wall, racing at a kamikaze pace beyond my window. The knowledge that I will never see Mandy in the way I did on that day in March seems as strong as the knowledge of my own death—and just as terrifying, just as tiring.
I blow my nose into a serviette left by the last occupant of seat number forty-two. Hopefully the Accountant Couple haven’t noticed I’m crying. They both appear rapt by the pink Hiroshima of the sunset; airport blockbusters lowered in their grey hands.
We’re out onto higher ground now. The vomit-encrusted portals of Finsbury Park have been replaced by the vista of Tottenham’s vast gas works. Beyond this I can see the riding luxuriant barge of Alexandra Palace, its planes of Aegean glass kaleidoscopic in the failing light. There’s an old danger in the air, the danger of descending blackness and cold, of having to find shelter and food and primal warmth. The human animal hurrying to its cave, its burrow. Man, could I use some of that primal warmth now. From this vantage, the petering sprawl of north London can be assimilated in all its squalor. There are industrial plants and peopleless waterworks. Articulated lorry crates stacked like surreally huge bricks. Glimpsed streets of kebab houses and blackened boozers. Then the sudden strangeness of greenery: verdant geometric patches interspersed with estates of shivering semis, all framed by the sighing umbilical powerlines, with their tireless lifting and sagging. One-porter stations are flashing past in a blur of concertinaed posters, their chained bicycles packed like biscuits. The ear-plugging gust of another tunnel cancels any view for a couple of seconds, until I am looking in at the lit windows of a train passing the other way: a parallel world in reverse time. Then we’re out again into the sorry sprawl of the dwindling conurbations—sudden perspectives allowed then blocked; a white house uniquely isolated: glimpsed then gone, replaced by a zoetrope of willows or a flashing row of stripped poplars.
I take out my notebook. This has to be captured, caught—set down (and one day I will fashion it into a poem in the smithy of my bedsit): A deserted golf course. Half-built houses surrounded by stacked timber. The low sun in its dizzying death throes. Flatlands of arable earth, paths, spinneys, quarries, copses. Sinister hags of trees. Greenhouses. Flying clubs. Leisure parks. Lakes. A trackside stretch of gravel, arcade-game-fast, bisected by the even strokes of telegraph poles. Hacked waste ground. The glittering coin of a reservoir. A distant graveyard; headstones dense as dandruff. Squat cottages with conspiratorial outhouses. The reaching arms of alders under immense cloud formations—fingers and quays and spits, evolving and separating. A horse bending to graze, unicorn-white. Distant, argumentative weathers over parish spires. Darkness descending. Cul-de-sac streetlamps like gannets with their opposing amber beaks. Geese on a path, cherry-winged in the sunset. Rolling-stock on browning rails. Scrapyards of flex-coiled wooden barrels. Rising ropes of hedgerows split by the thread of a canal. A ditched Sierra growing grasses from exploded seats. Broken birches. Gulls over clogged fields of refuse sacks. A private pond bearing a puffed swan; a royal dinghy in the threatening twilight. A barren field, the blasphemous rooks peppering the ploughlines …
Hold it—running out of space. By chance I notice the date at the top of the page. December the twenty-second. Two days ago. But, more significantly, more potently, our wedding anniversary. I let the pen settle on the paper, aslant my almost illegible scribble. I sigh gravidly: a bellows exhausting its chamber of air. December the twenty-second—three days before Christmas; chosen so we would ‘never forget it’. Three years ago to the (almost) day. A date that also coincides with the year’s nadir: the shortest, darkest day. The winter solstice; the year’s true midnight—although I
I blow my nose into a serviette left by the last occupant of seat number forty-two. Hopefully the Accountant Couple haven’t noticed I’m crying. They both appear rapt by the pink Hiroshima of the sunset; airport blockbusters lowered in their grey hands.
We’re out onto higher ground now. The vomit-encrusted portals of Finsbury Park have been replaced by the vista of Tottenham’s vast gas works. Beyond this I can see the riding luxuriant barge of Alexandra Palace, its planes of Aegean glass kaleidoscopic in the failing light. There’s an old danger in the air, the danger of descending blackness and cold, of having to find shelter and food and primal warmth. The human animal hurrying to its cave, its burrow. Man, could I use some of that primal warmth now. From this vantage, the petering sprawl of north London can be assimilated in all its squalor. There are industrial plants and peopleless waterworks. Articulated lorry crates stacked like surreally huge bricks. Glimpsed streets of kebab houses and blackened boozers. Then the sudden strangeness of greenery: verdant geometric patches interspersed with estates of shivering semis, all framed by the sighing umbilical powerlines, with their tireless lifting and sagging. One-porter stations are flashing past in a blur of concertinaed posters, their chained bicycles packed like biscuits. The ear-plugging gust of another tunnel cancels any view for a couple of seconds, until I am looking in at the lit windows of a train passing the other way: a parallel world in reverse time. Then we’re out again into the sorry sprawl of the dwindling conurbations—sudden perspectives allowed then blocked; a white house uniquely isolated: glimpsed then gone, replaced by a zoetrope of willows or a flashing row of stripped poplars.
I take out my notebook. This has to be captured, caught—set down (and one day I will fashion it into a poem in the smithy of my bedsit): A deserted golf course. Half-built houses surrounded by stacked timber. The low sun in its dizzying death throes. Flatlands of arable earth, paths, spinneys, quarries, copses. Sinister hags of trees. Greenhouses. Flying clubs. Leisure parks. Lakes. A trackside stretch of gravel, arcade-game-fast, bisected by the even strokes of telegraph poles. Hacked waste ground. The glittering coin of a reservoir. A distant graveyard; headstones dense as dandruff. Squat cottages with conspiratorial outhouses. The reaching arms of alders under immense cloud formations—fingers and quays and spits, evolving and separating. A horse bending to graze, unicorn-white. Distant, argumentative weathers over parish spires. Darkness descending. Cul-de-sac streetlamps like gannets with their opposing amber beaks. Geese on a path, cherry-winged in the sunset. Rolling-stock on browning rails. Scrapyards of flex-coiled wooden barrels. Rising ropes of hedgerows split by the thread of a canal. A ditched Sierra growing grasses from exploded seats. Broken birches. Gulls over clogged fields of refuse sacks. A private pond bearing a puffed swan; a royal dinghy in the threatening twilight. A barren field, the blasphemous rooks peppering the ploughlines …
Hold it—running out of space. By chance I notice the date at the top of the page. December the twenty-second. Two days ago. But, more significantly, more potently, our wedding anniversary. I let the pen settle on the paper, aslant my almost illegible scribble. I sigh gravidly: a bellows exhausting its chamber of air. December the twenty-second—three days before Christmas; chosen so we would ‘never forget it’. Three years ago to the (almost) day. A date that also coincides with the year’s nadir: the shortest, darkest day. The winter solstice; the year’s true midnight—although I
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