Light

A visit to my hometown. – 'Show me the suburbs', W. says. 'Give me a guided tour'. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life?' Where did it go wrong, W. asks. When did it go wrong?

We head out through the housing estate to the golf course. – 'Is this what you call the countryside?', W. asks. He can talk, I point out. He grew up in Walsall! Ah, but I'm forgetting about his years in Canada, W. says. He knew what a tree was. He's knew the lakes and the wilderness, as I do not. How could I? Look at this place!

There's no empty space around here, W. says. No wilderness, no scrubland or scrap of tatty wood. My God, there are not even any alcoholics! Every town needs its alcoholics!

He remembers what I told him about the light, the same indifferent light that falls on everyone in the suburbs. He remembers I said I feared it, that light, that I wanted to hide, but that there was nowhere to hide, that I wasn't like Adam, who could flee from God into the undergrowth.

There I was, exposed. There I was, in the pitiless day, the pitiless light the falls everywhere in the suburbs. There I was, accused, but by whom? By no God. By God's absence. By a night without stars that was at one with the day.

I used to go cycling, I've told W. that. I used to cycle out to the last scraps of unused land, to the sand dunes, to the shooting range. But they disappeared, didn't they? They vanished. And I couldn't hide, could I, not anymore? The day could see right through me. Light, in its indifference, passed right through me, like the particles of dark matter that pass through the earth.

I'd become a glassfish…. I was transparent…. I saw I was made of congealed light. Saw I was only a thickening of light, its doubling up. And saw that I would be undone one day, that I would disperse into the day like the the hero of The Passion of Anna.

No secrets, says W. Nothing hidden. That's what I feared above all, I told him. And I fear it still.