Chapter Two - The Stone Robin

It began with a stone robin; one my father had affixed to a mushroom log. A log that had never known the pulsating life of spores or the magic of mycelium but perched at the edge of our roof garden, it overlooked the fish market on London Road and observed all that went on below.  The robin was curios the type of curiosity that kills cats but its stony demeaner along with its hardened shell and general vacancy was enough for it to go unnoticed and enabled the people below to speak freely and at ease with one another. The people most often distraught over one thing or another would speak of their lives and their worries and would spill out over the sides to anyone that would listen. Like the confessions of a drunk ashamed and intoxicated at a bar trying to find a caring ear or anyone too polite to leave the conversation. What the Robin loved more than anything however was to analyse the people and all that went on when they formed groups. A true voyeur and thinker he thrived behind a lack of emotions causing a heightened intellect endowing him with mighty powers of deduction and clarity of thought. That not only made him wise but his heart black

 London road was frenetic during the daytime and had many stories to tell and lessons from time immemorial often played out repeating themselves in the way that lesson do if they are not understood and learnt from. But for less or for worse London Road was my home now and despite the vagrancy, alcoholism, thievery, manic street preaching and smack addled unfortunates either strewn across the pavement or clucking for their fix. London road held up a Lense to the world. A space for mediocrity, quiet desperation and those amongst us considered lowly and dare we say it the working the politically banished and tarnished common view of the working / non-working class. This was a poverty safari like no other - One of the simplicity of people’s lives a bleak order of the mundane and that endless merriment of public transport, cheap supermarkets and people that wear their pyjamas out in public. A torrent whipped by familiarity of the terrestrial. Despite all this Brighton was my town now, one I wish to find adventures, learn more about and discover that about myself that lurks in the shadows and those trapped inside that void that I could call my tribe

 I was living in Brighton and had only been here for a few weeks. The street names meant nothing to me still and I only knew a few routes around the town. Brighton was still alien to me. I knew how to get to theup by the pavilion, how to get to the downs and the sea.

 It was October the month of my birth in our lord’s year 1984 that we made the move. Stevie wonder was at number one In the Album charts with his hit “I just called to say Love you” was a good one. Alex turner was either a zygote or possibly a sperm about to penetrate an egg. His future hit of “You look good on the dance floor. Was yet to be written but define the era perfectly and I couldn’t wait until the day I could hear it. The 80’s were good for music but in an ironic way where should pads Buffon hairstyles and androgyny was somehow considered cool. It was a strange world to be born into but we had a great journey of music on the horizon and a still a promise of stirring amongst the rustle of leaves in a forgotten forest of dead wood was about to be caught by flame and a new dawn being blown as the fire grows in ferocity and the music  changing  with the winds of the future. 

 I was slightly apprehensive about the move to Brighton it was a big city, and I was worried about my father and the effect it might have on him. He had a condition which always confused me. He was either utterly useless unable to cook, look after himself, shower, unable to read, follow the narrative of films and sometimes he would just stare vacantly out of the window in a trance. Whenever I asked him what he was thinking about he always said he’s trying to remember a time when life wasn’t a total tragedy, he had been reading Camus before he got ill again which always bothered me. My father seemed triggered mostly by books and aphorism it was like the words were literal magic for him. He always like to tell me that words were magic and that’s why you spell them. This was interesting the first time but got more boring and less cosmic every time he said it. He also often apologised for my birth which I could never understand, I guess it was some type if self-pity that he wasn’t enough of a man to show me how to be one.  but then he would go through periods when he wouldn’t sleep for days, he was full of life and ideas, making extravagant meals, constantly drinking, and bringing homeless people back to feed them and buy them clothes he also became very religious in this time and wanted ti form an inclusive cult that would unite all people globally in a cultural movement that would be about music, love, fraternity and mushroom ceremonies. with my family, I was 14 years old. The family and I had moved to Brighton and were settled in many respects. My mother worked part-time as a psychiatrist working long hours Monday through to Thursday. She loved her work from what I could tell but found it hard working for the NHS where despite the good intentions of the staff and the sacrifices people made. The system failed a lot of people. A lot of people who fall through the cracks of the NHS end up relying on medication to function. My father said all hospitals were essentially drug pushers for big pharma and only treat illness instead of trying to inform people about how to live healthily and perhaps providing free gym membership, nutritional, cooking lessons and herbal alternatives for avoiding illness and improving general health. So that people can stop going to hospital all together. That said it’s one of the last institutions I hope never gets privatised. NHS wonderful service maybe its not as good as it could be but at least we don’t put people in a position that an accident can turn into your house being repossessed and you having to sleep under a bridge in the spirit civilisation this should never be the case.

When we finally arrived in our new home and I looked ot the window into London Road I thought in any city of Albion had there been a road named so aptly.  It was a reminder of the centre of it all, the heart of England, the big bad city of London. Where the homeless and drug addicted unfortunates live cheek to jowl with the rich and privileged. Both searching for the same thing but in very different ways. The Brighton lights shone upon a similar indifference one that is palpable but felt with a little more charity and generosity, one, emblematic of the people of this fair city and its spirit of love, tolerance and compassion. Looking upon London Road behind times eye. I felt the spirit of the road and walked amongst the hungry ghosts of the past. A time passing and striding into the unknown future ahead, one that gives and takes away without consideration of the sacred or what has workeds. It is a city that has lasted the degradation of time innovation progress and from its first inception brought the first holidaymakers, merchants itinerate travellers, artist, musicians and nobility on horses or foot or by horse drawn carriages to and from this dazzling seaside town. I felt connected to Brighton like the familiarity of a recurring =dream or that feeling that you’ve already seen an apple in time but can’t recall where.  Even though I had only lived there a short time, I loved this city but knew amongst the shadows and between the cracks that darker forces laid dormant like a super volcano always threatening to erupt and I felt that there was something else, something obscene, something unknowable, dark and unseen and one that scared me. During the day it was a melting pot. A cosmic cataclysm of parallel lives that collided or brushed past each other without acknowledgement. A place where people occupying alternative universes expanded and contracted together against a backdrop of the only thing they shared the spirit of Brighton. Their dissimilar lives colliding and gliding past without the knowledge that their stories were being written and twisted together for a moment and that just one interaction could change or warp each other’s life story as it passed by forever. It is the throbbing artery of Brighton and pulsates between a beating gilded heart creating waves amongst an undertow of ordinary lives and extraordinary ones. The life blood of this buzzing seaside town was one I was yet to truly explore but that I intended to.

I preferred London Road in the early morning, when all was black and slowly purring like a chaos engine turning over with a comforting sound which was alive yet restful like the snow at a peak of a vast un surmounted mountain. I would imagine myself at the bottom observing a vast mountain for the first time, awestruck by the journey it must take to get to the top but curious about what could be seen and what it would feel like at the summit. But like all things in life attempting that first courageous step was a daunting and difficult one but one all heroes must take. They must break through the resistance within them and their self-doubting, self-preserving ancient programming and try to imagine what it must be like to be sitting at the top and basking in an unseeable and unforgettable vista. A  sublime snap shot of God's grand design as Gaia sleeps  below laying out like a beautiful women on a rose petal bed half covered by bed sheets but still a vision of the female form in all its divine curvature and unsurpassed beauty that women effortlessly inhabit and has mesmerised men and continued the species quite effortlessly since the dawn of time- a fine carnal tapestry of nature’s glory. That which sustains, provides and creates life and yet that very same beauty has its time as all great things do and is taken away and in an ethereal moment lost to the ever-marching advancement of time. What a cosmic joke our existence is that we alone in the animal kingdom can look upon beauty and be bought to tears by it and that the magic of it doesn’t preserve our souls somehow and that that must also be taken away. Only preserved is that set in stone or in the collective memories, oral traditions or the art that is created and if inspiring enough is kept and not forgotten. And what tragedy that a life rich in decades of joy and adventure can be forgotten so quickly and that many of our last moments are ones of pain and anguish instead of a slow peaceful acceptance of our journey and the gift of existence and that for many the last memories are ones of pain and fear. The religious on the other hand stare death in its eyes knowing that they are with God and that Jesus walks beside them. Always quiet and without interaction but making sure that at every moment we are not alone and that we are being held by the divine religious or not. This comfort is only reserved for the pious and the artists where the atheist must deal with the fact of their existence and death by looking into a fathomless void of despair. There only comfort a narcissistic intellectual vanity that states I’m better than you because I’m too intelligent to believe in religion but with little to sustain them from the ultimate tragedy of life and questions of our existence. I guess there’s little or something i must be missiong in the story of the big bang that sustains the inreligious through the difficutlties of life. im missing an explanation I can’t see. Explosions are always something to behold like an orgasm or fireworks but one like the latter or former which last only briefly. To see the world behind a child’s eyes however and to carry that into adulthood is only reserved for children their parents and poets. They remind us of all the simple beauty that is all around us. The art in nature and awe-inspiring reality of Gods grand designs.

One morning the sun seemed to be lazy in rising and London Road was stirring and starting to come to life long before the seagulls cawed or the street cleaners had arrived. I decided to see if my father was awake and reading so I made a cup of hot water and went to my parents’ room. My father was nowhere to be seen, and the bed lay uncrumpled without the evidence of anyone sleeping there outside my mother. I decided he must have stayed out again. My father had been known to go through episode of extreme melancholy when he would cry a lot and couldn’t look after himself he would look at me if I was the only thing that was keeping him alive and other times when he wouldn’t sleep at all and would disappear on long walks around the city normally arriving home intoxicated, with that week’s earnings spent and often without shoes on his feet and the grime of the city  black and tarred amongst his toes. Outside of these episodes when his medication was working my mother and I loved my father very much. He a was very loving man and proud of his family but was ultimately selfish, terrible with money and the company he kept was let’s say somewhat undesirable. He was also an apt lier and manipulator but charming and loved by all who met him. My mother put up with all this the way women do but to me he was my hero. Without a word or a note left we discovered after days of waiting for him to come crashing through the door in the elevated way he would be full of stories and fire in his eyes that he was gone without a trace. My father, my hero had disappeared vanished from our lives leaving behind a silence as vast and as echoing as a lost tomb. It hit us hard—my mother turned off the light in her eyes, and I sealed my lips shut not able to express my grief or understand who I was without my parents together and the love they had for each other and for me. Words slipped away like fish through a net. But the robin was there, and I spoke to him. 

The stone bird only answered when the moon bathed its surface in silvery light or when dawn cracked open the sky, scattering clouds into wisps of cotton. Once alive, it never mourned its fate encased in stone. Instead, it whispered secrets of shadow people—wretched beings lurking just beyond the graveyard’s boundary and those that dwelled underground having fallen through the cracks that the city would create as it breathed deep the salt and filth of the city’s fumes. But beyond the creeping ivy and crumbling tombstones that belonged to a more pious time there was a stillness in the bird’s song that was beautiful. It spoke of freedom and the burden of feelings; how splendid it was to feel nothing at all. But as night fell and the moon's glow faded, the robin would grow as cold as a winter’s breath. Morning sun would coax it back to life, and I would sit, staring at the city while shadows twisted in the eldritch light of the church looming over us—a relic from another era, one that had swallowed the vestiges of faith whole.

Each dawn, I’d slip out of the house before my mother stirred, navigating the quiet twilight when London Road held its breath and the usual raucous chatter of the day seemed far away. The seagulls, those loathsome creatures, gave no respect for night or dawn for that matter. They screeched, cawed, and bickered, like mobsters in a back alley plotting their next heist. They were charming alone but utterly vile on masse—maddeningly raucous, devolving into chaos or worse, a kind of violence only seagulls and corvids know.

One night, as the warmth of the robin’s presence turned to the chill of stone, an unfamiliar sound broke the stillness. It came from the church or perhaps the graveyard, a forlorn echo that was nothing like the songs of the other birds. It rolled like a groan, halting midway as if something had caught the song that prevented it ever arriving. My curiosity twisted, and I had to know. I climbed onto the chair, swung my legs over the railing, and crept along the wall, venturing to the flat roof beyond. It was draped in a long-forgotten prairie of grass, a ripe haven for nests in the spring. Standing there, my familiar balcony looked strange in the moonlight; I imagined the robin watching me and the stories and warnings it told, and for a fleeting moment, my reflection loomed before me—vacant, bewildered, hauntingly lost. 

As I crossed the wall onto the next roof, I slid down a drainpipe onto Francis Street. Once vibrant with graffiti that sang of joy, it had transformed into a nightmare. The cheerful murals now lay beneath a sheen of dark, sinister spray paint that seemed to permeate the brick—a rabid black dog snarled, and an angry samurai warrior glared with eyes that threatened to leap off the wall like demons from a hellish dream. I felt a pulse of dread, as if the very air had thickened with an ominous energy.

And then it happened—the blade of the samurai’s sword caught the moonlight, shimmering wickedly as it aimed itself toward me. Its eyes seemed to swell, locking into focus, while the dog let loose a snarl that turned my blood to ice. Panic surged through me, and I sprinted across the street. The church's silhouette loomed behind me, a gaping maw waiting to swallow the unwary. 

Suddenly, descended from the sky came a seagull—daring to strike, startling me. They usually kept their distance. But as I ran, weighed down by the chilling fear of those dark paintings, I remembered the helpless chicks strewn across London Road, in their clumsy attempts to live, while their parents screamed and hovered like furious guardians above.

The church doors were locked, but I scoured the perimeter, drawn by the mournful cooing that seemed to seep through the stones. Hesitant, I slipped through an iron gate, entering the graveyard, the very ground thrumming with unease. The source of the sorrowful sound revealed itself—a pigeon perched upon a gravestone, its head drooping as if bearing the weight of the world. 

“Hello,” I stammered. The pigeon blinked and regarded me with weary eyes.

“You can speak to me,” it said.

“I speak with all the birds,” I replied.

“You look like a pigeon, but different. What are you?” 

“I’m a wood pigeon,” it answered, feathers ruffled by the moon’s glow. 

“Why do you sound so sad?” I asked, leaning closer, drawn in.

“It’s not sadness. It’s just the way I sound. We wood pigeons once sang the most beautiful melodies in all the forests. But that all changed long ago.”

Then I sensed it—a shiver at the fringes of my vision, a black figure that danced in shadows, dipping just out of sight. “Did you see that?” I whispered. 

“You need to leave this place now,” the wood pigeon urged. “It’s not safe for you here. They’re coming back!”

In an instant, a cacophony of screams erupted around me. Gates rattled in a storm of shadows, and the graveyard flooded with swirling green and purple light, twisting like a tempest of madness. The wood pigeon took to the sky, a blur of feathers and panic, while I turned back to where I’d come. Everything smelled sickly sweet, intoxicating and wrong, something dark yet unseen nipping at my heels, pulling me toward oblivion. 

And then the ground crumbled beneath me. I fell with a sense of forever and only terrifying silhouettes recoiled above me could be seen. When I hit the ground, I expected pain, but there was none—only darkness and the suffocating smell of earth, enveloping me like a shroud as I lay there, lost among the bones of the past.