Scraton A Dream of White Horses

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915693-21-1
Verlag: Bluemoose Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 180 Seiten

It is a story about journeys. Ben travels from London by train to a small German island to see his famous friend Pascal. As he travels, Ben listens to voice notes from Pascal, each relating to a photograph from a different moment in his life. The messages tell the story of family, of migration, of exile and the search for home in a fractured world.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scraton, Paul

Leseproben

II. Drizzle falls on the Euston Road as I switch my bag from one shoulder to the other, standing in the doorway of a pub to check the time on my phone. Noon. Pascal’s award is too big to fit in my bag, so I’ve had to carry it in my hands. It’s a square, glass-like object with a hole through the centre. I’m not sure what it is supposed to represent, but at least it is easy to hold. Water is speckled on the surface from the short walk between the underground station exit and this doorway, and so I wipe it with my sleeve as I look out across the street, through the misting rain and the steady flow of cars, buses and taxis. The sound of a wet road in England is different to where I live now. It must be something to do with the road surfaces, or maybe even the vehicles themselves. Once I left the country of my childhood I realised those differences were everywhere: in the shape of the street furniture and the painted lines by the side of the road, the strength and colour of the light cast by the streetlamps or the sound of the ambulance sirens as they bounced between the buildings. Of course, every place looks different to another, but I hadn’t realised how they sounded different too, and that these two things were connected. We experience a city because of the long story of how it came to be, how it shaped the layout of the streets or the site of the buildings, the present day an end point of a long and individual story. And now, when I return to London or Liverpool, Manchester or Leeds, I find that to rediscover those elements that make a place look and sound as it does is to trigger memories of my own story, many of which I am surprised are still there. The walk home from football training, legs muddy beneath scratchy school trousers because the changing room showers were broken. The wait for slow drinkers on a university pub crawl, standing on the street between the picnic tables and the bus stop, a night out often attempted but never completed, because halfway through we reached the end of our road and we were drunk enough already. The time here, in London, on a hot summer evening, outside on the steps of a closed laundrette, beers in plastic pint pots, talking with Pascal as it slowly went dark and the streetlamps flickered on above where we sat. A bus moves through a puddle that has grown above an overwhelmed drain and so I step back, further into the doorway, even though the spray is a long way from reaching me. I use my phone to take a picture and record a snippet of sound. I will send them to Pascal later. He asked me to document the trip. The details were important, he said. The moments of waiting. In all his travels, they were often the experiences that lingered longest. There is still an hour until my train and the drizzle has turned to rain. The pub door opens and a man pushes past me, stepping out to stand beneath the sodden awning to smoke his cigarette. I feel the warmth of the pub’s interior as the door swings, the smell of air freshener and long-spilled beer. Another one of those moments. I step inside. The pub is quite empty, a cavernous room of patterned carpets and wooden furniture, raised sections and fruit machines by the toilet doors. There are menus on every table and a long line of beer taps behind the bar. It’s a place to grab a drink and a bite to eat after work or while waiting for the train, and on this Sunday lunchtime there are only solitary men, sitting with cups of coffee and their phones, and a small group of football fans who came down on the early train, the rain driving them into the first pub they came to outside the station. They are gathered around a stand-up table close to the bar and nurse their beers. Kick-off is still a good few hours away. I take my pint to a table in the corner by the door, and put it down alongside Pascal’s award, my bag tucked away beneath my chair at my feet. Having served me, the barman has come out into the room and is moving from table to table with a collection of wooden boxes, each filled with cutlery and condiments. ‘What’s this?’ the barman says as he reaches me, looking down at the plastic shape next to my pint glass. I tell him about Pascal and his photographs, about how he had asked me to come to London and collect it, and that I was now about to deliver it to him. The barman is having a quiet shift and seems eager to talk. He wants to know where Pascal is now and, when I tell him, I am surprised that he has heard of the island, that he nods in recognition when I say its name. He was there once, the barman says, or at least on the mainland, from where he could see the island low on the horizon from the top of the dunes. It was a church trip, years ago, and they had slept in huge tents a short walk from the beach. Not that he ever went to church any more, he continues, stumbling slightly over his words, his demeanour changing as if he is suddenly aware of what it is he is saying, out loud and to a customer, to a stranger. It was nice there, he says, a little helplessly now. What he remembers most was the view from the top of the dunes, when he would climb up there in the morning and look out across the sea. That, and the fact that there were no tides. He stops and looks at me, waiting for a response. I tell him about the train, about how I arrived only yesterday at St Pancras and that I am already leaving again, retracing my journey home and then on to the island. The barman has recovered his composure and shakes his head. ‘If it was me,’ he says, rearranging a couple of sachets of brown sauce in the wooden box on the table between us, ‘I’d just fly. Climate change or not.’ I just nod. He gives me a small smile, and then he moves on. I don’t tell him that I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice, that from the moment Pascal asked me to do this, it was clear I was going to be taking the train. It wasn’t that Pascal insisted, or even asked about my travel arrangements, it was just that I knew how he would have come if he could, and so it felt only right for me to do the same. And in any case, he’d given me more than enough to do to fill the time along the way. As time passes it feels like you can become increasingly close to some people who you never, or hardly ever, get to see. The major beats of life are shared and distributed, liked and commented upon. Subtle changes of appearance, of hair colour and length, of the ageing process, are unconsciously absorbed. Relationships and birthdays, new jobs and a new flat. People might lose touch, but they don’t lose track. In the fifteen years between my leaving England and the house I’d shared with Pascal in Leeds, to the evening in London when he came back into my life properly again, I’d seen him in person only twice. Once in Rotterdam, when we both happened to be there for work at the same time. Once in Landeck, in Austria, when we were close enough to meet each other halfway. Those meetings amounted to perhaps five hours together in total. Five hours in fifteen years. And yet thanks to the pictures and posts, the emails and messages, it never felt like we had to play catch up. It never really felt like we’d been apart. When we met in London, something changed. As we sat by the Kingsland Road and watched the rush hour traffic stream by, I already felt that it would not be another four or five years before we saw each other again. I was in the city for work, for a series of meetings that kept me busy throughout the day but which finished close to a small bookshop near Pascal’s flat. It was one of those July days when the heat was such that the road melted beneath the tires of the...