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G R A H A M L I N D S A Y |
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How do your get out of here?The place has changed you'd hardly recognise it even the locals don't know how much. Only the hills at the end of the street look the same, sunbathing in the decaying pixels, masts eaten by the inscrutable stonewashed blue. Sleepy village in the sun's trap 'criminals' and 'heroes' fetched up in to have children to forget themselves to scratch a living, to bow out in a blaze of invisibility-- falling stars nobody sees. The stories the trees and paths told have lost their colour and detail for want of our audience. Even the changes made after we left look old. What used to be the hub, simple as a bicycle wheel, the spokes radiating to the four winds-- which Rewi Starnes's three-quarter draught carried him home from the pub across divots loose as dung waking from the green as much mayhem as the wheelies of the all-night revellers-- has become the kind of maze any self-respecting ratepayer would be proud to lose themselves in. There are roundabouts everywhere. The people who live in your old house have put a high-pitched garage on the front lawn under the blue atlas a rusty rock wall along the boundary. You wouldn't recognise the place and yet you would. You'd be amazed then you'd thank your lucky stars you didn't have to put up with it anymore. A few spots of rain curve out of the clouds just as on the day we buried you-- they loved you, your parents, the sky father and the earth mother-- and it feels like cherrio. We look down the beautiful slope we're about to turn our backs on when home's almost become unrecognisable enough to consider exploring all over again. Almost. The lichens on the stone look like they could do with a drop look like the cancers on your ninety-four-year old sister's tortoise-shell skin where she lies under a white cotton blanket in the secure wing talking nineteen to the dozen as ever though mostly gibberish now or maybe not: And we'll go that way and we'll go that way and we'll go that way . . . We had to go we had to go we had to go . . . We can take it back we can take it back we can take it back . . . And he can go and he can go and he can go . . . You didn't know who you were. We didn't need a heather. We didn't go all the way. She doesn't want them, not the way they are. But we'll go alright we'll go alright we'll go alright . . . You're the ones who'll be going and serve you right. To hell with it. We weren't going to have it. And we stayed away and we stayed away and we stayed away . . . We'll wait we'll wait we'll wait we'll wait we'll wait . . . Go on, get home! Her neighbour, a religious nutter when we were kids, pushes her walker past the door banging on, God has the mercy and God has the way only now it seems prophetic. When it's time to go, we find the doors all have keypad locks. We try catching the charge-nurse's eye, but it's like we're part of the flock flapping at the windows which has us wondering for a while till we ask a couple of old birds how you get out of there. They shrug their shoulders and flap their hands. Fly? they suggest and grin hopelessly. |
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