55

The bus unnervingly swerves around the tight bend of the crossroads before stopping. A group of passengers, of which I am included, lurch forward as we wait to depart. I make my way through the busy streets.

 

It’s a Friday, and I notice the Friday rush as the mole-faced shoppers start to show their faces. On the ground, a light rain has left a film of muddy water which covers the paving slabs. Imprinted are the footsteps of those that have gone before me.

 

Drinkers come here for the cheap booze. Not the decor. The cheap drinks bring out the heavies, the all-day old sorts with nothing left to do with their lives but while away the hours knocking back ale until the doors close. Lombard is sitting in the far corner of the room reading a paper. I walk over.

 

A weathered black guy with a long white beard stares into oblivion. His hat is frayed around the edges. An old boy stands, takes his plastic bags and rests an unlit smoke between his lips. Down an alley a junkie slips away, his chequered shirt hanging limply off his wiry frame.

54

Even over the revellers’ voices you can hear the boats moving on the river. The creaking of ropes as they tighten and snap to take the strain from this November night’s wind.

Buoys clank hollow against empty hulls and untied awnings lash rebelliously as the wind blows in harder from the North Sea.

I remember after nights like this, when my father would a fret and always come down early the next day to check for damage.

52

And where should I start, where? Sweating at the great machine before me as it spits out great streams of unwanted papers. It never asks for small chat, never asks for star-signs in the age of reason or falls foul to fatness and domestic life death. When are they ever caught with one eye on the window? 

50

The more I worked, the less I burned. I was angry at the circumstance and could not sleep. Those fractures in reality began to reopen and what I saw were brief glimpses of the throbbing white world...awe-inspiring, frightening universes inside oneself which longed to be free and waited hungry, no ravenous, on the fringes of conscious thought.

43

People crawl out of here and they crawl back in when they are old and tired. 

41

Exhausted, I lay on the nearest bed to the door. No sleep comes.