The suburbs, the suburbs … There are still bits of countryside, we notice from the train. Forlorn horses in tiny fields. Rabbits hopping across a golf-course. Rats crawling along a wall by the sewage treatment works.
W. pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery fire, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.
What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you were? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?
What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I used to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?
The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. — 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …
A pristine snow bank like a blank page. And whirling snowflakes above. And silence, deep silence. I underlined a passage in my book. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upwards at the seeming emptiness. And I gazed across the snow into the white emptiness …
K. on the bridge, that’s where it all began for me, I’ve told W. that. K. on the bridge, gazing upwards into the swirling emptiness, just as I was on a metaphorical bridge staring upwards into a metaphorical emptiness.
'So you went north', W. says. I went north. — 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (back then, he could only read Kafka in translation). But they'd lied in the prospectus, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things — great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great railways of Europe.
'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like a Russian space station.
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