South Eastern Train, between Lewes and Gatwick, 09.28

More Tunes, Fewer Chats

Don’t know enough about trees and how they work to know why the leaves are so brown this year. Only a few golds, mostly many varying shades of brown. Vaguely melancholic. Which is how a friend described Guston and now how it feels as autumn sets in. Late this year. So much rain prolonging the greenery and maybe now to blame for the brown. Read in The Times or The Guardian fashion supplement when trying to escape from the other news, that brown is back. Elegant, they called it, old money they probably added. My nails, painted somewhere between chocolate box and nut bowl, are on point. Suella gone (for how long) and Cameron back in cabinet and Gaza razed and hostages not returned. What to do other than read the fashion pages. Wifi patchy. Nothing like being a frequent user of public transport to make you obsessed with its ineptitude. Tree on the line. Last month returning to London from Wigtown or Edinburgh - journeys blur - trespassers on the line, train guard announces we will continue slowly; not sure that’ll work out well for the trespassers, arrive in Euston so late that the tube’s off. Uber home. I have no late night Ubers left in me. No night buses. Give me the holy sanctuary of a train, departing/arriving on time. Difficult to differentiate between sea and sky now, each bleeding into the other. At Eastbourne, train doubles back on itself, branching into the depths of the countryside. Shakes violently as we move towards London. Read the speech I will give later about Ava Anna Ada, and how else could I write anything but a horror story. Think of Genet’s to escape from horror, bury yourself in it. Certain epigraph for a future book. Today, I must avoid the horror. Work demands I concentrate. What a filthy luxury to have. Turn the music up. David Holmes’ new record. Makes me want to dance. Recalls early April, some time around my birthday. Spring. World waking up. Some time short of London Book Fair, of Ava Anna Ada being announced. Some feeling of jubilation. A friend wining an unexpected and big prize. Out celebrating. Dragging them to a club afterwards to meet other friends. Get told off in the line for bringing other people into the wrong one; they put stickers over our phone cameras. In the toilets, a sign, more tunes, fewer chats. Sneak the sticker off the camera for a moment to take a photo. In the cubicle next to me, my friend does the same. Back to a crowded dance floor, three floors of it, pushing to the front to see David Holmes behind the decks. Always a good night when he plays. The holy communion of strangers. We leave under a full moon, send each other pictures of it later when we congratulate ourselves for splitting some time around 3, and not at dawn like the rest of them do. Text the same friend now that we need to go dancing, this will sort us out. Although under a stone heavy sky; damp trees, some on the line, some not, the speech for a horror novel running around my head, it seems a big ask of a night in a club. Oh the fucking filthy luxury, again, of all of it. Of switching off and compartmentalising and continuing amidst the horror; of turning the music up loud and dancing and writing my silly little books that do nothing at all. Necessary fictions, the epigraph to Grace Paley’s short stories, and tell me Grace, how are we to spend our days. How?

(Missed yesterday because yesterday was work and unpacking boxes and trying to find something clean to wear today and moving and trying to work and having children not in the their new schools yet is something else. This was written in real time on the train going into London. Still not in London.)