In those days there was a kind of feeling of pushing
out of the front door, into the pale exhaust fume park
by broad water pond where the grubby road eventually
leads to end field. Turkish supermarkets after chicken
restaurants after spare pawnshop, everything in my life
felt like it was coming to a mysterious close.
I could hardly walk to the end of the street without
feeling there was no way to go except back. The dates I
had that summer count to nothing, my job was a dead end
and the rain check was killing me a little more each
month. It seemed unlikely that anything could hold much
longer. The only question left to ask was what would
happen after everything familiar collapsed, but for now
the sun was stretched between me and that moment. It
was ferociously hot and the equality became so bad that
by the evening the noise of nearby trains stuttered in
in fits and starts, distorted through the shifting end.
As I lay in my room I can hear my neighbors discussing
the world kemp and opening beers in their gardens on
the other side someone was singing an Arabic prayer
through the thin wall I had no money for the pub so I
decided to go for a walk. I found myself wandering
aimlessly to the west past the terrace of chicken and
bomb shops and long dreads near the tube station. I
crossed the street and headed into virgin territory, I
had never been this way before grabble Dutch houses
alternative with square 60s offices and the white
pavements angulated with cracks and litter. I walked in
wall because there was nothing else for me to do and by
the breeze the light began to fade. The mouth of an
avenue led me to the verge of a long greasy A road that
rose up in the far distance with symmetrical terraces
falling steeply down and up again from a distant
railway station. There were 4 benches to my right
indispurced with those strange bushes that grow in the
area. These blossoms are so pale yellow they seem
translucent almost spectral and suddenly tired, I sat
down. I held my head in my hands, feeling like shit but
a sudden breeze escaped from the terraces and for a
moment I lost my thoughts and its unexpected glooms. I
looked up and I realized I was sitting in a photograph.
I remember clearly this photograph was taken by my
mother in 1982 outside our front garden in Hampshire,
it was slightly underexposed I was still sitting in the
bench but the colors and the plains of the road and the
horizon had become the photo but I looked hard and I
could see the lines of the window ledge in the original
photograph were now composed by a tree branch and the
silhouetted edge of a grass barge, the sheens the flash
on the window was replicated by gunfire smoke drifting
infinitely testify slowly from behind the fence my
sisters face had been dimly visible behind the window
and yes there were pale stars far off to the west that
traced out the lines of a toddlers eyes and mouth. When
I look back at this there?s nothing to grasp, no
starting point, I was inside an underexposed photo from
1982 but I was also sitting on a bench in Haringey,
strangest of all was the feeling of 1982, dizzy
illogical as if none of the intervening disasters and
wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty and
inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back, to
school; the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving
in my mothers car, all gone, gone forever. I just sat
there for awhile, I was so tired that I didn?t bother
trying to work out what was going on. I was happy just
to sit in the photo while it was lasted which wasn?t
long anyway. The light faded, the wind caught the
smoke, the stars dimmed under the glare of the
streetlamps. I got up and walked away from the spot of
little benches and an oncoming of Garish kids. Our bus
was rumbling to my rescue down that hill with a great
big fire Alexandra palace on its front and I realized I
did want to drink after all
