Horace in a Vacuum

Here’s something with a view to something. Borne of eighteen minutes spent at a window, it begins like this, with a tap filling a bathtub and a radio on, and it ends like this. Somewhere in the middle I’m curled asleep, letters spilling from my nightstand and a projection on the inner curve of my forehead. Elsewhere my phone's blinking, nothing like a guillotine's blade. There's something on if you wanna go, it said, if you can be at the station around seven. Yeah, I guess so, but at the time I wasn't sure I was willing to forsake an evening of not being at the station around seven. I put my arms in my jacket.

It had been raining. I slipped three of the buttons on my jacket into three slits on the other side, assuming this was what the buttons and slits were for (nothing on the jacket told me so), and pushed on for a further six minutes. It was short of around seven when I stepped onto the station and the owner of the voice on the phone was already there, dressed tidily in jeans, belt, T-shirt and a jacket of his own. It was less clothes than would be necessary to keep satisfactorily warm, perhaps why there was no warmth in his smile when he saw me. We boarded the second carriage and sat opposite one another by a window on the far side. I noticed he had a crumb or a loose bit of skin on his lower lip which remained even as he yawned.

I recall being asked, twice, what I did. I recall a small woman and a smaller man seated around a kitchen table with me, the guy from the previous paragraph, and someone else. Nothing else bears repeating, except that we were drinking something from a bag that I can still taste as I climb into bed. A radio drawing from an outlet set in a skirting board is discussing a film I have no inclination to see and even less inclination to hear discussed. It's distracting me from the water coming in under the door.