Mind over matter

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The complex and unreasonable part of Ged's personality had gone on holiday. There was no doubt about that. The look of dreaminess on his face was one of someone who was completely gone. It was obvious to anyone that this boy was currently as high as a kite.

He just couldn't see anything from where he lay on the station roof with its long plastic ridges which stretched up into the ceiling to the places where only pigeons dare go. For a moment he floated there with no thought for this intrusion. Then as quickly as that had happened he heard the sound of a train coming in. Not his train though, oh no, his train would never arrive.

Meanwhile, on the outside track, people passed Ged by as he lay dazed on a bench in Waterloo station. No—one cared about him . But that was the way that London was nowadays. That was the way London had always been. and so Ged floated on.

Through some thick clouds of subconscious, onward to where pigeons dared not even think about going. Old memories started surrounding him, and for a moment Ged soberly looked for an escape, but there was none. He realised he had come here for a reason. 

Suckling off the sleepy sins in his mouth, Ged opened his eyes to find himself in a gutter somewhere near Regents park. It was a bright morning and the white hot light punctured holes in his eyelids and stung the inside of his head. This was the aftershock of travelling without moving. The dirty jet lag of light. 

It was not wet, it was cold and he shifted up from the pavement and tried to remember the night before. He felt his face and was disgusted *with the dead feeling in his skin. He really didn't want to know. A feeling shared with the people who passed him now as he raised from the dry gutter, and looked along the road. 

The quiet trundeling cars limping along the street gave an unexpected and false impression of London in the morning. Even on  Sunday.

Ged remembered when he was young growing up in the country. The bitter freshness of the air. The people in the city had such thick skin. They would sit through any amount of bombardment toward their realities. Whereas Ged had learned his way in the country. Flashpoints between tree and lane, field and orchard. 

Now as he searched for new work he had used many of these skills to help him survive in this urban puzzle.  Even though a lot of the time he was sleeping in the street, he didn't mind. That was the story of his life. He didn’t and couldn’t mind. 

The early days hadn't been so bad. He would sleep in a bed and breakfast every night with the dribbles of money that he had saved from home. That soon ran dry, however and he had to make money the old fashioned way which was time consuming and dangerous and involved staying in one place for too long. Money had no intrinsically had no value to him unfortunately like so much of Ged's life that was a dream which he had to live in.

He walked carefully along the pavement and tried to recall which dreams he had the previous night

 He remembered-the-one about being stoned in a station;

that was a re—occuring one he had for the last three nights.

Then there was a new one. He was up a tree he used to climb when he was a child, he called her Old Oakly because she was a massive old oak tree. And as he sat he watched the clouds bubble annoyingly in the sky like the white of an egg in a frying pan.

Then the sea things happened. People fell from the sky and he was falling with them, but what seemed to be downwards was now upwards. They were falling into the sky. No being sucked into the  sky by a giant vortex which was hoovering them all up. The sky and the sea. The roots of the tree space stations in the heavens preding out like thickets of tangling life. He felt himself shift and start to go. Hold back. Stay here. 

The woman who then tripped over him  cursed and grabbed onto the wall to steady herself. picking up her shopping and piling it willy—nilly into her bag. Ged rose out of his dreamy haze and rose to meet her. He rose nobly like somebody important. Not that she noticed. 

"Fucking junkie, shouldn't fall asleep on the pavement."

She stampeded off like an ant with a shopping list. Ged realised he had laid down in the middle off the pavement and let the crowd walk over him. Which means he hadn’t been there until he pulled himself back. 

 Sometimes it was hard to remember where he was; or more accurately where he wasn't.  this was not the first time this had happened either, and he was afraid it could have been more serious. 

Ged panicked, and in doing so was suddenly, wholeheartedly very there. London street. His breathing lit up.

 He made good and ran towards the park as the cold memories of Old Oakley flickered inside his head and the dogged dregs of his dream rung in his ears.