Young Street by Ian C. Smith

Min An

Young Street

This street replays in his mind, a street at the terminus of a city railway line in Australia where a platform ramp emptied into a bus station and taxi rank, where scenes in a movie about the world’s end would be shot, where a glamorous actor and actress guided by an acclaimed director would then vanish into movie history, phantasms on celluloid, with the cameramen, crew, extras, leaving the bright light of one day in the past captured on a reel, a street where a boy lugged holiday travellers’ bulging bags for tips, smoked cigarettes between train arrivals, plotting his escape from a home stained by unhappiness, his thoughts of the glittering city fizzing with speculation about obsessed novelists tapping at typewriters, gangsters swaggering, noirish women shimmying in black lingerie, a demi-monde of whisky-drinking musicians, gesticulating artists silhouetted in wood-panelled bars, before believing nobody could step back into this street the way it was, this relic that, so many trains, so many movies, so many whiskies later, wafts into view when he is alone, won’t be erased.   

© Ian C. Smith

Ian C. Smith

Ian C. Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria and on Flinders Island.

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Lost Language of Trains by Ian C. Smith

 

Pixabay

Lost Language of Trains

An early scene from My Beautiful Laundrette.  South London, where my father grew up.  Daniel Day-Lewis, a gay bovver boy, no way of knowing he would one day be the U.S. President, still young then, as was I.  Trains rattle along the line below a young Pakistani Englishman whose mother suicided by jumping onto it, where he pegs laundry that will fleck with soot, take forever to dry, as it does in rain-streaked districts of stained bricks.

I became familiar with laundrettes in Thatcherite London, and constant trains, their echoes wails of suffering as if from ancient bones buried beneath the lines in that centuries-old city of conflict.  Like a pardoned convict’s return, mine took years from when my parents whisked me to the other end of the Earth, if that verb applies to a crude six-week voyage by ex-troopship after we seemed to leave as hurriedly as the squatters scrambling out the window in another early scene.

One woeful Wednesday, sent home from school because the King died, I skipped home joyous at this unexpected half-holiday only to disturb my mother, a chilblained war-damaged woman, hands fixed in washing-up water, staring at something nobody else saw, face damp with sorrow.  Soon we were off to the Australian jungle, I thought.  Well, school was savage, which suited me, London days disappearing dreamlike.

Back Down Under where laundry dries quicker than yesterday dies, a squatter myself wherever I lived, years worn to the bone now, the evening train comes on down the line, earworming me, a train in an Elvis song, lights semaphoring my walls, hauling me back to when everybody seemed on the dole, another line from that film, when I needed little more sustenance than the energy, the wan thrill of returning emigres you could call underground love, memory and landscape alike in attrition. 

© Ian C. Smith

Enjoy other posts by Ian C. Smith HERE.

Ian C. Smith

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria and on Flinders Island.

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Saudade by Ian C. Smith

Samet Burak Daglioglu

Saudade 

I moved from here, only several miles but long ago. Walking back where I once lived, I feel I am returning from exile, wondering why this neglect for so long. Breathing the tangy old neighborhood – wood smoke, breakfast cooking, piled-up leaves – I try calculating sequences of various events and people in the clandestine past. The riverbank where those who lived rough got drunk seems unchanged. Unlike this and other town landmarks, some past people leave ghostly gaps in my retrospective. Diaries would be a treasure, but even these can lie. Though I’ve loved reading famous examples, I was too slack to be a diligent diarist. Scenes swarm slant in my labyrinthine recollection. Our first date, both of us fourteen. A Sabbath, past hushed factories, backed by church bells, she talks and talks. A boy ill-equipped for love, I hold her hand, want to kiss her, know I should but delay this. We could walk for miles along streets I would later run, timing myself with a stopwatch after quitting smoking. I’ve quit a lot of things. In the flour mills’ towering shadows near the edge of town, we stop to kiss. My relief matches that when I summoned the nerve to plunge into the pool from the terrifying high board to save face.

In thrall, passing houses on once-familiar streets, I strain to reel in what led to my long estrangement, but my medication increased, chronological memory lurks darkly raveled deep in my mind’s chambers. Details waver, some previously believed facts clashing. Lost seasons exist like islands in climate change, drowned in a rising sea of forgetfulness, yet weighing like nagging sorrow. Sorrow for mistakes made? Because I abandoned people? The town’s pool, long superseded by a heated facility, lies eerily quiet. Its still, black water would make a great lingering camera pan for a movie about regret.

That walk culminating in a kiss was the second time we met, the first being at my sister’s wedding. While young adult guests danced hotly, we adolescents talked unobserved in a marquee’s dark corner. Was kissing on our minds then in fairy light glimmer? I remember lipstick, her intaglio brooch, and name, though many other details have drifted off. That Sabbath walk also peters out into memory’s black hole. I’d love to know what we discussed but our words, like most, are forever truant. Do we simply love that which is gone because of our remorseless deterioration until reaching our vanishing points?

Passing the fine house where my jealous sister lives, lonely, like me, I feel as black as that pool’s water thinking of the bitter discord in our family that would prompt a playwright to begin fervidly typing. I want to be back here embroiled in life again, but young.  Leaving the antiphony that disturbed my complacency, I shortcut to my car through quiet back lanes behind shabbier houses in narrow streets I knew where newcomers spend time they might have forgotten one distant future day.  My gaze resting on a fence so rickety-faded it could date from my elusive boyhood, I feel skittled by loss, a qualm of half-realized echoes.  I want that fence imbued with its original hue, straight, strong again. I also feel compelled to drive back while I am still able to my sister’s immaculate garden, where I thought I glimpsed her.

© Ian C. Smith

Enjoy other posts by Ian Smith HERE.

Ian C. Smith

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria and on Flinders Island.

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Heartache by Ian C. Smith

Simon Leonardo

Heartache

Karen Dalton sings Something on Your Mind on YouTube, those sweet fiddles tugging at my heartstrings, her throaty voice a summons as sure as a tolling bell’s.  To what?  The churning past?  I have flexed scornful wit on some pop lyrics.  Now her threnody evokes old iron bridges crossed slowly, sultry light flickering through latticework.  This is especially so in the throbbing drumbeat intro before her plaintive drawn-out Yesterday. Karen is headed for dead-set trouble, another doomed singer.  I want to hurry back, wrap her in my arms, keep her from leaving all her dreams behind even as she pours her wounded life into music, save myself yet more of this driven remorse.

In their fire’s last burnished light, some warmth remaining, I picture a couple who combined art and career, working together but offset by yearning, and his flaws.  At first, he drank, argued, laughed, drastic panic attacks a scourge slouching in wait.  He also liked music and movies as their partnership fell in thrall to increasing tensions.  Given to excess, in speech and gesture, he was sometimes fired with a bitter fervour due to blows during his loveless childhood that she believed was her cross to bear.  Volatile, hurt, he resented her eye-rolling common sense responses to his unreason.

Although he felt his youthful chances were squandered, they had enough money and energy to seem modest models of success, he with his much-traveled trunk of journals and notebooks, his dangerous belief in saying what really happened, what he thought, her with her caring profession, and, following her own loving childhood, good deeds.  But she could not grow wings, fly to the coast of his dreams and nightmares.

Displayed photos dating them, they relied on routine, death a blur beckoning distantly, edged towards redundancy by youth and progress, forgetfulness a stealthy burglar.  As their days sailed away, no longer beloved, they gleaned what they could from co-operation. This was their end-game, that mysterious shaky swirl, time no longer on their side.  After dark in bed they turned to stone instead of each other, listening to the old house creaking.  Above these effigies cold stars glimmered in space.

In soft rain driving home to my house, my large bed, tires hissing, lights appearing in roadside dwellings where fireside drinks might be shared, Moby’s Mistake starts, that slow build-up redolent with regret, then the beat, insistent as sadness swoops and I tap the steering wheel.  Hammering my heart, that sustained pulse from The Next Three Days movie soundtrack conjures past chaos when, at night’s brink, fire in an iron grate dampened, smoldering words formed into flames in a withering scene.  The sky gods battering me now, wipers losing it, lightning’s refraction performs on night’s screen as Chekhovian characters arrive in my mind’s welter, nodding knowingly.  I imagine being borne beyond this ache, on and on through a dark dense forest to stanch pain, find solace, if I could claw my way back to the ghostly past as. Don’t let me make the same mistake again, repeats.

© Ian C. Smith

Enjoy other posts by Ian C. Smith HERE.

Ian C. Smith

Ian C. Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria and on Flinders Island.

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