Sinister: I Was Just Hoping You Might Stay

[P F]

Every day is a leaving party of the heart. Who
remembers the Suncharms, the Badgers, Basinger and
Pushkins? Songs that tell me over again of the old
world: of the rehearsal rooms with nineteenth-century
amps and scruffy attempts at insulation: of the autumn
leaves and half-empty car parks that you look at
across the green while the bass player makes his move
to B and A under your circling notes. Corny, genre
equivalent of a 12-bar blues (listen to the bid for
epic in Pushkins’ ‘Sea Egg’), but I don’t hear it much
anymore, I can forgive: it probably seemed a one-off
in a million at the time.

The skies above in their permutations: on heatwave
days plain blue, plus massed impressive clouds: at 5
yesterday morning, woken by the memory of the
drinking, a zesty high expanse of wisps and trails,
weather portraits of old June, always new. Above me
now the cobalt background behind the insistent cloud
cover. The other night the blast of warm early evening
rain like a gigantic shower had been turned on:
desperate travellers pushing past into the train,
water bullets between the porches, the catharsis after
too many blinding sunny days to believe. The sky at
night, deep blue straight above at one in the morning;
the horizon as it comes down, still dimly lit at ten
like a tasteful restaurant, subtly darker blues, white
clouds turning pink at the foot of the airy page. “In
thinking of nature as harmonizing, in the diversity of
its particular laws, with our need to find universal
principles for them, we must, as far as our insight
goes, judge this harmony as contingent, yet also
indispensable for the needs of our understanding –
hence as a purposiveness by which nature harmonizes
with our aim, though only insofar as this is directed
to cognition”.

He leans on his bike at one end of a bridge in
October, in the cathedral’s long shadow as the cars
whiz past below us, talking about getting a band
together. Sillitoe world of bicycles and locks: Golden
Grahams, Stradhoughton prose in the bus stop’s
midnight blue early morning. Lager and Lime Top every
night: meek tenacity in the throng at the bar. Up and
down the row of faces in the light and darkness, youth
that doesn’t know its own youth. The same scanty books
of poetry in crumbling houses up and down the land’s
undulation. Every day is Valentine’s Day. She wears
purple lipstick at the bus stop. The Henriads.

- S’blood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged
bear.
- Or an old lion, or a lover’s lute.
- Yea, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe.

The raindrops falling on the glass roof over summer's
watery coffee. People I never know as well as I would
like, unaware that they don’t know what resignation
is. Snow suddenly coats the avenues from one broad
side to another, tops the crimson post box on the
corner of the silent street.

People fade and I forget you. (The ginger leaves
falling around the streets of Massachussetts, the
yellow and black school bus, the Californian summer
sky under which a car blinks out of memory.) I have
already forgotten too much. (A sneaked video moment of
last night’s match, Platini scoring in the European
Championship Final, before I must scurry, hardly
understanding what it all means, up the road to
school.) But I have remembered more than you might
think. (Grey streets of Guildford as the Berlin Wall
comes down: at the top of a slope a busker singing
Sting outside the Our Price.) I have forgotten you.
But I haven’t forgotten YOU.

I suppose

(the orange street lights on the way from the
Fruiterers’, the heave of the midnight traffic under
overpasses, down thoroughfares)

that it’s goodbye

(the sun blazing off a vast green pitch, hundreds of
miles away, as for two hours France in bright blue
play Brazil in canary yellow, on a screen in the dark
middle of a party)

to the old ways.



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