This town is always wet with the smell of nightlife and Indian food. Passing by the bleak, glowing doorway and you can smell the tandoori spices within. There's always a gloomy Pakistani guy in a threadbare jersey looming, looking fed up by the brick wall. In old alleyways nearby, in dull closets, that at night are dripping from telephone wires into tangled midnight bushes, all starkly lit by yellow, grim, offensive light. I had my dreams of Nosferatu here, I saw him flexing his claws here by the bush, or rather I dreamed it. Drip, drip, the danked and rusty sound. Nobody ever thought to check these bushes back and trim them, that's the wonder of it! Old tramps in busy shuffling afternoons simply ignored them and spat angrily on the pathetic concrete. Little bauble of spittle on the sicksplashed floor.
That always dreams of urban decay, youthful wreckage of forgotten drunkenness you can see in the wrecked, splintered carry-out cartons abandoned, just dropped pitifully on the pavement while he moaned in his drunkenness. His friends were overtaking him, cursing in the sniffly alley, greystained trainers thudding the awful concrete, arching toes to resist the steady, pulsing ground.
Always strikes me as awful that man can create such horrors! That billions of us boiling down here in the hole can be joyful, unknowing children in golden years of infancy and then, too late, too soon, we find ourselves getting swished by dank winds so we have to grit our bitter teeth on lonely streets, chomp some wasteful snack and discard the sorrowful packaging on the pissy puddled concrete! Where there are awful condoms lying trampled underfoot, likewise abandoned in the midst of some tearful drunken madness. Shirted, mournful youths laughing loudly, struggling drunkenly home.
Sometimes there were dim setback restaurants on sloping streets and which behind the dusty 70's blinds you could glimpse an unutterable brown sadness which was always related to ancient brown sauce bottles, all dun and plastic, sitting in the gloom of a homely laminate tabletop. When, as a kid, we would get chips there, I would never see what went on inside. I was almost scared to look in, I was too apprehensive to question. Perhaps there was the hum of a forbidding radio or bumbling TV on a neglected shelf in the back. The owner or proprietor was completely shadowy and used to peer and mumble in the static gloom over counters to hear the order. And sglash the squelchy redhot noise of chipfries which is drowning out the Saturday afternoon requests of brown-haired mothers on the tiled or worse, worn carpet floor in the dim foreboding hallway you have to step inside to announce your order. I got so scared, so shadowy scared that I didn't even want any food. All the hum and ancient creek of brownsauce bottle in the dark restaurant where I never ventured, all I saw were the sinister grey blinds which were the type which got raised with a little drawstring made of little metal beads, maybe uncanny genteel patrons sulking inside in dreams of Lennon, humbled over to draw them shut, all the grim cackle of tinny 70's radio and inside Harold Steptoe is gripping the brown sauce bottle, you can see his mean sideburns by the gaudy toaster.