Haunting London Road

Sat in the study at my parents house in Cleobury Mortimer. I can hear the sound of the TV from downstairs, and my fingers on the keyboard. The silence - compared to Brighton - is quite striking. To my left, the uncurtained window shows me a silhouette of the house next door, beyond that the deep blue of the sky. I remember that colour sky from childhood, from staying at my grandparents house out in the country at Stone
I left Brighton this morning at 9:19am. A train with no problems to London Victoria, then the tube to London Paddington. The London you travel through is very different to the London you actually visit. It becomes a city of platforms and passengers, draughty concourses and screens showing departure times for trains and tubes.
The train journey to Worcester passed without incident, aside from a deep, deep exhaustion as I neared my destination. That old refrain; I could sleep forever and wake where...? Well, Great Malvern. The train didn't go any further.
I got off at Worcester Shrub Hill.
Back to Worcester again.
Always back to Worcester.
I had two hours before I was due to meet my parents so I set off for London Road, where I used to live. As I left Shrub Hill Station it began to rain. The sky was covered with thick, white cloud, depthless and wet. I remember so many skies like that when In lived here. Gloom in Brighton has a whole other quality to this. I walked along the canal, cut through the Commandery grounds to the base of London Road hill.
I was last here July 2012, and before then, May 2011. As I walked up the hill, it all seemed so much more familiar than an annual visit, an accidental yearly pilgrimage. I spend so much time thinking about London Road, and dreaming of it - and currently working on a comic strip based on the time I was living here - that it seems as real and vital as everyday life. It was an eerie experience, walking along it as an actual place, rather than one dreamt or imagined, or seen on Google Streetview.
As I walked up the hill, I tried to imagine living here. I couldn't. There was a hollow, empty atmosphere, some sense of something sad and lost... The gloomy weather didn't help. At least by this point the rain had stopped. I pass by Harrys Wines, now called Bargain Booze, pass the entrance to the flats where Joe used to live, follow the slight curve of the hill as it levels off, and there it is...
136 London Road. My old house.
That place haunts me. Maybe I haunt it.
It didn't look impressive from the street - it never did (there's a whole other level you can only see from the back) - but this time the house seemed to have faded further, as if it was shrinking, collapsing in on itself. The house (the whole building, 136 is one of four in a terraced house) had the same empty quality as that white sky above. I looked up through the old bathroom window above the front door. I could see another window. Was this the one out the back? The one that was next to my old room? I couldn't tell. As I walked on, I wasn't even sure if I had been looking at the right house. Was I looking through next door's window?
I went to the petrol station where I used to work, bought a chilli chicken wrap, and walked back.
I crossed the road so I walked right past 136. I could see right into the back garden - the long green lawn leading down to those two huge trees at the end. I used to watch those trees from my room, wake in the mornings when Ruth would stay over, and right through that autumn of 1997, the leaves on those trees stayed green, only becoming bare as Christmas approached.
I looked through the window into Al's old room at the front of the house. I couldn't make out much; bottles on the wall, some kind of bong maybe. I could not imagine living in that house, ever having lived there. I could imagine Al still living there though, that that was still his room, and the front door might open, and Al might be there, still with his long hair, and he would look at me and wouldn't recognise me. He would go back in again, close the door, slightly puzzled, as if he had seen someone that he thought he should recognise but didn't.
I walked back into town, had a cup of tea down by the river (grey water, wet-drifty air, breathing in the kind of daydreams that are thick with soporific drugs) and went to meet my parents.
The taxi comes to pick us up at 1:45am to take us to Birmingham airport.
This time tomorrow I'll be in America.