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Drunk Walk

The Constitution of Wrights & Sites insists that alcohol be


consumed during business meetings. (I don’t think that’s
strictly true. This must be a reference to a secret
constitution.) It had been a meeting to lay out the basic
shape for making a ‘generic’ Mis-Guide. On getting home I
realised I was in no fit state to go to bed and needed a
constitutional walk. At the bottom of Danes Road I paused
to decide which way to go – I was thinking graph-like, with
the dip down into town and its granular uncertainties, the
unappealing rise towards Stoke Hill and the hard-to-escape
self-parodic matrices of suburban roads. I recalled a
conversation with Stephen about the private road beyond
Taddyforde Gate and how I’d never been down there. I set
off along the prison wall, the softness of the unfinished
castle on my other side. Wild voices in a nearby street
speeded my unsteady step. Stumbling past the Imperial and
Thornlea I approached the Gate under a dread tunnel of tree
roof and ivy, mundane and grey when viewed from a car,
on foot this passage this night glowed green and slippery,
silvery fishes of light squirming about in it. The world was
beginning to liquefy, becoming part of my extended
organism. But I was having to keep a part of me sharp so I
didn’t mesh with a car. Nothing coming and I ran across the
wet road and through the dried blood sandstone Gate in
which it is said is buried the body of one of those
conservative Kingdons (Iron Sam, maybe) who gave
Clifford his middle name.

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There was a shapely noticeboard on the right: “Our vandal
now entertains himself not by smashing the glass, but
stealing the notices. There are some sad people about.”
This was the only notice. Not stolen yet. The sheet of wood
to which it was attached rippled with dampness. A wave
passed through me. I stumbled down the incline. A turning
to the right and I thought I saw a kind of dread place
overgrown, at the end of a cold/cosy road among a ruin of
shrubs. A boat named Cho Cho San. A house called The
Chalet. I struggled through the clutching stems and slipped
in the mud, leaned against an ivy-scarred brick wall, like
the sucker-torn head of a Sperm Whale, the ground falling
vertically away 40 feet, a wire mesh fence wrapped
somewhere inside a low wall of vegetation, but I couldn’t
quite see it, nor where exactly the ground gave way to
emptiness. Be careful… On one side of me were the ruins
of garden furniture, a stock of maybe twenty long sticks
leant against an out-building, a snap of cast iron guttering.
I’m on a cluttered platform, beyond the fence of furze there
are long stems with heads full of seeds, and 40 feet below
is the railway, the level crossing and the ends of the
platforms of St David’s Station; a burger van, doing quiet
trade, is suddenly surrounded by two vanloads of police in
yellow and black, fluorescent wasps clustering. Once
served, they stand, clumped, not changing their spatial
relationships, for maybe half an hour, as I watch unseen –
the women with their hair pulled back hard. The state at
rest. A city acquiescent enough. Two trains cross – a
sleeper and a freight train. I lean against the wall and the
dampness spins around, the seeds swirl, I finger the ivy
scars but I can’t focus on them for very long. One copper

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breaks away to speak to three lads sitting on a metal crash
barrier – they slope off towards Exwick, the police
pretending not to hear their impotent curses. I stumble on
something like a dog bowl. I can feel the vertigo kicking in.
Sobering down a tube in the city. A pipette. Once stabbed
in the leg with one of those, the cul-de-sac scar. Now, I’m
hovering on a wound, an escarpment, a diving board, a
telescope, hovering over the cops and burgers, their black
and yellow calmness, their policed hair. I came away.

Stumbled right. The tar macadam gave way to a crumbling


world behind two out-of–place control barriers. Through a
gap in a wall the cross-section of a valley was waiting for
in-fill. I could see down a stepped earth descent to the level
crossing copworld and burgers. I went home. Past an
edifice of chimney, like a meaty gravestone. Past the
noticeboard, full of possibility. Back out under the Gate-
Corpse. Later I passed an ambiguous fence and looked
forward to crossing it another day.

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