the suburbs

There is a small brick station, lost, blind behind the leafy trees. If you walk hurriedly by it on a blustery Monday morning you might mistake it for a post office or a 1930's municipal building in a state of disuse or disrepair. There are so many stations like that, half in the countryside, linked to the city like an open wound. One day you will get on the central in the dark and stop at every station, walk up the stairs into the light and look at all those small worlds I'm not a part of.

The spiritual history of the suburbs: ice-cram vans prowling on empty summer roads, lemonade and ice clinking in tall glasses, cricket on the radio,  the dull aftermath after Wimbledon, the early arrival of a brief September light enough to chill us in the shade, remind us that all this cannot last. The grass growing thicker by the hour, the last war veterans sunning themselves, their facial expressions having been fixed many years ago, cats and dogs deep in their dreamworld, a young girl just breaking out of hers.

At night a drunk utters his first coherent words of the day, a silver-backed fox slinks through the broken wooden fences out into the sloping gardens and fields, the perfume of the flowers brushing against her, past the constant roaring drum of the motorway traffic. The last song is playing at the straggling party down the street, the plates heaped up next to the remains of the barbecued meat and fish, the bones, the toothpicks, the stained paper tissues that had looked so pure when tightly packed together, the clocks that have croaked, the exhausted, childish giggling, the bodies loosened, hands autonomous of the mind-and it is still not clear at this hour who will sleep with who.

"S", who has worked hard to get here, looks out of his bedroom window in partial disgust at what he sees below him. He looks out at them as would his ancestors, ancient Russian Jews, with great pity and remorse. "Is this a life?" He feels the warmth of the presence of his wife and children sleeping cozily behind his back in a parallel world.

In winter the suburb is Japanese. It is quiet and formal...The last true rituals are played out, the big metaphysical questions worked out in the tawdry details of wrong turnings,  chances that have slipped by. How did I end up like this, my hands so unsure? The summer of my childhood, it seems like a minute ago, less...these patterns, these arrangements, stitched together..what do they all mean? Here we are, a name on a map nobody wants to read. The old gods, Pan-Shiva, weigh down on us like the spirit of the dark forest. You wait, each day, for the threshold, for some great turning point in your life, an event that will draw a line under your past. Jesus-Christ.

In the late afternoon the tinkling sound on the rail tracks like the jangling of keys, the train that passes us by, floats, curves way out from the ghost station, our abandoned little frontier outpost, this temple to some forgotten god. No-one gets off, no-one gets on. We have no idea of the journeys other people make, their easy-going accommodation with the world and with risk.

My life, folded like a Japanese flower, simple and ornate,already a thing of the past.

(Lines from John Burnside. Film: The Swimmer)

~~~

The short story is a gem but the film, well, now, that's another story. As with John Huston's The Dead the film version outdoes the short story in darkness, strangeness. It's the perfect summer day, but already there is a dark cloud up above, heading this way...