Jenny takes me down, first the Tube then the streaked and dirty streets, back to her house stopping only to pull in at the all night garage to buy milk, and survey the ragga youth hanging by the boom box, and the cars swirling in and out, the furry-dice bobbing in the windows. The ‘lads’ are buying the petrol and the ‘birds’ are dolling up in the mirror, in a haze of back-seat bass they speed away, down the High street, towards the South Circular, and the road to the rave.

I shudder, I really don’t like being here, in this part of town, not at this time, but she just shrugs it off. ‘Saturday night innit,’ she prompts, and taking my hand leads me up the silent hedge-rowed side streets, skipping in and out of the rain speckled parked cars, picking flowers from one well tended garden, pausing only to pull close as we pass under the railway bridge, to push a sudden and ferocious kiss on my mouth. Walking on, silent and solemn, signing a conspiratorial ‘ssssh’ with one elegant finger, she inserts a key in the lock of her front door and we climb, shoeless, to the back bedroom.

And then, in the solace of her bed, amidst the sounds of her records, I realise that part of me will never leave South London. I too can disappear into this anonymity; the endless roads and terraces, the slew of late buses and canceled trains, and the furtive, slimy, back street public house crime. I am home, because, spinning in her arms, translucent, swapping stories of here and there and everywhere we’ve been and are going, I look up, and brown eyes meet mine and I know she knows, because we’ve thrilled to the same and raged at the same, felt the same slow ivy crawling awareness, that there could be more. Growing in separate beds, in separate genders and colours, we’ve sprouted the same wings. Only now she is comfortable, she says, anywhere and everywhere, whereas I, in my obscure discomfort, am utterly opposite, and consequently, one morning, some morning, she brings me to the airport, and we speak of time passing and phone calls and letters, and hug, and smell on each other the sex of that morning, and then I am gone--another loss? another betrayal?


But when I return --perhaps ready to embrace her-- she tells me that she too has found that to stop is to sink; to sink too deep into the sticky clay of London’s foundation. She too would fly..