siren
And most of the landscapes I crave aren’t blemished by pylons. I want salt-scored panels and pebbles and spray. There’s a siren on the speakers: H.M.S. Ginafore, sketching the Scottish coasts for me.
Nothing but grey-skies. Holed up in the living room watching the world of parents and push-chairs prepare for the winter. Bare bones of trees poke from behind the houses opposite. It’s really all quite comforting, quite controlled.
I’m put in mind of an untyped story, and rifle through old notebooks and photographs to piece it together. I look over images of Hastings to find a line of best fit, trying to divorce aesthetics from memory. Failing.
I have enough things to work with and work through. I have this review to write, for starters, due too soon.
curling
Crash-zoom on curtain netting: the television bores me. I start looping Ginafore’s voice in the back of my head, comforted by the whisper, by her curling tongue and the thought of her wilderness and waves.
I move, washing my face, trying to stay awake. I can’t sleep the day away. The sadness sees me trying to push through the mattress, hoping to be absorbed by it. Swallowed whole. I’d be left to the skewering of bed springs, the duvet covering every trace of me. This cycle of grim lows and elation - never manic but distressing all the same - reminds me of the crashing of the sea.
shoreline
I hate being stuck in my own company. I haul my coat on and step out for breakfast. The cold tries to creep up and under, but body heat prevails. Motion is now reassuring.
The face in the toy shop never changes. The vintage shop is never open. The church is still a chain pub. Right now I’m not sure I want that stability. The revelry and turmoil of the shoreline is calling.
I watch my breath steam and feel little droplets of vapour condensing on the bristles of my beard.
Mittens have appeared on the hands of children now, a sign that all the excitement of winter has crept upon us. The first – maybe only – snow of the season came and went very quickly. A sugar frost remained for a few days on rooftops and car bonnets that evaded sunshine.
bucket
My feet have taken me to a cafe and a wicker chair. In mind of the chill, I order a bacon buttie and a strong black coffee.
At home the melting water had seeped through the sky-light seal, forcing action. The bucket sits there, the erratic dripping a terrible distraction.
processing
This is about five years ago: The first hours of a new year we wrapped up and went downhill. Maybe seven of us, a little sickly by this stage as we’d been drinking all night. We walked to the waters at Netley.
I can sketch most of the area from collated memory. Through a crumbling gate of dark wood onto thorny shards of shell and shingle. Groines sporadically interrupt the beach. obstructing passage. Yawing ropes swallow ankles and twist momentum. Our beach, now, overlooked by empty pubs, some back gardens, some flats, a corner shop: all now dark.
I know who I was with... but cannot picture them there. I can picture only the splash of light that illuminated me and the lapping tongue of water a few feet away. Burning in the distance like the city of tomorrow were the fires of Fawley.
The towers are distorted by the darkness between us, and what is doubtless tall is made a metropolis in imagination. It could be a city that houses a million souls, and in the quiet night of another year I decide that it is.
scrabbling
Coffee makes my breath hot, and the tongue-sour taste does little to shake my reflective mood. Tonight may not be a night to go out. One more night at home. One more night to run around my memory. I don’t leave a tip, the sandwich was terrible.
It is cloud-dark when I get back to the flat. M– leans with his back to the door in the front room, smoking out of the window. The lights are off. It’s a great shot.
We’d be normal people if we didn’t write. I have in mind a night when we settled in his old room in Angel, lit only by candles and on a heavy drink. A battered chopping board sat on the floor between us cluttered with fragments of lemon and juice. We swapped stories and shots. Moving in together ended that.
M– doesn’t speak at all tonight. He just fixes on the faces in windows over the road. I don’t know why.
stirred
Notation. Lists. I have the facts. It is 27 minutes long, thirteen tracks in length, self recorded and the sleeves hand made. Is any of this important? I’m not sure anymore. Would these words help someone purchase this? Is that my job?
In writing about these sounds I should admit what is stirred in me. I react to music in my own way, buoyed by memories I have made. Memories that I want to dive back into, sometimes, with such a passionate strength, not to relive them or play them back in black and white but to actually experience those moments for the first time. It helps me avoid myself. A review can’t distill that.
exposure
I make a beeline for the Old Town on arrival. My refuge is The Stag. ‘Heroes’ is on the juke box again, as it is every time I drink there. I smile and order a pint before setlling in with my notebook.
The Stag is a pub that actively resents the smoking ban. A sickly patina coats the surfaces, and the scored tables seem to pre-date carpentry. The beer garden is stepped, offering a crooked view of the hill-bordered Old Town. Crenelations and exposure-blasted fortifications pepper the folded landscape.
The barman, young, stutters to a pretty punk “i could never be like that i was brought up by my big sister and i could only hit a woman if she hit me first and could hit me back” and the punk replies “Oh, I can hit him. I just can’t puch him across the road.”
faded
Back in bed now under cover hot mouth uncomfortable twitches coffee slinking slowly through nerves and depression and I need to calm down. Back under cover eyes shut open shut sick with tension heavy-lunged seeing sentences bleached blonde sneaker stares and I need to calm down.
Breathe. Back in bed staring at the blinds and an afternoon’s dark grey ache up my side after long abandoned stretches empty bed empty headed empty I need to calm down.
I return to Ginafore, let her sing to me for a while.
Her voice loops to a faded seaside synth and swirl. Close clips of soft lips trapped by the mic. Coughs trickle through with the creak and strain of an old guitar neck. Double tracked vocal haunting. ‘Comfort in Rum’ has the narrative and melody of rocks on the edge of the ocean. The twinkle and static of a satellite rolls behind the eyes, blinking in the dark.
Phone clicks and coughing, again. Ghostly, spare voices, creep and crawl into the world of each song. An album of reprisals, the title track resurfacing as a motif and a sentence. The chorus on ‘Nobody Knows...’ a gang, a multitude of the genuine and affectionate. ‘And The Racket They Made When The Lights Went Down’ comes back with a crackle and pop of drumskins and night.
drywood
Leaving The Stag I pitch for the beach. The Old Town fisheries hum with odor despite the coastal breeze. A cloying, salty smell, soupy in texture, contrasting with the husky drywood each shop is cased in.
Tall monoliths for hanging catch point out to sea. Black. Impressive. They always tickle me. Twin furnicular railways pincer what little of the town is worth exploring. I march over broken tracks and onto the stones, taught towlines running from the ramshackle sheds to the array of rickety buckets beached there. Ships look strange out of sea. There seems too much of them, as if what penetrates the waterline ought not to exist.
Continue.
Amusements. Tourist Traps. Bright lights and 8-bit jingles. The fountains in the crazy golf course run green. I’m not entirely sure it’s deliberate. The sound of the tide is a constant.
There are greater gaps between sights after that.
The pier, broken by the elements. Beaten and scored and dented on all sides, fenced off and bolted and barricaded, collapse imminent. Rust alone cannot bear a load indefinitely.
Nothing lasts forever. I should know that by now.
Nothing but grey skies.
I walk beside the sea for half an hour until I get where I’m going.
dripping
There is dripping again in the bucket in the hall outside of my bedroom. Irregular. A gentle reminder of the passage of time.
No, not gentle, I suppose, if water flows inside my home as well as out.