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I didn’t sleep and, trapped in January 1994 in Stepney, in a single Victorian room, / I reached for a timetable
I didn’t sleep and, trapped in January 1994 in Stepney, in a single Victorian room,
I reached for a timetable and conceived a journey that would escape my essay
and took it two hours later, early and cold, with the commuters I’d never met - as far as
Swindon with an expensive morning ticket, snow on the platform and a Shostakovich cassette,
then, finding I was some way there, I knew the calling
was not away from home but toward it - or a version of it. I phoned my
dad and announced a rare visit, that very morning, in the snow,
like a belated joke Christmas.
The haul up the valley on a single track ended in his car and a precarious
dive up icy sharp inclines to that coughing, fractious estate — sofa in a garden next
door — where he’d ended up last year.
His heart attack had been in the Autumn, brought on by arguments with neighbours
and a despair I knew myself, shut up for Winter nights in a box
in a place people fought, but this wasn’t my future and I hadn’t much talked to him.
I didn’t now. The rooms were unredecorated since they moved in.
She asked me about having a girlfriend, to which there was no answer
but to look at the fire. I stayed one night and schlepped back to London
and lectures the next morning.
There he was, a trip away, still real, more than I felt I was,
and now paler, sicker, and living in a house empty of childhood but
still with someone’s Ninja Turtle wallpaper in the damp spare room,
full up with the unpacked junk of his life, and I was fifty pounds poorer.
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