The fox in Bermondsey

Coincidence level: 4/10 Category: I can predict the future

The last story was life imitating art; this one is art imitating life. Kind of.

In 2018 I went to London a lot–work and personal reasons. One week I was staying in Bermondsey, just a wee bit south of the Thames; in fact, it was a joy to run along the river in the mornings. It was also a joy to wake up in a room that had a clear glass door into a backyard “garden.” I say “garden” because the thing was loaded with shrubbery, untamed, weeds sprung about everywhere, but still gorgeous in its natural lushness, a few stray vines creeping up the adjacent brick wall into the neighbor’s “garden” (probably a real garden, I didn’t look).

There was no air conditioning in the room, so I felt the full blast of summer heat, mosquitos, spiders and all, and that smell of life in South London.

Saturday morning I awoke at 6:00AM, too nervous to sleep, and the river breeze brought a beautiful, red-furred creature down the steel stairs. I wasn’t even wearing my glasses, but my blurry vision still caught the thing because it was treading very slowly, like a cat, one hind leg after the other. I should mention the building was a couple of stories, I was on the ground floor, hence the garden, and the upstairs terrace led down to my backyard via said staircase. The staircase was also directly in front of the glass door.

I scrambled for my phone, but the fox was too quick – I only managed to catch a photo of its moving underbelly.

Before it reached the very bottom, though, it turned its head and looked directly at me.

Yes, I’d made eye contact with a random fox from my bed–my BED–in London on a lovely summer morning.

I went on a run that morning along the Thames river while chatting with a date I’d made plans with for later that evening. She was very posh and had arranged for us to meet at Soho House. One of those types. About 10 years my senior, mostly had famous friends.

During the run I stopped to send her a song from a playlist called Abusey Junction. I’d heard it in Camden a couple days ago at a jazz cafe and it caught my ear with its somehow woeful and hopeful tones laden in one song that dared to scale this way and that, a harmony of irregular instruments and hums.

The cover of the song (the single, not the album) held a photo of a fox at a street corner, a dreamscape of sorts.

“That’s your spirit animal then–that’s what it means if you made eye contact with the fox,” is what my date said later that evening. She was German, had a fabulously exaggerated British accent, model-thin frame and cheekbones, grey-green eyes, and a very stylish flat in Haggerston.

I ended up staying the night in the flat. The next morning, as we sat on her couch in the living room, I looked up at the painting overlooking us, resting on the same wall as the back of the sofa.

It was an X-ray vision of a fox, impaled by a stone-like, chiseled, bright, white dagger. The fox was suspended in black space, curled up a bit but of course you could really only see its outline. All bones and all — X-ray vision.

She’d said her young artist friend had painted it for her–wildly talented at 23 he was.

Funny thing because this lovely woman almost killed us both in Tuscany (a story for later), but not unbefitting the fox and my spirit animal motif. Foxes would also later appear to me many more times in other shapes and forms.

. . .