I set off down Portland Road, and past the place where I meet Em when she works up this end of town, and into that section I have not walked since the unemployment summer of 2010. It struck me how much larger everything on Portland Road seemed to be. This needs some explanation as the buildings are quite obviously a lot smaller than Brighton. There was a huge billboard to my right, advertising something I have now forgotten, and that industrial building that looks like some abandoned experiment between a church and a factory. The buildings on the other side of the street were simple one and two storey affairs, some of which were retail outlets of varying description ('Bargain Vacuum Centre'). Perhaps I felt dwarfed under the huge billboard and the church / factory, but I don't think it is quite that. I think there is just that air of desertion around here that makes t he place seem larger somehow, and the sky vaster and almost carnivorous. There is an air about Portland Road of something ragged and run down, like a street in a less than salubrious suburb of London. A place that might be notorious for crime... if only there were enough people there to commit them. As I walked down Portland Road, nearing Portslade (only a mile or so away from the Mews where I live) the shops became fewer and fewer. I passed by streets leading away from Portland Road into darkening labyrinths of houses and silent questionable estates, their geography sinking into the slowly gathering twilight.
I became oddly superstitious about walking through the centre of Portslade itself. Old and not-really-remembered rumours of the usual teenage miscreants kept occurring to me. This, despite the fact it wasn't even 6:00pm and there were many normal looking families heading back home from the shops... and not a teenager in sight (nor indeed very many people at all). I cut down through the houses onto the parallel road of New Church Road and continued walking toward Portslade... just lower down and nearer the sea. Twilight was gathering quickly now, an incoming tide that was coming in from everywhere. The sky was clear so the darkness seemed to rise from the ground itself, from beneath the leaves and between the houses, and all those hidden places of the day. I passed by the church and graveyard that was near the end of New Church Road. I remembered this church from the summer of last year. I would sometimes walk down New Church Road to sign on, and this church would be the last signpost before Portslade. I hated signing on, and would dread it as much as one dreads an urgent and important job interview. The church in summer was ragged and overgrown with weeds and grasses, and last night it was looking much the same, though this deep in autumn, the undergrowth was much depleted. There were no lights in the church or around the tombs, and the light here was a startlingly deep blue. It was like a scene in a ghost story, though as wonderfully atmospheric as it was, there was nothing, disappointingly, eerie about it all, as is the way with such things. I imagined sleeping between the tombs, oddly warm in the autumn night, waking in the small hours as drunken passers by made their way home, and I would be invisible to them, unseen in the shadow of their own disappointing ghost stories.
When I reached Portslade I turned left and walked toward the sea. I passed by a barred golf shop, and a DVD rental store advertising the new Batman game. There was a fast food pizza place quiet at this time of night, and some kebab emporium out of which a skinhead man came out clutching what might have been a package of fish'n'chips.
-down the end of Portslade now, and we're at the apex of twilight, this place is different here, shifted and older, an ancient and industrial air-
This is what it was like though, like stepping across the unseen boundary from one country into another. Though there is no deliberate demarcation line, there is undoubtedly a difference, something in the air, the light perhaps, or maybe even the sky. This was the apex of twilight of course, the dominion of dusk, transiently triumphant.
We were on the edge of the dockland industrial zone that stretches from the edge of Hove to Shoreham-by-Sea, and the site of one of the first entries from Bridge 39, nearly two years ago.
I watched the squat warehouse-buildings silhouetting themselves against the violet-rippled sky, a display of bare shadow and exposed nightfall. In the spaces beyond the frontline of these buildings, a deeper geography I couldn't see, of docks and dark water, dreaming, drifting ships, locked up walkways and the ghosts of quarry machines and power station accidents.
The breathing of steam, the red light on the chimney, a Cyclops stop-light for passing aircraft, frozen in the sky.
This little section of Portslade, or the seafront, or whatever liminal section I was on the edges of, seemed so utterly unconnected to Brighton and Hove, and even to Portslade just behind me. There was a curious air of a small, dark fishing village about it, a feeling that was only heightened by the sinister architecture of dockland industry. It put me in mind of H.P.Lovecraft's Innsmouth, a coastal port hiding marine secrets, a malign and beguiling occult trade route.
I headed back home along the seafront road, and the small squat houses by the roadside promised mysteries behind their windows through which I could see the 'X-Factor' being watched, Saturday night entertainment repeating itself on every television screen. Beyond these watched rooms, a deeper cartography of old and yellow-light bulb lit rooms, silent hallways and cold landings, and from the frosted cracked windowpanes of bathrooms I couldn't see, there would be glimpses into the dark and crowded gardens below that belonged wholly to the night now.
Over the dark geography of the docklands, on a slight rise, I could see a line of street lamps on one of the factory roads.
They seemed to be watching the sea, as if waiting for something.
