Death between Berlin and Vienna.

Chords are played on a piano in Berlin. They are played with a slow, melancholic touch, late on a cold night. The apartment is quiet and the sounds travel through an open window and echo around the empty square below. The music and the brittle light of the stars ricochet off the walls of buildings gleaming with sleet, though ricochet seems to be too harsh a word to use for chords of melancholy piano music, though I cannot find a more appropriate word to use. I could say instead that the music bounced off walls but perhaps bounce would be too frivolous. So we will leave it that when the music was played by a slow, despairing hand the sounds flowed out of the open window to be redirected out of the empty square when they touched the wet walls. Some of the music along with some shards of broken light slithered down the walls to dissolve in puddles of snow melt.

The melancholic soul of the pianist was transmitted through the quiet atmosphere into hallways and attics of buildings all the way to Vienna where they disturbed the dust in one particular closed-up room where generations of my family took their turn at dying over many decades. I heard the music arriving in the rustle of an evening newspaper. My grandfather heard it also and it disturbed his sixty year sleep and he paced around the room for a long time, fretting over pictures that had hung on the walls since before he was a boy, photographs that had been faded by age and revenge.

*

Now the light of the moon is glinting off the wet cobblestones in a small town in Umbria. The world has fallen silent, or just about. The only sound to disturb the cold peace that has blown in from the countryside is the occasional squeal of a cat roughly mated by a passing Tom. The back street I walk along is narrow; in places I can touch the houses on both sides at once when I stretch out my arms. In the near distance I can see wooded hills on top of which the moon seems to be balancing. The smell of pines and cooking drifts about on the night air. A door opens quietly onto the street, letting a wedge of light fall onto the cobbles. A women puts her head out into the street, holding her dressing gown tightly around her body. She looks around but doesn’t notice me standing in the shadows. A man pushes out past her, takes hold of a scooter that he pushes down the street away from me without responding to the woman’s wave, and soon in the quietness I hear an engine kicking into life and the scooter zips away into the night, buzzing like a demented wasp at the end of summer. The woman stands in the doorway for a while looking up at the stars. I can smell the smoke from her cigarette and hear a slow melancholy playing on a piano from inside her house.

*

And so to Syracuse. By the time the music arrives the moon has moved away. I have an espresso on the terrace of a café opposite the cathedral where the early morning sun glints off the wet, white marble forcing me to hide behind sunglasses. No-one else is about, or almost no-one. A priest comes out of a tiny dark door in the side of the cathedral. Black, ankle-length soutane, black hat, green scarf. He sneezes in a loud, uncontrolled fashion almost losing his balance and his hat. He looks embarrassed and pretends it never happened, he never filled the quiet piazza with a vulgar sneeze. A nearby dropping of pigeons is startled and lifts off the white marble pavement in a flap of dry, dusty feathers to roost on the roof of the cathedral, and as they and the sneezing priest leave the piazza it returns to its melancholic quietness to make room for the piano music pouring into the morning out of an upstairs window above the café.

Brasserie Federal, Zurich.

While I’m waiting in Zurich (watching the spy in the mirror who is wearing a hat just like mine) I’ll take a seat in the Brasserie Federal. I’ll have the peppered venison with red cabbage, chestnuts and apple, with a Falken schwartzbier to drink and fried apple rings with vanilla sauce to follow. Then coffee, after which there’ll be just enough time to board the 21.40 to Prague. We’ll pull out of Zurich train station precisely on time and before long the seats will have been turned down into beds and I’ll be able to watch Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic zip past my window under a clear, winter sky full of crystal and pearl.

Peaches, but not so fresh.

 We sat on a rock in the smoke of a hot afternoon. The sun beat down hard but the trees around the stream used their thick-packed leaves to filter out most of its merciless rays. Only a little direct sunlight managed to penetrate the leafy canopy so not much grew beneath the trees making it easy to find a good spot on the river bank to spread out the picnic blanket. There were squirrels, and the only noise was of the fast river pouring over rocks. And there were birds. I don’t remember much else about the day, but I do know that it was the day that Peaches died and after that there were no more picnics and we moved away to live in the city.

An over-active imagination helps.

This is the kind of night when I'd really like to be at sea. It would be late at night, well after midnight; the boat would be a cargo vessel without the frivolity of holidaying passengers. I'd be on deck, well wrapped up and with a full hip flask of whiskey on me (not rum, even though rum is more commonly associated with the high seas) and the sky above would be like a bubbling cauldron with clouds surging and spilling in all directions, obscuring the moon and the stars. I'll have spent the evening in my cabin reading something deep and unsettling and the spray from the ocean will refresh my eyes without dissipating any of the melancholy that will have accumulated around my heart as plaque accumulates around improperly brushed teeth. I peer out through the mist and the spray knowing that there is nothing to see, knowing that the coast of Panama is still three days sailing away, but the smell of the land has already begun to arrive on currents of warm, wet air.

Too much Proust perhaps.

Under the influence of too much Proust I became sluggish of mind and bowel. I was just nineteen. I spent most mornings in bed, unable to bring myself to face the day till my bladder was about to burst. Once it had been emptied I returned to bed unless the smell of warm buttered toast persuaded me otherwise. Or a freshly baked Madeleine.

My sense of self worth became so low that when I thought of my name I couldn’t see it written with a capital letter. My sister was convinced that it was a case of unrequited love. She pestered me for information, a name, and concluded that it was an older woman who had been disappointed by romance during some war and still thought that she too was nineteen.

My brother coaxed me on the occasional warm, summer afternoon down to the river where we used to swim as children, hoping that the fresh air and exercise would claim me from the clutches of despair. Once or twice I ventured reluctantly into the cold, slack water under the bright sun, but the feel of wet clothes against my skin was unbearable and the new road that ran alongside the river bank prevented swimming without clothes. Till the previous summer there was no road, no drivers and therefore no need for modesty.

At the beginning of that autumn my father lost patience with my torpor. He declared that I had become so apathetic that even growing a moustache would be too much of an effort for me. So he arranged with Doctor Carduso (with whom my sister was having an affair) for me to be admitted to a sanitorium to be treated with frequent doses of vigour, vapours and purges.

Possessions were forbidden at the “Hôpital Purgatoire “ and after just a few days sans Proust I began to revive. I even fell in love with a young nurse but Doctor Carduso’s jealous nephew found out and she was fired. I thought I would descend again into the depths of stupor once Nurse Collette had gone, but her replacement was just as acceptable, and I concluded that the problem all along had just been too much Proust.

Death in a huff.

Death sat gaunt and unloved at the piano in Alice's drawing room. His coattails fell almost to the floor behind him. Light from candles threw shadows on the walls as his fingers raced over the keys releasing shivers of Tchaikovsky that transported Alice to some place where she believed love could never touch her. Leonard came in after midnight. He sat on the recently reupholstered Voltaire in the corner of the room and watched Alice start to sink into oblivion and gravitate  towards Death's clutches. He blew blue rings  of cigar smoke towards the dead roses that were looking in at him from the patio on the other side of the French windows. From the air he grabbed hold of the floating notes of Tchaikovsky as they passed under his nose. Alice was already starting to dissolve. Leonard mixed the black notes of Tchaikovsky in the bottle of Chablis that Death had left to chill on the hearth of the unlit fire. As he poured the adulterated wine into a pewter goblet the musical notes were rearranged into a waltz-like version of "Knees up mother Brown". The spell that Alice had fallen under was disrupted. She swooned; Leonard caught her and laid her limp, feeble body on Daphne's chaise longue. Death put on his overcoat, wrapped a white scarf round his scrawny neck and took off in a huff.

Apologising in advance for bad poetry.

It's cold today and the winter home is full of sweety mice, the rabbit beat the butcher at a game of magic dice; I fiddled at the corner where the fancy ladies pass, but they called a big policeman and he made me move my ass.

At Bristol university the sand was running out, the hourglass tangerine fell down and no-one heard her shout; my captain pirouetted as the whiskey made him numb, so he didn't feel the consequence of landing on his bum.

Can you tell that I've been drinking more than ketchup laced with rum? Does my docile constitution speed you up and make you hum? The little Robin red breast shared his apples and his cheese, so I'll follow your example and I'll get down on my knees. And say sorry.

Cold River Bath.

 

I climbed up into the hills today, the same hills I used to camp out in many years ago, sometimes with friends and sometimes not. It wasn't camping with a tent of course, just finding somewhere sheltered and then lying there till morning looking through the trees at the stars, confident in the vague hope that there were probably no strange characters wandering about. In the morning, stiff and sore from lying on the hard ground, the best remedy for the aches and pains was to jump into the freezing cold water of the Shimna river and stay there as long as possible and hope no-one was about to run off with my clothes. I've never felt so clean. Breakfast was fruit and the promise of coffee when I got back down out of the forest into Newcastle. I thought today of suggesting reliving that part of my youth to my wife and then thought better of it.

Church bells and kidney stones.

I've just set myself up for a fall. On this little afternoon with its thin light and the suggestion of approaching spring, I read yet again Camus' devastating little story "L'Envers et l'Endroit", the title that he gave also to the collection in which the story appears. I've never read anything so shocking, tender, depressing, sweet and uplifting in all my reading days. It makes me want to lie on my bed smoking a cigarette (even though I don’t smoke) and contemplate life with all its vague deceptions and uncertainties; to watch it through a net curtain on the surface of which the soft, shy sun throws down the shadows of a tree whose heavily-leaved branches sway gently but hypnotically in the heatless, sunny quietness. Through the open window the strains of a Church bell announce a death; from the flat below a howl and a squeal announce a birth and I'm caught in the middle. As dear Albert asks, "One man thinks, another hollows out a grave for himself: what's the difference between the two?" Surely we all need to be both, this side and that, but I'm no good with my hands. And what about the university graduate with the bitter soul who served me up this coffee that's now gone cold? Where does he fit in? But now that I’m able to read again maybe my recent depression is beginning to lift after an unreasonable length of time. Maybe I expelled it along with that kidney stone. On the other hand I might descend into the depths and ponder hollowing out a grave for my bones.

Getting Married in Prison.

The night before Jim got married the other inmates on his wing of the prison poured buckets of water over the small exercise yard knowing that the heavy freeze would turn it to ice by morning. As soon as the cells were unlocked, and while it was still dark, Jim was dragged out of bed, stripped and bundled along the corridor past the kitchens and out into the full, searching glare of the spotlights that rained down on the yard.

In no time he was on the ground being dragged by the ankles over the rough ice to the cheers of the whole wing. Prison warders changing shifts watched the prank being played on the groom from a distance, amused: although the perimeter of the jail was as tight as a drum the regime within the walls was relaxed. Politics, Irish prison politics.

When Marley thought Jim’s butt had been slid about on the ice for long enough he called time on the pre-wedding entertainment and the men went in for breakfast laughing and shouting and leaving Jim to pick himself up off the wet, bloodied ground and drag his numb, lacerated ass in after them.
He ached all over, but the pain didn’t really kick in till the hot water of the shower started to thaw his frozen cheeks. Some of the other men started to think they had gone too far when they saw the damage but most just laughed. Someone tried to turn his shower tap to cold. He spent the next hour lying on a bed in the sick room with the two nurses picking gravel out of the wounds that ran from his shoulders to his ankles, wincing with every drop of antiseptic they poured into them. He was to be married in a few hours.

At 10 o’clock the bridal party arrived at the prison gate along with the permitted 10 guests, all bundled into two minibuses. It took from then till noon to put them all through security, checking out the flowers, wedding cake, top hats and the frills and flounces of dresses for drugs, knives and whatever else might be smuggled in.

The over-excited sniffer dogs, the searching hands of the guards and the smell of the tiny search rooms each honoured guest had to pass through on his own soon dampened the party spirit, but the sense of anticipation revived as the appointed hour for the wedding drew near and all was in place.
The guests at most weddings are usually anxious to get to see the bride as she makes her entrance, but at this wedding it was the groom everyone waited eagerly to see; most of the guests hadn’t seen him for a few years.

When the wedding party was settled in the small chapel and the flowers had been stuck in a vase, the music Carol had brought along with her started playing through a speaker at the front. Prison guards took their places at the back, and a door at the side opened letting a nervous-looking Jim into the room accompanied by a minister. He was limping and seemed stiff and uncomfortable, but Carol thought he looked good in the suit she had bought for him and had brought along when she visited the previous week.

 Fifteen minutes later it was all over, they were married. Fifteen minutes was all the prison allowed for the preposterous frivolity of a wedding, and fifteen minutes was all that was needed. A quick prayer, a hurried reading and two almost inaudible “I do”s and the deed was done, but there was still the reception.

Filing out past the prison guards, Jim, his bride and their collection of family and friends all looking ridiculous in their finery were given one small plastic glass of non-alcoholic champagne. A prison guard cut the cake, neither bride nor groom being authorised to hold a knife within the prison grounds. Fifteen minutes were allocated for greeting and congratulations then one of the guards, the only one with a sense of humour on display, lead the couple through a door into what he announced as the honeymoon suite. Everyone strained their necks to get a peek through the open door where they saw a bed and nothing else under the dim glare of a flickering fluorescent light. The door closed, leaving the guests on the other side of it along with the guards.

This was the moment Jim had been anticipating. With no marriage there had been no conjugal visits allowed but now he had a wife, and after today he would get to have sex six times a year, and today was to be the first of those times. The anticipation however soon evaporated when the door banged behind him and he was alone with Carol for the first time in three years, with his own family and Carol’s parents on the other side of the door not four feet away. How could he perform under that kind of pressure?

It didn’t seem to inhibit Carol in the slightest. In no time her wedding dress was lying in a heap on the floor so he added all his clothes to the pile, but when she ran her hand round to his back and down onto what she always said was his finest feature - his butt - he let out an agonised yell.

Carol jumped back grabbing her dress off the floor, covering herself with it, shocked and bewildered, not knowing what she had done wrong. The gathered family on the other side of the door fell silent. One of the guards burst into the room giving everyone a ring side view of Jim’s lacerated body, the wounds freshly opened by the putting on and taking off of his wedding clothes, blood trickling down his back and thighs onto the floor, the wedding bed still unused.

Another date had to be set for the consummation of the wedding of Carol to prisoner 123456/789.

Murder at the Quacking Duck.

The Quacking Duck was a night club in the basement of a hotel in Beirut till a shell landed on it on New Year’s Eve at the turn of a year back in the seventies. Magda had just finished a set with the band shortly before midnight and was stepping down from the small half-moon stage. I had been waiting for her at a table at the back of the smoky room along with Zainab and Nabil. That’s when the shell hit.

The lights were dim; the applause was weak and half-hearted at that time of night before the main act came on to see in the New Year; we were all tired after the long bus ride up from Latakia where Zainab and Nabil had arrived by boat from Alexandria the previous night.

The shell must have hit just as I turned my head away from the stage to see if the bar was clear enough to let me go and order more drinks. There was a confusion of noise and light and sudden movement. In an instant I realised that I was lying on my back with a small, round table lying on my stomach, its legs sticking up in the air inelegantly, but I couldn’t figure out why. Why had the world been re-arranged without me seeing it happen? Why was I looking through swirling dust at the ceiling? Why was Zainab lying on the floor with her skirt pulled that far up? Everything was wrong but there was no-one to tell and I didn’t know exactly what it was that wasn’t right.

“I’ve fallen into a coma”, I thought, “I’ve had a stroke. I have to break the spell”.

So I tried to speak and move. That worked. Forcing air and sound out from between my dry lips was the first act of rehabilitation, the start of the long process of putting things right, bringing order back into life, but it was only the first tiny step.

Bit by bit reality sunk in, pieces of a jigsaw started coming together turning chaos very gradually into order, but many pieces were missing or in the wrong place. Some bits got moved round in my brain as other people joined in. Someone started to moan, then another. As the reality of pain kicked in moans turned to screams, but Zainab wasn’t making any sound and she didn’t move. Sirens blared. Water gushed from a fractured pipe. Noise began to build and men started walking around the room, taking long strides to avoid standing on whatever was in their way, and the world was sitting at an odd angle.

Someone bent over Zainab then straightened again and came over to me. A weight was lifted from my chest, dust poured into my mouth. Some dark, towering figure kneeled beside me and I could feel hands running up and down my body. I was rolled over. I was on my feet. I had grit in my eyes. There was shouting. I was standing in the cold night air in a wonderhell of sirens and flashing lights and the moon made the sea all starry with tiny, yellow pinpricks of light.

Can there be life without a bottom?

"So this is life then; it's not quite what I expected" said the one I had decided to call Flute on account of his melodic voice.

"What exactly did you expect? I asked him.

"Something a lot less ..... colourful. I think that's the word you use for it."

"Is your own planet not colourful?" "Everything is what you call dark green there".

 "That's odd", I said trying to imagine a world of dark green. "Anyway sit down and have a cup of tea", I told Flute.

"I can't" he said. "Why?" "I haven't got a bottom", he explained.

I thought about that statement for a while and couldn't get my head round the notion of not having a bottom.

"What are bottoms like?" Flute asked me.

Again I sat in silence for a while never having been asked such a question before. I didn't know how to begin answering Flute's enquiry. Flute filled the silence by asking, "Will you show me your bottom?" I made it clear that that wouldn't be happening.

"What does it look like?" he asked.

"Well I've never really seen my own bottom", I told Flute as I sat on it on the other side of the table from him, creating a buffer zone between us.

"Would you like to see it?" he asked me.

"Not particularly. Maybe if you watch more TV or go to the cinema you'll see a few bottoms there", I suggested but Flute wasn't too keen on the idea.

"Why won't you just show me yours?" he asked again. "Is there something wrong with yours?"

"NO", I shouted defensively. "My bottom is perfectly normal".

"Then your bottom would be a good one for me to see if it's average", he said, obviously thinking that his logic had defeated my objections and I would have to oblige.

"I said normal, not average Flute. And no. We don't show each other our bottoms and that's the end of it", I said a bit crossly, hoping to close down the conversation.

"But people on TV show their bottoms you said" he replied looking genuinely confused.

"Why won't you show me your bottom? I've never seen a bottom?"

"Oh sit down Flute", I ordered.

"But I don't have a bottom to sit on".

Lissadell Breeze.

There's an old log on the shore at Lissadell, right where the shingle meets the fields. It's lain there for as long as I've been holidaying in County Sligo and weeds grow up round it. I like to take a few beers along when I go to sit on it on a summer evening to smell the seaweed and listen to the curlews and lapwings and watch the oyster catchers on their long legs running on patches of wet sand. After a while , especially if I'm tired, I shuffle on down to sit on the stones and rest my back on the decaying lump of tree and take long looks at the sky while I take long slugs from a bottle. I'm not the only one who finds peace and rest at that old log. Dogs seem to cock their legs at it too.

Ready for happiness.

At long last, after many years of longing I think I might just be ready now for happiness. Certain things have passed, other things are no more and this cold, sunny afternoon has distilled into a drop of pure emotion.

A small, empty piazza in Rome comes to mind, with pigeons that lift away on noisy wings from the dusty pavement. I sit down on the bench under a tree. High walls on every side with shuttered windows to keep the heat out of small apartments. No movement of air.

Two tables with a few chairs outside a dark doorway: a café bar. I drag myself over and go through the door and the air is cool, but stale. Cigarettes, fried food, beer. A girl with greasy hair tied back sets a beer on the counter. I pay for it. I drink it and go back outside to the bench beneath the tree.

By now the sun has moved and the piazza is pretty again with the shutters open and girls passing through it going somewhere and I know I'm ready for happiness.

The sky leaks, Brel bleeds and I cry.

It’s a long time since I’ve seen rain leak so heavily from the sky - it makes me feel quite righteous for having wrecked myself cutting the grass last night instead of putting it off until today. Jacques Brel is bleeding mournfully out of the radio in the café and when his words combine with the rain dripping from my hair and with the thin morning light and the heavy smell of coffee grinds in the air, the resulting melancholy rises around me like steam. The rain bounces off the cars and empty pavement outside like Brel’s “perles de pluie”. It washes down the window I’m sitting beside distorting my view of the street, maybe also my view of life, as the poet rhymes “Bonheur” with “Coeur”, “malentendu” with “le temps perdu”. I could cry.

And in walks Annie, drenched, hair stuck to her cheeks and the warmest smile outlined by the reddest lipstick and turning each “perle de pluie” into another extravagant adjective. I’m no longer in Belfast as she smiles at the room and walks past me to the counter; I’m in Paris, café at the bottom of Rue Moufftard, and it’s still raining, the end of December, and she isn’t Annie she’s Maggi, but the lipstick is just as red. She’s wearing the big, creamy, ankle-length coat I bought her to cover up her bump and keep it warm. My heart swells.

Now I’m definitely going to cry. I’ll go outside so that people, if they look at me, might mistake my tears for “perles de pluie”.

Smoking all the way back to Paris.

Tony's a flying instructor who drinks in the café I drink in early most mornings. He always takes his second cup of coffee outside to a rickety table for a smoke and he smokes French cigarettes and the smoke leaks back into the café through the louvered air vent in the big shop front window and wraps me in nostalgia and I'm right back in Paris.

A hot afternoon in Ahmedabad.

There were flies in the small café but at least it was cool. The chink of plates and cutlery and the low buzz of conversations gave the impression of busyness, but the busyness wasn't happening round me; I sat on my own slightly away from the other customers. From a pot plant just outside the window a faint breeze wafted a whole summer of hyacinth scent in my direction. The smell wrapped itself round me like grave clothes. I found it nauseating and it stayed with me the rest of the afternoon. Even the heavy smell of cumin drifting in from the kitchen was no match for the sickly, deathly hyacinth. The television was turned up loud though no-one seemed to be watching it. The music from the adverts screamed in my head and a football commentator raced faster than the ball he was chasing with his eyes and voice and even the mad dash of red and yellow football shirts that I caught in the corner of my eye were deafeningly loud.

 

I walked back to the hotel reeling from an afternoon of sensory overload beneath an over-headed sun. Children kicked cans up and down the street and shop keepers shouted at each other. Scooters scooted around me like demented wasps at the end of summer and it wasn't until later, in the cool of the evening,  that I began to recover from the day's assaults.

 

At the hotel buckets of water were brought to my room for me to bathe in. Afterwards a sprinkler revived the tired looking lawn while I sat on the veranda. Alcohol would have been too heavy so I ordered a nimbu pani and let the lush garden hidden from the rest of Ahmedabad soothe my eyes and heard. The sounds of the city couldn't reach me from the other side of the high walls: I could have been in a desert rather than in the middle of a dense and clamorous urban sprawl.

Looking out over Naples.

The man leaned against the cold metal rails of the balcony three stories above the street and lit a cigarette. He drew on it deep and slow with long intervals between each drag and let the smoke out through his nose as slowly as he was able. and all the while he looked out over the street below and enjoyed being solitary, brooding and Meursaultesque.

 

 Young people sauntered and dallied in the street and late buses cruised about under the brusque control of drivers who wanted to get home. In the distance over roof tops the man kept an eye on funnels of boats at the docks. The smell of fried food wrestled with the smell of the docks and the street, each taking its turn at dominating the others, but once his cigarette was smoked the man let the smell of the sea win and his imagination turned to scented islands, albatrosses and dusky maidens. The mournful call of fog horns and sirens raised the tension in his breast as did the wail of trains carrying away the cargo brought from faraway places by ships, and he let the night get swallowed up in dreams that tasted of salt and coconut.

Ancient and forgetable.

The world was already old when I was born. I tumbled into its ancient, incomplete story just as one day I will drop out of it, unnoticed by most and soon to be forgotten. Even the memory of me will one day be gone; it will probably survive a while in the minds of my grandchildren but then people will stop talking about me, descendants will look at family photographs, point and ask who I am, and no-one will have an answer. My own grandparents' faces are still easily recalled among my siblings but my children cannot recognise them. My great grandparents are now only dark, faceless impressions, ghostly memories, though I do remember the hearses that took away their bodies so I assume they must have been real at some time. By the time I follow after them there will be no trace left to say that they were here other than faded ink on parchment that itself will one day crumble and fall apart. But for now my birth and childhood are vividly held in my parents' minds. My brothers hold other parts, and yet more episodes sit half-forgotten in the unstable memories of school friends. Most of the people I have met along the road have already thought it not important to hold onto whatever snatches of life we shared briefly. My children take care of other impressions and my wife of others still. As one by one their memories or bodies will fail, a part of me will die till there is nothing left.

A cafe in Vienna.

It was an old café with polished tables and high-back, leather chairs. It was an old part of town. The customers were old too, not necessarily in years, but in taste and status. They took breakfast in this particular café perhaps because of its air of endurance, and there they checked the state of the markets from the privacy afforded by the broadsheet newspapers that they held in front of their faces. The rustling of newspapers was the only music to be heard and it wasn’t intended to create an atmosphere that was either convivial or relaxed.

 

I walked into that cafe early on a morning in December many years ago. The pavements along the narrow street were backed up with the snow that had fallen during the previous night, with little paths cleared from the front door of each building out to the road. I had just arrived in the city on the first train from Budapest. My heavy, black travelling coat was all filled up with the memories of trains and European cities, reeking of cigarette smoke and alcohol and dozens of cheap hotels. I was probably also carrying with me a strong whiff of loneliness, though in those days I didn’t know that was the name for the dull ache that I woke up with most mornings.