I am waiting for the platform to be announced.  Looking up at the parade of train names under the Departures sign.  Individual heads looking up, waiting.  For the same train, I think. There is a desk behind me, a help desk, a woman with a binder and a tatter or worn pages inside.  She is talking to a younger man standing beside her, both wearing the different shades of blue marking a transportee.
‘…if they’ve got the gift of the gab, they just talk and talk,’ he says.
‘And they’re just the worst.  The laziest, the most useless…’
A woman with a buggie walks up towards past the desk, stops.
‘For the 10:24 to Manchester, when will be able to board?’ Patient, innocent.
‘You’ll have to look at the departures board,’ the woman says stiffly. ‘It’s still getting ready.’
My platform is announced.  The stream of heads turn and start walking fast.  Several people are running.
On the ramp down, I remember the arc of a bird.  We were driving from Galway to Dundalk, a damp gray morning, a low gray car, deep shrubs lining the road.  A sparrow or starling made a slow, graceful glide over the hedge ahead of us, bouncing with a thud off the bonnet of the car.  It went upwards, higher than before, landing lightly on the road behind us.  It was ballet, dead.

I steer the three of us into the Cancer Research charity shop, because the week before their display window had held a series of commemorative cat plates that I thought would be perfect for my flatmate’s birthday. The shop is decked out in pink: ribbons, balloons, posters.

‘Would you like a biscuit?’ The hunched woman at the counter asks.

‘No thanks, I’ve only brushed my teeth.’

‘How about if you donate a pound for breast cancer? You can pick a balloon and maybe win five pounds, you can name a duck, or you can guess how many sweets in the jar.’

I give her a pound, saying I wouldn’t need any sweets.

‘Why don’t you pick a baloon? You could win five pounds.’

‘Some people have already won five pounds,’ another shop keeper chimes in. ‘They’re really in there.’

My friend gives a pound a picks a balloon. The woman asks me to pull it down for her, and the thumb tack pinning it to the ceiling falls as well.  My friend winces and looks away as I’m pushing the tack into the balloon, and it disappears from her hands.  Picking up the rolled up paper on the floor, the finds she hasn’t won anything.

I pick the one just above my head.  Bursting the balloon, the dark roll I’d seen inside is simply gone.  We look on the floor, the table, it’s not there.  As my friend’s boyfriend begins his choice, the woman finds a thin strip of pink membrane, a small bit of paper hanging from, dangling off a miniature column on the side of the decorated table dedicated to breast cancer fund raising goodies.  I haven’t won anything either.

Greg, however, has two lumps of paper in his balloon, and the larger one turns out to be ‘£5′, written in pink.   He immediately says, ‘Ah, I’ll just donate that money.’

‘Are you sure?’ The woman asks incredulously.  ‘That’s very nice of you.’  I had just been thinking we could get a fiver off if we bought anything.

Later, we are walking down Turnpike Lane.

‘Isn’t there any real food?’ My friend asks under her breath.  She’d just turned down a samosa from the store we just left.  I remember a small sandwich deli around the corner that I believe she’ll be comfortable with, so we begin trekking that way.  I’m relieved that it is there, that it is open.  The woman running the shop is sitting at the one table in the long room that makes up the ‘Sandwich Cabin’, talking in a language I don’t recognize to a grey haired gentleman.  His sandwich is grilled, I can see tomatoes.  Greg orders his: chicken, salad, nothing else.  My friend gets the same, I think.  She seems so sullen and serious faced, I can’t tell if she’s relieved to be getting a sandwich, unhappy about the choices, doesn’t like the woman making her food, or if my neighborhood has scarred her in some way.  I turn over my shoulder, looking out onto the road, just in time to see a rat scamper in the doorway, following the wall into the Cabin.

The man looks up from the table to me, then back at the door way.

‘Was that…?’ He says it quietly.

‘Yes.’ I say, smiling uncertainly and raising my eyebrows.  He looks surprised, sits down again occasionally glancing at the corner past the display counter.  I decide not to tell my friends.

Minutes earlier on the night bus, she had stuffed our engagement ring down the front of my shirt.  Our stop had come up.  As I shuffled my way to the exit alone, one of the two hoodies in front of me half turned.

‘Smoke on this,’ he said, and I heard a fizzing as he tossed something into the bus.

‘You fucking bastards!’ Someone yelled.  The firework was kicked out of the doors just before they closed, bouncing off the bus stop advertising to under the bus.  I was walking away when the loud, cringing sound went off.  One fellow in the bus had decided to confront them, banging on the door of the bus, shouting threats.  The two hoodies taunted him from the outside as the bus stood at the red light at that immediate corner.

‘Put in in the hole,’ I heard one of them say, as another firework went off somewhere beneath the bus.  The light changed, and the two scampered off across the intersection.  Around that corner, a tall, shaven-head man was pacing around his motorcycle parked on the paving.

‘What the fuck man?’ He said, looking at me pleadingly.  I stopped, thinking he was going to talk about the two pyrotechnicians just witnessed.

‘They come in, they meet two guys, then they just go.  That’s supposed to be my fiancee.’  He looks at me wide-eyed. ‘My fucking fiancee!’

I turn and keep walking.

On the train to Bristol, the clouds are rolling and heavy.  A dark gray low over the muted browns and greens.  I stare through the window through my left eye, looking through my own reflection until the doubled ghosts meet and become more solid.  In front of me, hovering alone over the landscape, are two sullen eyes staring straight back.  I think of the projected eye in Boorman’s silly film Zardoz, or how in one Talking Heads video a large, blinking eye is projected onto the side of a suburban house.  My two left eyes seem dull, unnaturally still but with an imposing presence in their corporeal appearance.  I quickly shake my head and let the illusion pass.

The queue for the post office at the back of the shop is surprisingly short today.  In a few minutes I am at the window.

‘I just need to send this to the U.S.,’ placing the yellow envelope on the scale on the counter.  It weighs 0.333g.

‘That’ll be one pound twenty.’

‘How much is it to register the envelope?  Is it even worth it to the States?’

‘Well, what’s inside?  How important is it?’

‘It’s a ballot, just something I want to definitely get there.’

‘It’s three pounds twenty extra.  It means someone will sign for it when it arrives.’

‘Alright.’

He walks away, stamps the postage on a large, square box, lifts it and places it on the floor, and walks further back.  He gets a new packet, presumably full of the small forms for registered packages.  He comes back towards the window a few minutes later.

‘Pass the letter through to me.’

I slip it in the narrow window underpass.

He puts his left index finger on the envelope address and begins typing.  I watch his finger, thinking at first he’s entering the final part of the address: DeKalb.  But that doesn’t fit.  He starts another word: M-E-M-orial.

‘It’s a really tight race between those two guys isn’t it?’

The envelope does say ‘Election Mail’ on it quite large.

‘Yeah it is close, it’s crazy.’

‘But it’s not like in previous years, neither of them are someone you can tell will definitely be a strong leader.  You don’t know who will come forward.’

I shrug self-consciously, it doesn’t feel like me.  ‘What about a few years ago?  Bush and Gore were more of two bad choices, both very boring.’

‘Yes, yes, but before that, there was always one person you could tell it strong, who will win.  It’s not like then, the American people have….no choice.’ He laughs at his own little ironic turn of phrase.

‘Yeah, it’s a funny one,’ I add lamely.  That’s been my stock ‘anyway’ phrase recently.  I don’t feel up for committing who I voted for, that I think either way it will be a change, and despite all the hype and rhetoric I guess I do believe Obama will be a good step.  He continues in silence, then doesn’t even look me in the eyes when he hands my receipt through.  I thank him and leave.

Wind and rain swirl the house, we decide it’s a day to watch a video.  By the time I cycle out it is only overcast and blustering, and I enjoy being on my bike for those fifteen minutes.  Coming up to the film shop, though, I remember where I left my lock key.  I pull up all the same, and ponder just leaving my bike out the front.  People do it in Dublin even all the time, I know I’ve seen it here, and I half trust Stoke Newington.  But I know I’d try to keep one eye out the window in vain – just to see it roll off- while I go through the trial of video hunting.

Two guys pull up on bikes.

‘Are you going in there for a minute?’  I jerk my thumb towards the video shop, holding a heavy U-lock in my other hand.

‘Yeah.’

‘Any chance I could lock my bike to yours?  I just realized I forgot my keys.’

‘Sure no problem.’

‘You’d like to trust the neighborhood, but you never know.’

‘I wouldn’t.’

Their two bikes lean against the black shop front, and the taller guy starts wrapping a thick chain around their frames.  Just as he almost locks the two he remembers, and lets me put my own bike on top of theirs.

‘Thanks a million.’

I pause to go in the shop for a second, waiting for them to finish as the second guy adds his own lock to the trio.  I feel we’re on a mutual expedition now, maybe I should ask what we’re all going to watch.  I follow one of them in, mumbling my thanks again.

Once inside, I have a list.  I had prepared for the inertia of searching by narrowing it down beforehand: spy films, and failing that, anything else on the list.  Of course, the shop is organized by country, then director.  I know little or none of these facts about the films I’m looking for.  Our Man Flint…no.  Torn Curtain…no.  I remember we had talked about seeing the original Solaris; all of his films but.  The two guys are still there, casually browsing the ‘Comedy’ section, then ‘American Indie.’  I look in ‘British classics’, then in the TV section for the Gilmore Girls.  I start to panic, returning to places I had looked already to see if I had missed anything, constantly re-checking my list.

I hear one of the guys say, ‘Let’s just go with this.  We’ll be here all day.’

They begin to leave, I start to follow them out.

‘You make a choice?’

‘No didn’t find anything I was looking for.  I’ll just call it quits, I’ll be here forever otherwise.’

They say nothing, once I get my bike I thank them again and turn around quickly to hop on the road.  I am intending to go home, get my key, and come back.  I make it home and stay there; we end up watching Born on the Fourth of July.

We are sitting around the sink in a kitchen.  My friend is explaining the benefits of a newly acquired job, selling sausages at a market.  I helped put him in touch with its owner, and he introduces it as, ‘This job Chris got me…’  I smile at the thought, as if I had hired him, or rather smirk quietly to myself.  One of guys living in the house, someone I had met years ago during college, I can see from the corner of my eye looks over to me and, seeing me smile, shares a similar smile.  I don’t look directly at him, but instead look down at my shoes.

Several days earlier, I had traveled down to see an abandoned apartment in Southwark that had been turned into a sort of crystal grotto.  The set of apartments is signposted, with an arrow pointing to one row, while a queue of people stand outside a door on the opposite end.  An open door nearest me bears a piece of paper saying, ‘Information Room, Coffee and Tea Available 50p.’  No one is inside, just some newspaper clippings, flyers, and a few bags, and another sign saying, ‘Only a limited number of visitors are allowed inside the apartment at any one time.’  I go outside and silently join the queue, hoping it leads to the installation, but don’t ask.  Opposite, is another open door, into which one member of the queue had recently disappeared.  I turn around to walk inside, but am stopped by a, ‘Hey.’

A tall, sallow-faced man in a black bomber jacket saunters up.  He looks me up and down in a side glance.

‘You…here to see the exhibition?’

‘Yea.’  I hold back the temptation to be a smart ass.  Why else would I be here?

‘We advise you wear boots into the exhibition,’ he says in a nonchalant almost-whisper. ‘But you don’t have to.’

‘Why is it “advised”?’

‘You don’t have to.  You can wear your normal shoes, you know, if you’re in a rush. ‘ He looks around, still talking. ‘You might get blue stuff on your shoes, but you know, it’s your choice, it’s all part of the experience.’

‘Where can I get the boots?’

‘Just over there.’ He points to the door I had been heading towards. ‘You can leave all your bags and such in there too,’ waving as if he had been just about to tell me bags weren’t allowed inside.

I walk over to find another empty room, this one with a dozen sets of wellies along one wall.  Back outside all booted up, the man is leaning against the wall near the entrance to the apartment, casually listing off the places he has been.  ‘I’ve been to Dublin been to Galway…’

Two people exit the darkened doorway.  ‘Alright,’ he says, waving a hand, ‘go on in.  Only three of you.’  The next three people shuffle in, and he resumes his talk. ‘You know Temple Bar Gallery?  Right in Dublin city centre, they feature it on the Art Trail.  I been there as well.’

Eventually I get inside, and when I emerge five minuted later, he is talking to a new set of people who have queued up.  ‘I’ve been to Cairo, Morocco….

It rains in my dreams.

I am walking through a low ceiling hospital’s countless corridors, searching unnoticed but knowing I’m not allowed to walk so freely.  I spot several key chains, then a flat, hexagonal shaped disc that when handled properly acts as a fingertip massage.  I think, this is perfect for Katie’s birthday, for her editing and trumpet playing, but I am dragged out into the wet trees.

Later, I am traversing a large barren landscape to come to a hollowed out wreck of a building, hanging seaweed like some sort of ghost ship.  I have been sent to find the crow-being’s god, and in a room on the second floor I know the disparate parts of this god are kept.  The peeling wallpaper holds several pictures in simple wooden frames, and I lean out the window to give the signal.  ‘Ah! ‘ I shout out into the mist, ‘Ah!’  In response, hundred of crows arrive to pick at and carry together this found deity, working at the eyes int he picture frames and bearing them back.

I wander on down a field, to stumble upon a small festival going on, only to find my friend Christian dancing hazily in the crowd, and our friend Martin singing for this skill-less but energetic punk band.  He used to drum, I think it’s a good suprise to find him out front, leading with voice.

In the library, there is a large, central cube, a monolith of stacked books rising from the ground floor to the 3rd floor.  I am eating an apple, walking around the small walkway on the top floor.  An older woman is squinting through a digital camera to the court below the stairs.  I walk around three sides of the cube, and each part of the way she is there, taking a photo of its rise.

Later, four film directors sit in chairs accross the front of a screening room that is entirely red.  After much reluctant but well meaning talk, they have opened to the floor for questions.  The man immediately to my left begins, ‘Why do you even use the word cinema?  It strikes me, from these films that it is more a question of, and I hate to use this word, anti-cinema, a sort of denial of…’  He holds his wire frame glasses in his left hand, sticking its end in to his mouth between pauses.  He goes on for several minutes, seemingly intelligently, but all I can notice is his slender fingers.  Long, thin, held together delicately but shaking uncontrollably each time he makes a point, sweeping them in a casual aside as if to hide their tremor.

The first support act starts.  It’s a low ceilinged and bare-walled, and as the drones and waves begin from his consoles all I can see is a tense elbow jutting out occasionally from the column in front of me.  It is incessant, a sore already grown, and my right ear reacts: I can feel the changing pressure of its tissue-rattling, but it mingles so closely with the music I don’t know what’s what.

Around in a semi-circle, the audience is silent, still faced, I think they must mostly be musicians why else could they stand this with such intense nullity.  What is this music for?  It is a cinema soundtrack, and I try to make corresponding images in my head: large, godzilla-like feet trample irregularly over a barren tree landscape.  It’s not for dancing, or nodding.  I wonder whether it’s even for live performance, the way it stuns the audience into sat reception, its energy hanging near the naked dimmed bulbs.  It must be the spaces, in my mind I unravel several of the day’s thoughts, begin the opening for an essay I’ve been thinking of, and then I realize I haven’t been listening to the music at all.

It has changed slightly, a sort of watery slashing that sounds like a tiger savagely trying to swim.  Katie leans over, saying it sounds like Cookie Monster on too much acid.  The struggle continues, swelling but not moving, and the slow shifts are not revealing in their movements.

My flatmate lights up her face with her phone, then after pressing several keys shows us the screen: ‘This guy has exactly 30 min of ideas.  I’ve calculated it.’