Prakrtilaya

by
Nick Papadimitriou

It is shaken,

This way down to old hospitals,

So ivy-packed sills

Frame faces looking out

Surprised now by blasts on the downs.

It vibrates:

A memory of sibilant heaving,

By wet edges of tumuli.

Look here -

Ack-ack.

Stuttering with shell-shock

We infiltrate the Cinque Ports

And, flourishing our helicopter sticks

Down dust roads pinked by sunsets,

End at clankings

End at floodings.

*

I go out into winter weather. Mist wraps the familiar forms and suddenly the tumult of traffic is romantic. On the heath the dead stems of the teasels stand like crosses to the fallen life. The chestnuts twist, muscular almost. An unrecognised bird, green with a large behind, flaps mechanically into the beech copse.

I must grow out of this waiting, this expectancy, which cannot be satisfied. Each hedge, wall, lit house seems to point toward the she who waits for me. Beneath each shrub, inspiration for all woodland sounds, the Leafy One sits. The orange-lit roads of the suburb, with their familiar curves just discernible in the gloom, lead me straight through to her.

As Julie and Keith wound down towards the station, Easter 1971, the grasses wobbled and some secret song rang shrill through years to ditches and seaside caravans. Here, where samphire parts onto picnic parties and sandy toes, she watches us. These deckchairs are loaned out to us, courtesy of her grace.

Hard man, turn away if you must; administer with precision, as the railways of Europe deliver up the victims. I escaped and hid in an oak in Białowieźa. Fungus and nuts sustained me. Later I came to an electricity substation – it was Mill Hill, 1965. A poet rambled on in a café but my interest had moved on.

The trees and mycorrhizal networks in continual contiguity. The bleeping lights mounted on slabs at the airport’s edge. You fade from cornfield into crescent; the clacking of plates being washed, and the rush of dishwater heard from the alleyway. I am a loping stranger muttering behind tobacconists. I catch the bus in the rain.

                                                                                                           It rains against the cooling towers,

                                                                                                           The sound of children playing

These chimneys are black against the night sky; these trees bent, ancient in suburban back gardens. The high-level sewage conduit runs off the watershed. We are momentary configurations of gravel only. I pull my hat down over my ears, better to keep the north wind away. Feet crunch on unseen cinders and a smell of cat food rises from the air-ducts.

At 23.30 a car passes quick, seen only for half a second from the alley. It turns off down Clack Lane and I hear its dull progress along the other side of the houses. I wish I were sleeping in a garage tonight, a sheet of cardboard and a grey duvet. About 02.37 a cat saunters up and joins me. Your majesty is in all things.

A security light clicks on at number 41. It magnifies the laurel leaves - great ovals where the withy meadow once lay. You are uncoiling now from the long sleep and it spreads to where a motorbike cuts along the flyover, up into the outliers and over to suburbs still unexamined.

I stride off across the bypass, up the dirty lane and through to the old isolation hospital. Asbestos slats give onto tussocks cracking in cold air and mildewed sacks on piles of broken bricks. You once stood over these dying moments and watched discharged patients chew Wagonwheels while my raincoat flapped in the damp air. It is deep night now and I cannot anticipate my next move. A bus passes, its lights off, its seats empty.

III

I visit Dr Lang in his fine house in Totteridge. He is a skilled practitioner and catches the past in a Kilner jar. His home is a commune for time travellers and worshippers of Kali. As I ring the bell I place my nose to the stained-glass lily set into the front door. I slide my nose across the pane and watch the statue of her undulate in the hallway and shift from blue to mauve.

His garage is a capsule: a rusting Morris Minor dust sheeted against all possibility; stacks of old knitting patterns; period oilcans; and yellowing wartime maps from the Mail – homes for harvestmen and earwigs. In the warm kitchen Mrs Beaver serves cupcakes in crinkled wax paper. A radio plays Michael Tippett. Dr Lang emerges from the greenhouse, from his experiments with shepherd’s purse and coltsfoot.

Across the valley a row of white bungalows sits on the tip of another watershed. I see rockets fall and remove them in one go. We perch on mounds of dead sea-creatures capped by sands and smoothed-out stones. A diplodocus schleps past Woolworth and Keith’s hair flows into scruffy locks and jaundiced decades in Highgate. He is a professional old hippy, much loved in the libraries and chophouses.

Tippett fades to Constant Lambert. The Watford Way brushes aside the wild service trees, the cuckooflowers. Flags unfurl on factory roofs. Munitions works become sofa warehouses and car parts traders. It is an office block memory; Xenia in her silken drawers, Janice has a pain under her pinny. I wasted the summer of 1966. These metal bollards at alley’s end remain – I saw them three weeks back. I saw you.

Now sunken spigots chortle underfoot. Kali squashes a pigeon beneath her tyres on Clack Lane. Dr Lang recalls his first commune near Alma Atta II; it was 1957 and the cultural thaw allowed for his methods. Simon Dee is losing it, stained loon pants and jeering lips, and the paint you splashed on the concrete culvert by the brook complements the comfrey and the ramsons years on.

Yeah-yeah-yeah becomes wooh-wooh-wooh. Old git crouches for a shit in Hendon Park, 1971. He is sweating and writhing. Waddles the rest of the day on his haemorrhoids. Dave Davies spits like a cat on Fortis Green Road. Keith’s purple Mini is parked at London Airport. It is a moment’s ride to sediment lagoons in cold rain at Perry Oaks. We encouraged the development of the famous Activated Sludge Process with our fibrous turds, Princess Diana style.

This afternoon I saw you. It was on the Hendon District Motorway. You drove past, watching me trudge through swathes of dead cow parsnip. Mill Hill towered above us in the rain, the green roof of the research establishment a density at the heart of a curving space. If I could get you alone in one of these villas, the years spent in municipal parks would be retrieved.

Later I rose to the downs at Harefield. The consumption hospital gleamed white against the Buckinghamshire skies. A raven croaked in a gap in the woods backing onto creosoted fences. I recalled you in the Białowieźa in your black shiny Macintosh. Rusted irons ran to phosphorous works. Bison gazed inquisitively on that day in 1944.

This absence will not end. The ending would signal a still bigger loss and will not be authorised. Somewhere far off I hear a rush of freight along the railway. They too search for her. They too allow for nothing. Chalk weeds – milkwort and sanfoin – wave momentarily. Gladness ripples through the grass as the calf muzzles the chicken wire.

The Town & Country Planning Act sat on the map. Behind the planted willow trees lurks the mythic outskirt. As noon stymies the land, choking drainage ditch with heat, something bounded by cable stanchion and gravel soaks the past into its vat. We compact to rags in local news archives, drawing square-eyed layabouts to our simpering dusk

                                                                                                                        The town, spread like a membrane

                                                                                                                        Cones and pods

                                                                            Flicked by a grey wind

                                                                                                                        That drains the fire

                                                                                                                        From a human face

                                                                                        And the intrinsic tone and hue

                                                                            Of a regional memory

                                                                                                    From the cells of its inhabitants’ skulls.

*