Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, Among the bathtubs and the washbasins A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. This is the one star in their firmament Or frames a star within a star. What should they do there but desire?
— Derek Mahon
A mark of one's aging is thinking of and naming places as they used to be, not as they are. Where do the old names for things go when they die? Nouns live on in the wrinkles and cracks of aging brains. The road I drive each day to work is the A4500, but to some people it's 'the old A45'. It is defined for them by what it was, not what it is. The past has permanency.
A few weeks ago, I ran past my old university campus. I studied at Northampton back when it was split across two sites, the flagship Park Campus in Kingsthorpe — the elder child, who had been bred to become a doctor and had just married a girl from a good family — and the beetle-browed, awkward Avenue Campus, who was best off at the seminary and made people feel weird at parties. My campus, of course, was Avenue, where English and the Arts were based. Here clustered the odd, the bedraggled, the effete. There's a new campus now, just off the town centre, Riverside, all chrome and curves and cafés. Park's land was sold for housing — you wouldn't know it had ever existed — but Avenue is still there. Nobody seems to know quite what to do with it.
I stopped, panting, sweat-steaming, and looked at the old place. Nature had had its way: grasses burst between paving slabs with vital nonchalance; the white frontage was begrimed and mossy; and the whole campus was belted by a high green fence. The windows were clouded like the eyes of the dead, or the damned. It was never the prettiest building, but time and dereliction had softened some of its brutalism. The whole place seemed to sigh.
For a moment, we breathed together, this old place and I, and as we synced our breath the grass retreated noiselessly amongst the slabs. The windows' milky sadness dissipated. Light spilled out. The fence rattled itself to invisibility. A yellow campus bus hissed open.
Something happened to me, too. The chalky sweat of running became the clammy sweat of that ultimate liminality: age 19, when one is neither adolescent nor man. My hair grew until it tickled the back my neck. I watch as from the bus boys spill: some bristling with lacrosse sticks, many in Sixth Form leavers' hoodies (usually deep maroon or mustard, their nicknames emblazoned in block lettering, their classmates' names phalanxed beneath), some staring up from under floppy asymmetric fringes, some tugging blonde-tipped forelocks, some hiking up rag-hemmed jeans. Boys whose spines curl under rucksacks, boys who shout. Boys with lager eyes, boys snapping cigarettes. Boys with beards stuck in the research and development phase. And girls, too: girls in snagged fishnets, girls kohl-eyed. Girls whose Converse are puddle-sodden, but who feign nonchalance. Girls who stalk, girls who stump. Girls air-kissing. Girls grinning beneath bucket hats, girls dancing in bike shorts. All, all: all converge here, a great spilling humanity, at the entrance to Avenue Campus. In they went.
And in I went, too. But my entrance made something ripple, like some contraction or shimmer within the fabric of time.
Time collapses; everything is now.
I pass Reception. Women fuss with manila folders while a man skulks behind them. Even when he sips from a large Sports Direct mug, he does not take his eyes off them. The Reception desk is behind perspex, and I realise that I'm not looking through the perspex but at it. It is crazy with handprints, little lives left behind. I look again, this time through it, this time into mouldering gloom. Bluebottles lie upturned. The whole area is dappled with crumbs of plaster. A file cabinet is open in a permanent yawn. A sigh of paper, in someone/no-one's slanted hand.
Through the doors, into the English corridor. The lecturers have their offices here. I stop in front of Charles' poised to knock, but though I smell the tea brewing and I hear the arrhythmia of bone china I know there is no-one there. I enter and the room appears to clear its throat. I see not a desk, but space where the desk was, little carpet-grooves in its space. His shelves are empty, dust-fuzzed. There is space, now that everything has gone, yet the room tightens itself around me.
He and I breathed here, spoke here, arranged our bodies here. We took up space; we felt permanent. Did I leave anything behind? I feel I leave parts of myself everywhere; what else is dust, if not little abandonments of self? When I die, it will be because I have nothing left to leave, nowhere left to go, nowhere to go back to.
I leave Charles' office, having never really entered it but also having never really left it. I climb the stairs, headed for the library. It holds rows and rows of dead voices, all smothered in dust-fat pages. When I open a volume, the poem I land on seems bewildered, as though I've caught it in flagrante delicto. I close the book; I let it rest.
There was a tale — possibly apocryphal — that the campus was formerly an asylum. Flickering now beyond my twin presents in a liminal space are hollow eyes, fingers that twist through bars, the raw taboo of voices judged to frightening for humanity. A lantern bobs before me in the dark, but I cannot follow.
I am outside. Grass, fence, dirt. My breathing has melted back to normal. I feel myself age. Time settles, cooling on the tongue, on the skin. So I run. And I run and I run and I run, away from this place, yet it pulls no further away from me.
Gorgeous and evocative. Those details that transport you through time. Lovely.