NIGHT

NIGHT


I am walking along Kingsthorpe Front in the dusk. There's a chill in the air and a light rain is starting to fall. I'm so involved in my own thoughts I barely notice when somebody screams "Lazy bitch!" out of the window of a passing car.

Then I hear my name being called. I look back and this girl is waving at me and blowing kisses from the window of a black car stopped at the traffic lights opposite Waitrose. She's young and cute, with long black hair combed straight down on both sides of her face. I raise my hand and wave but I have no idea at all who she is.

Later I find out it was my friend Sonia.

***

Does it make a private journal self-conscious and inhibited knowing it will soon be seen by the public? (I dunno, ask Allen Ginsberg.)

***

What's this prim over-made-up middle-aged woman in a BHS trench coat listening to on her ipod in the seat in front of me?

***

The children rush home from school to put on cheap sportswear and shuffle around in the rain smoking roll-ups.

***

It's impossible to walk down a slowing bus with dignity.

***

Is it possible that karma is morally neutral? that one thing simply follows another without intent or judgement?

***

Sick with tiredness at 2am, hating a man for wearing pyjamas because it's me who has to iron them.

Get up, come downstairs, turn on the radio, close out the dreadful sound of birds singing as the sun rises.

***

4.50am. The clock in the conservatory drags the sun over the horizon with every laboured tick.

A cock crowing, coughing, yodelling insistently somewhere nearby.

Made it through another one, boys.

The miracle of morning.

Only night workers feel no optimism at dawn. Their leaden minds and bodies sink towards the grave.

***

"You don't have to call me sir."
He gets a hard-on relinquishing power he claims never to have had, or wanted.

from the author's journal.