Tuesday 22 May 2007

Unspoken

Even now I'm not sure how much of what I saw was real.

Getting lost in the maze of flatblocks leading from a little behind King's Cross station up to Agar Grove, running behind and alongside the canal.

The last familiar point I remember was the Egg Club on York Way, cold, closed, and shuttered. At that time in the morning, I suppose that's only to be expected, but it looked a lot smaller in the half-light, and a lot more dead than I ever wanted to see it.

I picked up a discarded flyer pack at random. There wasn't a single flyer in it that was in date. Everything had already happened.

I don't know how we ended up where we did. We should have ended up coming out on to Camden Road and the relative familiarity of a long and fairly dull walk before we got to the next noteworthy outpost of civilization. And that was only a bloody 24-hour petrol station.

Instead, we took an unfamiliar path. Losing concentration, we had been swallowed up by buildings. Winding stairs and ramps took us higher, but although we could in places see the canal and tow-path along which we had first come, we could discern no way of reaching it.

While we could often climb higher, the stairwells that would have lead us down to street level were locked and barred...

The walkways between buildings let out on open-air car-parks, above road level, and with no lower stories that we were able to find. Some of the cars had been abandoned for months, tires empty, tax expired, as if they'd come up here one day, and no one had ever been able to work out how to get them out again.

Feral cats and foxes scavenged among stinking, overflowing bins, dragging away with them small prizes that we didn't care to examine too closely, and for a couple of brief instants the light of our torches illuminated eyes that by their reflected colour could have been neither cat nor fox.

Somehow, in time, we stumbled upon an exit.

Somewhere behind King's Cross station.

On half-asphalted roads where re-development work had one day stopped and never began again, empty and leaking warehouses stood shoulder-to-shoulder with brown-field dumping grounds and piles of twisted and decaying rubber and metal in the yard of a long-closed automotive works.

Metal stairs, tangled round with thorny trees that grew more than three floors high. These finished at a gate, which let out back on to solid earth. We sat for a few moments to drink, trying to breathe, trying to get our bearings, trying not to look at the trees that surrounded us, trying not to think about what we saw tangled between the branches and a warning-posted fence.

We didn't speak much.
When we stood, we continued along the barren patch of earth that lead through diseased foliage. It was only a matter of a turning and a few meters between where we had rested and the next gate.
Getting to it took a couple of false starts, and then, ultimately, a dash to the gate, eyes fixed in front of us, not looking to either side, nor to see what it was that a magpie among the trees had alighted on and begun to peck at.

That next gate brought us back to the beginning of sanity.
A couple of walkways and staircases beyond it took us to what was recognizably part of the main line station.
From there, a short walk and a tube train took us back to what passed for home.

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