch this, and Ben is there too, and he moves to the front door, and he goes to open the door, and we wonder if this is a good idea, because surely the water might come in and take us all away too? Wake throughout these dreams, these fragments of dreams, hear the rain out there, the open window just by my head - Should I shut the window? Were these dreams a warning?
Morning comes quickly, with a gray 7:30am light that somehow manages to last all day.

(after the night)
I look up Aldrington Station on the internet, and discover it is not really a station but something called a halt. The word has that dead end night-time ring of something lost and serious, a dark remote lot. Oh I love that phrase - saw it only once on the back of a taxi in Los Angeles nine years ago. Jet lagged and strange in that first American night; why leave your car in these dark, remote lots when we can look after it for you? Something like that. Those three words remain, and Aldrington Station, this halt is also a dark, remote lot.
I've been searching for you for years, and here you are.
A lost landscape I could feel through the too near air of an open window.