The sun is facing us so we must be heading west for a while. Cathie is her name and her surname is Fields. She lives just over the hill in to the sun.
“There is a perfect hill of pine to my right, crafted by the landscape, which dances around in the pallet of green in the breaking evening sun before it’s setting. And then a tunnel in to browns and greys and yellows and blues. The falsity of late summer that looks warm but hides rain around the corner and damp under your feet. And the train still hums on.”
The whole journey now sets itself in reverse and all the hilly hill hills look vaguely familiar as they roll in to one. Two, three green brown jade-of-purple heather and heath. The clouds too take on similar shapes, setting the horizon as something altogether inspirational, so to speak.
So, to speak is to sit across from someone you’re not sure about, you have a memory of them starting a business in Yoga and or in Palates but you have never been ever so sure of the difference, and of the difference in her. So you speak to her and you ask “how the Yolates business going?” – and she gives you a funny look whilst shoving yet more free paella in to her mouth and washing it down with bread.
This was an art exercise. For us to arrive and climb the stairs, after each flight there was a taster of a menu built up from what the building had to offer – each doorway opening on to a free sample of publication and construction and printing press and chalkboard. We dined in the end at the very top. Two artists were in the guise of chefs cooking a rice dish. We sat on a long thin table. On this table the woman sat opposite me. And conversation eventually flowed after we disregarded the idea of us being placed in a social experiment.
We were fooled by the food as it took us to somewhere exotic via the heavy vegan desert. Upon descending the stairs we took another door on to another street and it soon became evident who was the most prepared. I pulled out my umbrella to shelter from the rain. The woman, she stood as if naked for want of being dry against the sky. The sky, well, that was littered with disused buildings: once printing presses and publishers – brass signs disguising the real goings on and the real deal inside. We then went our separate ways and I won’t see her again until I forget what it is she actually does. When we do meet it will merely be a repeated performance – a repeat journey.
We’re now exposed to the maintenance tracks. Such observations would be impossible if there were but a break in the clouds in the sky for the sun: now more houses, more settlements and more trees and common land in between are set behind us. And there’s a constant black line that floats beside me on the other side of re-enforced glass – it’s not that comforting though it keeps disappearing above the window frame.
