Extract of
Alysson's Shoes
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I rang home and left
a message on our answerphone. Hi, it's me. Mac, look,
I've got caught up here, I'm having to work late; I should
be back around seven, something like that. My voice brisk,
matter-of-fact, as though it was a day like any other,
an ordinary work problem.
I sat on the train to Wimbledon, looking down on the rooftops,
the tenements, the windows with dirty net curtains, the
hidden lives of Vauxhall and Clapham, and the cemetery
at Earlsfield, bleak in the thin afternoon light: in the
distance the colours of the flowers on the graves faded
to grey. I had never in my life been so afraid.
At Wimbledon I changed, got on the blue and yellow train
that goes south. It's crowded in the rush hour, you see
it on the news sometimes, people pushed up against one
another, jostling for seats: but that afternoon there
was hardly anyone travelling that way, and the cold stations
we passed through were empty except for the pigeons. The
embankments were covered with brambles: you could see
people's back gardens, their sheds and heaps of compost,
the back ends of things, a football pitch with worn grass
in front of the goal-posts. I sat there in the silent
carriage, feeling unreal. And arrived and stepped down
onto the platform, in this place where I'd never been.
Only a girl with a buggy and a tired slow man got out
as well as me. The platform was high above the houses
on either side, looking down into the winter gardens.
Thinking back to that moment, I find it hard to recall
what was going through my mind: some notion perhaps that
I might be able to salvage something, to put my case,
restore the balance of life. But this is pure supposition:
I really can't remember, it's all been blotted out by
what happened afterwards: it's hard to put myself back
there and make any sense of it all. Yet the things I saw
around me are all there in my memory, as clear almost
as if I was standing there now: the feathery shapes of
the bare trees, the colours of the gardens, brown and
russet and sepia, warm like the hides of animals, the
tangled banks that sloped down to the gardens and that
at midsummer, I guessed, would be brimming over with flowers:
the precise quality of the light - filmy, blueish already
into evening. The train struck fabulous sparks from the
track as it pulled away into the blue distance. |
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