like you’re asleep.
I lie down next to you under the tree.
paradise
The good people of the town are asleep in their beds. The bad people of the town are asleep in their beds. The tourists are asleep in their bed-and-breakfast beds in the town’s bigger houses on the more genteel streets with their scent of high fir hedge, average price per person per night between £20 and £30, higher for en suite, higher for a guest house, a good bit higher for a hotel. Out down the empty loch road, and the monster deep asleep in the bed of the loch, the hills and the sky are beginning to appear again upside down in the water. It is half-past two in the morning and it is light.
Not that the light ever really went away; between eleven last night and two this morning the thin line of blue, which in midsummer means dark, never quite settled on any of the horizons round the town, and this is tourist heaven now regardless of foot-and-mouth, this is the place which will be reported later this year in the broadsheets as the biggest grossing tourist attraction in the UK because of its splendid scenery, its welcoming folk, its clean air and its light like this in the middle of the night, mundane and uncanny, prowling out as only light can, the big-pawed hulk of it unstoppable over the fields and the single track roads and the disinfected cordoned-off woods; unstoppable round and behind and over the out-of-town tree that not many tourists ever know about or find, the one by the well at the side of a back road, whose branches and trunk and roots have been hung (and all the other branches for yards around it in the roadside wood, all weighed down too) with the rags from shirts, coats, underwear, skirts, curtains, anything that can be ripped, and socks, hats, handkerchieves, scarves, things left by people making wishes they think will have more chance of coming true if they’ve ripped something up, something close to them, something they wear or something someone they love wears, and taken it there and hung it on a tree.
The woods are deserted. There is nobody on the road. The rags sway slightly, like terrifying leaves.
Across the farmland, over the firth and down into the town there is nothing but the noise of wakened birds. At the top of the birdsung High Street, inside the concrete box put there by the police, which, when locked from the inside, has no way in from the outside, the boy who’s been curled on its floor since three men he didn’t know chased him down the road after the club shut, all of them after him along the late night pavements and past the multi-storey and the night-blank shops and across the pedestrian precinct shouting how they were going to beat him to fucking death, standing round the security box kicking its door and battering it, breaking what sounded like bottles on it, then everything going quiet, and then the noise of birds, has stopped shaking and has finally fallen asleep. Inside the box it is always light. The light in there is vandal-proof. On the wall there’s a screen and a button for audio/visual communication with a police control room and the boy, who knows better than to ever press such a button, is asleep below the screen, hunched up against the wall of the box with his arm over his eyes.
On the pavement by the door of the box the broken glass is glinting. Up above the town early morning seagulls glint their white underbellies as they cross the sky, and the roofs of houses and the steeples of churches glint, and down there the black river glinting; not yet three a.m. and it’s light as daylight now over the town flanked by its new supermarkets, nestled in the curve between its bridge from south to north and its hospital and its cemetery where, the story goes, years ago two men once spent a Saturday night against the gravestones getting drunk, and just when they’d run out of drink a door handily opened in the side of the hill and in they went to a room whose walls were tall, made of packed earth
I lie down next to you under the tree.
paradise
The good people of the town are asleep in their beds. The bad people of the town are asleep in their beds. The tourists are asleep in their bed-and-breakfast beds in the town’s bigger houses on the more genteel streets with their scent of high fir hedge, average price per person per night between £20 and £30, higher for en suite, higher for a guest house, a good bit higher for a hotel. Out down the empty loch road, and the monster deep asleep in the bed of the loch, the hills and the sky are beginning to appear again upside down in the water. It is half-past two in the morning and it is light.
Not that the light ever really went away; between eleven last night and two this morning the thin line of blue, which in midsummer means dark, never quite settled on any of the horizons round the town, and this is tourist heaven now regardless of foot-and-mouth, this is the place which will be reported later this year in the broadsheets as the biggest grossing tourist attraction in the UK because of its splendid scenery, its welcoming folk, its clean air and its light like this in the middle of the night, mundane and uncanny, prowling out as only light can, the big-pawed hulk of it unstoppable over the fields and the single track roads and the disinfected cordoned-off woods; unstoppable round and behind and over the out-of-town tree that not many tourists ever know about or find, the one by the well at the side of a back road, whose branches and trunk and roots have been hung (and all the other branches for yards around it in the roadside wood, all weighed down too) with the rags from shirts, coats, underwear, skirts, curtains, anything that can be ripped, and socks, hats, handkerchieves, scarves, things left by people making wishes they think will have more chance of coming true if they’ve ripped something up, something close to them, something they wear or something someone they love wears, and taken it there and hung it on a tree.
The woods are deserted. There is nobody on the road. The rags sway slightly, like terrifying leaves.
Across the farmland, over the firth and down into the town there is nothing but the noise of wakened birds. At the top of the birdsung High Street, inside the concrete box put there by the police, which, when locked from the inside, has no way in from the outside, the boy who’s been curled on its floor since three men he didn’t know chased him down the road after the club shut, all of them after him along the late night pavements and past the multi-storey and the night-blank shops and across the pedestrian precinct shouting how they were going to beat him to fucking death, standing round the security box kicking its door and battering it, breaking what sounded like bottles on it, then everything going quiet, and then the noise of birds, has stopped shaking and has finally fallen asleep. Inside the box it is always light. The light in there is vandal-proof. On the wall there’s a screen and a button for audio/visual communication with a police control room and the boy, who knows better than to ever press such a button, is asleep below the screen, hunched up against the wall of the box with his arm over his eyes.
On the pavement by the door of the box the broken glass is glinting. Up above the town early morning seagulls glint their white underbellies as they cross the sky, and the roofs of houses and the steeples of churches glint, and down there the black river glinting; not yet three a.m. and it’s light as daylight now over the town flanked by its new supermarkets, nestled in the curve between its bridge from south to north and its hospital and its cemetery where, the story goes, years ago two men once spent a Saturday night against the gravestones getting drunk, and just when they’d run out of drink a door handily opened in the side of the hill and in they went to a room whose walls were tall, made of packed earth
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