Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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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
2
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.