I hesitated, she hesitated or at least she failed to withdraw. Was it politeness that drove me out, looking for stairs, a lift, looking for a way down. Two floors down. I had left without breakfast and was beginning to feel that tremble and light-headedness of low blood sugar. And there was an accompanying shock of a thought: what if this was the wrong building? What if I in the haste of being a few minutes late had inadvertently entered the wrong building? Why hadn’t I realised before? What had made me so sure that this was the place? But even worse was the nature of this building I was inside. I had fallen into a challenge that I had no way of understanding. All agency was being removed from me. Kafka’s tales were metaphors. Ways of telling a story. How real were they? What is the nature of our emotional life? What bit had Kafka made up? What bit am I making up? Here I was trapped inside a radically changed set of rules.
In the relentless gloom I found some stairs going down but saw no sign of the stairs that I had descended ten minutes before.
The fish wharf (or was it Fish Wharf?) she had said. Though we are a hundred miles from the sea. With unusual briskness, which I suppose was a version of impatience to get this whole thing over and done with; done and dusted and returned to something that promised familiarity, I skipped down the stairs. Yes, I would solve this like I had solved all the other problems that had ever confronted me. Reaching a landing I noticed a figure, an elderly woman, wearing a sun hat and a blue silk scarf, a pale cream linen jacket.
You’d like some coffee, I expect, and a sandwich if you’re hungry and I’m sure that you are hungry, aren’t you.
She stood next to a small circular table on which was a silver coffee pot, a cup and saucer, a silver jug that must contain the hot milk, I could see the thin curl of steam rising from it; and a large plate of sandwiches. Smoked salmon, she informed me.
You need to keep your strength up.
I slowed and crossed the landing towards her. I compared her to the memory of my grandmother; my mother’s mother, and the implied line of women leading back into the past. A line of kindness. And I wondered as to how and where the past exists. Does the past descend as into a grave and do we rise into the future?
I asked her about the Kazoo Dreamboat.
Poetry, she responded, must be honest. Poetry is a chance for us to redeem outselves.
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