McGuinness - Jilted City

Its all inaudible through the triple glazed panes, but by something in that improbable clear blue we know its heavy with noise, drenched in spent jet fuel, and the bright blue emptiness is emptiness only, a desert of burned-off ozone where the suns ferocious waste scatters its perfect, equalising light. Shadows straighten up, level with the shapes that threw them house, high-rise, Hummer then disappear; and for a moment all is its original, unencumbered self. The clocks hands cross. The two halves of the day come face to face. The grainy, detailed hours have reached their zenith, now they fall away.

It fills the gulf behind the sofa, that small domestic void that stands for losing and forgetting, or for finding once again. It stands for things that outlive their necessity; for us busily outliving ours particles slow dancing in a shaft of light shedding the excess that each day we renew. Its tininess is a feat of scale, but it cannot disappear. It is the shape of nothing, the shape of nothing happening, and of nothings impossibility; matter worrying away at trying not to be, and being all the while; reminding us there are no absolutes, that all is graded on the scale, that all is incremental, deciduous, and undecided.

Lying for years in the cellar, it fattened up, grew milky, slow, echoed in my mouth as in a tunnel of its own disuse. Then, like drinking from the source, came our annual summers in Bouillon, where our Belgitude rose up in us like the damp behind the wallpaper in the house that stayed unused nine months out of twelve: its empty rooms, lost cupboards, the stored-up junk piled up so long that each forgotten item now dovetailed into the next, a perfect carpentry of abandonment; it was the tongue and groove of unused words, life in suspension, ready to rise again like dust in the backdraft from a closing door. Theres something in it when I use it here brings back those moments when, mid-play, Id nip indoors for a piss or for a sandwich and when I came back out the other children were all gone, the courtyard empty, the toys back in their boxes and the sky already crossed with evening; brings back the knowledge, always wrong but always knowledge, that there would never be another time than this, this ending-tainted perpetuity. Now my children taste it, the empty-courtyard French I used to speak; they push their tongues along the language and as I hear their words snag I hear my own again and wake from that recurrent dream in which Im always waking up, and break off that aborted first line of my story which Im always starting: that Im much younger and still Belgian.