the eclipse behind the cathedral

It’s a Summer’s evening. The Eclipse is a Tudor fronted pub, black beams, white plaster. Inside it has a low ceiling and a tiny bar. Tables always at a premium. It has its regulars, who prop up the bar and have their own tankards. Although it looks like a village pub, this is a city, albeit one which froze in size around the time of the Crusades, and The Eclipse still has an edge to it, a place from where late at night drunkards will spill out onto the streets keeping the locals awake. Outside, there are twin benches either side of the door, set into to the fabric of the building.

That’s where we are. It’s around seven pm. We’re drinking lager, because aged 19, it’s what everyone drinks. There’s only the two of us, myself and a man called James, known at school as Muppet, who will go on in life to become a long-serving employee of the Bank of England, a reliable dad, a resident of Surrey. All these things are probably discernable in his frame and demeanour now, to the soothsayer, but at this point in our lives he still carries other possibilities around in his back pocket. We’re both negotiating our way out of childhood, on holiday from university, back from the growing-up wars. Our friendship runs deeper than any we have at university, but it’s also at its zenith. These are the last things we’ll truly share, after six years of school. For the next decade we’ll remain in each other’s lives, slowly drifting apart, the ties that bind, the common interests, eroded by time, geography and the atomization of the late twentieth century. Because really there’s no reason why James and I shouldn’t still be meeting and talking Economics until we’re old men, cozy in the complicity of the conversation game. But we won’t and we don’t and that’s just how it is.

This particular evening there’s an edginess around me and there’s a reason for it. My girlfriend, the one from University, is not with me. She’s gone back to her stomping ground, the wilds of Hertfordshire. Only, on this day, she’s meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. His name is Masa. He’s Japanese. He’s a multi-millionaire who was part of the Japanese Olympic skiing team. He lives in New York. A week after she met me, she took down the photo of him that lived on her wall. Destined to be together, until I appear. They are meeting in London. At his hotel. I don’t know where exactly. Somewhere on Park Lane.

I’m too self-absorbed to be really worried. She and I have been together a whole academic year, we’re about to move into a little house with a yard with roses in a place called Dunnington. We’re playing out some kind of fantasy of coupledom which we both need and which is already turning sour. Nothing will interrupt this sequence, I know, and even if something were to, I would recalibrate my horizon, suffer the crisis which will arrive sooner or later, the world would have shrunk, but then the world is expanding all the time anyway.

Although the truth is I’m not even contemplating any of this. I’m just edgy. On adrenaline and lager. James, because he knows me, picks up on my edginess. I explain the context. Perhaps he asks if I’m worried or not. I don’t remember. James says something along the lines of: “It’s good {or unusual} to see someone so passionate about things.” His thesis doesn’t quite ring true. Later others arrive and the evening changes or becomes more drunken. For the next three years whenever we’re back and we go out it feels like the end of an era.

I never learn what happened in Masa’s hotel room and I never force the issue. There are things you know in the heart which are more important than the things that are actually lived. As decreed we will spend the next two years of our lives together in a house with a blue door and a yard with roses. Sometimes he sends her envelopes stuffed with money.

For two years we fight a lot then we split up. She goes to New York and marries Masa. James has a child called George. James and I drift apart. The Eclipse is still there. To the best of my knowledge.

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on the way to queensway station, 7am

I once knew roses that grew in back yards.
I’d wait for them and most years they’d show up.
When they did, I was grateful, if not inordinately.
I thought we’d grow old together, somehow, the roses
And I, in our back yards. Duplicate that course of
Nature, inherit a thoughtless rhythm. My roses –
Although they were never mine, they belonged to no-one –
Came back to haunt this morning, cascading over
City walls, crying for gravity, flexing dormant
Memory muscles of shared seasons, long-forgotten.


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unfinished 4am poem, written in a hotel near barajas airport, madrid

Four in the morning is a transient moment in
A Spanish night. For some, the final minutes
Of a day which has ended in the soft
Enveloping grasp of alcohol and friendship.
For others in this functional hotel, it
Will be the last gasp of a day’s business
Which, far from soft, has gone on longer
Than was ever planned (twas ever thus),
And a night fuelled by lust for profit, or
A colleague, or mere security, which can
Only be attained at the price of nights like
This, a mortgage paid towards the family
Redoubt, the sound of your children’s
Exuberance of a morning still five years
In the future, a sound already heard as
The door is shut and you fall into bed, the
Fog of alcohol on your breath, an
Unfulfilled desire tempered by the knowledge
Of the investment you’ve made towards
The future you shall not dream about tonight,
But live one day, the day when the sight of
Your child in a sunhat playing beneath the
Pine trees beside the lake will trigger the
Memory of a bad joke, or the strange
Juxtaposition of pompous sixties
Architecture with the medieval wall
Hangings someone has chosen to adorn
The hotel’s walls. When your child trips,
And cries, you’ll smile at the investment
You’ve made to hear the sound of their
Bitter tears, and for a few perfect minutes
It will all make sense. Four in the morning
Is also the hour at which the earliest of
Risers make their way to the airport,
Wiping sleep from their eyes, leaving
Their partner and offspring behind to
Catch a bus, arriving as the lights come
On again, the bustle of international
Travel on the verge of spinning the world
Like a top; a world measured in the
Dead hours taken to trawl the very skies.

june 2010

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