I don’t have to do it. I know that. But I feel compelled to do so.
I think I have always been afraid of the dark. I believe I have told you so already. As a child I had a night light. I thought it magical. It didn’t turn or play music or anything fancy like that, it was just a light, with Disney images, I think. But it was constant, it was alight, just for me. Now when I do my morning walks it is dark again. The morning light is coming later and later, minute by minute, and I am sad for that. And yet I still go out.
As I leave the flat there is a little bit of road that remains unlit. No doubt a cost-cutting exercise. I have to feel my way forward. My steps are less confident. I slow down my pace. Alert. Sensing with every hair on my skin. Sometimes there is a cat, slinking out from under a car. It is too dark for the birds. They only come out when their eyes can see the breaking of dawn. First light. By then I am almost by the Prom and in front of the sea.
I push into the dark. No, no, says my scared little self, let’s stay in. Where it is warm and safe. I push into the dark arriving at the Terrace Road junction. A woman strides out before me heading for the station. Her form is caught briefly by the yellow of the streetlamp. Along North Road I begin to hear the birds. The first ones. The ones with the largest eyes. The screeching of the gulls and then the whistling of the blackbirds. Then by the shore I hear the oystercatchers peeping their alarm. Is it about me? There is no one else. Earlier I did see a man coming out of a house. The slam of the door. Then a car engine. Diesel. Juddering. Then silence. Sounds lie heavy in the dark. Resonant, getting under my skin. Sometimes I see the smoker. She sits on a bench across from her house on North Road. She is closed-off. Wrapped up inside of herself. I say Good Morning, but I sense her reluctance to engage. She smokes and stares into the black.
Why do I do it? To master it? To challenge my fear?To walk into my fear and find it is alright? I have got through another night. And now? Now there is the joy of the day, the daylight. And today, yes today, the sun.
Bits of something like wisdom come to me from the radio. My new wee radio. Duck-egg blue. A Roberts radio, naturally. First from a short story by Brian Aldiss. ‘I think we work so hard because living, pure living, is too intense to endure.’ Yes. I concur. Sometimes one can be near exploding with it all. Work is a distraction. A way of escaping ourselves and those endless, unanswerable questions. I walk in the dark full of those questions, chanting my way, walking my way towards acceptance.
And then there was another. A play about some girls who chartered a barge during the war. The Maidens’ Trip by Emma Smith. ‘I felt so alive’, said one of the girls, ‘so full of sap.’ Yes, I remember that feeling. It comes less now. Now there is a something more akin to peace. Sitting in our wall, facing the sun, watching the sea, alert to the dolphins.
Any sign of Doris? he asks. No, I reply, not today.
We watch the passersby. Mother’s pushing prams, dogs on leads, middle-aged couples arm in arm, strolling. A child with a balloon. Anyone coming to join me? a woman calls from the sea.
Later, our Monday night Indian. Wellington, Cruz and Mohammed but no Melvyn. The table next to ours is taken by a three Muslim women and their young children. Everyone is chattering at once. Cruz turns up with a plate piled high with Nan breads and another of chips. Hands reach out and tear the bread scooping up curry. A little boy slides down off his chair to stand before us and beam. Hello, we say. He sidles back to his mother. She smiles. Proud. They are overtired, one of the women says. After they’ve left he notices a yellow plastic car under a seat and hurries out of the restaurant with it.
Did you find them? I ask when he returns. Yes, he says, pleased, a good turn done. My very own boy scout.
I was too tired for University Challenge. That’s the price you pay, he says, for getting up so early. I know, I say, but I need to do it. Have to do it. It’s my calm, you see. My way of walking myself into something that feels like peace.
