Just before Autumn

Ten minutes more and summer is over.

An Uncertain Nocturnal Cartography

I dream of Worcester again. A light-blue dream, of being at Joe Bird's house, looking out of a dream-window at a dream garden I can't remember. This proliferation by Worcester into my nightly wanderings causes a strange shift. I feel as if I am dreaming Brighton, whilst sleeping in the dream of Worcester. Always at the base of London Road hill, look up through a darkening autumn evening in my mid twenties.
I remember the rain there, the vast night and that circling sense of a dark and dreaming countryside beyond the city limits.

Breathing the Signals from the Days that are Nearly Here

Watching the water, perhaps of a lake, or a sea, for some shadow gliding under the surface. A sea monster, a myth, a ghost, or maybe just the days that are coming.
I observe the darkness creeping back, swallowing up 8:30pm, 8:00pm, earlier, earlier. An intimate tide, subtle and unimpeachable. That old line blossoming in night-swells occurs to me. I walk streets where the lamp light is subtly altered, where the skies are older and the days - for now only a tiny bit - shorter.

I hit the promenade just after twilight. On the horizon, the downed lights of ships, drifting to France. A skinhead waits under a sea-lamp, throwing a ball to a delighted dog. I turn right, walk past the beach huts, past the swimming pool, deeper into these lands I don't know so well at night, then further, -past that seafront bar I never go into (Babylon Lounge?) past even Mrs Bumbles cafe. The waters are deep here. If all goes well, this might be my walk home in just over three weeks. This time is impossible. Where does it belong - Summer? Winter? Some liminal and obviously nameless season?
We're between everything here.

I start to pick up signals from last autumn. Before now, last autumn was facts only, faceless figures indistinct and vague - I started a new job, I visited Worcester with Emily in October, we spent a night in a hotel in London, I worried about my job in November - but now there are resonances. Everything revolves around the end of October, that weekend in Worcester with Emily. It is pale blue, and laced with a liquid like a breeze. A reddened sky behind redbrick and imagined houses. This is the peak, and after the peak is the black-and-white of November, like some wartime photograph. Autumn ends with London, with a carousel promising Christmas, that Sunday walk by the canal and everything old and eternal and new and forever. Before the Worcester peak there is strange October and sun-gold September, a painting that I thought reminded me of January, and only now, a year later, I see that painting (I don't know where it is, hidden behind some cupboard in this fading bedsit) is -was- the interior landscape of the time it was painted in. A geography of the chrono-somal, an industry of impossible, barely dreamt of blue Twin Peaks skies.

The dark streets between the seafront and what may be the new flat. Semi-detached and detached houses. Narrow strips of night-gardens and the lamps are dimmer. Streets curve unexpectedly in alarming ways. There are cats and no people. I would lay with these shadows here, this suburban jungle, slip under their leaves and tides and felines, their garages and front gardens, some of which seem altars to a secret, kinder disrepair.
The streets are neat, almost as if they have been hoovered.

I do not pause outside the hopeful new place. The possibility of a future neighbour shuffles over the irregular stones.

Another maze of streets. Poets Corner. Somewhere about me, somewhere in one of these streets is where a publisher called Alan Class printed his comics. His comics, with titles like Sinister Tales, Creepy Worlds and Secrets of the Unknown reprinted American comic strips of the 1950s and 1960s. The comics were printed on cheap paper, were not available everywhere and are not widely remembered. I remember them though. The newsagent up in Scotland, the one in Forres, always had them. I didn't like them much at the time. Would only buy them if I was desperate or experimental.

I still have them in the dressing table next to the mattress. I could reach across, open the doors, and pull out one and read the name of the road I might have passed.

I don't though. I never remember.

I wind up passing by the garage on the Old Shoreham Road. Mike is working behind the till. It starts to feel like summer as I pass by the dark country of Hove Park. The street lamps are tall and inscrutable, motorway-sinister and watchful as crows. Andy texts me, tells me his flat is disintegrating around him. It is not long before I am home, listening to the sound of the couple next door talking. Em texts me. I text her back. I flick through a magazine. I turn on the laptop.

I watch the waters, waiting for that serpent under the waves, that longed for shadow, and breathe the signals from the days that are nearly here.

Blackberry Picking in Haunted Places

Took a walk with Em out past Woodingdean today. We had walked here a couple of times before, twice to walk to Lewes, and once last October when we walked through the fields to Rottingdean. We did the latter walk today, winding our way through fields full of sheep, across a silent empty valley, and stopping for lunch under a patch of dream-like trees past a complex of disused barns. I should put some photographs up, but this ancient laptop and vague internet connection would make this a long process, and it's Sunday night and I must go to bed at some point soon.
Em was blackberry picking, with plans to make a blackberry and apple pie when she got back home. Our walk along the track was broken by short pauses to try and reach whatever blackberries she could find. I thought it was too early for blackberries, associating them more with October for some reason. Just past the radio transmitter (owned by Souther Water for some occult reason) there was a split in the path. I could see up the slight rise some kind of concrete structure, so suggested that we might stop here for blackberries and lunch.
The concrete structure turned out to be some kind of bunker, mostly hidden below the ground. The top of the bunker - a few foot high and easily mountable, was the area of a small garage - it's hard to describe the size of things in words. Em went blackberry picking around the corner while I ate my £1:00 cheese and red onion sandwiches from Sainisburys. As Em moved away from the bunker she said to me 'it's some kind of house, looks like someone's living there'. I hadn't noticed, but in one edge of the bunker was a black hole in the brickwork, the size of a small window. I put my camera to the hole, turned the flash on -I couldn't see anything in there- and took a few photographs. The photographs showed a large, surprisingly deep room. The floor of the room was covered with stuff - quilts and blankets, empty beer cans, industrial rubbish -iron poles and the like, and in the centre of the room a yellow lantern, like something that might once have been used by a railway worker. On the left hand side someone had, in dripping paint, written 'GADGE + REECE' Next to that, in smaller letters 'BLAZE'.

The place looked awful and diseased. I could not imagine anyone climbing through that hole in the wall and dropping down onto that filthy floor, never mind spending any time there. How would they ever get out again?

I climbed back onto the roof of the bunker and resumed reading 'Dreams of a Mannikin' by Thomas Ligotti. As I read, I noticed, by the side of the bunker, and covered by weeds, the rusted skeleton of an old car. God knows how many years it had been there. On the other side of the bunker, down the slope and on the path we would eventually take to lead us down to Rottingdean was an abandoned childs bike. It was leant against the grasses and bushes, as if it had only just been left. A bright pink thing, it must have only been recently left.

There was no sign of any children during the time we spent there.

It was a bright sunny day, warm with that end of summer warmth, but there was a cool breeze blowing. I could taste - and see - the sea, down the fields, and across the seemingly distant houses of Woodingdean, Hollingdean, Rottingdean. It felt like civilisation was an eternity away on the concrete bunker.

Em appeared from round the corner. She had found enough blackberries.

'Come on' she said 'lets leave. This place is creepy'.

I was glad to leave as well, it was an unsettling and troubling place albeit fascinating.

I think about it now, as I think about going to bed, a short pause in an afternoon, blackberry picking in haunted places.

Sunday 1:10pm

Slight hangover.
The bedsit is too bright
and the mattress is uncomfortable.

No food but bread
and I am bored of toast.
Watched last nights 'Doctor Who' online.

Did not like it very much.
Might go back to sleep now
after a diet coke.

Saturday Afternoon 4:32pm

Ravioli this time.
Bacon and something else, I can't remember what because
I've already thrown the pack away.

Bought the 'Tomb of Dracula Vol 3' reprint
from Dave's comics. The over friendly older
guy asked me if I needed any help

to which I replied I didn't.
There is bad music played
in the bedsit next door.

I dreamt of Captain America last night
who was a nervy, amphetamine-edgy thug.

Friday (Nothing Happens)

Rain.
Dark clouds over the sea.
White horizon.

'Alice's Last Adventure' by Thomas Ligotti.
The Independent (mostly unread)
Five pence coffees.

Pasta (Wild mushroom)
Baked beans (Sainsburys Own)
Tin of tuna.

The Dark Interiors of Mysterious Spaceships

Summer ticks down. The bedsit runs out. Rain and heat. Staring at the sea from the windows at work. The morning starts off with rain and ends with rain. A cup of tea. The humming of the fridge. A mattress on the floor.
Dreams last night of being back in Worcester, a strange nervy euphoria, at the base of the London Road Hill. On the side of a building is painted the word 'Forres'.
Sometimes I think about Forres. I lived there from when I was 10 until 13. I used to be fascinated by imagining of the dark interiors of mysterious spaceships.
I have just broken the '3' on my laptop.
Entropy.
Fragments.
Reaching backwards for something made up.
A cup of tea.

Yesterday a friend wrote 'August is the Sunday of the year'

New Church Road at Night

Took a walk up New Church Road last night to meet Em, and to see what the new flat (touchwood) looks like at night. New Church Road was interesting. I am used to walking up it during the day (last summer, going to sign on in Portslade) but this was the first time I had walked it at night.
A wide street, tall street lamps hidden among trees, houses set back across the dark deep-water strips of front gardens. The road was mostly empty of walkers. The street I shall (hopefully) live down is somewhere off New Church Road. A mixture of orange (good) and beige (bad) streetlamps.
Stood looking up at the new flat, trying to imagine it in October and winter, trying to imagine what it would be like -will be like- not living here.

After work today Em and me went down the seafront. A cup of tea on the strines, watching the dogs play, a fisherman, a man floating in the water.

The Noisy Couple in the Bedsit Next Door

The noisy couple are back in the bedsit next door. They seem incapable of moving quietly. Doing anything quietly in fact. He has a particularly annoying voice. They are currently playing some awful music which sounds like some kind of basic funk with a very annoying drumbeat. Despite the music I can still hear him wittering on inconsequentially about something. I don't know what he's talking about, but he just has this inconsequential, utterly irritating voice. Oh god, I can hear her now. She has an annoying voice too. The music seems to be getting louder now. Oh well. The final few weeks of the bedsit. Touchwood of course. Just as well really.

There is a Tiger in Every Room

Rain just begun, a light rain, though it feels paradoxically heavy too. Bedsit window wide open behind me; sounds of traffic, passing taxis, horns, seagulls. It almost seems twilight out there. Light darkening. I can hear voices out there now -briefly- then drowned again by the cars.

Sometimes I imagine a tiger. The tiger is always there, wherever we are, but most of the time, the tiger - in our imaginations at least - is in another room. We can relax, even if that feeling is illusory. That illusion is gone, and I feel the tiger in the room with me. Maybe it
has noticed me and maybe not, but the tiger is here, and one day it will and devour me.

Shall I sleep now - a light evening sleep before Em comes around at 9:00pm? Shall I close the bedsit window, put on a DVD and wait for tomorrow?

I found a photograph today of an autumnal street in mid-Scotland. A road on the edge of moorland. I imagined living in the houses facing the moorland, and found this easy to do. it had the quality of memory, of lost Octobers before I remembered the tigers that are everywhere.

Summer Disquiet

Em comes around for a cup of tea this afternoon - a break from the festivities of the Brunswick festival (I can still hear the sounds of music from across Western Road. That and the sounds of squalling seagulls). Em leaves to meet up with her siblings again, to go to Waitrose to buy things for dinner. I must leave here in quarter of an hour to her place.
I left Em on the corner at the bottom of my road, and set off, disquieted into the late August streets. My earlier desire for a walk had been eroded somewhat, but thought it would be better to get some fresh air rather than return to the stale light and air of the bedsit.
I walked past Andy's flat in Cromwell Road, called in at the Tescos round the corner to him. A pack of Doritos, a chocolate croissant and a can of Coke. Headed over the railway line, across the covered footbridge, and into those Wilbury Crescent streets that still linger on in my memory. Summer felt too old and disturbing, the sunlight too bright and feverish. My body felt clammy and heavy. Watching the dappled sunlight through the Wilbury trees I remember thinking that this weekend - and the next - are the most uneasy of all the summer weekends. Like a coach journey that has gone on too long through a hot day with no air conditioning. The last hour of the journey becomes increasingly unbearable.
After I had come back home, I had a shower - using the last of my shampoo - and read the story 'The Frolic' by Thomas Ligotti with a cup of tea.
I must prepare to leave the bedsit to walk over to Em's house.
I am full of tiredness and an odd superstitious air.

Mid-afternoon in the Bedsit

Em is out with various brothers and sisters visiting, so I sit in the typhoid-yellow light of the bedsit, reluctantly listening to the indistinct sounds of punk-ska bands coming from the Brunswick fesival across the other side of Western Road. It has just turned a quarter to two in the afternoon. Spent the last few hours reading threads about 'creepy stories' on random forums, watching old documentaries on Youtube about serial killers, and flicking through 'The Mammoth Book of Crimke Comics' that lies next to me. It seems hot out there, but I haven't ventured outside yet to find out. I talked to Joe briefly on the phone. I should like to go out for a long walk but I am afraid the town may be clogged with holidaymakers

August like a Fever from Earlier in an Imagined Summer

Work passes by quickly this morning, and without incident. The grey of the skies -lukewarm heat, slow roast of the internal organs- continues into the afternoon. After half an hour at home, I join Andy at Churchill Square. Usual pace round charity shops and Residents, a coffee at the Pavilion gardens. As we sit having coffee, we note the increasing sharpness of the distance. Summer, as it is beginning to fade - a little - throwing off the shackles of haze and too-heavy air. We decide to walk back along the beach, and as we do so, the heat grows incredibly, pounding down at us so it starts to resemble a dream of June or a heatwave July rather than an incipient autumn. As it should do of course. Autumns are always best appreciated following a fever-heavy ridiculously hot August. Back in the bedsit now, a full cup of tea to drink, and a 99pence album to listen too by a band called Sterling, which I found in the Residents sale.

Dusk for the Bedsit

The last six weeks or so of living here hopefully. At the end of September, shall hopefully be picking up the keys for a new place off Church Road with Andy. Our landlady being none other than Marilyn who was, of course, my landlady back during the Wilbury Crescent days. I happened to call her the other day, just on the off chance that she might have a place. I hadn't talked to her for years. As it turns out she did, so three days after beginning to look for a place, it seems we have found one.
The next six weeks will be strange, rather like those six weeks before moving into Wilbury Crescent back in 2007; the slow build up, like the approach to Christmas when you were a kid, 'sorting stuff out', plans for the new place, day dreams of what it will be like living there, fear that something, somehow, might go wrong...
We shall be in there at the end of September. I am glad of this. It gives a good chunk of the autumn there before winter sets in fully. It is the end of summer now though, a time of great anticipation for me -autumn is my favourite season, so this time of year is not laden with the melancholy people often associate with the death of summer.
The nights are drawing in now. Twilight falls shortly after 8pm, and this dusk has begun -I hope- to gather for the bedsit.

Brief Lines before Work

Six minutes till I leave for work.
Spent three hours looking for my passport last night. No sign of it anywhere.
The couple next door are now playing The Misfits (the band) really loudly. I dread to think what they will be like at the weekends.
8:27 in the morning.

Head full of Superstition and Identity Checks

The shifting wheels of flat hunting - are things moving or is it only fear or hope? Those two states of mind seem remarkably similar. The uncertain journey with an unclear ending (where, come October shall I be living?) transforms itself into a strange near superstitious mania. I leave things out here because I am afraid that if I write them they may come true - or not true - depending on what I am not writing about.
All through work today I remain convinced that if only I can sort out photographic ID in time then everything will be fine. Anecdotal evidence suggests that photographic ID is vital to move house now - not something I have ever had to produce before. Or have I? I have some vague recollection of showimg Mr Ahmed ID back in November of 2009, before I moved in here. Never before I think.
Shouted conversations with Andy on the phone at lunchtime. I can hardly hear him. North Street full of buses and foreign students, the latter of which engaged in some odd chanting ritual. I optimistically go into my bank, HSBC, to find out whether or not they may certify documents for the mysterious Citizen Card. I am informed that they do not certify anything but internal documents for HSBC for the last two years. Slightly deflated, and before lunch ends, I check the Citizen Card website again for other options. A birth certificate is accep[table, but only if the verifier knows you personally. From the list of acceptable occupatioons, the only one which is suitable is Joe in Worcester, a civil servant. I would need to first get a copy of my birth certficate, then send the forms to him in Worcester, then to send them off to be certified... What if something goes wrong? Should I just renew my passport anyway? Where is my (expired anyway) passport?
I suppose the next seven weeks are going to be very much like the last two days.
I suppose I must get used to this odd, strangely euphoric mania.

Room enough for Myself and Strangers

Sat on my mattress on the floor, next to the fridge, which gurgles away happily to itself, sounding like some industrial process impression of a woodland stream.
I think the new person who has moved in next door is actually people. A couple. At least they didn't keep me awake until the small hours last night as they did the night before, and they only slammed the door sharply once. I was less than pleased however, to find that they both use the bathroom (which is now shared, if there are two people living in the room next door, amongst FOUR people) between 7 and 8am. I had my hand on the latch of my door when I heard someone clump out of next door and into the bathroom. I presume he has finished now (It's now 8:00am) but I settled for a wash in the sink instead. At least the sink wasn't full of unwashed plates.
Met Em last night after she finished work. She was up in Kemptown this time. That section of town seems far more autumnal than anywhere else in Brighton. I passed by Flo's house of course. There was someone sat on his wall, so I couldn't linger and peer into the darkness of his room. I wonder if the woman leaning there knew him at all? A relative perhaps, or a friend? Probably just someone passing by waiting for a friend or a lift, and knowing nothing of what happened in that room behind her back in March.
I dreamt of her last night though. I don't remember much of the dream, but I was passing by Flo's house (I think) and she, the waiting stranger, was crouched under his window, in an attitude both of pain and alertness, as if she were listening to something in the stones.
As I walked through Kemptown last night, I had a sudden dream-recollection come to me. It was bright and clear and very, very sudden. Nothing very exciting. It was the interior of rooms - bedrooms, reminiscent of student rooms. Yellow lamplight, clothes on the floor. The feel of these being basement rooms. There were two rooms, somehow connected to each other, though I can't explain how. I can't remember when I dreamt of these rooms. The dream feels years old, but could just as easily have been the night before. Whatever, the quality of the memory had all the substance of real, if somewhat vague, memory, as if the rooms belong to the history of someone else and not myself.

Talking about Black Dogs and Photo ID

Met up with Andy this afternoon to discuss the still hazy plans for flat hunting. Went to the launderette with him while he waited for his clothes to dry. 40 pence plastic cups of coffee from the dispenser. A group of good hearted (as Andy described them) baseball-cap-and-tracksuit types with a raucous baby.
After the launderette, and back at Andy's place, scribbled figures on a piece of paper; how much money will we have to move, how much for the deposit, when do we pay the first months rent?
Talk about photo ID (I have none, nor Andy, -my passport is lost and expired, I have a paper driving license with my address on from 18 years ago).
We must apply for a 'Citizen Card' - more talk of how to do so - birth certificates (I lost this too, -my life is full of lost things- probably at the address my driving license is still registered to; Belmont Road in Uxbridge) or maybe getting a bank official to verify the forms, but, according to the website only if they 'know you'. What does this mean, 'if they know you'? Who knows anyone who works in a bank these days on a personal basis? After I get back from Andy's flat I ring Dad. He says that a copy of the birth certificate can be organised relatively cheaply and quickly. The Citizen Card can be dispatched in as little as 24 hours. We probably won't need any ID until some point in September, when we hand over deposits and rent, sign contracts and say goodbye to our single room capsules we have slept in far too long.
Walking back from Andy's, the air was all lukewarm and clammy, the grey light rattled in the evening disquiet.

Numbers from the Flat Hunting Season

Well, aim to move out at the end of September / beginning of October. In between washing my clothes at the launderette I managed to;
1) Visit the estate agent across the road. Deposit too expensive.
2) Visit Coastal Management estate agent. Everything available immediately.
3) Rang number Emily gave me for a garden flat in Preston Park. Voice mail. Left a message.
4) Rang Marilyn, the landlady from Wilbury Crescent, who said she would phone me if any two bedroom places became available.
Worried about;
1) Coastal Management want photographic ID, which I do not have - my passport ran out in August. How much does a new passport cost?
2) They also asked for a utility bill. The only utility bill I get is for the electricity - I suppose I can ask Mr Ahmed for a copy of such.
Oddly enough, as I just returned from the shopping I ran into Mr Ahmed. He said he was sorry to see me go, particularly as we were just getting central heating fitted.
He has now fixed the toilet seat.
Despite the bedsit not being the best of places to live -to put it mildly- he is a good landlord.

9:16am Back in Brighton

Back in Brighton after a long weekend spent with Emily at my parents in Cornwall. Bookended by two mammoth 12 hour coach journeys (on the way there we left Brighton Station at 5:00am) the weekend passed by far too quickly, as they do.
It was strange seeing Perranporth so crowded, swelled by summer holidaymakers. I usually see Perranporth over Christmas when the population is necessarily thinned. It didn't really strike me before exactly how much of a holiday town Perranporth is, in a very different way to Brighton. Brighton is full of foreign students and drunks. Perranporth is full of families and dogs. There were any number of souvenir shops open selling the kind of souvenirs I thought had stopped sometime in the 1980s. It was kind of nice though, being a time traveller into an era of buckets and spades and toys for the beach. They have these shops for Brighton too, but I am not a holiday maker here so, unlike Perranporth, am blind to these strangely charming shops.
On the last day there, Em and myself took a walk along the sand dunes, and then back along the beach. I looked out toward the distant sea -the tide was out- and those layers of blue sky, blue-green sea, and yellow sand were suddenly evocative of the autumn of 1999, which I spent living here before I moved to Brighton. I remember that time with fondness -the wideness, the cleanness, and the emptiness of the sand dunes once the tourists had vanished (almost overnight). I don't quite know what it was about that Sunday that bought me back to the autumn of 1999. Perhaps the light of mid-August is beginning to resemble the sharp, haze-free air of autumn. I don't know, but looking at that distant sea, I was reminded again of the wideness of those days, of a curious and pleasing feeling of being at the beginning of things.
Back in Brighton now though. Arrived back at just before 8:00pm last night. The toilet lid in the toilet is broken and the rim was covered with piss. The woman next door had a few friends over last night - dull boom-boom-boom of music and London-tinged voices, rioters accent. Anytime anyone left the room they let the door slam, sending reverberations round my room. She and her boyfriend kept me awake last night until the small hours, talking, listening to music, eventually having sex. Finally, about 3:00am it went quiet and I could go to sleep. I wish the previous tenant were here with his guitar, coughing, snoring and bongos. I hate living here.

I shall be moving from here though.

September must be my last month in the bedsit.

Attempt to Interview Emily whilst Waiting for Dinner at my Parents House

Me: How did you sleep last night?
Em: (laughs) You're not going to put this on are you? Very silly. (continues laughing)
Stu: Okay. Lets try another question. (Cannot think of any question to ask) Favourite month?
Em: Um... April.
Stu: Any reasons? I thought summer would have been your favourite?
Em: I like spring (laughs)
Stu: How do you feel about autumn?
Em: Stop it!
Stu: I'll take off the 'ums' (They have now all been taken off)
Em: And the laughs. And everything I say. You're not really going to put this on are you?
Stu: Yes I am.
Em: You're not.
Stu: Yes I am.
Em: Its not going to be very interesting though is it?

Wednesday Evening

Six days off work now, and when I return it will be the end of summer. I listen to an album by a band called Baronbane and it reminds me of autumn, autumn so early that it is really the end of summer. There may be the deepening of the skies perhaps, but that is all. A slight cooling of breath. The album seems steeped in that liminal time. The odd thing is though, that come the future, the album will remind me of the depths of summer and nothing else, as it is now I am listening to it - I only bought it last Saturday.
I don't have anything else to say really.
I hope this summer, which has never really started, leads to an autumn which lasts forever.
Somehow though, I doubt it.

Looking for the Lost Riots

Facebook rumours, Google searches, the police outside Churchill Shopping Square.
Somewhere in Brighton there is a riot, but nobody knows where.
I receive a message from a friend saying that there are rioters who plan to gather at 18:30 (very precise) on The Level at Brighton. Other people say that the nexus of the Brighton riots will be down London Road. I suppose there might be riots - there are across the country.
At the moment though, Brighton continues as normal, but everyone waits, looking for the lost riots. Perhaps like some tulpa, everyones combined excitement may create a riot, some psychic upheaval of unrest. Spectral hoodies on some shadowy and unreal estate, a shadow Brighton somewhere on the astral plane.
I imagine these phantom rioters not in the summer warmth of today, but on a cold and rainy autumn afternoon. Driving wet from dead-grey skies. Thin figures hiding jaundiced limbs in rag, and hoods pulled blind over faces like executioners shrouds, grim reaper headgear. Dismantling the night-side of Brighton, deconstructing this queen of slaughtering places.
Or perhaps not.
It reminds me of those skinhead rumours in the 1980s when I was at school. A pre-internet viral campaign, a word of mouth epidemic. There would be tales of how the skinheads were 'coming from South London' and had 'already done over Mellow Lane West'. Someone might have sighted some of them at 'Hillingdon shops'. They might have come 'hidden in vans'. The skinheads, of course, never appeared. I suppose there might be an uprising in Brighton, there is elsewhere, but now, as the sounds of seagulls and cries from the taxi rank intermingle, there is not.
We check facebook and the Argus website, searching for updates, looking for the location of these lost riots.

Notes from the Widening Cracks in Deep Summer

I: (three cornered copse at twilight)
Joe down. Up through Three Cornered Copse with him and Andy as night falls. Three Cornered Copse like some slug of a wood, squashed in between houses. Sticky grey darkness. End up at the Downs and watch it get dark from there. Some scrubby field, and in the distance, the last streaks of sunset. Back through the dark grey woods, and by the time we reach Hove park it is full dark. A swaggering bare chested teenager asks us for a cigarette before wandering back to his friends who berate him for approaching strangers to ask for cigarettes. The three of us end up in the Neptune, joined by Ben whom we found walking down George Street. I spend the night at Em's.
II: (first crack)
Shortly before 5:00pm, I am told that I cannot have Saturday off as was originally planned as there is not enough cover. I join Andy and Joe at the beach after work. Wonder up Lovers Walk and London Road to the Prestonville. Al and Claire join us. I leave them early, having to get up for work the next day. I lie on my bed. The night seems to pulse toward dawn, and shortly before dawn, Joe comes back -he went round Al and Claire's place- and crashes, surprisingly quietly into sleep.
III: (grey unpleasant heat)
Meet Joe and Em after work. Wander the hot, sticky and drizzly North Laine. Buy some old comics from a surly man in Dave's Comics. Go to Tiffany's for a coffee, and wait hours in some lightless basement room to be served. Go back to the bedsit and collapse into a heavy implacable sleep for half an hour. Go out that night to watch 'Sarah's Key' at the Duke of Yorks cinema. Not the most cheery of films.
Sleep at Em's.
IV: (a drink with the queen of slaughtering places)
Em works. Meet up with Joe back at the bedsit. Check Facebook. Receive a message from an old flatmate about an old council tax bill -still unpaid from two years ago. Have to meet her to pay it, and feel like I'm getting ripped off, which I probably am. Nine months in that hell-hole, and as I drink my half pint of lager, and listen to her tell me of a cat dying in her arms, I think; she is the dark side of Brighton. I'm sitting with the Queen of Slaughtering Places herself. I really hope I never see or hear from her again. She makes me feel sick and this nausea lasts all day until now, the evening afterwards.
V. (tainted monday)
Not a successful day back at work. I am called to the office because of my terse and angry attitude with customers, a valid point though. I have been in a dark and less than pleasant mood all day, brooding over yesterday and my meeting with the Queen of Slaughtering Places. Back home, the new person who moves in next door hammers things and slams the door making the furniture in my room shake. I have left my phone at work or lost it. I have a sore throat, maybe the beginnings of a cold.

A Chinese Girl opens a Folder

Sticky claustrophobia, a clogged up grey, -well, not quite heat- but I can't think of any other name for it.
In Brighton Library, using the last nine minutes of time after Em who was looking up films at the cinema for tonight. Joe is somewhere about, using another computer to book his ticket back to Portsmouth or Chichester on Monday.
Weird silent library computer room. Like some ghost of Worcester University years, except people only used the internet then to look at bands. A small Chinese girl sits opposite me, stares into her screen with perplexed intensity. The hum of the fluoroscent lights are loud, like a continual tide crashing on a battered beach.
The Chinese girl opens a folder.
Busy four hours at work this morning. Exhausted after my half pint in the Prestonville last night, the hours dragged by.
Hopefully the drizzle will ease off in the country.
I must go and find Joe and Em.
Em is in the travel section, and Joe, god knows where.

Staccato Words from the Entropy Shifts

Exhausted and pissed off. Too much work, too little time. Ad nauseum. Something must change.
Anyhow. A short staccato entry before sleep. Joe down for a few days. Went with him and Andy through Three Cornered Copse at twilight yesterday. Ended up at some scrubby field as twilight fell. Back on the ring road circling Brighton, the tall lamps, hawk-like, watch the cars. Something immutable and unchangeable about the sky. Back through Three Cornered Copse and the tangled first hour of darkness. Half a pint of ale at the Neptune and a pint of coke.
Sat on the sofa. Twenty minutes before midnight. Trying to get a bit of time to get my head together before sleep and my sixth day of the week at work tomorrow.

Twelve Minutes sometime before Midnight

I. The Outside (as it was)
Heavy heat, humid, pre-summer storm, a superstitious air.
Beyond the taxi rank, indistinct cries but
the seagulls are only nearly silent.
I walked a road lit by orange lamps talking
to Andy then Em. A fat teenager ran past me into
a garden yelling 'fuck you motherfucker' at no-one
in particular. I saw two men who looked like members
of 1980s boyband Bros nearby, saying 'I think he
jumped over this wall' but they didn't seem that
concerned about finding him.
If indeed they were talking about him at all.

2. The Outside (as it is)
An hour and five minutes until midnight.
A man screams on the street below this bedsit.
There is a muted sound, of glass - the song of wine
bottles rolling on the pavement. He screams again - silence -
then shouts. He moves further away, and as far as I can hear
is gone now.

A Day of Slight August Fever

Heavy hanging heat. Humid weight. it still doesn't feel quite like summer though. The call centre passes by quickly today. Ridiculously busy. Too many coffees leading to a somewhat manic temperament. The sea outside the window. A dream-like calm, as if the water is made out of treacle, or some other unreal liquid. A boat floats on the wave-less seas. Stuck in the hallucinogenic Sargosso Sea off the coast, choked by no tides and not seaweed. The hallway by the lifts at work smells like a jungle, some greenhouse environment. In one of the toilet stalls at work, I hear a scratching actually in the wall next to me, as if there is a mouse or a rat moving about.
In the Pound Shop on the way home buying shampoo, I notice the place is littered with scattered items; tins of food, deodorants, bits of rubbish, that everyone about me seem to be oddly Mexican. I imagine I am in some shop in Mexico. Lost my way to Ciudad Juarez on the way home... I buy 'Never Let Me Go' from CEX on Western Road, but then have to return it as they give me the wrong disc. I have, instead 'This Is Number 4' or something. There is no apology, not even an acknowledgement that a mistake has been made. I don't think they even said a word when I returned. Just sort of grunted. Strange.
A quick cup of tea, tidy the bedsit, then off to meet Em down at the beach.

Fragments of a Southside Dream

Another dream of Southside last night. I can't really remember very much of this one though. Southside was radically different though. The houses were all detached and 'box-shaped' and were quite a distance from each other. They were set amongst the trees of a wood. There is some connection with the image of a bird to this - possibly an owl. The sky was white, reminiscent of October. I was waiting for the street lights to come on.

Greetings and Felicitations Children of Deep Summer

Even with the curtains closed, the bedsit is ridiculously bright. Leaning forward, as the window is obscured by the TV to my immediate left, I see seven blocks of window frame delineated sun-brightness pushed against the infected-yellow pallor of the curtain. There is the sound of seagulls, a clamour of urgency and antagonism, explosions of sound leading to a climax, a gull-epiphany, and then a fade out to the silence of cars, of taxis, of the rubbish truck making its way along the street, emptying the communal bins.
I didn't sleep well last night - not after 4am or so. I kept waking up every fifteen minutes, these quarter hours of sleep punctuated with restless dreams, none of which I can remember now. I eventually got up ten minute before the alarm, had a shower and now sit in this too-bright bedsit waiting to go to work.
Last night, as I was dropping off to sleep, there was the sound of a church bell chiming. I could barely make it out, the noise just hovering on the edge of consciousness. I woke myself up, listened for it more carefully - yes, it was definitely there. It was an incredibly lonely and isolated sound, but also seemed to be surrounded by other sounds, none of which I could quite distinguish. I checked my watch, expecting it to be midnight, and I saw that it was 12:17AM. There was no reason for a bell to chime at this hour, even one on the far reaches of consciousness -not that that there is a church around here that is armed with such a bell. I imagine the bell tolled to bring in deep summer, rang in some hidden church of sunburn, fever and seagulls.