Incident by the Six Benches

This summer is ridiculous. This year. I can’t sleep. Again. At Valerie’s, on her goddam leather sofa which sticks to my back and my butt and literally fucking sucks. It isn’t her fault and in winter it’s fine but in this heat it’s just intolerable. Take your clothes off to cool down and you stick to the furniture. Put clothes on to stop yourself sticking, sweat your ass off all the more. An unwinnable battle. A double-bind.

Only way out of a double-bind is to say fuck it, so I pull on my clothes, check my make-up. It isn’t on point – whose is, at 4am? – but all it needs is a touch more mascara, a top-up of the brows, and fresh lipstick…after a drag on the pipe, of course. I don’t want to stain it.

The smart thing to do is head home. But I’m bored with that walk, by the cemetery, over the bridge with its cold war suggestions, down to the flats. I feel like taking a different route.

Out to the Co-Op? It’s risky. The shop won’t be open at this hour -though nowhere else will, save the garages – and that way you’re headed to Kenton. Rough country. I don’t know the local patterns. Here, nobody’s out at 4am, except the early shift workers and the truly masochistic joggers. Up Wansbeck Road way might be different. But even when I lived in Scotswood this was quiet time. And I’d get to see St Hugh’s, and the No Golfing sign, and those beautiful flats with the weird orange detailing.

I leave the house and take a rightward turn. A straight shoot from here and sooner or later you’re not in Newcastle no more: and the border starts early. Walking to Valerie’s on Ladies’ Day, scanning the crowd at the Three Mile Inn, the grain of roadside concrete, thinking this is where Northumberland begins. The girl I once got off with, who lived in filth and kept a copy of the Bristol Stool Chart on her wall, who told me her family were Border Country royalty. Her father announced he was gay, and started looking for love in the Telegraph personals. Her disgust: ‘everybody knows you use the Guardian for that’. How the other half cruises.

Catch a bus here and you can make for Morpeth, Alnwick, via Acklington Prison where the mood on the bus really changes depending on what side of visiting you’re riding. A girl I know is in there, detransitioned for her safety. I’d visit, but I only knew her vaguely and I think maybe getting visits from a tranny would be bad for her in-prison rep.

Maybe I’m a bad person.

I’m not going straight today. At the roundabout I turn left, past the postwar houses with their porticos, the nautical curves in their window bays, the new(ish) build flats on the right. This is not a long walk but, being mostly tout droit, it seems longer.

It reminds me of Nunhead station, part of this walk. The part by Wansbeck Road. Passing under the bridge. Meeting Leon there, and Billy Monster. The walk past the pub, over Telegraph Hill. Up Kitto Road and round the corner to the Big Queer House, where we drank and smoked until God knows what hour in the garden. This is the London I miss: not the tourist areas but the places people live. The bust of Olaudah Equiano in the park. The house off Pepys Road with books stacked to the top of the window, spines facing in, skyscrapers of paper. You could see Canary Wharf’s pyramid, light flashing, if you leaned out of Leon’s attic skylight.

The sign says NO GOLFING. Valerie and I both took photos. She wants to come back, borrow a golf glove from someone – or maybe just buy one, there’s a golf shop up the road, under the Indian restaurant whose curry Brianna finds too sweet – and take a photo of a hand wearing it, flipping off the sign. Golf or die, man!

It feels rural to me, this path by the Rugby Club. Nothing but fields in one direction. Val disagrees. Kansas City rural’s on a bigger scale than ours. She describes it as suburban but it’s more than that, out here. Rothbury Avenue, moving to Regent’s Farm Road: that’s suburban. This place…that field could keep going. All the way to the border. Like Christina’s World.

In the Co-Op up the road, they display the Scottish Sunday Post as prominently as the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. They know that we’re in the borderlands, even if the maps pretend they’re far away. ‘Every time something happens there are all these cries to move the border.’ A liminal place. Something could happen.

It’s a liminal time, too. There is no such thing as dawn. There are two kinds of twilight, morning and evening, and three types in each: civil. Nautical. And astronomical. BMNT: begin morning nautical twilight. Military coinages. Fortified language. A killing ground between the night and day.

That French film that Valerie raves about, the Queens of Night and Day. This is a film about magick, she says to me, and I hear her sounding the k. Valerie’s occult enthusiasms, witchcraft as a way out of the white girl trap of cultural embezzlement. I gave her a copy of Hutton, told her that stuff’s all made up. I suspect she won’t read it.

That film is pretty damn good though.

I walk past the topiarised hedges, three houses in a row with greenery so straight you could rule margins with it. I don’t know why just these three houses: I would like to think they’re council in a sea of right-to-buy, that Nick Forbes is sending a man out to shear these things straight, but realistically that isn’t very likely. The new opening times for the Library, an A4 sheet stuck to the back of the door. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the Team Mystic kids who have the place held down must wait outside to troll the gym. Or hit the Quaker Meeting House instead.

What’s more likely is one of the people here just likes his hedge straight, and does his neighbours’ so it isn’t out of place. The Big Society extends as far as next door’s garden. And no golfing.

I come to my favourite bit of the walk: the Six Benches. Municipal, black iron and wood, left right left, a De Chirico promenade, empty each time I’ve seen them. An invitation to musical chairs.

I’ve photographed them once already, put the shots through Pixlr and Prisma, all possible filters, but haven’t quite got it. There’s an angle that I haven’t shot from yet. I have to find it. Magic hour’s coming. If I work, then I can make this really good.

I stand at a distance, walk closer, step back. I hold my cracked phone on its side, hold it up, try Dutch angles. I walk behind the benches, meet them from the other side, I cross the road and shoot from there. I kneel on one knee until it aches, then on the other. It’s taking a while but I feel like I’ve got it.

‘Here!’

Damn. Got so caught up taking the shot I stopped paying attention. Where the Hell is hypervigilance when I actually need it?’

‘Here! Yee!’

Still kneeling, flicking the camera to video in case I need evidence, I look up.

‘I knaa yee!’

By the benches

in the morning’s civil twilight

I see her again