Half a Pound of Tupenny Light

Half light, they said. Write a story about half light, whatever the fuck that means, they said. It'll be great, they said. They didn't. I made some of that up. Half light, half light. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? It seems to me that there's two options, sunrise or optimism, and I'm not au fait with either. It's not a half pint, it's a flat one, and it's got a cigarette butt in it. And it's definitely not half light - it's cloudy, and I bet Diane Oxberry is on TV somewhere crowing about how it's going to puke down rainy, celestial despair on our saddened, sodden bonce all throughout the morning. Oh get fucked Diane.

I scrabbled around for inspiration like a hungry rat in a commercial dustbin, a rusty red Biffa skip of inexpressible verbal junk, but all I came out with was a single rotten turnip of an idea. No-one likes a turnip at the best of times, not least a metaphorical one tended by an imbecile. The Soil Association are never going to put their logo on that.

I left the house in the hope that some wild vagabond might per chance urgently accost me in the street with their coincidentally thematic life experiences and tales thereof. It didn't happen. The only thing I saw was the latest of Hampshire 5-0's "sexual assault took place here" posters. I don't think there's half a light in that. Sexual assault is very much an all or nothing affair. Alright, I know how you think. No, it's a harrowing and unspeakable wrong that you shouldn't joke about. Yeah, but it's also Jim Davidson getting kicked in the nads by a fat girl. You see. But what is there in between?

Half light, half light. You can't divide a photon, even if there are complex wave/particle duality issues at play. I dream for a moment about being a butcher, chopping up hefty marbled slabs of light, hanging them on gleaming silver hooks. 'I'll have the boneless please', some hapless cunt demands. 'Fuck off sir, that's ridiculous', I snap. I realise I'm having more problems with the customer service aspects than I am with the physically impossible nature of my intangible product, but this doesn't stop me chasing the old codger out of the store, cleaver waving wildly. He scurries off in the direction of Lidl to buy some questionable light of indeterminate origin. Fuck him. I flip the sign on the door, and with that my dream is closed for business.

Here I am. I cast my thoughts across broken Belisha beacons; a burning, flailing dwarf; energy saving bulbs, Gordon Freeman, Nick Berry, that's not right at all, words, words, letters, shapes, rage, black smoking chargrilled rage. I wonder if other people have better ideas in their better heads, and if I shake them, will they spill out of their mouths? It seems probable, I think, but I don't really like engaging with strangers.

I walk and I walk and I walk. I wish I was Iggy Pop so someone would drive me around. I walk through the greying city, through the greyer suburbs, through post industrial dereliction and decrepitude, past skeletal cranes and characterless trains, the shining silver space dome of the incinerator, over roads and rails and rancid river, and at last I am released, admitted into the woods.

Of course I'm no closer to a story; neither its inception nor its mangling in my unwieldy hands. I am the Lenny of my own clumsy domain. The tale eludes me like the rabbits I trigger off as I crash through the scrub, looking for a path to anywhere new. Its absence leaves a thin but visible depression in its wake, like my footprints in the waterlogged earth, each immediately flushed with a murky soup. 'HALF LIGHT HALF LIGHT', I mutter, cursing now. My mind ebbs and flows with a tide of fanciful notions, yet none will quite reach home. I see an advance of creeping soldiers shrouded in the pines, but now they are dissolved, melded into another thought by some Kimya line about love, in turn exploding into a mist of opportunities to pursue, not one of them useful. I'm carried by an imagined kayak down my stream of consciousness, control surrendered to its behest, until even these waters tire of humouring my folly, and will carry me no further. I have nothing.

It's still gloomy, has been all day, an impending rain biding its hour. The overcast veil renders it hard to guess quite what time it is, but it must be getting late. I rest on a tree stump and contemplate my move. The only option is home, a reluctant, unedifying acceptance that not all hunts return their quarry, that sometimes there is nothing to be sighted, chased, cornered, seized, slammed onto the page and committed. That and Hollyoaks is on.

Whatever route I followed here was jagged and unfamiliar, but I still have a faint sense of direction, so I plod into the undergrowth in search of some distant visual clue. A miscellany of unseen life flutters and rouses around me, the bracken clutching at my shins. A brief pause, and at last I see the way, a cottage I remember, a welcome hint of déjà vu. I should press onward now, so I step forward, two steps, three. As I lift my foot again, I am arrested by a natural tripwire, some canny root below. There is nothing for it; I stumble and tumble forth, arms extended, instinctively feeling to greet the muddy puddle ahead. Alas, there is no such reply.

Expectations evade me. The rising ground does not catch me, and I am ignored with a cool disregard as I sink into a much wider embrace. Where I should have lain, sprawled out, collided into soggy dirt, I am somewhere beneath, absorbed into some empty and featureless aether, lost in its infinite, incomprehensible grasp. No call or cry out is permitted here, and none is ever proffered; I have no retort, no fight to gather against an insurmountable emptiness. Worst of all, it all seems right to me now, a fading concession that somehow this is what I deserve.

In the woods where I was quietly forgotten, slow ripples in the mud decay to nothing. No further being stirs. A swathe of the clouded sky above shifts to pale; a growing patch spreads more thinly now, parting, gradually clear. The moon shines through the void, a perfect semicircle.