Coming home

Coming home is like drifting off through a film or living through a coma punctuated by an intermittent consciousness. What you see is familiar but things are slightly out of place. Some characters are gone, others reaching the end of their arc. Every so often you fall back asleep. Your life continues. It feels like nothing's changed, though your own lives have been many and your face and manner would confuse those who encounter you too. 

The doorbell rings and there's Brenda, hair set and ruddy cheeked, with a wrapped box of After Eights and a bottle of gin. Shall we have some now, together? Frank next door is in his garden working on his model railway. His wife Viv is whispering the village gossip to mum over the top of the garden fence, her white hair and glasses just about visible if you stand on your tiptoes. 

The settings change: in the movie, the school gym is no longer festooned with streamers but now empty and abandoned, light streaming through a broken window. In life, these days, it's usually the other way: the alleyways you ran through are sealed or gated, the trolleys and prams and nails in those magical dumping grounds are cleared, and the treasure they concealed taken. Disorder has been contained behind a tall, clean fence and subsumed by a garden lawn, or swallowed up by decking. 

The doorbell rings: there's mum, back from Brenda's because Brenda gets a bit confused these days and it's not the drink. Frank and Viv dropped by with some chocolates earlier, but we'll give them to Big Pete from the pub shall we? The pub has three visible Christmas trees now; one for each apartment, and the jukebox is probably in the same graveyard as the dartboard and the pool table. The Pub Lachaise. The White Horse is the only one holding on. He dresses in a sombre grey. 

The slumber releases its grip for a moment and the sky is a soft pink. They've planted saplings on the playing field. Somewhere Charlie Brown's tree is roaring with laughter. In the dusk, the plastic "tree" protectors resemble a Somme memorial, if fashioned by the local theatre company. 

This is where I first rode my bike. Down this hill, straight through these future woods.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life Is Art Is Life is Death

Image
A recent  poll reanimated the story of Kolpashevo, a Siberian town where thousands were put to their deaths by the NKVD during the Great Purge of the late 1930s.  In 1979, erosion at the banks of the river Ob revealed the bodies of thousands, hidden for decades just below the soil. NY Times  report , 1993:  "From its headwaters on the Russian-Mongolian border, the Ob River flows northwest across Siberia, sweeping through thick fir forests and marshlands before emptying into the Arctic Ocean. Like the Mississippi, which also traverses flat, low-lying country, the Ob flows in lazy bends and loops, and changes its course slightly when it floods.  In May 1979, swollen by melting snow, the Ob began eating away at its banks at a Siberian town called Kolpashevo. As the flood waters gnawed deeper into the base of the river bank, the earth and sand that crumbled into the water disclosed a mass of human skeletons. Beneath this strata of bones was another la...
Read more

corrupt the cultural memory

Image
Simeon is still there. The rock gets smaller every day, a change imperceptible to the eye, but he's still up there suspended by some unknown force.  He received a visitor the other day: a wild eyed boy with a poisoned leg, and the gait of a wading bird.  The boy spoke. It seemed to Simeon that he was speaking to somebody else but no one else was there. "They said that I look like an Old Believer. What's the use? I'm clean shaven!". Simeon found it very difficult to keep his eyes on the horizon.  (                                                                                          ) (                                           ...
Read more