It was the smallest hotel room I’d ever stayed in. Calling it a “room” was overstating it. It had a window like an archer’s slot in a castle turret. If I wedged myself in against the wall between it and the tiny single bed - smaller than the one I slept on when I was 5 - I could see the front door of what had once been my local Maccas, five minutes walk from the crumbling Cuba Beach. I briefly considered going there for dinner but didn’t much feel like eating. I wasn’t in Wellington for a holiday, or even for any sort of fun, and had booked the teensy room because I just needed somewhere to sleep before an early morning appointment. With a brain surgeon. Was I freaking out? I think I was. But I made the most of having a room to myself, cupboard-like though it may have been, and went to bed with headphones on - and this album playing. I just wanted to swim in it. To hear every note of wonky piano, every brushed drum, every creak and whisper. To marvel at it. To think of nothing else. To peer undistracted inside the near-silent mystery of it, the miasma wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a riddle that is Spirit of Eden.
I dozed off and woke to an angry squeal of guitars and Mark Hollis protesting that It Ain’t Me, Babe. Must have been tired, eh? I played it through a few more times, til it was properly late, and had to give myself a stern talking to, take the headphones off and get some sleep. Big day tomorrow, girl. I woke to the sound of fire alarms and a creepily recorded voice telling me to leave the building. I stuck my head out the door, saw a fellow inmate casually strolling by, in no rush to leave, saying “someone’s burnt their toast, happens all the time, don’t worry about it.” Er, ok. The surgeon was chilly and arrogant and he also told me not to worry and that it was something that happens all the time. To him, maybe. I didn’t view brain surgery as an everyday occurrence. I left his office and wandered around Newtown in a bit of a daze. Slapped the headphones back on again. ... “Oh yeah the world’s turned upside down...” Was there ever a more devastating opening line?