Sat on my bed earlier with the window open. The angles of the backs of buildings, the garage, the hidden geometry of Drury's Coffee Shop. Icy and uncomforted. Walking on a frozen pond in the first hours of a deep, deep January night. Broken-bone trees and the night between those trees like something solid, a tangible thing full of points and comas. A punctuation of unconsciousness, no full stops of stars. Keep walking, keep going. Get out of the wood, get out of the trees.
Small-hours pulse, a bell chiming in the inside of architecture. Once was going to write a story about this time of year, a ghost story, of kinds, about these days before Christnas and after the pleasant cooling glow of mid-autumn. Fading embers shine now like warning lights back in those woods. Came up with the idea back when I was working at the petrol station. The character in the story, who was me obviously, -even the most fictional of these unwritten tales are unequivocally autobiographical- at the beginning of each winter would begin to feel haunted. He would see nothing, but would begin to feel her, start with the dreams and images of the places she would hibernate through spring and summer... a basement room somewhere near the estates of Moulscoombe. A mattress on the wooden floorboards of a room whose windows were gray with dirt, bushes and weeds and ragged trees obscuring the light. There was no other furniture in this room - the hidden room of an archetypal crack house, one long since abandoned, by even the most lost of junkies. Stir slowly, and she would not be real of course, this girl whose face was never seen. A tiny figure wrapped in a dark cloak with a hood covering her head like a shrunken grim reaper.Nothing was to happen in this story, but out protagonist would be aware of her growing closer and closer to him as autumn deepened into winter. Would know that she would be two or three streets away as a Tuesday afternoon slipped into a cold sunless nightfall, would hear from a friend how he, or she, had glimpsed the figure, following him at a distance of a few winding alleyways. He would be disquieted, until, finally, there would be a confrontation that was not a confrontation. In the windowless bathroom of the house our protagonist would be in - like the bathroom here, outside of this room, across the hallway - after a bath, he would hear the door of his empty house open. Hear her footsteps come up the stairs, hear her ragged, decayed breathing, lungs cut to haunted ribbons, and he would put his ear to the door, and across the wood of that door, would know that she was doing the same, listening to him as he listened to her. Then she would leave, and over the weeks till spring, he would feel her fade, feel her go back to sleeping the summer in that basement room, waiting for winter to awaken her again.
I never wrote the story of course, but in those petrol station days when I had closed the garage for the night, I would imagine her in the stock room, in that cupboard with the creepy sink near the switchboard. Suppressing panic I would hurry with the locking up of the station, quick steps across the dead forecourt, and on the pavement heading back into town along the Old Shoreham Road I would look back over my shoulder, half expecting to see a figure at the counterl watching me.
Nothing of course, only emptiness and somehow that emptiness there was even spookier.
Evening creeping on now. Swear the shadows are deeper come this end of November. Turn up the music ('Sonic Mass' by the Amebix; '...beneath a crescent moon, a silhouette is rising...'
A cup of tea? Perhaps, but the kitchen disquiets me, the plates on the draining board, the cluster of forks and knives, a pool of liquid aluminium seeping from factories denying all safety protocols. Outside the window, the mews, always silent, just that imagined swing of the lamps...
Just check my cup - the tea was hardly drunk and still warm.
I remember two nights ago, that road on the edge of town, a liminal space between the hedges hiding the suburbs and the utter unimpeachable blackness of that countryside, an irrational and fascinating void, an imagined landscape of tilting fields, night-curved woodland, ancient stiles on the edges of silent meadows shaped like gallows, unmapped lane and forgotten crumbling farmhouse buildings hiding lamps that flicker their SOS messages of sunset red, barns of jagged sleep, overgrown orchards, lie in the black of yellow grasses with the ghosts of wasps, dreams of the honey-summer still licking lips, the skeletons of fallen apples, somewhere out amongst the glades of sudden spinnies and copses and coverts the trickle of rivers, and the wind through the trees like a tide, makes me think of the stars and wolves, and broken tractors crumbling on brown fields like tilted temples.
The cup of tea is drunk now, and 'Sonic Mass' is playing the last song, and in twenty minutes I'll leave this disquieted house for the disquieted streets, and all the disquiet that these November nights seem to bring.
