Recurring ghost past

And to my left, the station. The usual suffocated clamour from in there, the tannoys, broken-off shouts, communal buzzing. I nip in to that place and head to the sandwich store, which is at first a creamy square in a great gloom. Even inside there’s a distinct graininess, like a grim fog of light.

Identikit packets laid out along the shelves, mediocre folds of bread or whatever. It’s so dim I just grab one of the first I see, a vague slab of beige, pay the figure behind the cash desk, and rush out of there back into the scramble. It shakes me up, I’m swept along by it.

I don’t bother trying to identify with any of those – those what? They don’t look pure human, certainly – surrounding me, as without looking I know that they are nondescript echoes of people I’ve seen before, maybe even those I once knew. It drains me to actually focus. Instead I pretend I’m one particle of a giant moving mass that’s drifting, sliding over the concourse.

I’m one simultaneous body in the river. Then out, in what takes an age but also happens in an instant. Buses, of the old-school kind surely, because this is the music that resembles what I remember came from buses, squeaking somewhere in the densefogs, invisible monsters rattling to their destinations. Prowling behemoths, their headlamps burning away the mist. Then the tentative outlines of these vessels floating away, to another place.

I’m going too, moving with my sandwich, the atmosphere blistering my one naked hand. Every day I come this way. Or a version of it. And each time I’m flattened by a mind-echo of a once-spied place within these lands. But my mind’s been frazzled to the point that the labyrinthine layout is completely scrambled by an edgy domain. Yet I sense it in the air, in the smell of the air – a tiny telltale of the recurring ghost past.

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