Exit, herb Robert
I leave my friend at the driving test centre, anxious for her, hoping to take the burden of nerves on my shoulders as she’s left alone to face her task.
I walk: quiet pavements flanked by large houses, big trees and smart springtime gardens in favour of the test centre waiting room. Forty minutes of wandering, wondering at the lives lived here. Unimaginable wealth and privilege. Past driveways clear of weeds, plumped up with vehicles large enough to move a small army, borders burgeoning with bearded iris and peony, lilac and wisteria clothing the walls like celebratory bastions against, what?
A small dog barks from the driver’s seat of a parked van. It wags its tail at me, I smile back. The verandah of a large Edwardian town house has been dismantled to accommodate renovations, to be reinstated minus the veneer of age and cleansed of the stories it has seen and sheltered. A fresh beginning.
I need somewhere to sit, in the sunshine. A great-tit shouts loudest amongst the city birdsong, accompanying the constant murmur of vehicles from busy roads out of sight beyond the residential slumber. There is a blackbird from a higher vantage somewhere nearby, its notes riding the rooftops. I follow the fresh green of garden hedges to a treeline behind a large church. The tarmac carpark wraps around two sides of the stolid building. The strip of wilderness behind is in fact the railway cutting; a blackcap and a chiffchaff are making use of this space, in-between the passing of trains whose presence are marked by the warning high-pitch electrical whir of approach and the sad whine of retreat; the string section of a brutalist, modernist symphony. I find my seat on the broad steps of one of the church’s generous doorways, this one pronounces itself as an emergency exit: from a crisis of conscience maybe, a lapse of faith? A solitary herb Robert is my companion, growing miraculously out of stone and cement and a crack in the building. Its tiny pink petals matched by a gossamer thread of cotton caught in the filigree of its leaves. It could have been any colour, this minute happenstance, but it matches perfectly.
Swifts squeal their ebullience overhead, competing with David Bowie singing through the wound down window of a white van that pulls up into the carpark, its nose facing the railway cutting, the driver, like me, finding an out of the way place to wait, for whatever pause is needed. The lyrics of Modern Man, perfect for the venue, are themselves interrupted by the driver intercepting a phone call. I hear the ring-tone and then one side of a conversation which ends abruptly. Inconclusive.
The sign on the door, the emergency exit: please leave clear at all times. Am I to leave now, with a clear conscience? Am I instructed to have clarity, always? Can I fulfil either of these hinted at demands? I walk back past the stately town houses, the villas, the enclaves, each buffered from harsh truths and uncomfortable realities by a defensive veneer of clean, fresh paintwork, by thick, lush neatly kept hedges, by wealth.
Sunshine warming the face of a large house: the advantage of affluence, the assurance of spring, the protection of abundance; who are you fooling? There is a struggle to find one’s place in the world, there is a battle to find happiness, to grasp contentment; there are no means left by which to achieve one’s necessary goals.
My friend will be making a return to the centre, it turns out. Opportunities remain diminished. Thwarted, for now. Disappointment presents a gateway for all manner of other unwelcome sadness’s and it is hard to see a way through to a better place. I try to leave the way clear, so we can exit: allow the birdsong and sunshine in, to blast everything else away.