Overnight in the city

There's an insistent chugging within hearing distance, as if a car engine is running all night, a private generator to power all-night pirate radio, perhaps. Otherwise it's a trick of the night, as road traffic concentrates along Talgarth Road. It's not that cars in side streets are rare, though, as the residents of town houses return from parties, or maybe arrive at parties, or at discreet private clubs demure behind basement doors. Low monologues pass my window now and then; there are those who do their best deals after one. An eighties ballad I'd forgotten soars for a second, then is lost in a croak. I cough, more because of my lingering cold than because of any poisons in the metropolitan atmosphere. I have six hours left in which I can sleep, before business calls.