The floorboards rest on the solid earth, I tell myself; this is not true, but it is true for me now. They are solid, the floorboards; they rest - and upon the solid earth. I walk across them as though I walked on the earth. Yes, it is the earth below my feet, even though I know the centre of the flat is sagging, that a mine shaft was once open outside my front door, and this group of houses was once a coalmine.
Above me, though, the students - their flat. Their flat, not mine, a space above my ceiling. What are they doing up there? Sometimes, they are noisy, but tonight, so far, quiet enough. Above me, the students, in their airy flat, and me in my dark flat. Above, students, walking in the air and light and me in the pit of my flat, my writing table level with the floor of the yard, half-buried, half-subterranean, with barely any light let in here. That's why there is a window between living room and bedroom - bevelled glass, four foot by five, through which light can come, though very little light comes.
I've seen several tenants come and go upstairs. Several of them - noisy and quiet, students and workers; once a family from overseas, I spoke to them. The children lined up to greet me. We shook hands, each of us; they did not speak English. Then, after them, the businessman who let his son live there in the evening. In he'd come, the son, who worked in a nightclub and play music. Three AM, four AM - music. No point knocking on the door, he never responded. I lay awake and redrafted the book on which I was working. Were it not for those nights, what would I have published? Sometimes, then, I'd escape to R.M.'s, catching the train to Edinburgh: it was too loud here, and especially when he had his friends around, the son.
That was two years ago. When is it that such memories become narratable? When is it possible to write of them, those memories, to recall them and set them down? Tonight I tell myself I am more solidly here than ever before; I walk on the stripped floorboards of the flat and know it is mine. How different it was when music came thumping down! How different when the flat seemed to shrink and compress and I was as though crushed between its walls! I used to go from this room to the other, on the other side of the glass. There, too, the music pounding.
And now? I rest on solid earth, but still the flat seems too large, too empty. How will I remember it? Perhaps for those happy evenings when I came home and wrote without forethought. For those evenings when writing was possible, and I wrote, taking up every evening the thread of what was written the night before. That, too, is in the past; the writing dried up; nothing asked to be written. The past: the flat has moved through many phases. For how many years have I lived here? But I'm not sure I've lived here. The floor is too wide, too large, even though I can cross to the other side in one stride. This room is uninhabited, although I am here in the room.
Have I given it a history, this flat, this envelope of my life? Has something happened here? When my friends come to eat, I place candles in a ring on the floor. We sit on cushions. When R.M. comes, she rests her bike in the hallway (mine is in the bedroom). And in the meantime?