The Secret Basement.

I live in an old building in a small side street lined with a few bars and restaurants, a book shop, a toy shop and several other boutiques. There’s some graffiti on the walls, nothing spectacular, just quick tags spritzed up by faceless boys at night, marking their territory like alley cats. At one end, there’s a fountain - a couple of tarnished lion’s faces spewing eau potable into a deep stone trough. Sometimes, alone under the dimly burning street lights, I dabble my fingertips across its icy surface; it leaves my fingers tingling in the night air as I meander back to my doorstep. An old shop front with dirty windows, screened with yellowing paper. No sign, no opening times. A metal and glass door that needs a key to open it from both sides, so when guests want to leave I have to let them out, casting them out like cats into a night garden. The door locked behind me, I’m in a corridor lined by mirrors on one side and glass on the other. Through the glass is a large room, an old shop, I imagined at first. If I pass it and continue through a second door I reach some stairs and after the stairs is a large, airy courtyard with a high glass ceiling and plants growing up the walls. My apartment is a small studio with a window facing into the courtyard. Nice enough, though the carpet is filthy. Under the window is a skylight which lets light down into the empty shop below. When I look down, I can see a white gate and beyond the gate is a flight of stairs that leads down into fathomless darkness. Sometimes I would lie awake at night and wonder where they would take me, those stairs, if I were to unlock that gate and follow them into that darkness.

I don’t remember when I first opened the gate. It was never locked, as I’d fancied it would be. I flicked a light switch beside it but the darkness remained. I flipped open my mobile and, guided by its feeble bluish light, edged down the staircase into that mysterious basement. The first thing I noticed was the floor; covered in rubble and debris like a building site or mountainside. I noticed because I was only wearing socks; I could feel the stones jagging into my soles like errant Lego on a midnight trip to the bathroom. Treading gingerly I looked up at my surroundings, lit faintly with my phone’s ghostly glow. I was in a long room with a low ceiling. The walls appeared to be decorated with some sort of mural; moving closer with my faint modern lantern to see more clearly,  I saw that the designs were Italian-looking chefs cooking pizza, boldly stylised in bright spray paint, accompanied by PIZZA in graffitied letters which put to shame the scrappy tags on the street.  I explored further, looking for more evidence left behind from that old restaurant, but there was nothing but a blackened pizza oven and rubble and exposed wires. I became uneasy, down there in that abandoned eatery, and, treading carefully yet hastily, climbed back up the stairs into the dim shop front where I collected my thoughts. Why did it close? Or did it ever open?

When I lie in bed, 10, 15 feet above it, I think about the pizza I’ll never eat from that restaurant I’ll never see open. I think about how secret it is, how I was one of few, perhaps, who knew about it. And I wonder. I wonder, how many more places are there like that, abandoned, lost to public knowledge, under my very street? Under the city? Under all the cities of this world? And I feel an infinite to go down into them all, holding out my mobile phone to light my way into the darkness, tentatively treading out a small adventure with my bare feet.