Drunk Walk

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 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. 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 GateCorpse. Later I passed an ambiguous fence and looked forward to crossing it another day.

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