At Night, No Shadows, No Sounds

As the last of the night minutes crept slowly into the first of the day minutes the fear would leave us a little, and we would go to our rooms and play our new singles on the record player, keeping the volume wheel at a tinny 2 or less. With the lights off, the music so low we could barely make out the metallic voice emanating from the single speaker, our father slumbering downstairs, Mum getting ready for bed and the girls already retreated from fear and now dreaming, Brendan and I lay on our beds and watched the street. Four streetlamps illuminated the stretch of the street we could see from the window, but nothing lit up the garages; skewed toe-pointers had sent footballs smashing into the streetlights just once too often for the borough council to replace them. The substation was pitch-black, the longest, darkest parts of the alleys the same. The garages were quiet, the sub-station might quietly hum if the wind was right, the alley-ways were quiet, and the only sounds that late on would be couples walking home from bars, or cars driving past on Woodburn Avenue, or vulturous children picking dry the bones of some old dead car somewhere behind us in Blackthorn Park. We listened and watched until the early day minutes became the early day hours, the tinny voices of Africa Bambataa or Adam Ant our only comfort. We slept when dawn broke.