A narrow bed, a table, a sash window
looking out on a fire escape

My first years back in London
were spent moving around
from high on the hill to the valley
where I had drunk with you

It was already a battle hymn to the magic of retrospect
a nicotine cathedral with a country and western band
and denizens from the deeps of the thirty-two counties:
family groups or, collars up, swimming at dark tables
under its dusty brocades, columns, mouldings of ivy,
walls clinging to heavy pub furniture from the nineties.
‘The crack was mighty at the Crown’: MacAlpine’s
Fusiliers. They played Spancilhill, The Race Is On.

I remembered her vaguely from my childhood as some sort of dissident who’d escaped from the Eastern bloc to freedom in the West. At the time she must’ve been about fifteen or sixteen, a stocky and cheerful teenager on the news. All I understood about it at the time was that she’d done something to annoy them over there, and she was being welcomed over here, as the one that got away.