I wrote the following last week while at work. I can't remember when, and forgot all about it. it ends abruptly because I went home ill from work, and didn't think about it again until I found it this morning in my drafts.
Here it is:
Look out of the window, at all the roofs of Brighton, a landscape of chimneys and aerials. A geography of anachronism. Flutters of seagulls. There is a slight haze about everything, a sea mist, been here for a few days. The sun is weak, and can’t break through, reminds me of trying to drag yourself out of the exhausted sleep of convalescence.
I could daydream here for days.
One of those washed out and mysterious spring days. When walking into work this morning, the roads were heavy with rain, or the ghosts of anyway. I don’t remember it raining last night, but the pavements were wet, and there was something shivery about the still leafless trees.
If there is a ghost story for each season, I thought, what would the ghost story for spring be? All I could think of was of certain places – certain kinds of places – that may exercise some kind of influence on someone. Imagine; a drifty-day like this, full of coolness and slight traces of warmth, the taste of some budding and soporific fecundity in the air. I could taste this air in the cool sigh of the stairs here at work – the angles of the shadows were softened and old – and I thought that this was a very ancient day. The kind of day that feels as if it has always been here, shifting at the edges of all the other younger days. Ragged wings. A butterfly song.
The kind of place that might exercise and influence would be one of those small clumpy woods (a few old and tangled trees really) that might huddle by the side of a railway line. The kind of place that might be glimpsed when passing through – perhaps on a train – or walking by, seen across a lazy, wasted field perhaps.
On certain days – such as this one – the place, in this case, the small clump of obscure trees – might, in some way become active. By active (or perhaps alive) I mean that it would become transmitting something, some kind of signal. The person concerned – I suppose I am talking myself – even the most fictional of
