Two London Roads Dancing

I walk up London Road at lunchtime, to the British Heart Foundation charity shop at the far end, ostensibly to look at albums, but really because I just to walk up London Road. I get there by cutting through the walkway that comes out at the front of that odd, tall church, where back in late autumn 2001 I attended a strange art exhibition. Photocopies of ghost-faces in lost photographs, a verger's unimpressed explanation, an M.R.James afternoon in my late twenties.
As I cut down onto London Road, I watch the people passing back and forth, lost in their mid-afternoon supermarket thoughts, their student-noodle expeditions. Across the road, through pale-white light of late afternoon, I see the entrance to the open market. Lived here nearly twelve years and still never been there. It strikes me that London Road is old. That people have been here for decades. Imagine time flipping back, people in the 1970s walking back and forth. Back further, the 60s, the 50s. Blitz era London Road, a black-and-time. All men in hats, and the cold grey mornings full of the vague tastes of smoke and bomb shelters. Remember a taxi driver telling me once how a German fighter plane tried to gun him down when he was a kid. Said the bullet holes could still be seen in the bricks of the wall. London Road? Upper Lewes Road? Hartington Road? Somewhere round here. Pass by the Somerfield where I worked as a shelf stacker for 6 weeks when I first moved to Brighton. London road is an old road for me. Intimate and ancient resonance. Think of that other London road in Worcester. Two London Roads, circling round each other like serpents, cobra dances, python squeeze. Time all emptied out and not flowing properly.

At the base of the hill looking up to where I once lived - but this London Road is flat, and I still would once have walked back along here to get home. Moulscoomb days. Earl Grey tea and Lawrence Durrel's Alexandria Quintet. Could never get past the first book.
The newness of that room.
The starlings out of the window.
I do not get to look at the albums in the British Heart Foundation charity shop. There is someone already there, bent over the racks, ponderously fingering his way through the plastic vcases -click-clack-click-clack- like the sounds of bones, or dice.