Reaching Out

Somebody in the flat below ours has taken up the didgeridoo. Their gutteral rumbles and wails come up through the floor, resonate in the weary flesh and bone of our feet. It signals you are not alone.

Switching

Weeknight, quiet city. It’s a balmy eleven o’clock in San Diego, which lies sleepy and tolerant under a deep blue sky. It doesn’t think much of night-time: the streets glow electric gold and the palm trees, tall slender personalities, nod and doze. The homeless sleep ragged humps in the shadows. We pitter-patter through the gentle streets peering in at the drinkers and diners, on our way to the supermarket.

In the sterile fluorescent aisles (American abundance multicoloured on the shelves) the only thing I want to buy is a pack of St. Paddy’s Day themed cupcakes, fifteen of them held in stiff transparent plastic, as delicate as eggs.

Another night I’m on my own, it’s nearly midnight and I’m far to the west of where I want to be. I’m crossing a dark parking lot by the harbour, breeze beating warm like feathered wings against my face, one eye on the faceless clusters of quiet-talking men around their cars. That’s why the woman surprises me – sagging face, layered clothes, hair short and wispy and too sparse, suddenly in front of me. She asks me for a quarter.

I’ve got one loose in my pocket. I saw it glint on the concrete by the sea this afternoon, picked it up with thoughts of what I could buy with it flitting through my head. Money’s tight here. I give it to her now, thinking fate and easy come, easy go.

When she hears my accent, she tells me I need to get out of town. “It’s a bad place here,” she says, “there are evil men that do evil things. Go anywhere, just get out of San Dio.” The night is close and hot around us as we hug and move on on our seperate trajectories.

Two days later found me paying attention to fate again, at the Greyhound station downtown: bag at my feet, 99-cent sunglasses glaring the last of San Diego back at itself.

Screaming

The seagulls cry outside our window, and they sound like nothing so much as the voices of children yelling and wailing. When they wake me in the morning, dragged up through the cobwebs of dreams to kick out of sleep in my too-warm sleeping bag, I always think there’s something going on.

Brain cycles through possibilities: apocalypse? car accident? paedophile? before I clutch my senses together and realise the voices are screaming in an alien, avian tongue.

Their troubles aren’t people troubles, so I roll over and go back to sleep.

Hitting It Big

He has a classically handsome face – a Hollywood cowboy face, strong and sensual and stubbled, with weathered blue eyes like coloured glass in his head and always so cynically amused – on a flawless frame and the way he slumps in the armchair in front of us, sinewy, is just right.

He’s melancholically in love with this life – post-show parties, globetrotting, stoned, ripped, twisted – and he suits it well, hitched, drawling Canadian delivery and rockstar attitude.

I sit across from him, wondering where he learned that trademark penetrative stare, the one that says I see you and you make me wonder about the possibilities but honestly I could take it or leave it; the filthy, deep-plunging eye contact that lingers on your skin.

In love maybe, but he puts me in mind of falling. What he pushes onstage isn’t confidence, its disinterest. He flings out wit like a billionaire spending money. Offstage – here, his Edinburgh flat, oft-mentioned wife and kids conspicuously absent – everything he says carries the aftertaste of despair.

Still, impressions change. When we finally say goodbye at three AM – “Okay, that’s it, I’m kicking you out.” – and he puts his arms around me and squeezes – “I’ll see you again.” – the solace of hot human flesh tells me everything will be okay.

Mulling

Softly rained upon night-time, air moving cool on my skin: face, hands, neck. The coquettish sky promises glimpses of star-pricked stratosphere in between the cloud. To anyone inside, the garden behind the hostel is invisible in the darkness. To me, the grass – and the single, monstrous tree – breathes relieved wetness. Because I can, and because, despite loose acquaintances, I haven’t made friends here, I’m standing alone on a lichened wooden picnic table at midnight, smoking a cigarette and idly browsing the yellow-lit windows.

New York lends itself to these contemplative fugues. The city’s an immense entity, and it pretends to not care a jot if you wander about it thinking deep thoughts at night. I think I can feel it paying attention, though; the gentle weight of it is just at my back.

I play along and ignore it. I watch the people indoors do what people indoors do; and I watch the rats, and I watch the roaches, and I chain-smoke and talk to the lonely tree.

Working It

New York City. I was told by an old hippy guitarist (relic of the expressive sixties, neither burnt out nor faded but weathered and hardened and diminished to his altruistic essentials) that it was the new Florence (renaissant), the only place to be in the twenty-first century. The city’s a bundle of sensation to me: it’s the smell of cigarette smoke on my fingers, in the folds of my clothes. It’s the pale strip of sky far up above the street. It’s the rattle-crash of subway trains in the filthy subterranean bowels. News-stands and their grubby owners; express and local on opposite sides of the platform; taking your chances crossing when the sign says ‘don’t walk’.

Just smile and let them hear your darling British accent and they’ll do anything for you, Robyina said. I let my personal mash-up of ragged-jeansed, roach-flicking bum and sweet English rose do its work. The city never denied me anything.