The plane descended below the clouds and, like a photograph materialising in a developing bath, London appeared into view, a quietly glimmering expanse of nocturnal lights. Winter Wonderland pulsed with a flare of bright colours like a shining nebula amid the dim clusters of orange and white lights speckling the city. Thames cut through like a rift, opaque and obsidian. A long slither of headlights stretched into the black distance. Nothing else moved in that network of lights except, strangely enough, the lights themselves with their subtle and persistent twinkling, which, though seemingly random at first, gradually assumed a dreamy pattern and immersed the entire city in a rhythmic quivering like heat-haze rising from a sea of candles. The lights switched on inside the plane and my reflection grew clearer. I shifted my focus back and forth between my translucent double floating in the air and the buildings rising through it until I was broken from this little trance by a sharp shooting pain in my ears. Suddenly the lights were above me.
On the train I took a seat next to a woman on the phone. Her voice was so hypnotically soft and calm that I couldn’t help eavesdropping. I pulled out my book and pretended to read.
“Well, I’m glad it’s better now. I hadn’t heard from you for so long I was getting really worried. . . You know your situation reminds me a lot of Brief Encounter, have you seen that movie?. . . Oh you should, it's beautiful. . . It’s basically about a woman who’s in this very traditional middle-class marriage, you know, housewife, two kids, a very English, gentlemanly husband. Anyway, one day she meets this man at the train station and has an instant connection with him. And at the end of the movie she has to decide between him and her husband. . . Yeah, but she chooses to go back to her husband who in the last scene sits next to her, holds her hand, and says, ‘You’ve been gone so far away, thank you for coming back to me.’ It’s so beautiful, you should really watch it.”
I will. I didn’t mind the spoilers. I smiled at the coincidence of hearing about the movie on board a train.
I got off at my stop and made my way to the hotel. The streetlights blended into a single stream along the glistening road and at the far end, on a slight uphill curve, converged into an unearthly and ever-distant cascade of white light. The moon drifted in and out of puddles along the path but not a single ray of moonlight could reach me. It must have fallen into the streetlights and, overpowered by their icy, gauzy rays, dissipated in the film of milky light cast over the road. In its place, lampshades of phantom moonlight frayed towards the ground in mists of electric glow. As I walked from light to light, a fan of shadows unfurled around me, an array of shades spinning elliptically with every step, stretching in front then curving behind, sharpening then fading away into the night air.
The clouds were oddly bright against the dark, as if lit from below. And I noticed then that the sky wasn't as dark as I had first thought either but that it had in fact been faintly tinged by a wave of skyglow that had lifted up from the city lights like a kind of dawn and swept away the stars. It invaded the sky to its depths and, like a magnetic field, held off the descent of total darkness, suspending the night in a perpetual, manufactured dusk.
I wondered if those sparse points of light far above me were flickering stars or only stationary planes. I couldn’t tell. And maybe it didn’t matter. Starlight arrives too late anyway, when the stars themselves are no longer there, lost in either their orbits or their deaths, and what’s left is just an afterimage of something long gone. It was better to look at the sparkle of wet concrete, it showed me galaxies the sky kept hidden.
I checked into the hotel, ran the bath, and played A Musical Romance by Billie Holiday and Lester Young. I went to the window and gazed back out into the night; the music and running water faded into white noise. The moon was directly opposite my window just as it had been back at home a few hours earlier, melting in the rain-blurred pane; relative to it, it was as if I hadn’t moved at all today. Beneath, crowns of winter trees cocooned haloes of white half-light radiating from streetlights and, in the interplay of shadows and gleams, transfigured before me into giant silvery spiderwebs haunting the streets - and then they were gone, just as suddenly as they appeared, unwoven by my startled blinks and turned back into spirals of dewy, leafless branches. Sprays of raindrops flit in and out of existence like shooting stars around the trees and for a moment I thought it was snowing; I don’t know why I fell for this illusion, it doesn't snow in December anymore. The splashing sound of the bath overflowing brought me back to myself.
I got into the bath and sank into a stupor as the water weighed down on me. My eyes rested lazily on the kaleidoscope of gossamer light the ripples reflected onto the ceiling. Something flickered in the haze of my peripheral. An image - a face - was seeping through the thin layer of fog filling the mirror. It must have been drawn on by the previous guest, possibly the night before or maybe even that very morning. I flicked some water onto it and watched its outlines unravel and drip down the glass. The face slowly disappeared into the thickening fog and I was left alone with Lady Day - a slight muffle in her voice as if it too was dissolving into the steam.
Moments to spare, with someone you care for. . .
Afterwards, I felt like watching Brief Encounter. I found it online and left the album playing softly on loop. The glare of the screen pressed my eyes into a drowse. Music and dialogue infused my dreams, thinning into trails of mist barely distinguishable from the darkness of sleep. I was woken up by the sound of a train whistle blowing.
Oh, Alec. Alec, I must go home now. I really must go home. . .
Said Celia.
Now who’s to guide me, because I’m lost at sea. . .
Sang Billie.
I had already forgotten my dreams but I was sure there were people in them. I switched off the movie and the music and set my alarm for work.
Wow!