No sleep for either of us on the flight to
Maine and then to Gatwick. Ftom the train, backyard
allotments and cooperatives, the city hardly
there at all outside Victoria and there inside it
only as a crowd. It’s hot, of course, and everyone
just manages. We pass them in their queues. They need
maps and bookings, taxis, other trains. I try to think they
like some part of this. It would help me through the raw
worry of what to do if I could think they
liked it in some way I didn’t. I ask about the
Grosvenor, and it’s silly to have asked because it’s
here, inside the station. We take our bags upstairs,
come down again, go out to look for dinner, eat,
come back and go to sleep. When I heat it, I know
first that it’s coming from below, from that odd warm
hollow where the people were and where they must be now,
still purposeful and hearing differently this voice.
A woman’s, young, it names in series all the single
destinations, platforms, times, then carries here with
nothing that disturbs me, nothing I can understand,
no word, with nothing lost, no listening and only
letting go, forgetting.