Blossoms

I remember the blossoms, a plague of pastoral pinks and violets and whites. Early spring days, inedible and delicate, fluttering like moth wings in the still cold-breeze, and the sun in the sky was still cold too, but it always felt like spring had come.
I never really noticed it till I was nineteen, nearly twenty. It was on a tube train, oddly enough, that I first felt the inaudible click of the year switch to a new groove. I was probably on one of those endless trips to London on gloomy Sundays, looking round the second hand shops for albums by old punk bands; Black Flag, The Necros, Fear, Dead Kennedys, Vice Squad... I remember the carriages moving through the deepening blues of early night, and there was the sound of birds, and they sounded electric, the sound of suddenly remembering something.
Spring in Ickenham was different to springs elsewhere though. I always found something slightly sinister about those blossom covered trees, beautiful as they might be. The lengthening days and warming nights would mean that we had more time to delve further into the unexplored territory beyond the suburbs of Ickenham. There was one place I was always fond of, a sprawling collection of man-made lakes and quarries, tangled woods and clogged rivers that did not have a name, but that we somehow ended up nicknaming The Psycholands. Edward and Simon were not as fond of them as I was. Simon regarded them with suspicion and Edward with less than enthusiasm. There were sections of this odd landscape that you always felt relieved to be out of, like you were being watched there the whole time. The odd thing was that you never noticed it until you had left, and I'd promise myself I would never go back again, but I always did.
It was only in spring we seemed to go to these places. In winter it was unthinkable, too harsh and cold and remote, and in summer too dusty and rural-industrial and the kind of place you could vanish in, another Picnic At Hanging Rock region.
There were trees there too, and these trees would also be covered with blossoms. I would daydream about stories I would never write - or sometimes did - about the trees in this tangled wasteland covered with a particularly deep red blossoms that would be the only sign of an incursion, some invasion from another dimension. In another story I wrote (The Sometime Sinister) the blossoms heralded the appearance of a seductive malevolent vampire. As I went to sleep at night in the house on Woodstock Drive, which I believed at the time to be haunted, I would be haunted also by images of these blossom covered trees, alone in their desolation by the quarries, and the man made lakes that were so large they seemed almost tidal. As I fell asleep, I would promise myself I would never go back there again.
This was early in the blossom season. It was 1992, so twenty years ago from when I write now. I was probably bunking off college from the course I was soon going to drop out of. Edward, an eternally unemployed school friend, and myself had plunged ourselves into the amnesiac depths of The Psycholands. To get to this unnamed place, you had to take a tiny alleyway by an old gospel oak, walk through the private roads of the rich where I used to have a paper round, and finally through a private threatening golf course.
It was early in the blossom season as I said, and seeming earlier because it was such a dark day. There was a huge downpour at some point and we took shelter in the woods where one day we saw a dwarf who cheerily wished us good morning, and another time we both thought we saw a giant black wing moving in the trees beside us. By the time we made it to the canal the sky was darkening, and we hadn't even made it to the lock gates yet. I remember looking at Edward in the gloom with glee and a little fear. You know I said we're not going to make it town before dark?
What I really meant was when it gets dark we're still going to be here.
I remember how the light changed, how everything turned grey and somehow yellow at the same time. The woods on the other side of the towpath became a dark smudge of shadow.
We hurried through the rain coming down, and as we passed under the trees we were showered with unpleasantly wet blossoms that clung to us like something you can't forget or can't quite remember.
By the time we reached Uxbridge it was nearly dark, just that full late winter / early spring blue, the street lamps reflected in dark puddles and the rush hour traffic an ever present soundtrack. I had a blazing headache by the time we got there, the kind which verged on being a migraine but not quite. There was some kind of discount bookstore there at the time that I remember nothing about apart from the fact that that day I bought a book of poems called 'Archaic Figure' by Amy Clampitt that I never read.
Even when I got home - I probably took the bus - I was still covered with those damned blossoms.