Losing Haringey

In those days there was a kind of feeling of pushing

out of the front door, into the pale exhaust fume park

by broad water pond where the grubby road eventually

leads to end field. Turkish supermarkets after chicken

restaurants after spare pawnshop, everything in my life

felt like it was coming to a mysterious close.

I could hardly walk to the end of the street without

feeling there was no way to go except back. The dates I

had that summer count to nothing, my job was a dead end

and the rain check was killing me a little more each

month. It seemed unlikely that anything could hold much

longer. The only question left to ask was what would

happen after everything familiar collapsed, but for now

the sun was stretched between me and that moment. It

was ferociously hot and the equality became so bad that

by the evening the noise of nearby trains stuttered in

in fits and starts, distorted through the shifting end.

As I lay in my room I can hear my neighbors discussing

the world kemp and opening beers in their gardens on

the other side someone was singing an Arabic prayer

through the thin wall I had no money for the pub so I

decided to go for a walk. I found myself wandering

aimlessly to the west past the terrace of chicken and

bomb shops and long dreads near the tube station. I

crossed the street and headed into virgin territory, I

had never been this way before grabble Dutch houses

alternative with square 60s offices and the white

pavements angulated with cracks and litter. I walked in

wall because there was nothing else for me to do and by

the breeze the light began to fade. The mouth of an

avenue led me to the verge of a long greasy A road that

rose up in the far distance with symmetrical terraces

falling steeply down and up again from a distant

railway station. There were 4 benches to my right

indispurced with those strange bushes that grow in the

area. These blossoms are so pale yellow they seem

translucent almost spectral and suddenly tired, I sat

down. I held my head in my hands, feeling like shit but

a sudden breeze escaped from the terraces and for a

moment I lost my thoughts and its unexpected glooms. I

looked up and I realized I was sitting in a photograph.

I remember clearly this photograph was taken by my

mother in 1982 outside our front garden in Hampshire,

it was slightly underexposed I was still sitting in the

bench but the colors and the plains of the road and the

horizon had become the photo but I looked hard and I

could see the lines of the window ledge in the original

photograph were now composed by a tree branch and the

silhouetted edge of a grass barge, the sheens the flash

on the window was replicated by gunfire smoke drifting

infinitely testify slowly from behind the fence my

sisters face had been dimly visible behind the window

and yes there were pale stars far off to the west that

traced out the lines of a toddlers eyes and mouth. When

I look back at this there?s nothing to grasp, no

starting point, I was inside an underexposed photo from

1982 but I was also sitting on a bench in Haringey,

strangest of all was the feeling of 1982, dizzy

illogical as if none of the intervening disasters and

wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty and

inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back, to

school; the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving

in my mothers car, all gone, gone forever. I just sat

there for awhile, I was so tired that I didn?t bother

trying to work out what was going on. I was happy just

to sit in the photo while it was lasted which wasn?t

long anyway. The light faded, the wind caught the

smoke, the stars dimmed under the glare of the

streetlamps. I got up and walked away from the spot of

little benches and an oncoming of Garish kids. Our bus

was rumbling to my rescue down that hill with a great

big fire Alexandra palace on its front and I realized I

did want to drink after all