Little Black Book

Little Black Book

Present Day.

The fog lay wishful along the tops of the jagged skyline, rising like teeth to meet the grey sheets of London’s sky. The city sky is familiar, her jaw wide by half-light, waiting like a March day. Black book I thought, we’re here. When dreams come true it’s like stepping into the imaginary space of a painting yet to be coloured in and once you fill it, somewhere in your body was already there waiting for you. The night had been there telling stories, being awake was simply a means of gathering.

March.

It was in the calamitous early days, when the air was heavy with questions of will I be next, panic plane tickets bought back and forth’s, a search for some arrangement of home. People closed their doors, sealing off months behind them. Later, monotony formed new habits for the day in simple logical steps, I walk to the kitchen to make coffee, then I move to the other room or up the stairs, to set about surviving until lunch. Still, the effort of a cough from behind a masked mouth led to feeling buried an inch or two with guilt. Hearts weighed heavy from hours trapped indoors, feelings hanging like a heavy bell persuaded by the slightest breeze of a possible truth, looping minds with questions like is it all real? Looms of data spooled out across flat-screens all around the globe as we all watched it unfold.

Echoes became palpitations.

Windows spilling out salutations.

April.

By now I was in the depths of the South East where miles of rolling hills crept up and clung to the shore of the English Channel. Farms peered out from knolls and crevices, small settlements surviving, side glances from deer pierced the space between us, only the proximity of real eye contact could do. In the house I dug out old notebooks and found earlier stories I’d written on top of those hills, pages filled with places drier, more orange in glow. Now I sit within those tops, those sandy prenatal caverns casting a sail out hoping to catch the wind. I was in this first place, the only place since breaching the southern coast, heavy with bribes of adulthood and the carrion calls of childhood.

May.

In one of the guidebooks I found in the shed, Sussex is celebrated for its rolling South Downs and Roman history, paperback palimpsests where nightly damp enmeshed the front covers, entangling the meanings, Lonely Planet became Lonely Guide and Rough Planet. I peeled the two apart, but I was too late, they had made their own new form, and prying them apart would tear them both, which felt too violent for this space that had found a submission to survival. I didn’t know what to do with it all, my eyes crossing the space filtering through the noise of moss and cobwebs. I wandered my hand over the surface of dust, it reminded me of them, brushing aside those who had passed through. Arriving in this place held at the back of the garden by brash oaks and fences falling in over impatient roots I felt the cold air of something familiar on my neck, like two passing ships who finally get to meet.

I stepped over the thin line separating the shed from its garden, glass crackled under my trainer, I looked down, my back arched to look below, stuck right in the corner, wedged underneath the workbench, stood a small black notebook. I pushed my hand through the empty space snapping it back quickly in case something in there snatched it back. It was one of those notebooks with an envelope, like a satchel for words. It was written in, so in my hands the pages felt thick with thumbs that had leafed through and fluffed up the pages. In the little pocket a bus ticket, an appointment slip, three perforated stamps.

My eyes criss-crossed over the blotchy scribbles and half notes of half thoughts. Something’s too thick in the back of this book, I thought. I knew what it was, I did, but with obvious doubt. I’d flung into bird’s eye, viewing from above, looking over and over… it’s not real, I thought, running my fingers through note after note, finally counting… 20,000.

Hedgerows peered out from the grinning plantation as I reached one hand into the shape and depth of my pocket. I couldn’t move, a million pieces falling into everything around me. A jet of fear for the dropping of a bomb, or the crashing of a jet into garden – the silence crushing! I thought, and for so long.

I should go…

Thin rain whipped across the empty asphalt carving up the tubular shape of the road surrounded by narrow columns of silver birch, a wipe of fine silt carried by the wind felt across my face. Six miles to the station, I’d chosen the road, feeling safe with someone else’s money in my pocket. Nothing more than sheets of silver bark, I thought, moving my legs like molten wax along the empty road.

I gripped the tiles that hugged the station door, an open arch dripping with ivy. Long slats of real wood under my feet as I moved through the ticket office, the conductor's chair half spun in the wrong direction. A heavy ticking clock. Peering down the track it was obvious there wouldn’t be anything moving soon, but perhaps if I could get to the next junction. I took my eyes off the vanishing point and looked down to tie the lace that had come loose from my trainer, it had collected bright green grass stains and some mud, I’d trodden on and flattened the tip of the plastic cover at the end, leaving the edges frayed into a brush.

I crept over the yellow line on the platform and jumping down into the gully looked over my shoulder once more, catching the sight of the dew drop lights hanging over the tracks slowly turn on in the waning afternoon light. I felt company from this transition of light, knowing that the darker parts of the day could keep me going just as well. My whole body felt the warmth of a million jackets, and I would make it all the way. He would be waiting, as promised, two years and eleven months ago…