Alchemy for the Nostalgic Man

A gap in the curtains, a foot, no more, and over the condensation on the windowpanes, the angles of the house next door are sunny. A steam pipe casts a long morning shadow. The colour of the sky is a pale blue, spring-like and pleasant, but still somehow cold.

I went for a long walk last night, headed up to Portland Road, then onto Sackville Road, before joining the Old Shoreham Road. I bought a can of coke from the unsmiling girl in Sainsburys on Portland Road. It was a warm and quiet night. A slight and sudden haze about the distance reminded me it was spring; the red of traffic lights shimmering, the halos of street lamps now transient and delicate things. Moth-wing lights, a butterfly darkness.
The petrol station I used to work at was still open. The same old white vans and their occupants on the forecourt. I watched a man scurry to the door. Knew that look on his face from my five years working there, a mixture of vacancy and boredom. Thinking about going home, the football, anything but paying for petrol in a petrol station in suburban Hove on a Sunday night. The boy -he surely could be no older than twenty- behind the counter I had seen before. He looked like someone who I might have worked with there. Long hair, a slightly harassed expression, all quick and thin wiry movements. I wonder how he came to be working there. I wonder if he keeps a sketchbook on the counter like I used to, and draw in between customers.
I sometimes miss working at the petrol station.

The Old Shoreham Road is a dark road, drenched in all the arcana of nocturnea , the abandoned institutional looking building near the recreation ground, lower windows all boarded up and the gardens all overgrown and winter-ragged. Then there is the house I used to call the House on the Borderland , after a story by William Hope Hodgson, where I would imagine in it's garden there would be a vast and bottomless pit stretching down into forever. Hove recreation ground itself was filled with pitch black night as always, a silent place, made sinister by thick bushes that line it's southern edge. The street lamps here are tall and unfriendly and look like crows. On the Old Shoreham Road it either feels like 2:00am or like you're waiting for it, a geography compomsed of the essence of those dark, remote lots of the imagination.

I passed by my old house on Wilbury Crescent, looked up at my old room, at the angles of the door I could just make out in the blue darkness there. I wonder what it is about these observations of past homes that so fascinate me? I wonder what it is I am looking for? There can surely be no more information to be had that may sharpen memory left to find... and yet I still pore over Google Streetview with all the fascination of an archaeologist, or perhaps more accurately, an occultist, trying to uncover some secret, some element, some chrono-alchemical formulae to snip those threads in time...

I took the footbridge over the railway tracks, ended up on Cromwell Road, where I passed by Andy's old flat. Yellow light against the curtains, and whoever is living there now is unaware of the nearly eight year tenancy that preceded them.

I woke sometime toward dawn last night. There was a noise in my room. A definite noise, like that of something falling, or something moving. I couldn't work out what it was, and drifted back into an uneasy sleep, thinking of rats in the walls and all the poltergeist stories I've read. It made me think of last night, where I walked from the kitchen into the hallway, and for a second, thought I saw a pale figure standing by my room wearing white trousers. Trick of the corners-of-eyes, a play of light. It was only my quilt cover, slowly drying on the radiator.
I tried not to think about it, and looked at the blue light of dawn at the gap in the curtains instead. It made me uneasy.
It was too easy to imagine someone watching me.