Last Night I Walked Home

Last night, after what proved to be a particularly productive band practice (for me at least, less so for Adam), I walked home from Ross’s house at around three. While it was admittedly a fairly late time to walk home, I’m not entirely unfamiliar with walking home late, and so hadn’t any reservations when I set out.

I left with a half consumed bag of M&Ms and was making good progress on the rest when I reached the main road leading back towards the Park (in which I live, for anyone who isn’t up on all the details of my life).

I’ve recently installed a playlisting app for my iPod that measures the pace of my footsteps and plays tracks deliberately such that the two are in sync. I’d been enjoying this as I walked home at a pace that could be best described as “sedate”. The rain of the previous day had cleared to leave the night air balmy and soporific.

In a sleepy daze I meandered back towards the house, the sodium-orange of street lamps providing that unwonderful monochrome light that seems universally to provide just enough vision for whatever surrounds you to be boring.

Suddenly, I found myself swept up by a tide of grey-orange children, mouths open with the exertion of running as quickly as possible, eyes wide enough to see the orange light reflected all around the irises. They flooded onto the road from housing estates on both sides, from alleyways between houses, and over walls all sprinting in the same direction, numbers swelled by the surprise of seeing so many at once and the low light, shadows and children being roughly indistinguishable when moving at speed.

All at once I experienced two things. The first was that the crisp-sugar shell of an M&M compliments the coppery taste of adrenaline in roughly the same way as apple juice does toothpaste. The second was that music chosen in an attempt to mimic a slow paced walk is near enough to the perfect tempo to slowly incite panic. It being so very late at night, the seemingly vast number of ten-to-fourteen year olds so determined to make haste in one direction gave me what can best be described as “an uncomfortableness”. I ran; I ran as fast I altogether can.

I remember a few details with unusual clarity, I remember the low pulse in my headphones as my walkman informed me it had judged that I’d changed pace dramatically enough to warrant a revision of what track was playing (it changed from Massive Attack’s Teardrop to The Faint’s Mirror Error for anyone inclined to look it up).

I remember too the sound of my own footsteps as I ran, high on the balls of my feet and leaned far forward, made somehow sharper by the thin layer of liquid still covering the paths from the rain earlier that day, reflecting, with equal vagueness, my feet as I ran and the glow of the streetlights above me.

And suddenly as they had appeared, the crowd of children with whom I’d been running were gone, left behind or hiding, and still it seemed tremendously early to stop running from anything that had so scared a group so big. I continued running until I reached the gate to the Park itself.

Still fearing pursuit (in the manner of accomplished cowards everywhere) as I passed through the gate, I let my feet drift out in front of me and slid, right foot forward and the left only slightly behind it. The ground was slick and wet, I slid so low and easily I planted the fingertips of my left hand on the ground to remain stable and, as I did so, turned my body so that I could plant my right hand on the ground and look behind me.

Sure enough there was a shadow, tall and thin, limned by the dull orange glow, running (though without the energy terror had lent me) some distance behind me. In my sudden and brief stillness I could hear that run. Where my footsteps had been a rapid tapping, light and sharp, these were thudding, loping strides. Fortunately enough, my slide had left me in the same position as a sprinter’s, ready to start a race.

Despite the speed and sense of urgency, the park struck me as being unexpectedly bright, the throbbing, artificial orange light having seeped in from the surrounding roads. Given the comparative lack of darkness, I ran for the concealment of the woods, rather than the narrow path that leads towards the house.

However bright the park might be, there are few ambient lights that will illuminate any decent woodland, and so it was that, with a disturbingly simian motion, I vaulted the wrought iron fence surrounding the woods and felt my feet bury themselves in the soft humus of the woodland.

Anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time in woodland as they grow up will tell you that running changes entirely on entering. The number of sticks and small plants waiting to claw a sprinter down is disconcerting during the daytime, but during the near absolute darkness of night you’d do best to run in long, high strides, keeping your feet as high from the ground as possible from the beginning of each step to the end. It adds the effort of having to extricate each foot from soft soil with every step, but it’s always worth it.

To cut this short enough that I leave out the uninteresting bits, I’m not sure if I was ever chased, but the combination of dreariness, music and a late night lent me just the right kind of effervescent paranoia to lead to a good sprint home.

Marc “Craven” Mac

P.S. I finished the M&Ms as I wrote this blog, they were more delectable for the warmth and comfort in which I relished them.