gaps in the story

There are three drafts unseen to in the eponymous section of this website, stretching back to March. They touch upon spring blossoms, the patterns of feeding geese on riverbanks and stargazing in a French swimming pool, among other things. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish them. Blog posts should really be finished in a short time, whilst the neurones fire. I write down a title that amuses me and an opening paragraph and then I get distracted and then that’s all that’s left. A sentence fragment that seemed clever to me at the time and maybe, if I’ve been productive, a hundred or so words that segue into nothing. Like a house converted to flats that still has one of those staircases that lead only to cream-painted plasterboard.

I know what they were going to be, vaguely what observations they hoped to make. The spring blossom one aspired to turn a brief sojourn to Cornwall into an Odyssey, likely to be littered with comments about hedgerow and the hope that spring brings and the joy of the wilds. There would have been a melancholy to it though, as it was my first trip to Cornwall since July 2018, and that trip, as joyful as it was, was joyful in the face of a grief and sadness I cannot shake, nor do I want to. I’m sure I would’ve made it work somehow. Blossoms and grief. The end of winter. The mirror glass of tidal water at the ebb, crusted hulls of abandoned boats askew in the spreading mud reflecting some fucking thing. If I’d written it I’m sure some links would come. I would’ve hammered it out.

Sat in the pub with a pint by the pier I watched the geese creep up to the river grass with caution, as though there may be a fox hidden below the tide line, small enough to hide amongst the reeds that stood only a foot tall. Each step they took they took as though there were boobie traps everywhere. They were the water fowl Indiana Joneses of the Thames that day. It piqued my interest, in part because I was trying to write a lot of other shit at the time. I watched them dart their heads into the foliage, quick, eating whatever it was that lurked in that grass that looked edible. Every couple of jabs their heads would pop up like meerkats to see if there were anything coming to eat them. Then they’d go back to eating. I’ve no idea what the point of the post was going to be, or if there was one other than the joy at observing a hitherto new (to me, at least) behaviour in the invasive, annoying and usually uninteresting behaviour of our loathsome invasive goose species.

As for the stars and the pool and France, that all feels like stolen time now. The title I came up with for the draft is “lying in the dark to stare at the light” and I’m quite happy with that as a title because that’s what we did. I think I managed a sentence or two and deleted them and rewrote them about four or five times before retreating from the post. I can make all sorts of excuses about why I didn’t push on with that but it’s because I’m selfish and I didn’t want to give it away. Sometimes writing is a release and I didn’t want to release that for fear that it wouldn’t be held quite as close to my heart afterwards. We saw shooting stars and satellites and aeroplanes and at least two nights were dark enough to make out the pale cataract-ic band of the Milky Way. Sometimes you write so as not to forget, but sometimes you don’t write because you’re not quite ready to let go yet. And writing can be letting go.

Letting go. I didn’t start a draft about this past harvest. I never got that far. It rattled in my head quite a bit. There were several storylines and a surfeit of metaphors to abuse but instead I just made wine and drank beer and ate wild boar and anchovies with my pals. I wish I had. I wish I wrote more while I was there instead of thinking about writing more. I didn’t because it was my fifteenth harvest and sometimes when you’ve done things for fifteen years in a row you pick up your pen with a little less urgency to scribble every detail down. If you’re not careful though, they can all blend into one. The fruit was good but there wasn’t enough of it. That could be 7 or 8 of the last fifteen years. But this year was different. I just didn’t know it at the time. I’ll have to stumble over my notes and photos and see if I can put it all together.

Now it’s autumn. And I look over the heat and tumult of the summer and spring and it doesn’t all quite fit. A didn’t go to b then c. I remember pretty much everything but nothing has followed seamlessly as cause and effect would have us expect. I lament the lack of writing but don’t know where I would’ve fit it in. Yet that might be why it doesn’t fit. Because I wasn’t writing it down. Perhaps those are the empty spaces, the bits where I didn’t take the time to write it down and make sense of it while it was happening. Not that it made sense at the time.

old haunts

I climbed the steps out of the tube station into the familiar. Streets I’ve wandered for 32 years, give or take. So much has changed that I can’t quite place everything. The Itsu that used to be a Burger King but was a Wimpy before that... or was that the Boots? The WH Smiths is now a bakery. The dodgy used record shop where I bought knackered old comics is still there, though. In fact, it’s multiplied and split off into several dodgy shops, each specialising in various used wares, all looking equally knackered and yet somehow still sort of desirable.

Every memory brings more along with it. Sometimes they’re specific, lingering, moments and sometimes it’s a flip book, a mental shorthand where several years are condensed and rush by in a flash. And sometimes it’s not the memory itself but the realisation that there’s a memory there, just out of reach, slipping between neurones, elusive, like a shape in the fog or a shadow under the water. It’s those that shorten the breath and brush the spine. Like you’ve been touched by a ghost. Tendrils of the past caressing lost corners of the mind, withdrawing before they can be seen and remembered.

It’s always been a little dirty here. Shabby, chic, but not a combination of the two. Somehow both at once. The mansions of billionaires and the council flats all stones throws away from each other.

It’s the end of winter but in my head it’s a summer morning thirty years ago, probably about 6am, the sun already up and blinding, my eyes red raw and crumbling to dust without sleep, but sobered up enough to make my way up from one of the squares next to Portobello Road back to Notting Hill, hoping that the bus is running. It’s probably a Sunday. The streets are wet from the thunderstorms the night before. We turned the lights off at the party and watched the lightning through the window and played Purple Rain really fucking loud. Tins of lager and Thunderbird and probably some other stuff kicking about. Stuff that gave me a wicked fucking headache. We thought the thunder would break the windows it was so loud. It woke up some of the drunks we hoped would stay asleep.

Some market stall people are just beginning to set up and the hill was so fucking steep. I could’ve just got the tube from Ladbroke Grove to Hammersmith but my world was smaller then.

Jump forward a decade and a half and I’m at lunch in a little Greek or Italian place across from where the posh wine merchant used to be, hoping to impress someone I thought I was in love with.

Then back again even further than the walk of shame to a lunch where we snuck a beer or two and then went back to school. Wondering if the teachers would notice. Wandering the canyons of grand terraced houses broken up into flats, some of them crumbling, some of them with fresh paint, made whole again by a wealthy developer hoping to attract a wealthier buyer.

From the tube I walked past the Coronet, now a theatre but formerly a cinema. I sat in the smoking section twenty-seven-or-so years ago for Clear and Present Danger and smoked too many Marlboro Lights and drank too much beer afterwards. It was a shabby cinema. It seems quite a chic theatre.

A year and a bit ago a friend of mine and I drank cans of Tyskie and ate tortilla chips on the corner behind The Gate cinema just back down the road. The pubs were not open. It was plague time. It still is.

Turning up Campden Hill Road I remembered a generous client taken suddenly ill and now gone who lived only a hundred or so metres away. The hills are steeper than I remember.

A night in the Windsor Castle, a restorative pint after the worst wedding ever, five years or so ago. It was only meant to be a pint but it was more. It started off as three of us but others joined. Just at that right time late on a Sunday afternoon when all the roast-eaters have buggered off and the staff look so grateful you just want a beer rather than to specify some terrible preference for overcooked roast beef. We kept getting rounds in. It wasn’t closing time but it was late and dark when we left and I didn’t go home straight away. One of us from that night isn’t here anymore.

It’s a pub with hidden corners. Ancient panelling and small passages from one bit to another. Almost every corner holds a memory, even the garden. The same with The Churchill Arms down the road, with its myriad tchotchkes and cheap, great Thai food. The two couldn’t be more different as pubs yet they bear about the same share of my ghosts.

I’m not back here that often anymore. I think it’s been a year or so, sipping those cans of beer on a street corner. And yet, in spite of all the things that are different, it’s still like walking into a set of all my lives before. As though turning a corner it might be 1990 again, or 1998, or 2005, or 2017. And so when I’m here, I’m not all there. There’s a part of me lingering in the past, tracing old steps, sipping empty pints with friends who aren’t around anymore, getting into trouble and wondering how to get back.

That’s the trouble with old haunts. They’re haunted.

ten years

We sat around the table, the two of us, speaking in hushed tones. She was sad, disillusioned. He'd been a dick. Again. I poured out the end of the bottle into both our glasses. She looked at the wine and then at me, her large blue eyes surrounded by a haze of red. Hurt but strong. I took a sip and tried to look at the time without looking at the time.

What are you looking at? It's 4 in the morning. 

It's Game 4. The Red Sox could win the World Series. 

You came over here with wine when Game 4 was on?

You sounded like you needed wine.

I needed wine. You want to see if we can watch the game? 

It was the sort of late that just didn't matter. No exhaustion or sleepiness. It could have been any time of day.

Yeah.

She popped open her laptop and we looked for a feed, but nothing came up. The connection was too slow. We finished the wine and poured a whisky. 

One of the computer labs?

Could work. My ID's a lot out of date though.

I'll get us in. 

The rain pelted. The wind hammered. Both came from the east. It was cold. We leapt over puddles and leant to the right as we did to keep our balance. A proper Scottish gale. It was only a block. Cobbles one street, tarmac the next. A wynd and a half in between.

We dodged the empty kegs outside the Keys and crossed North Street. The lights around the library glowed but it was dark. But we weren't going there. She slid her keycard down and the lock clicked. One lone student sat working in front of a glowing screen. One screen out of dozens.

She logged us in and I found a feed. It was so pixelated. I still can't believe there was audio. Just a small window on a small screen. Small blocks of green and red and white and sand and grey. Blurs, really. My heart beat fast and my breath shallow and then there was no breath. She grabbed my shoulder and still there was no breath. We watched.

Pixelated, impressionist, Keith Foulke flipped a ball to Doug Mientkiewicz and the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years. I looked at her because I didn't really believe it. She looked at me because she was happy for me. It's a rare joy to be truly happy for somebody else. We laughed and ran back out into the storm. 

I woke my dad up with the call, but mine wasn't the last. My sisters and brother phoned too. We phoned our dad who handed the bat to Ted Williams 50-odd years before that. He sounded happy and sleepy when I spoke to him. Not as excited as me. As though that flame had been passed to me and he was fine with it. It was my joy and burden now. 

I said goodbye to him and hung up. I said goodnight to her and walked home in the rain. But I didn't go home. I walked to the end of the pier as torrents, gales and waves pounded and the North Sea raged and I looked out into the black and grey maelstrom of night and elements and I shouted and cried and punched the air and my hat soaked to my skull and I laughed because it happened and I couldn't believe it. 

Damp and cold I went to bed about 7 and was at work for 9. My shift ended at 5 and I opened a bottle of Dom Perignon 1996 for my colleagues and friends who knew nothing of baseball or curses or Ted Williams or David Ortiz. I explained everything, or I tried to. No one cared. There was great Champagne, what else mattered?

Everyone is in a different place now. But that morning, that day, ten years ago, everyone was right there, and it wouldn't have happened without them.