Category: Fiction

'Before I was ill, I was unemployed', the poet says. 'Or was it the other way around? Illness, unemployment: I switched from one kind of benefit to another. Lost in illness, I became unemployed. Or I became ill through unemployment, because there were no jobs or because I never wanted one?

'What did I do all day, every day? How did I occupy my time? But I didn't occupy it. I'd fallen; time passed me by. There was nothing to do. Days passed. Weeks, and nothing. I think I kept notes for a time. I jotted down the symptoms of my condition for the in-house specialist at the surgery.

'There was television, of course. It became the structure of my day, its frame. At 1.40, Neighbours – everything worked up to that. Morning TV – chatshows and magazine show; antique shows and the news – led to the plateau of Neighbours.

'And after Neighbours? That was difficult. There was the long stretch of the afternoon. The sag. What target audience were the programme makers trying to reach? Cop show repeats. Made for TV films. It was always a difficult time, the afternoon.

'Things picked up in the evening, after the kids' shows. 5.30 Neighbours (the repeat); the evening news. The trick was to cross the afternoon safely. It was hazardous, the afternoon.

'I didn't go out. I knew I shouldn't. The noise of the street frightened me. The light – above all, the light. I hadn't lied to my GP about my photophobia. It was quite real. It still is!', the poet says. 'The light, the light. Sometimes I thought I was sick from light, that that was the cause of my illness and its motor. Light, light …

'Sometimes Ann phoned me. She was getting iller still, she said. Her paranoia was worsening. Her fatigue. She wasn't doing anything, she said. She'd given it all up. I asked her how her friend Claire was. Ann didn't see Claire anymore, she said. She didn't see anyone. And now she wasn't going to talk on the phone, either. I could leave messages on her answerphone, but that was it. She wanted to be alone.

'Now there was nothing to keep illness from having its way with me', the poet says. 'There was nothing to divide us. My strength had failed; I accepted this. I lay beneath time; this, too, I understood. I slept a great deal. I kept the curtains closed against bright light. But otherwise my illness was gentle.

'I thought: this would be the way to die, as one might fall asleep in the snow. I was falling asleep, perhaps dying, but my suffering didn't seem to have much to do with me. True, I was tired, infinitely tired, but this tiredness didn't seem to be my own.

'Meanwhile, the city sprawled all around us. The city, and the pressure of regeneration. New jobs were being created. New opportunities. A bright, gleaming future. The ill had been cut some slack. We'd been given a few years before we had to become worthy of its transformation. How tired we were! How lost! But, for all, we were sheltered. Months could pass – years – but we'd be okay.

'Sometimes the inspectors would visit us. Sometimes, we'd have to go to our doctors to get new sicknotes. Sign us off!, we said to them. Sign us off for life! The inspectors called us clients, but we were really dependents. The city tolerated us; the city indulged us. Everywhere there was regeneration; everywhere the remaking of the city, except in our sheltered accommodation. Everywhere people property investing and buying their council houses, except for us, except for the ones who lived in half-darkness.

'I liked my flat. Was it mine? I liked the flat through which I was passing. When they showed it to me, I thought: here I will have time. Here is peace. And when they left me there and closed the door, I thought: I won't disturb its peace. I'll go about quietly. I'll leave no mark.

'This is a flat for the ill, I thought, and I am ill, just as others will succeed me who are also ill, one after another, in a long series. Just as there had been many before me, equally respectful of the peace, equally quiet.

'I will have my time here, I thought. Others will come, but this is my time. I thought: this is where I'll lie every day as my illness is lifted from me. Doubtless it will intensify at first, strengthen, but gradually it will leave me.

'The spaces of the flat will ache with suffering, I thought. Soon, the rooms will be empty of everything but suffering. The rooms will suffer as suffering is drawn out of me. I will have delegated suffering to this space, this time. I will have swapped places with this peaceful expanse.

'I knew there were others ill in their flats all around me. The agoraphobe, who liked Denton Welch. The depressive. We knew of one's another's presence; sometimes we passed by one another in the stairwell, or along the corridor. But I imagined each of us was busy making his or her exchange in the darkness of our flats. Suffering was elsewhere, as we were each to be inhabited by the expanses of space, by a time broken from the onrush of time. We lay in separate rooms, falling, falling through our lives.

'I felt tiredness, a great tiredness. My hands were not mine; I could barely lift my arms. What actions could I bring about? What could I do? I could hardly pour a glass of water. But tiredness freed me from the great questions: how was I to make my way in life? What was I to do? I need ask no questions, I thought. I would lie down, and the flat would draw my suffering from me like a sting.

'I lay slumped on the old sofa. I lay feverish in bed. I left messages on Ann's answering machine. For a time, I was determined, like the stranded Crusoe, to keep track of the passing of days. I thought to make marks on the walls of my flat.

'But then, as week fell into week, and whole months came to resemble one another, I saw there was no point, and I might as well drift, and that this time was the gift of my flat, and the gift of my illness. I have an alibi, I thought. I have a sicknote. Everywhere around me, the city is transforming, but I do not need to be transformed'.

'How many years is it now?', the poet says.  'Ten years? More than ten?' It's set adrift in his life, he says. A part of his life adrft in his life, like a floater in the eye. What happened then? What happened back then?

He was unemployed, he says, and she, Ann, was ill. He was on unemployment benefit, she on sickness benefit. Or was it the other way round? She was unemployed, undoubtedly. But illness was her thing. If you asked her why she didn't work, she'd tell you she was ill. She was taking some time for herself, she said.

He had his ill days, he said, but he regarded himself as being unemployed. Ask him why he didn't work, and he said, quoting the song, I've never had a job and never wanted one, even though that wasn't quite true. He was a part-time TEFL teacher, really. He taught English in a Foreign Language. He taught foreigners, he said. But he claimed benefits as well. He only worked part-time, after all.

He, anyway, was unemployed, and she was ill, says the poet. But then, she told him that he, too, was ill. She was a great believer in illness. Everyone's ill, she once declared. Everyone would be ill, she said, if only they would allow themselves to be. She had allowed herself to become ill, she said. It was a liberation. And now, he, too, should let himself become ill. It was time to be ill!, she said. 

'Now, Ann had a friend who was even more ill than she was' the poet says. 'Claire was a kind of exemplary ill person, the measure of all illness. She was a former businesswoman, Claire. She lived in sheltered accommodation. People brought her meals. – "I don't go out much", she said as we drank tea in her flat. She couldn't go outside.

'It was rush hour. The cars were jammed outside. Claire was too clever, her doctor told her. That was her problem. Too clever. – "Clever people like us always become ill", she told us. Like us: did Claire really see illness in me? Her flat was dark. She kept it so, she said.

'She told us of her former life. Of her intelligence. She was very convinced about her intelligence. She'd put on so much weight, she said. She never used to look like this, she said. But after her nervous breakdown …, she said, and let the sentence trail off.

'Claire had panic attacks went she went outside, she said. And she felt terribly exhausted. Tired all the time. But she thought she might get better. She held on to the idea of recovery. One day, when I get better …, she said. One day. But what day?

'She's working on herself, Ann said, when we left. She was working on herself, she who could barely get up from the sofa to make a cup of tea. Illness was working on her. On us all!, Ann thought.

'Ann herself was expecting to get sicker. She was spending less and less time outdoors. It was time for her, too, to stay in, she said. Time for her to draw the blinds. Was she as clever as her friend?, Ann asked me. I said she was very clever, very perceptive. Then she might get very ill, she said. She was frightened.

'How can the weak help the weak?, the poet says. How could he, an unemployed man, help an ill woman? He thought she was strong enough – she was a landlady, after all; she owned property; she had a big car with a toolbox at the back – but she was getting weaker. She thought she'd sell one of the houses, she said. And she might sell her car. Maybe she'd sell her second house, too, and arrange for sheltered accommodation.

'That was where she was heading, she thought. She was preparing to be ill, very ill, she said. She wanted to give up everything for illness, to let her illness be itself. She wanted to be alone. I was no help. I had spent years falling more deeply into unemployment. I was more unemployed than anyone! And there she was, preparing to become more ill than anyone.

'She sent me to her GP and told me what symptoms to report. It wasn't a lie, she said. I had the symptoms – she could see it – but it was just a question of reporting them correctly. I told the doctor I felt tired, very tired. That my limbs ached. That I was photophobic, and that when I went outside, I only wanted to go back inside. I was agoraphobic, I told her, but that when I was inside, I only wanted to go back outside. I'm claustrophobic, I told her.

'I could barely sleep, I told her. And when I did, I had terrifying dreams. I couldn't stand getting on the bus, I told her. I couldn't stand other people. I felt they were watching me, criticising me. And I couldn't eat in public, I told her – Ann told me not to forget that one. In fact, I had trouble eating in private. I couldn't keep food down, I told her. I had a nervous stomach. I had nervous indigestion – Ann had taught me that phrase. I get headaches, terrible headaches, I told her.

'The GP sent me to their in-house specialist, whose office was in the basement of the surgery. I've been feeling tired for months, I told her. Exhausted! She made me fill in a questionaire. When did I feel most tired, it asked me. All the time, I wrote. Do I feel pain?, it asked me. Frequently, I wrote. Do I ache anywhere? Everywhere, I wrote. Do I have stomach problems? Continually, I wrote.

'The diagnosis was clear. There was no question about it. I have the condition myself, the in-house specialist said. She had it too! We both had it, the pair of us. No wonder Ann liked it here. There was a sense of fellowship. Of fellow feeling. She had the condition, the in-house doctor said, and so did her sister, who was confined to bed. Her sister's children were being looked after by someone else, the in-house specialist said.

'I was instructed on how to handle my symptoms. Take it easy, she said. Plan everything when you have strength, so that when you feel weak, you're not overwhelmed with worry. Arrange your life so there's no stress, no panic.

'Should I go out?, I asked her. Not unless it's strictly necessary, she said. Should I get buses? I should avoid buses, she said, and public spaces. She avoided public spaces, she said. She found them very taxing.

'It's common to highly successful people, our illness, she told me. I'm hardly successful, I told her. To highly motivated, intelligent people, she told me. I was flattered. So I was intelligent! Highly motivated! I told her I lacked motivation. It's the illness, she said. I told her I didn't feel highly intelligent. – "The trouble is, you're exhausted by your illness", she said.

'Am I really ill?, I asked her, doubting for a moment. Yes, I was really ill, she said. She was ill, too, she said. Is this illness common? Oh yes, she said, more and more people were being referred to her. And was our illness really an illness? Oh yes, she said, it's definitely an illness.

'I was lucky, she said. This was one of the few surgeries that took the condition seriously, she said. She gave me a pamphlet. It was full of practical advice and cartoons. The list of symptoms indicative of the illness seemed endless. They were listed down one page and halfway down another. Nausea. Depression. Listlessness. Stomach upset. Acid reflux …

'So, I was ill. I embraced my new identity as an ill man. I'd read The Magic Mountain. I expected great insights! I wondered about the people among whom I was walking on the narrow pavement. Were they ill, too?, I wondered. Did I, an ill man, have insight into their illness?

'Perhaps they were all ill, I thought. Perhaps that was the great secret. They were ill as I was ill, as Ann was ill and Claire was ill, only they didn't know it yet. I should hand out pamphlets, I thought. I should recommend my surgery.

'How many times did Ann I meet, after that? Not many. It's not a romantic story after all, is it? We were on separate paths. Separately ill, she heading in her direction, a little further ahead than me, and I heading in mine, a newly ill person. An apprentice in illness.

'I remembered what I said to Ann when I first met her. I'm don't think I'm ill, I said, just tired. Ann said she was sure I was ill. She was certain of it. Don't fight it, she said. And I hadn't fought it. I was letting myself be ill, she said. I'd let myself be ill. Did I understand what that meant?

'Soon, I'd be too frightened to go out, she predicted. It frightened her, stepping out of her house. Terraced houses in both directions, dark cliffs. It menaced her, she said. Everyone with our condition gets frightened, she said. No one wants to go out.

'There are thousands of us, she said. Thousands!, I thought, imagine! Thousands of ill people, all over the city! This in the same cafe where we'd first met. This a few months after. Her car was outside. She wanted to make a quick getaway, she said. Public spaces frightened her, she said. It was too much.

'Off she went, leaving me alone with my Purdeys. Would I, too, have to plan for sheltered accommodation? Would I have to give it all up and let myself get really ill?'

'We should have been shot like horses, didn't they know that? We should have been stunned like cattle about to be slaughtered, and our throats cut …' He sees it in his mind's eye, he and the others strung up, hung from butcher's hooks, bleeding from their throats.

He sees himself hung thus, forming words in blood. Speaking them, his last silent words, in bubbles of blood. And isn't that what he's doing now, as he speaks into my dictaphone? Isn't he really upside down on a butcher's hook? Isn't he to be trussed up and splayed in a butcher's window? – 'You Danes. You crafty Danes …'

He'll carry on with his story, he says. He'll continue with my instruction. – 'They'd called us in for training. Their heads ached. Their eyes glazed over. So the future had come. The city would gleam, and they were part of the dross of the past'.

Who were they, the remnants? Who, the voyagers out between worlds, between the old and the new? They were rounding them up, the unemployed, the long term sick. The last drunks were being picked up and driven away. The last smackheads were being rounded up and shipped off. The criminals were all tagged and under house arrest. There was to be no slackness, no time to wander across the face of the earth.

'We'd lost the battle, the poet says. We'd lost it because we couldn't be bothered to fight. We'd lost the war because we'd barely known there was a war. We'd been asleep. Asleep at our posts, our non-posts. We'd been left behind. We'd deserted, but then we'd never joined up.

'We weren't guerillas. We weren't partisans. But the great wheels were to roll over us as great wheels roll. The wheels would turn, we would be crushed, and no one would notice. Ah, the wrecking balls at Old Hulme were only a forewheel of the great juggernaut. Only a plate of the great caterpillar tread of what was called regeneration.

'We weren't prepared, of course. We'd posted no watchmen. The sentries were asleep, the army scattered. How could we resist them, we who were unprepared and dreaming? How, we who barely knew we were there, let alone an enemy? In truth, they, too, barely knew we were there. They didn't set our sights especially on us. They didn't crush us as the Israeli army crushes Palestinians. We were the slack, and the slack was to be taken up.

'What happened to them, the last Neanderthals, driven to the edges of Europe by the new breed?', the poet says. 'They knew they didn't belong and couldn't belong. Knew the coming world was not theirs. They weren't hunted to extinction, but died of irrelevance.

'No doubt, the new breed were kindness itself', the poet said. 'Bursaries were offered and scholarships set up, but the Neanderthals knew they were not for them, not really; that they didn't belong to the new world.

'What would become of them, with their heavy brows and dangling arms? What would become of their swamps and still water? What would happen when their marshes were drained?

'They called us in', the poet says. Their names were called and they stepped forward. They crossed the floor tiles of the open plan office to a waiting desk and Case Worker. Why bother with us?, they wanted to say. The midges are buzzing in our heads, and mosquitoes are hatching in our hearts, they wanted to say. We're the old breed, and you're the new breed. You win.

You win. But how could they do anything else but win, the new breed and their Case Workers? They'd become clients, he says. – 'The light had reached us. The gleaming city. And what were they to do, who had banked on structural unemployment? What, for those who had no corners left in which to hide?

'We weren't all Neanderthals', the poet says. 'We hadn't all given up. I'll tell you how they got us', the poet says. 'It was a very Danish ruse', he says.

'Community arts! Community projects!, that was it. We were made part of community regneration. We were encouraged to bid for money. Encouraged to wear hardhats and to tour the orange-bricked housing in the new estates that were replacing Old Hulme and everywhere like Old Hulme'.

They were treated like Prince Charles, he says, as they were shown along the gently curved streets that were named after hedge flowers. Community arts! Community projects! All of south Manchester was going to hold hands Denmark-style, he says. The supermarket was about to arrive, and carparks were to sprawl out on unused land. Orange-bricked community centres were coming, and the healthfood shop would be rehoused in an orange-bricked complex. Community arts! Community projects!

But he'd grown suspicious of it, the word community, he said. They're manipulating us, he thought. They're regnerating words, and not just the city, he thought. Words: soon he wouldn't be able to speak. Soon his words wouldn't be his words.

The word I, for example. The word am, for example. The word alive, for example.

'We were to become our own spokespersons, our own salesmen. We were learning to sell ourselves, to become our own advocates. We learned how to construct CVs and write cover-letters. We learned to read the job pages in the papers.

'Ah, we became avid readers. Avid writers, using the computers in the Jobseeker's training suite. We opened blank Word documents. We watched rows of text march across the page as we typed. We centre-justified and double-spaced. We emboldened and italicised … 

'Some went into web design, God help them. There was training for that, too: web design. Web imbecility …

'And the rest of us? We could hardly believe in our CVs, in our letters of application. Could hardly believe in the world. We would have laughed, if we had the strength. You woke us up for this? 

'Our heads ached. Our eyes were red. The welfare state was receding, we saw that. We were the last, and the last of the last. They should have left us lying on the shore. Should have left us beached, defeated, on the great shore of the future'.

'Cycle lanes', the poet says. 'They're the sign'. He remembers cycle lanes appearing in Hulme. ('Hulme was a rough part of Manchester that was rebuilt in the '90s', he says, 'put that in a footnote for your readers'.) That was when old Hulme was becoming new Hulme, he says, which is to say, unrecognisable. He saw cycle lanes being painted on the roads. Uh-oh, he thought. Who was going to use them? Who was coming?

The new cyclists, the poet says, with their helmets and yellow jackets. The advance-guard of property developers and business start-ups. The new cyclists …

Manchester was becoming a European city, the poet says. A 24-hour city, my God! A bright, gleaming city. That's what it is today, he says, a bright, gleaming city.

He used to see them from the bus, gathered at the health food shop, the old Hulmers, he said. They'd sit out on the Oxford benches idly watching the traffic as it went past. They had all the time in the world, he said. He envied them.

Time was propitious for the Old Hulmers. There was so much time. They'd been given it, time, all of time; freed into it. The afternoons were their kingdom. They dreamed away their afternoons on the Oxford benches, rolling spliffs and watching the traffic go by.

Old Hulme, the poet says, like a lamentation. How can he get Old Hulme into my Danish head? How the transformation of Old Hulme into New Hulme, upon which everything rests? From Old Manchester to New Manchester. From Old Europe into new Europe, he says.

It was bad for everyone, that time, the poet says. 'They were hunting us down, every one of us. They were hunting us down, the long term unemployed, the long term sick … One by one, we we'd be caught and brought in …', he says.

'You'd get a letter', he says, 'calling you in. You'd be docked £10 from your benefits if you missed the first interview, and £20 if you missed the second. £10 or £20 for not joining their brave new world', he says, shaking his head.

The leaflets were dropping through their letterboxes, he and the other unemployed, he says. They read of funds set aside for the transition, for schemes to get the long term sick back to work. He was one of the long term sick, he says. He was sick of the world! Sick of everything!

It was time for them to be straightened out and reskilled, he says. Time for flipcharts and groupwork and the long road towards employment.

'They called us in', the poet says. 'Letters arrived, leaflets … Ah, they were friendly enough, the Job Seeker people. It was all first names and shaking hands, and we're here to help you'. It was all personalised service, the filling out of forms. It was all sitting with them at desks in open plan offices.

'They never kept us waiting long, we who had all the time in the world. They were always polite, respectful, we with whom no one had been concerned before. Jobseekers, that's what we were called now, not the unemployed. We were seeking work, looking for it, supposedly. And we always had been, that was the supposition. The pretense.

'Let's pretend, that's what we said, in effect. Let's pretend you really were looking for work, all along … That's how they changed the past. That's how they forgave us our pasts. It was the new ammesty. We were Job Seekers, now. Job Seekers who'd got lost on the way to the future.

'And now each of us had our advisor, our Case Worker', the poet says. 'We had Case Numbers. We were to sign Agreements. We were to present ourselves at the office to be retrained. Reskilled! – 'It meant flipcharts', the poet says, 'group work'.

He's sure Danes love group work, the poet says. He's sure it's all about group work and roleplay back in Copenhagen. Every Dane has a Case Worker, he's sure of that. A Case Number! You get one assigned at birth in Copenhagen, he says, he's sure of it.

'They had music playing there, in the open plan office. Distant music, calming, soothing. We were all to be calmed and soothed. It was going to be okay. Everything's going to be okay: words whispered to a sick child as you stroke its hair.

'We were to be reborn, retooled for the new world', he says. 'We were like nymphs looking up at the world with underwater eyes. Now it was time to hatch. Now we would hatch and dart above the water like mayflies …'

He looked around the office. My God, his fellow unemployed! His fellow absentees! They were a sleepy lot, he says. They looked dazed, red-eyed. No doubts their heads ached from the night before. There was always a night before, he says. Always a night before, and never a day.

They'd been asleep too long. They'd been asleep half their lives! They'd fallen asleep and woken to – this. Why bother with us?, their demeanour said. Give up now, their slouching in the chairs said.

*

'What was never understood', the poet says, 'what no one seems to understand, was that there was a kind of wisdom to us, the long term sick and unemployed. A wisdom that had accreted over the months and years', he says. 'A wisdom that had dripped down from the sky, forming us like stalagmites. A wisdom that had lain down on the earth over the millennia, like the tiny skeletons that make up coral.

'What had we understood? What you Danes will never understand, you who plan out everything in advance. You for whom everything is planned!

'We'd known five hundred kinds of boredom', he says. 'We'd seen everything, and the wearing out of everything. We'd lost ourselves; we'd discovered ourselves lost. We'd seen our reflected faces in the windows of night-buses. We'd ascended to the plateau of the hours before dawn, and to the plateau of dawn.

'What hadn't we understood? It was as though we'd lived a thousand lives. Memory grew thick in us like Molasses. Not our memory, but the memory of concrete, the memory of crushed glass on tarmac. We remembered like puddles lying out beneath the sky. We remembered like kebab wrappers blowing in the wind.

'We were lost', the poet says. 'We disappeared into the empty hours. We rode acrosss time like wave-froth on the deep body of the sea. Today, what is to happen today?, we asked ourselves each morning. And we knew the answer: nothing at all. Nothing in particular. Today will be exactly the same as yesterday.

'And we dreamt', the poet says. 'We dreamt in those days. Does the Dane have any idea of what it means to dream? Of dreams only the idle can dream? Of carrying vague thoughts in your head like fireflies? Of mist-thoughts that have yet to coalesce?

'We saw the vagueness of our futures like summer haze on the roads. What's the opposite of deja vu?', the poet says. 'Not I've seen it before, but I'll see it again? What is the opposite of a story? Of the succession of days? Nothing happened today, we wrote in our journals. Nothing happened. Nothing completed itself. Nothing was resolved. Life is not short', the poet says, 'but long, terribly long.

'Today is the same as yesterday. Today: that word turns in eternity. Everything that happens – every incident, every event – happens on the backdrop of the nothing-is-happening. Of the immensity of time, and the impossibility of stories. Of the river that silently bears all, sustains all and destroys all, like a Hindu god.

'You can't step in the same river twice', the poet says. 'Today is the same as yesterday. But the depth of the same! The depth of today, of yesterday! Those words ringing out like great bells', the poet says. 'Those words ringing out from the heart of time …'

'The same is not the same, that's the secret', the poet says. 'Only those unemployed or sick for years know that. That there are too many hours to inhabit. Too many of them, like the abandoned rooms of a house'.

That's what he saw in the people of Old Hulme, he says. That in the faces that looked up at him from the Oxford benches.

Did I bring him some schnapps? I should at least have brought him some schnapps. And then, Ah!, schnapps! Good. And what about sild – see, he knows some Danish, he says. Sild. They used to be a Danish restaurant in town, he says. He'd go there with his friends – when he had friends – for an open sandwich on Saturday mornings, he says. The open sandwich – well, it's not really a cuisine, is it? The Danes don't have much of a cuisine. But sild on an open sandwich - not bad, he says. On rye bread. Home-made rye bread, preferably, he says.

He goes to fetch shot glasses from the kitchen. Aalborg Akavit should be served cold, he says. See, he knows that. He knows something about Danish culture, about so-called Danish culture. They used to drink Aalborg Akavit with their Danish lunches, he and his friends, he says, and drink Danish lager. A shot, then a chaser: that's how the Danes drink, he was told. A shot, a chaser, then another shot and another chaser. And then some more shots and chasers.

I hope you're not going to get drunk on me, the poet says. Drunks he doesn't mind, but Danish drunks! The Danish drunk is always maudlin, he says. Always morose. Tungsind, that's the word Kierkegaard uses for Danish melancholy, isn't it? He wrote it down, that word, on a post-it. Tungsind – was does it mean, literally?, he asks me. Ah, heavy souled. He likes that, he says: heavy souled.

He'll drink, and I can watch. Oh, alright, he says, I can drink too. He pours us each a glass. Skol!, he says. – 'Are you full of tungsind now?', he says. He thinks he might be full of tungsind, drinking with me, he says. Drinking with a Dane, God help him.

'Your dictaphone's still going', he says. 'Why don't you turn it off? Are you trying to catch me unawares?', he says. He's got nothing to say, anyway. – 'Not a thing! I might as well record the empty wind whistling'.

He's lost in the middle of his life, the poet muses. Lost in some sense, although he doesn't know how. In the middle of life … It's like the beginning of the Inferno, Dante's Inferno. He's lost in a dark wood, assailed by beasts. – 'You're a beast', he tells me. 'A great Danish beast …'

Sometimes he feels like a character in a novel, who realises he's in a novel. – 'But I'm not in a novel', he says.

Ah, he says, pouring more schnapps. What story should he tell me now? The story of the leak from the gutter from the upstairs flat? Of the leak, the flood, that ran down the wall in a single sheet? Or how about the flying insects that stuck to his face when he walked through the Meadows the other day? It was disgusting, he says.

Anyway, he says, his storytelling is only a kind of indirection, like the magician who tricks you by distracting your attention. There's something he wants to say by not saying it, the poet says. He's trying to tell me something.

But what would a Dane understand of these things, regardless of his tungsind? Danish melancholia turns inward, he says. It's a melancholy of the Danish soul. Mancunion melancholia – because that's what he's trying to describe to me, Mancunion melancholy and perhaps British melancholy, he says – is turned outward. It's about the world and the relation to the world, he says.

It about being defeated by the world. It's about lying down and giving everything up. You've had enough! You can see no point in anything! Why bother? That's what he said to himself when he gave up writing. Why do anything at all? Why not just lie down and wait for the apocalypse? - 'For Ragnarok, as you pagans would call it', he says.

There's probably a can't-be-bothered grant in Denmark, isn't there?, the poet says. A waiting-for-Ragnarok grant …

The flat, the yard. – 'Nothing really begins here', he says with great emphasis. 'Nothing really happens. You can be up early – but for what? Ready to work – but for what? You can pull the chair to the table – but for what? There's no way to gather yourself for a beginning as God gathered himself up before the creation.

He went astray, the poet says. – 'I lost the beginning. I lost hold of the beginning. And if you can't begin', he says, 'you can't end either. The day lies down and rots. The day gives up', he says.

But what could I know about that, the poet asks, about days rotting? The Dane has no idea of ruination. He always keeps his appointment with the beginning. The Dane's punctual, above all! He knows where he is and where he has to be!

There is no people more orderly than the Danish people, he says. None more dutiful. The Dane can become melancholy, yes. Melancholy over his schnapps on a Friday night. Melancholy in a Danish bar on Sunday afternoon. Muttering about his tungsind, the heaviness of his soul. My soul, he says, it's so heavy, boo-hoo, boo-hoo, he says.

But come Monday, and the Dane's refreshed, he says. He's forgotten his heavy soul and his boo-hoos! He's ready for work! Ready to organise! Ready to be taxed! Ready to spend tax-payers' money! And off he goes to work on his bike, following his cycle lane!

*

God, it's disgusting out there, he says of the yard. The plants are dying. The concrete's streaked with green. And a layer of scum over everything, God, what is it? Everything that will happen, will happen here, that's his feeling, the poet says. Everything that can happen …

It's like that scene from Nostalghia. The sky will brighten, and the sky darken. A night passes in eight minutes. A week in eight minutes. A year, a millennia. Everything that has happened, happened here, the poet says.

'There's only one word for this flat', he says. 'Absolute. It's an absolute flat', he says. 'With an absolute yard. Look at it', he says. 'The plants look ill. God knows, I look ill. We're all ill, all of us, except for you Danes with your white teeth'.

What can I know of it, his illness, his wretchedness? He's a wretch, he knows that, the poet says. – 'See, this is what your schnapps is doing to me! It's poison', he says. 'It's liquid tungsind', he says. 'You've come here to poison me, you beast of a Dane'.

'Look at them, the clothespegs on the washing line. What do you think they're try to say? What do they mean? And that oval rock, covered in algae … what's it doing there? And that brick, likewise covered in algae?'

He could never write about the yard, the poet says, that was his trouble. There was no poetry that could be written about the yard, or his flat, for that matter. His table edge is at the same level as its concrete surface, the yard, he says. He thought he might make some kind of reckoning with it, the yard, he says. Thought that if he began writing earlier enough, if he was there before dawn, watching it dawn …

Purple and black and white, those are the colours of the pre-dawn, the poet says. Purple light, the outline of the black pipe, the white wooden door to the road. Every day, waking up, his first thought: I've outlived myself.

Upstairs, in the morning, he hears his neighbours passing from one room to another: there are others around him who are alive. But he's not alive, not anymore, he says. He watches over his own corpse. He keeps his own vigil. He passes alongside himself, among himself … how can he put it?

He sees the light come on in the bathroom of the house opposite. The sky's light blue. The colours of the world are beginning to reveal themselves. He closes his curtains. He's had enough, he says. It reminds him of so many mornings, old mornings. It reminds him of so many botched mornings and botched days, he says.

'Oh God', he says, 'no more schnapps'. Can't I see what it's doing to him?

'The water company', the poet says. 'Let me tell you about my dealings, my tussle, with Northwest Water … This is a story for a Dane, especially for a Dane, a visiting Dane'.

The story begins in summer, in high summer, almost exactly a year ago. It was a warm and soupy day, he remembers. It was warm, muggy. A very Mancunion summer's day, he says. He was inside, of course. Of course he was inside! He can't bear the summer, he says, let alone the Mancunion summer. It's so heavy, he says. It's killing, he says.

Anyway, there he was in his my armchair, reading, the poet said. Reading, because he'd long since given up writing, the poet said. He was an ex-poet, which is to say, a non-poet. He no longer had anything to do with poetry at all, to his great relief, the poet said.

He was essentially outside poetry, which actually restored poetry to him as a reader, the poet said. For the first time, he was actually able to read poetry, the poet said, without his mind being perpetually drawn to his writing. Only non-writers can read poetry, the poet says. Non-poets!

So he was reading, the poet says, though he's not sure what. Perhaps some Celan. Perhaps Sachs, with facing translations. Perhaps Quasimodo, with facing translations. Perhaps Montale, again, with facing translations.

Ah, now he remembers, the poet says. He was reading Trakl. Or trying to read Trakl. Probably he was just reading the translator's introduction to the poems of Trakl. Of the difficulties of translating Trakl, which he's sure are insurmountable, says the poet. Really, an English Trakl isn't Trakl at all. An English Trakl is a contradiction in terms! How could there be such a thing as an English Trakl? An English Trakl: madness!

Anyway, he was reading, the poet says. There was silence in the flat, for once. Silence! It's rare enough around here, the poet says. There are students upstairs, you see. They can be very noisy, they often are, but that night, as he remembers, they were quiet, completely quiet, he says.

What sort of life do they live up there, his students?, he wondered then as now. Above, the students, living their unknown life, in the air and light, and here below, his pit, which used to be a writing pit, and now is a non-writing pit, which is to say, simply a pit. 

To them, his students, air and light, the expanse of a flat on the first floor, and to me, suffocation and darkness, and the squalor of a flat on the ground floor, or rather, sunk into the ground floor. He lives in a sunken flat, the windows of which, I will have seen, are only at the level of the pavement, but, for all that, not really a basement flat, either.

There he was, anyway, in his flat or pit, the poet says. Reading, or trying to read. Idly toying with a translator's preface to the works of Georg Trakl, 1887-1914, he didn't live long, he says.

That's when he heard it, on the edges of his hearing, he says. At its limits. But once he did hear it, he could no longer not hear it, if he knows what I mean, he says. It formed a kind of backdrop to everything he would henceforward hear. Indeed, it was as if what he heard were only formed against that backdrop, that it was a temporary silencing of a perpetual noise. Everything he heard in the flat, henceforward, he said, he did so as a silencing of a great and prior roaring.

He pressed his ear to the floorboards, the poet says. The noise grew louder. There was a rumbling, even a shuddering, as would be caused by a distant earthquake. A perpetual earthquake, which is a strange thought, the poet says. Or a perpetual waterfall, a buried Niagara, the poet says.

You can still hear it, the underground river – that's how he thinks of it, he says, as an underground river. Even I might be able to hear it, he says, though he's not sure. – 'Let's sit in silence for a moment', the poet says. 'Let's just sit here and listen'.

'What are you doing! Get up! You can press your ear to the floorboards later', the poet says. 'You Danes!', he says. 'You're so eager! It's like one of those dogs who dry humps your leg', he says. 'Hump, hump, hump', he says.

'Anyway, where was I? You have to listen. Remember I'm doing you a favour by telling you this story. I'm filling up your dictaphone with my verbiage, with my wisdom: that's what you want, isn't it, for your idiotic Danish reasons? Get up off the floor and sit down'.

I'm lucky he still admits visitors, the poet says. Of course, he barely sees anyone now, he says. It's not like the old days. Mind you, there's no one he wants to see, and especially not Danish would-be translators and interviewers. But here I am, he says. Here I am and there I was, at his door, looking pitiful, he says. All blonde and blue eyed, he says. Hitler's dream, he says. All eagerness and a wagging tail. All dry humping. Hump, hump, hump, he says.

So what did he do?, says the poet, returning to his story. What was he to do concerning his river? He phoned the water company, he says. Of course he did! Who else should he phone! He phoned Northwest Water Customer Services, he says.

'You probably have very efficient water companies in Denmark', the poet says. 'They're all publically owned, for one thing. And you pay high enough taxes, God knows … Well, all our water companies were sold off in the 80s. Everything was sold off in the 80s', the poet says. 'The country sold itself off in the 80s', he says.

'If you want to understand anything about this country, you have to understand the great sell-off of the 80s', the poet says. 'And the great sell-offs that followed in the 90s and the noughties (that's what they're calling them now, the noughties). But it was the 80s that started them off, the sell-offs.

'You Danes were immune, of course', the poet says. 'Nothing's been sold-off in Denmark', he says. 'In fact, there were probably buy-ups in the Danish 80s', the poet says. 'They probably bought up half of Denmark and charged you for it, the Danish taxpayers!'

There he was, anyway, ready to phone. He was ready to give them his name and his address, the poet says. He was ready with his customer number, he says. He was ready to give them some idea of when his problem began, he says. He'd even prepared a sheet of A4 on which he had outlined his problem, the poet says. In short, he was ready – calm and lucid. He was a man of sound mind! Of mature years! In many ways, he was at his peak, he says. In his prime!

He dialled. He pressed the buttons. He raised the receiver to his ear … Of course, it was impossible to get through. All our lines are busy: that's what he heard on the line. Please call back later: that's what he heard.

And so began his new life. Every morning, he called, and every morning he was rebuffed. Days went by. Weeks, and still he called. He'd built it into his morning ritual, his call. Shit, shower, shave (of course, he doesn't shave anymore, he says) … make a call. He thought nothing of it. He expected nothing.

Gelassenheit, Meister Eckhardt called it, releasement. He'd been released from expectation, the poet says. He knew nothing of the future. What did he, the poet, care about his former hopes and dreams? Satori, the Buddhists might call it. Enlightenment.

He waited, the poet said. He waited until his waiting became wholly intransitive. Until it lost its object. All it was waiting. Waiting – just waiting, for what, he'd forgotten, he said. He noticed a change in the air. Spring had come, he says. Spring, and the winds of spring, stirring up the yard. There was a marvellous freshness to the air, he says. A promise …

Still he waited. Still he phoned, and was rebuffed. How many weeks had passed? What had they made of him, his waiting weeks? Was he still the same man? Had he altered in some way? Had he attained some lofty plane of Zen consciousness?

But then it happened, one morning. Then it happened, the miracle: he heard a phone ringing. It happened … One morning, long after he'd given up hope, and even the very idea of hope – long after phoning the water company had become anything but a ritual whose origin he had forgotten, there was no automated message, and a phone ringing somewhere, in some call centre.

Where was it?, he wondered. In Northeast England? There are loads of call centres, up there in the Northeast, the poet says. Call centres replaced the industries they sold off. They're selling the call centres off now, of course, the poet says. They're moving them to Poland. To India. But there it was, ringing. Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Then a kind of crackle, and an automated recording: Your call is important to us. Please keep holding. All of our operators are currently busy. Your call is being placed in a queue.

Placed in a queue! At least it was in a queue!, the poet says. I probably have no idea what a queue is, living in Denmark, he says. The Danish don't queue, he's heard that. The British queue, but the Danish huddle and shuffle and use their elbows and speak over each other. But the British queue, the poet says. 'We're very good at queuing. Very orderly.

'It must be something to do with being a monarchy', the poet says. 'Mind you, Denmark is a monarchy as well, isn't it? A bicycling monarchy, that's what they call it, he's read that', the poet says. 'You see pictures of your royals cycling about, cycling to work, cycling back home from work. Cycling on Danish cycle lanes.

'We don't have cycle lanes over here', the poet says. 'And our royals don't cycle. They wave from carriages', he says. 'We like a bit of distance between us and our royals, the poet says. You like to be pressed up against them, you Danes. You want them to be exactly like you, Prince Frederickson, Queen Fredericason, or whatever they're called, cycling to work and cycling back home from work. You want to pass them on your cycle lane.

Everyone has to be the same in Denmark, that's how he imagines it, the poet says. Everyone! The same! In the cycle lane, heading to work in their cycle lane, and driving home, again in their cycle lane. To each his place in the cycle lane, that's what it means to be Danish, the poet says.

Anyway, there he was in his queue, the poet says. They even played some music down the line, he liked that. Classical music. What was it? It wasn't Carl Nielsen, at any rate, the poet says. He quite likes Carl Nielsen, he says. What's that symphony where the percussionist has to play birch twigs? Well, whatever it was – not Nielsen -, it was on a loop. It began again and again, a five minute piece.

He thought he was ready to wait. He'd phoned up early, as soon as the lines were open. He'd been ready at 8.00! He'd had a shower; he'd washed and changed. He had his details written out neatly on a piece of paper. His customer number. His details. His circumstances. His impressions of the underground river. He thought he was ready!

Once, he might have written a poem about the underground river, God knows, the poet says. A poem!, what folly. But he was already post-poetic at that point, which was only a year or so ago, he says. He'd left poetry behind, a bit like Rimbaud, he says, laughing. A bit like Rimbaud, he says and laughs a bit more. Not a bit like Rimbaud!, he laughs. Not a bit like him!, the boy poet. The poet didn't have youth on his side, he says. Nor did he have genius. Neither youth nor genius.

Anyway, the poet did get through eventually, he says. It took about forty minutes, with that five minute loop of music playing over and over. Eight times, he counted it, from start to finish. It wasn't Nielsen, he says. It wasn't a piece of Danish modernism, he says. – 'You Danes and your modernism!', he says. 'Your state-sponsored modernism, which is to say, non-modernism', he says. 'Your tax-payer's modernism, i.e., the opposite of modernism'.

Where was he? Ah yes, Customer Services, he says. So-called Customer Services. He was on the phone to a member of Customer Services. To whom am I speaking?, he said. To whom: he wanted to sound like a person not to be ignored. Not to be trifled with! He put on his posh voice, the poet says. He drew himself up, in his armchair, to his full seated height – not particularly high, he says, he's not a tall man, but no one could see him.

To whom am I speaking? And the voice on the other end of the phone. Ken. So it was Ken. Where are you calling from, Ken?, the poet asked. From Team Valley, Gateshead, Ken said. Team Valley, Gateshead is on the other side of the river from Newcastle, in the northeast of England, the poet explains.

Well, he told Ken of his problem, the poet says. Of his underground river. Of the distant roaring of his underground river. He told him of his fears relating to the underground river, i.e., that it might carry his flat away: that it might detach his flat, and the flat above, from their place in the terrace, and carry them away.

The poet feared floods, he told Ken. He feared the river would one day burst through his floor. That it would smash up through the floorboards like a geyser. Surely Ken could understand his predicament? Ken could. And wasn't Ken of the opinion that someone should be sent out to inspect his flat?, the poet said. Ken was.

Well, Ken, Geordie Ken, took down his details, the poet says. Geordie Ken entered the details into the computer, and said that I would hear from them soon, the poet said. Then they said goodbye, Mancunion and Geordie. They wished one another a pleasant afternoon. Then he put down the phone, and that was that.

The waiting began again, the poet said. This time it was different, he said. He'd had some kind of contact with the company after all. His hopes had been raised! And it was spring, blue-skied, windy spring. He had his windows open, the poet said. He opened his door to the yard. He was full of hope. Hope hung him in the air like fresh laundry, he had to admit it.

Of course he heard nothing, the poet said. Not a thing. Nothing at all! His phone didn't ring! No one knocked at his door!

To the Dane, he's sure, this is very confounding. The Dane, no doubt, places his full trust in the public services. Everything's public in Denmark, after all, the poet says. Publically owned. He can imagine there's a great sense of community and solidarity among Danes, he says. A sense that being Danish means something, that it stands for something. – 'Of course, your country wasn't sold off in the 80s, that's the difference', the poet says. 'You don't know how lucky you were'.

He's sure the Dane can expect quite a lot in terms of public services, the poet says. Customer Services, Danish style, is, he's sure, quite excellent. One Dane rings another and explains his problem or her problem, and it instantly becomes a public problem, a collective problem, and the Dane in Customer Services sends out another Dane, or a team of Danes, to address the problem, which is now a problem for every Dane, for the whole of Danish society.

When the Dane sees a problem, he takes ownership of the problem, and sets out to address the problem as though it was his problem, the poet says. The Customer Service Dane is a Dane before he is a member of Customer Services – a Dane first and foremost! And likewise, the client Dane is also a Dane, and that first of all. His problem – his underground river, if he has an underground river – a collective problem.

Anyway, from then on, the poet says, he kept a detailed log of phonecalls he made: dates, times, and the first name of customer service people. A wrong had been done to him, surely they, the customer service people, could see that. He was the victim of a wrong – a tort, as they call it in the law.

There's a river flowing beneath my flat, he told them. It's been flowing for some time, probably, but he'd only just noticed it, he said. He explained in many different ways, the poet says. He called it a wrong, a tort.  Northern Water have committed a tort!, he said.

At times, he admits, he became angry. Would you want an underground river beneath your flat?, he said to the Customer Services Advisor. Surely it can't be right for a customer of the water company to have a river, a whole river, flowing beneath their flat, and the foundations of their flat?, he said.  

He tried pleading. He tried severity. He tried appealing to their fellow feeling, the Geordies, on the phone. Geordies have a reputation for their fellow feeling, he explains. Cheryl Cole's a Geordie, of course. She's full of fellow feeling. Gazza – Paul Gascoigne – he's full of it, too. I should put in a note about that when I transcribe our interview as a bit of context for my Danish readers, the poet says. Geordies: renowned in Britain for being full of fellow feeling, he says.

He wonders how our interview will read in Danish. He wonders if there are nuances that the Danish will lose, or, for that matter, whether his English will gain in translation, that could happen, he says, although that's unlikely from the look of me, he says. – 'How did a stormtrooper get into translation?', he wonders. Facing translations, that's what he recommends. 'The English and the Danish side by side', he says, nodding approvingly.

Anyway, back to his story. He became high-minded on the phone, the poet says. Sometimes you have to get high-minded. To appeal to people's higher nature. He invoked Gandhi and Bevan and international socialism. He spoke of Marx, and of the proletarian condition. He spoke of Weber, and of the iron cage of bureaucracy. He spoke of the great sell-off in the 80s, of the miner's strike and of the shipbuilder's strike – he thought that would arouse Geordie sympathy, the poet said. They're instinctively left-wing up there, he says. 

Then, on an ostensibly personal note, he told them that he, too, had once worked the telephones, as he put it, which is not quite true, the poet says. He told them he himself worked in customer services, he says, which was an outright lie. He'd been in their position, he told the customer assistants. Really, he was just like them. We're all the same!, he said. We're all in it together!, he says. My problem is your problem, don't you see?, he said. It's our problem! My problem is a collective problem! 

That was a Danish ruse, he now sees. He was appealing to the inner Dane of the Customer Service Advisors. Of course, they probably are part Danish, coming from the Northeast, the poet says. Half the population up there are descended from marauding Vikings, of whom I am clearly a direct descendant, he says. – 'They're probably distant cousins of yours, those Geordies', the poet says.

Anyway, he tried every ruse he could on the phone, he said, but to no avail. Nothing happened. He had to begin again with every Customer Service Advisor with whom he spoke. From the beginning! Each time! How many of them were there? How many Viking-descended Customer Services marauders? What was the turnover of Viking-descended Customer Services marauders? Because there seemed to a continually fresh wave of Viking-descended Customer Services marauders, the poet says.

Days passed. Weeks flew by like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea, the poet says. That's a quotation, he says. He reads from a post-it note:

Here was abode of the ancient king of Wu. Grass now grows peacefully on its ruins. There, the vast palace of Tsin, once so splendid and so dreaded. All this is gone forever – events, people, everything constantly slips away, like the ceaseless waves of the Yangtze that vanish into the sea.

'Beautiful!', says the poet. And then, 'turn your dictaphone off. I need a break'.

The indefinite. He wants to explain. He'll tell me some stories, the poet says. He found a slug in his washing up bowl this morning, the poet says. The exposed edges of the bowls were slimy, he says. And here's another: last night, quite late on, he smelt toast from upstairs' kitchen.

Stories, stories, the poet says. Nothing very much happens around here, the poet says. That's how he likes it! Nothing happens, he says. The white sky, that's a story. That's story enough, the poet says. The grime on the concrete. Thick grime, that's another. He laughs.

'I suppose you go skiing', he says. 'I suppose you going sailing'. I probably sail up to Norway to go skiing, he says. Then I sail back and ask the Danish government for more money, he says. For tax-payers' money to interview daft poets, he says.

Nothing much happens round here, the poet says. Occasionally, someone upstairs flicks a cigarette butt into the yard, he says. He can even hear the sound of the flick: a fingernail on the base of a cigarette. Flick. Once, a workman came over the yard wall, climbing up his ladder on the far side and letting himself down. That was a surprise, the poet says. He was here to fix the pipe, upstairs' pipe, which was leaking into his, the poet's, kitchen.

For a time, there was a magpie who would peck at the binbags when the bin lid was up. He closed the lid. And he saw a blackbird once, poking around in the drain. Oh, and sometimes the drain overruns, that's always exciting, he says. That's always a drama. He has to go out and poke a bamboo stick through the grunge. He has to find the holes through which the foamy washing up water might drain.

Nothing much happens here, the poet says, and laughs. Every morning, the day dawns above his yard and, guess what?, nothing happens. The plants are dying, the concrete is streaked with green, nothing is happening, nothing in particular, do I understand …?

*

Nothing in particular. There was the episode of the underground river, the poet says. He heard it at night, the underground river. His hearing fell through the layers of silence to find it, and there it was. A streaming. A rushing.

He imagined a mountain stream. He imagined a fresh brook, babbling in the fells. But he knew this stream ran in darkness, and was probably full of sewage and rats. He shuddered. There was a disgusting stream running beneath the flat. Everything disgusting was running beneath his flat.

But when he pulled up the floorboards, he found nothing at all, just earth. Someone might be buried under there, he thought of the earth. There's no proper foundations here, he thought. But under there, somewhere, there's an underground stream, he was sure of that.

In the end, the water company came out, he said. It took a lot of phonecalls, but they came. A workman pressed his ear to a long tube pressed to the concrete and listened. The pipe's burst, he said, and then had me fill out some forms so the water company could come out with a drill to see what was what.

Then he marked out with blue paint a square of concrete besides the kitchen wall. They'll dig there, he said, and that's what they did, a few weeks later, when they came out with their pneumatic drill. They dug and dug, and what did they find? Nothing, the poet says. An intact pipe. So they filled up and the hole and left.

'Can you hear it?', the poet says. 'Can you hear it now, the streaming?' And then, 'Of course you can't. You've got Danish ears. You can't hear the indefinite'. I can't smell it, either. Something is rotting, he says. Can you smell it? No, of course not. Well, he'll make me touch it, he says. Go on, touch the wall in the kitchen. It's wet, isn't it? Clammy. There's rust-coloured paste on my fingers, I tell him. The plaster's coming off, he says, laughing.

The poet's flat. The poet's rooms. He has three rooms, he says, and that's enough. His kitchen/dining room. His bedroom, and his bathroom, which is surprisingly large, he says.

He shouldn't have left me into his flat, not really, he says. What am I doing here, drinking his tea? But here I am, in his flat, his writing pit. His former writing pit, the poet says.

I ask him about the bevelled window that divides the kitchen/dining room and the bedroom. It's an unusual feature. It's to let light through, the poet says, putting his hand to the glass. There's not enough light, not here in the flat. That's how he likes it, the poet says. The daylight oppresses him. It makes him feel agoraphobic. Agoraphobic and claustrophobic, he says.

When there's too much light, it's maddening, he says. Light everywhere, he says. Light pressing down. But here, in the flat, reading in his armchair in the bedroom, the light is blurred and diffused enough to become unthreatening. It asks for nothing and demands nothing. He feels very close to the indefinite. 

*

How can he explain the indefinite to the Dane?, the poet wonders. How can he make it tangible, felt? No doubt, my life is full of excitement, he says. Full of events! I go on holidays, no doubt. I probably go sailing. I look like a sailor. I have the far-seeing eyes of a sailor. Do I play golf? No, probably not golf. Even I am not shameless enough for golf. But I am used to the sea, he can see that. To the froth of the waves. To the salty air. He hates the sea, he says. He hates the salty air.

Blue eyes have no depth, he says. They can see as far as infinity, he says. What haven't I seen, with my Danish eyes?

'Look through the bevelled glass', the poet says, 'what do you see?' Nothing very much, I tell him. - 'The other room is blurred, its objects are without contour', the poet says. 'Now you have to imagine that in terms of time, the poet says.

'Imagine blurred events, moments undivided from one another. Imagine events that never quite transpire. Imagine life without contour, where nothing completes itself, and nothing really begins. Imagine that there's no end to things, and no beginning to them either'.

No matter, the poet says. He can see it's beyond me.

There's a shot in Nostalghia – you have to spell it with the 'g', he says, it's the Russian spelling, or rather, our transliteration of a Russian spelling – that always returns to him, the poet says. It's eight minutes long, he's timed it, he says.

Gorchakov – the Russian poet – first sits and then lies down, that's the action, all of it. It's dark at the beginning of the shot, but by the end, dawn has come. In eight minutes, a whole night has passed, I think that's it, the poet says.

At one point, an Alsatian wanders into the shot. We viewers saw it last in the poet's memories of the country he's abandoned – Gorchakov is living in Italy. The Alsatian has wandered into the shot from his memories, from his dreams, the poet says.

Then it disappears. Dawn comes. The room lightens. The dog came and went in a secret fold of time. Was it a dream?, I ask him. No, the poet says, the dog was quite real. Everything in the room was real. He thinks a lot about that, the poet says. Am I real? Is he real?

*

Tarkovsky has a great feeling for the indefinite, the poet says. Tarkovsky above all. Bresson is less concerned about the indefinite, he's busy advancing his story, but Tarkovsky … He reads from a post-it note:

We've come to the end of the day. Let us say that in the course of that day something important has happened, something significant, the sort of thing that could be the inspiration for a film, that has the makings of a conflict of ideas that could become a picture.

But here's the crucial bit, the poet says.

But how did the day imprint itself on our memory? As something amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a cloud. And only the central event of that day has become concentrated, like a detailed report, lucid in meaning and clearly defined. Against the background of the rest of the day, that event stands out like a tree in the mist.

Like a tree in the mist, the poet says. That's a spatial image. Film can certainly capture space. It's made for that, for framing space. But it's time Tarkovsky is after. He thinks film can sculpt in time …

'How are you going to sculpt anything with your dictaphone?', the poet says. Look at you, waving your dictaphone about … it's grotesque!' If he stood for one thing with his poetry, his dreadful poetry, which he gave up a long time ago, the poet says, it was an attempt to sculpt in time.

'How pretentious!', he says. 'That's the thought in your Danish head, isn't it? How pretentious!' It's the thought in his head, too, the poet says.

But even now, he's after the same thing, the poet says. Not writing poetry is the same as writing poetry, in this regard. He knew what he was after, back then, when he wrote poetry, just as he knows what he's after now, now that he's given up writing poetry. It's the same, the same thing, the poet says. Only now he's on the side of the indefinite, part of it, the poet says.

Tarkovsky or Bresson, that's the question, the poet says. Tark … no, Bresson, the poet says. It has to be Bresson! Everyone uses the same words when it comes to Bresson, the poet says. Austerity, for example. Impassivity. What a cliche!

Still, until recently, it was always Tarkovsky for him. Tarkovsky came first, although he was thinking of the Tarkovsky of Mirror, and to some extent Stalker, and not so much of the 80s Tarkovsky, of the later Tarkovsky, where he becomes altogether too Tarkovskian, if that's a word, the poet says.

Of course, it could be said that Bresson is always Bressonian. That there's a Bressonian way of doing things. Of looking at the world. At people. But Bresson isn't self-indulgent like the later Tarkovsky, the poet says. He's swifter. He's surer, an arrow loosed through the air.

A film shouldn't be much longer than 90 minutes, the poet says, although he makes a partial exception for Stalker. 90 minutes, and some of Bresson's films are shorter than that, he says. Joan of Arc is only 65 minutes, for example. 65 minutes! The arrow finds its target. There's no boredom. No longeurs when it comes to Joan of Arc, the poet says. And A Man Escaped is only 83 minutes long, he thinks it's 83. Nothing extraneous happens. Nothing indulgent.

Mirror is about 100 minutes long, and it only gets indulgent – a little indulgent – towards the end. Other than that, it's perfection, he says. The way its parts combine! The ordering of materials! The thought of Tarkovsky in the editing room makes him shudder with awe, the poet says. He only has to think about it, and he shudders.

He has his own summary of the scenes and shots of Mirror on his wall, and every time he passes it, he shudders, he says.

*

Mirror, says the poet. He never stops thinking about it. Mirror. Tarkovsky, in his film, wanted to show us an apartment in which time itself lived, the poet says, reading a quotation from a post-it note stuck to his wall. Time itself, the poet muses.

The secret of shooting time, for Tarkovsky, lay in the preparation for the shot – in particular, the conditions of light, of weather. He used a minimal number of takes for each shot. A single take was ideal – rehearsed, but one off, the poet says.

Tarkovsky wanted to allow time to flow, living and aleatory. He wanted to capture time in the shot, but also to release it – to realise what he calls the ceaseless flow of living life that surrounds us, the poet says, reading from the same post-it note. To capture and release time, both at once. The shot must breathe, live. Time has to live …

How to let time live?, the poet wonders. How to give life to the shot – the imaginary shot that pans around his flat? How to the framing of the wheelie bins in the yard, and the long scar in the wall where the pipe was pulled away? How the backs of the houses opposite, and the plant whose pot is broken, a cone of earth held together by roots?

Everything points towards a kind of wearing away of time, of linearity, of succession, the poet says. Of the way moment might be uncoupled from moment.

Sometimes, he imagines there is a kind of passion of daylight. That, seen from a certain angle, light falls into itself, and the day turns inwards, away, pressing into another dimension. That just as the third dimension unfolds from the second – a drawn square becomes a cube – there might be a fourth spatial dimension, and a fifth, and a sixth, in infinite succession.

The day unfolds itself in itself, he imagines. Somewhere else it is dreaming. Somewhere else, it is lost in its own corridors … Only he feels he's touched it, that other time, the other side of time. That it's come close to him, like a wild creature suddenly emboldened, trusting.

Above all, the Dane wants a stake in the day, that's how he'd sum it up, the poet says. – 'That's why you're always writing in your notebooks'. He takes my writing as a sign of very bad taste, he says. Danish taste, he says. Danish greed, he says.

For the Dane wants the day to be his; he wants to hours to part for him like the Red Sea to the Israelites. He wants to be granted passage, and to so join the passage of this day to the passage of others, and so on through his life, letting it – so he thinks – be his, and letting him live.

Ah, but life is exactly what the Dane misses, the poet says. Better still the amnesiac who loses his memory overnight. Better the patient unable to form new memories, for whom the same day repeats itself eternally.

The Dane knows nothing of the happiness of forgetting, says the poet. The Dane cannot let go of time.

*

'Above all, you have to learn to let go', the poet says. 'What happens does not do so for your benefit', he says. 'It's the greatest of lessons'.

I need to study Tarkovsky, he tells me. I need to study Mirror, and the continuity shots of Mirror.

He tells me of a scene – scarcely a scene, he tells me, and more of a gap between scenes – in which the wind passes among the things on a table, blowing them over. A bottle rolls and falls to the ground, he says. That's all! That's enough! And isn't that the miracle of Mirror, that is made up of continuity shots that are supposed to pass unnoticed in the film?

He can see I'm lost, the poet says. Continuity shots, he says, are when the camera lingers on a detail, and it has nothing to do with the story. With the ostensible story, he says. What happens then?, he asks. What fails to happen? Of course, that's precisely what I would miss, the poet says, what fails to happen.

The Noise of Time, the poet says. Mandelstam's title. He's always admired it. Always turned it over in his head. What do you think it is in Russian?, he wonders. He should have asked his Russians, back when he taught them, what the English phrase, The Noise of Time translates. Of course, I would be able to tell him what The Noise of Time translates, if I was anything like a decent translator, he says. If I could translate things to and from the Russian, rather than to and from the Danish, he says.

Time, to the Russian, is as vast as the Russian steppe, he images, the poet says. Time is as vast as Russian space is vast, their whole vast country. To the Russian, time is a cathedral that could hold any cathedral, the poet says. No: it's the night above all cathedrals, greater than them, higher than them, drawing their steeples up higher. No: time is the night above all nights, the absence of stars above the starry rift. Isn't that a lovely phrase, he says, the starry rift?

That's what he can hear, or thinks he can hear, the poet says, changing metaphors, when he lowers his ear to find time. What would it mean, he often wonders, to make sound from silence, to speak not by adding more noise to the world – there's too much noise! – but by subtracting silence from noise. It would be like drawing with a finger on condensated glass, he says.

Ah, but these are Russian thoughts, not Danish ones, he says, and no doubt this is all beyond me.

He knows I'm busy with my notebook, the poet says. He knows my drive to narrate, to account for things. It's my Danishness, he says. I am a kind of book-keeper, he says. A balancer of accounts. 

Why don't I understand?, he asks. Narrative is the enemy, he says. Narration, all that. My desire to record my conversations with him, for one thing, the poet says. Madness! My desire to array every one of our encounters along a single line. Madness again! I am an auditor of the spirit, the poet says. I have an accountant's soul, a bureaucrat's soul.

'You Danes want to round everything off', he says. I want to round off, which is to say finish off, each incident, each event – each of our conversations, for example, he says. Each of our walks. I want to take a kind of revenge on the indefinite, he says.

We have to give up writing, the poet says. No one seems to understand it but him, he says, the need to give up writing. Least of all me, his amanuensis (although he didn't ask for an amanuensis, and not indeed for a Danish amanuensis). 'You don't understand, do you?', he asks me. No.

Our problem is that there's too much writing, too much speaking, too much communication, the poet says. We have to create spaces of non-communication, of non-speech, of non-writing, he says, though he doesn't expect me to understand any of this.

Samuel Beckett, for example, was said to speak very little. Callers wouldn't be surprised to sit with him in silence, he said. Fellow walkers would walk with him in silence. It was a companionable silence, the poet says, but silence nonetheless.

Beckett was able to be silent, the poet says, as he is not. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut, he says. He's a talker, though this is really my fault. He talks too much, but that's because I keep waving my dictaphone in my direction. I'm corrupting him!

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark!, he says. No doubt there's something rotten in every Dane. – 'Well, there's certainly something rotten in you'.

But perhaps every poet needs his Dane, he says, his amanuensis. Every poet, every ex-poet, because that's what he is, an ex-poet. Or even a non-poet, so long as I understand the 'non-' of this phrase in an expansive and liberating and therefore non-Danish sense, he says.

The Russians!, says the poet. The Russians! He's glad I asked him about them. He's glad, and he's not glad, the poet says.

There's Mandelstam, of course, eternal Mandelstam, and there's Tsvetayeva, fierce, fierce Tsvetayeva, a she-lion, the poet says. A vixen. She makes him shudder, the poet says. Her life. Her terrible fate.

No, there are some things of which it would be indecent to speak, the poet says. I shouldn't torment him with my questions about the Russians. The Russians, the Russians, he says.

He photocopied Russian poetry in the university library, he says. You didn't need a security pass in those days, he says. You could just sneak into the library, he says. No one cared. No one was looking. But nowadays …, he says, and shudders.

He has them in a folder somewhere, his photocopied Russian poetry, he says. He can't even remember their names, those poets, and after he went to such trouble to photocopy them. Fet – that was one name. But there were others, he says. He loved them fiercely, he says. He loved them like a she-lion, he says. As Tsvetayeva must have loved: terribly, fiercely.

What a fate, what a fate, he sighs. Her letters. Her letters are the best of all, he says. You can't get them in a complete edition, alas, he says. Not in English. You have to make do with seeing parts of the letters quoted, he says. By Cixous. By Feinstein, in her biography of Tsvetayeva.

For a time, the poet says, he had a job teaching English to Russians, the university employed him, he says. He taught a Russian Professor, Vladimir and his wife, Ludmilla. He pronounces these names very carefully, the poet. Vladimir sounds more like Vludimir, when he says it. Vladimir and Ludmilla, he says.

Of course, Russians value their poetry, says the poet. All Russians. They can quote it by heart. It lives in their heart, just as it did Mandelstam. The Russians are a soulful people, he says. They had no Enlightenment, he says, not really. And they had Orthodox Christianity, nor Catholic Christianity, which makes a difference, he says. The theologians of the Russian Orthodox church were poets, not philosophers, as they were in the west. The Russians think differently to us, he says. They're a poetic people.

He would ask Vladimir – he pronounces it Vludimir – and Ludmilla simply to pronounce the word Tsvetayva. Simply to pronounce it! Svetayev, they would say – that's what it sounded like. Svetayev, he would say to himself on the bus on the way home. Svetayev, and he would add a very quite – a on the end of the name as they did. Not Svetayeva, he says, emphasising the last syllable, but Svetayev …

Char, the poet says. Char. The poet's poet, he says. Char is unfathomable, the poet says. Pure poetry, the essence of poetry, he says. It's too much for him. He can't even think of Char, the poet says. It gives him a headache.

Char! He shakes his head. No, he won't speak of Char. Not a word! The Leaves of Hypnos, he says. No, he won't speak of that. Commune presence, which he has in French, it's an anthology, he says. He doesn't understand a word. No, he won't speak of that, either, he says.

Char was a partisan, he says. That's the most poetic of vocations, the poet says. Captain Alexandre, that was his name in the Resistance, he says. That was his name, as a leader of a Maquis group, the poet says. A Maquis group; a group of Maquis: he's not sure how to say it.

The poet tells me he's going to read me some Char. He'll read me the opening of The Leaves of Hypnos, Feuillets d'Hypnos in French, he says. But when he opens his little hardback book, he finds it impossible. – 'I bear it', he tells me. 'You read it', he says, passing it to me.

 'These notes owe nothing to self-love, the short story, the maxim, or the novel', I read. 'A fire of dry grass might well have published them. The sight of blood spilled under torture once broke their thread, destroyed their importance. They were written under stress, in anger, fear, emulation, disgust, stealth, in furtive meditation, in illusory hope for the future, in friendship and love'.

Stop!, the poet tells me. I am to stop, he says, it's too much. Then we sit in darkness, as he refuses to turn on the lights.

We have to learn not to write, the poet says with great intensity. Not to write! We write too much, he says. We think we can write, and that we're entitled to write. But we're not so entitled, he says. We don't have that entitlement, not now, not here.

He doesn't have that entitlement, the poet says. Would could he write? What could have fallen to him, and uniquely to him to write? Do we struggle?, he says, looking up at me. Do you struggle? No, I don't struggle, I tell him. There's no struggle, the poet says. And where there's no struggle, there's no entitlement to writing.

Of course, it would be easy enough to undergo a certain kind of suffering, the poet says. He could come off his benefits, for example. He could come off the long term sickness benefits, he says. After all, he's not sick, not really, he says. He's rather morose, admittedly. Rather depressed, on occasion. But he's not sick, not really sick, he says.

If he wrote, he says, he would be the equivalent of one of those state-funded German writers, he says. One of those state-funded expressionists, there's a lot of them in Germany, he hears. Probably in Scandinavia, too, he says. In Denmark, for example. They're very comfortable in Denmark, poets, he says. They probably have a union: a poet's union.

No, he's no different from them, on his benefits, he says. But there's no point coming off benefits, he says, not really. It's not as if there's a general movement to come off benefits, he says. It's not as if he'd be part of something, a great wave.

To the poet, there has to belong a people, the poet says. The poet is part of a people, speaking for them, he says. The insulted and the injured, he says. Sufferers, he says. He has no people, which is to say, no constituency, the poet says. You have to be part of something to write, but in the end, he's part of nothing, he says.

*

Elytis. Gatsos, the poet says, reading the spine of one of his books. Elytis is famous, of course. Didn't he win the Nobel Prize? Seferis won the Nobel Prize, the poet says, he's sure of that. But Gastos is more obscure. Who's heard of Gastos, outside Greece – is that where he comes from, Greece? 

Gastos is probably a local poet, the poet says. He's probably from and represents a particular region of Greece. He's our poet, the people of this region would say. He speaks for us, they would say. Forget Elytis, they would say. We have Gastos. Elytis is for the Nobel Prize Committee, not for us, they would say. Forget Seferis, they would say. He has his admirers, they would say – even they admire him – but Gastos, now. Gastos: he's our poet, they would say.

Mitteleuropa is very regional, the poet says. Of course, Greece is not really part of Mitteleuropa, but it's near enough to it, the poet says. It's close to Macedonia, for example, which is really part of Mitteleuropa, he says.

What he knows of Greece comes from Angelopolous films, the poet says. And in Angelopolous films, Greece looks very like Mitteleuropa, he says, or at least the Mitteleuropa of his imagination, he says. It's very rainy and bleak, he says. Does it remind him of Manchester?, I ask him. No, it's more wild than Manchester, he says. More mountainous.

Nezval, Bartusek, Hanzik, says the poet, reading the spine of a book. Weores, Juhasz. Poet's names, says the poet, poet's names. The poet should always have a circumflex in his name somewhere, says the poet. All poets – all European poets – should be East European, he says. Mitteleuropean, whatever that means, he says.

They should at least be East European, he says. They should have passed through the horror of really existing communism, he says. They should still have burning memories of the war, he says, and of obscure conflicts we don't even know about over here, he says. They should have been resistance fighters, he says. Partisans.

He sees them in his mind's eye, wandering through the fields, lost in the long grass. He sees them in the forest after the rain, drops falling from the boughs. He sees them wading across marshes, composing verses in their head, remembering them, for theirs is the time of fighting, not of writing. He sees them locked up in solitary confinement, curled up on the floor, shuddering with cold and with hunger, but with poems locked up inside them.

Mitteleuropa, he says. East Europe, he says. Where all poems come from hardship. Where all poems are secret signs, passwords. Where words matter, and poetry is more important than bread, the poet says.

Ah, what it would be to read over there, in Eastern Europe, in Mitteleuropa!, the poet says. To read, which is to say, to listen. To take in. To enclose in your heart. To repeat it in the darkness before you're led in for interrogation.

*

Holan, the poet says. Herbert. What names! What names these are! He can't imagine them, the bearers of these names. He can't form an image of them, not a real image.

Herbert by the water pump (they have to pump water in Mitteleuropa). Holan in the grocery queue (they have to queue for food in Mitteleuropa). Men closed up against the world. Men holding themselves tight as a fist, clutched.

And what are they holding? What in the closed fists of their mind? The poem, the poet says, leaning forwards. The poem!, he says.

Reading, that should be enough, let alone writing. There are no readers anymore, the poet says. Well, none in Britain. Or at least none in Manchester. Or none in his street, or in his flat. There are no readers in his flat, he knows that. Not even him! Not even him, he says mournfully.

He stands outside reading. He's waiting outside. He's sunk to the floor in the eternal corridor, waiting to be admitted, but knowing that he will never, ever be admitted, not to reading, and even if he were admitted, it would be to find that there was nothing behind the door, that reading had fled long since.

*

Of course, the real reader of poetry would be able to quote poetry, the poet says. To quote it, great reams of it. He's unable to quote any poetry, says the poet. He should be able to, but he can't. How could he? He's British, and for the British, poetry is altogether too literary.

The British are very suspicious of the literary, he says, and rightly so. The literary can run off with you, he says. The literary can abscond with you, and you'll have no idea where you are. It's fine in Europe, in Old Europe, where life, in general, is more literary, in the positive sense of the word literary, he says. Over there, in Old Europe, in Mitteleuropa, it's perfectly possible to read poetry and to quote it.

He can imagine them, the Mitteleuropeans, roaming their wilderness, wandering through the forests and steppes, poetry on their lips. They lead literary lives, literary meant here in the positive sense, says the poet. But the British person is not a literary person, he says.

Literature is not natural to us, for all that our country has produced so many poets. No, literature is not natural to us at all, which is why, probably, our poets, British poets, either have to live abroad or in some kind of internal exile, says the poet. They have no place here, as he has no place here, not really, says the poet.

Once upon a time, he imagines, people actually read poetry. They read it, they read it out. They gathered together and read, and listened. Perhaps they still do! Perhaps that's what happens in the countries of Bobrowski and Herbert, of Kovner and Sachs.

That's what happens in his imaginary Europe, he says. In his imaginary Mitteleuropa, he says. In his Old Europe of the mind. One person reads, another person listens. They take it in turns. The first listens, the other person reads. 

And it's not pretentious, he says. It's not literary, he says. It's part of life, real life, ordinary life. It's like eating a crust of bread. It's like beer and sausages, which is what they eat in Mitteleuropa, he imagines. Beer and sausages, outside on trestle tables! Beer and sausages in the mild spring evening, the thaw long since come and gone, the winter snow forgotten.

In the mild evening, in spring, you can read poetry as you eat you beer and sausages alone, the poet imagines. There'd be nothing unusual in it. Nothing literary. He despises the literary, he says. The literary, literature; he spits. That's a sign that you've come too late, when you start using words like literature, he says.

*

One day, he'll read, really read, he tells himself. Perhaps such reading requires what Kafka wanted for his writing: an underground room, far below the earth, in which he'd be locked up, sequestered, and to which there would occasionally be brought meals.

To be locked up with a book! Locked up with Ungaretti! Ah, what a marvel, says the poet. To be locked up with Montale! Locked up with Amichai!, and not the Penguin Modern European Poets edition, either.

Facing translations, that's what he'd want. Facing translations, and he could map word onto word. He could mouth the words the translated ones would mirror. He could mouth them one by one and suck on them like lozenges, like cool stones in his mouth.

Hasn't he dreamt of learning a language by divining its correspondence with its facing translation? Of learning the languages of Nezval, say, or Cavafy by going back and forth between the original poem and the facing translation?

He's a great reader, the poet grants. He likes to read. He likes the lightness of reading. What does he add to the book by his reading? Nothing – nothing at all. He doesn't disturb the book. He leaves it alone. It goes his way, and he his.

It's just that his way passes along the surface of the book. That he passes lightly across it, as across a sleeping dragon in a fairy tale. The book turns in its sleep. He's frightened.

But in truth, he could never wake up the book. The book is not dead – it's still alive, but in a way that is indifferent to him, remote from him. It's alive as a quasar is alive, buried in space. It's alive as a creature made of stars might be: unfathomable, vast.

*

He reads, of course he reads. Still, he's not sure he reads, for all that. What does he take in? What does he really understand of his Penguin Modern European Poets, of Ekelof or Holub? What can he make, really make, of Quasimodo or Pavese? Ungaretti, he grants, he does understand. He feels some connection with Ungaretti. But the others?

His editions haven't even got facing translations, he says. He can't even mouth the foreign words to himself to which the translation corresponds. He can't even mouth them and fantasise he knows them, that he could speak unknown European tongues.

Ungaretti, now. Ungaretti is different. His poems are very short, for one thing. A couple of lines. A single phrase. Very short, very simple. He likes his poems short, and surrounded by commentary, the poet says. In truth, he prefers literary critical books that quote poetry rather than real, actual poetry on the page.

The space around the poem makes him shudder. It's always too white, too vast. He fears he will go snow-blind, space-blind. How could he dare to leave tracks there? How to disturb the snowy peace? Even Ungaretti makes him shudder, he says. He hardly even opens his Ungaretti now, he says.

Of course, he's the last person I should call 'the poet', given that he's never written a line, and still thinks he's written too much. He has no, absolutely no, interest in writing poetry, he says. 

The time of poetry is over, he says, and so is the time of those interested in or feel close to poetry. He, granted, is interested (to an extent) and feels close (in some ways) to poetry, but, in the end, has nothing to do with poetry. It has nothing to do with him!

Poetry's retracted, he says. It's withdrawn back into itself. The tide is out. Somewhere, far away, poetry is alive, lost in itself. Somewhere or other, there is poetry pressing darkly into itself.

And he, who is he? A beachcomber? A tide-out walker? Not even that. For what does he understand of what has been left by poetry? How can he even read the signs of the former presence of poetry?

A geographer could point out the drumlins and eskers left by the disappearing glacier. But what he can point out? What could he understand? Even the withdrawal of poetry is closed to him.

*

The doors are closed, tight shut against him. The doors are closed! He's too late. And if the doors were open? If he forced himself through? There would be nothing there, nothing at all. A wasteland. A shore without a sea.