The Road To Darker Killingbeck

The dark woman, who reminded me of an older woman with silver darlings and peat and a clay pipe dangling from the corner of her mouth, stood aside and invited me inside. I stood in the poorly-lit hall and could see several men playing cards in the front room through the gap left in the half-open door. One, old and grey gentleman with a horrible green polo neck sweater, a thick white beard, a cigarette trapped between his yellow fingers - blue smoke curling and rising upward toward the ceiling - looked up, a frown creasing his heavy brows. He nodded, showed me the queen of clubs, grinned, his huge yellow teeth escaping from between his lips, but I did not respond.

The woman brushed past me and I caught the smell of her stale perfume, minty and spicy. She walked upstairs without another word and I followed, the stairs creaking as I ascended them.
"That's strange" I said to the woman. "I thought I could hear the ocean"
"You can" she smiled. "It's only 100 yards to the beach,and there are stars in the sky to guide your way. Beautiful stars." She smiled.
I frowned, I didn't know what she was talking about

She showed me to the room of teenage memories, opened the door and switched on the light.

It was a room with a solitary single bed, a poster of a football team above the head board, a football scarf casually draped over a chair beside it, a pair of football boots under the chair. A book on a small bedside table, an exercise book and a pen.

I moved to a long mirror by a second hand wardrobe and glanced into it. A stranger returned my gaze, was this witchcraft?

The stranger looked vaguely familiar, like an acquaintance from a long, long time ago. As I watched I saw that he was the life and soul, a carefree spirit who liked to drink and have fun, but then he was removing masques, one after the other, but in such a mesmerising way that no one could tell what lay behind. I noticed...and thought about it later when I couldn't slip into sleep... though he was at the centre of the party, he was also standing on the margins looking in. Always being someone else, which ever way you looked at it.

I was overcome by a strange feeling of poignant regret.

How much did I regret not being twenty years younger, how much did I regret not fighting the good fight then, how much did I regret taking advice from those who said they knew it all, but really knew nothing, liars, frauds and cheats, their hubris only matched by the depths of their ignorance, those and their offspring. How many lives will they be allowed to damage, learned idiots, qaulified clowns. How many artists will they dissuade from picking up a paint brush, how many writers will they dissuade from purchasing a pen, how many photographers will they advise not to buy a camera? How will they look to tick the correct boxes before giving encouragement?

The room was small, yet lived in. Here is where someone plotted to take over the world, someone who was just learning about deceit and injustice, who had learned not to trust and felt the abandonment of every teenager and wanted so much to find out who they were and have the maximum fun on the journey, who knew not what lay ahead and didn't care, tomorrow would always take care of itself, and death was a cul-de-sac for old people, and bungalows were naff, and prog rock was a poor excuse for music of the most self-indulgent and overbloated kind, and everything had to be edgy and raw and stripped bare of pretentions. This was someone who wanted to start walking, keep going and never look back. Someone who wanted to go where everything was an adventure and nothing could ever be foretold. Someone who held the fascination of the world in his eyes and wanted to know everything. But all he found was dissonant sound and the headlong rush and the mostly futile opinions of existence.

A growing crescendo of sound climaxed and was immediately followed by a solitary piano tinkling in melancholic minors in an empty room, but in the end, he was always doomed to contemplate how he had got to a certain point in his life a certain time in a certain era.

In the distance I heard a train whistle. A strange, plaintive sound rising into the night air, and I moved away from the mirror and to the window. From here all I could see were houses, high rise flats and an open concrete square, where several cars were dumped or abandoned and seemed to be rusting. Time flaking the fresh paint from the exterior, the inner workings decaying and falling slowly apart, oil leaking slowly in thick globular drips from a cracked sump.
I could hear too, but not see, great waves crashing onto rocks.

And, anyway...what was he doing here? And, anyway...what was I doing here.

A high pitched sound caught my attention, it squealed with energy and shrieked with pain and rage. The muffled sound of people calling my name...over...over...and over, mixed with unfamiliar voices, people shouting commands...

"I lifted a stick from my basket and he ran out into the road" I heard the old crone say.

Sounds which resonated and reverberated.

Until, at last, I drifted off to sleep.