Markers

Only the yellow markers remain, two slanted lines running parallel at each consecutive right angle of where the tent was once pitched from one end to the other of the vast playing field. There is a scattering of hay here and there and some paper bags, uncollected. The event has come and gone. Alongside that field, in what would have been beyond the margins of the tent, there is the dog run which has barely got going yet. It is now established as a weekly event. People are beginning to gather. Dogs run and are called sharply by their owners as they scatter here and there over the surface of the ground once lost to the tent. One jumps and grounds another in mid-flight.

A man lays out a lime green kite on the ground in the field adjacent. It is one and a half times his size in every direction. I look away. When I look back it has gone and so has the man. Up in the sky something flutters, it's feathery multicoloured tail blowing in counter-direction to it. The man is way off at the other end of the field, a small figure in opaque metal blue running into the distance and becoming less and less distinct, tethering a line over his shoulder I think. There is no wind and the kite begins to falter and wind it's way back down. The rope goes slack. The man stops, turns and waits. Then he starts walking the long distance back through the field towards me. It takes forever. Later as I too make my way through the field in the opposite direction I see the remnants of the dyed individual feathers; red, yellow and blue lodged here and there between the tufts of prickly grass that I am picking my way through. The sound of helicopters overhead is unceasing and makes me bend more than I need to. It is what finally got me to move. Trains continue to cross one another at the far side of the field blending with each other before seperating out again.

Commentary

I'm in a small square just off from a main road. I have wheeled my bike up some stone steps into the central square where there are benches around a flower display with a tree in the middle. The flowers are red with plenty of low-lying green leaves that are sometimes dark and sometimes light. The leaves on the tree droop as if moist. There are green pods attached to some. None have turned brown. Sun dapples the seats on the other side. I am in the shade. A woman on a mobile phone with blonde short hair, shorts, tanned legs and jewelley talks into the machine as she walks back and forth looking into the square, over the low lying wall, her back to the small playground where a climbing frame, slide, ropes and hang-bar are all condensed into the same one area. Everytime someone walks in or out the gate creakes, the jumble inside rearanges and everyone in the park looks up. There is an outer perimeter too with more benches and odd depositeries of flowers at regular intervals built into the wall itself as if bricks have been intentionally left out, the gaps filled with earth. Two black men sit on a bench behind and to the left of me in the outer rim. Their legs are stretched in front of them. There is a constant commentary going on between them. A couple moves from one side of the park to the other, stretching out a blanket and laying out with their packages of food. The man has on a purple T.shirt which contrasts with the grass in the sunlight. A chinese man picks a child from off of the slide in mid-descent and lifts her outwards before pressing her to his body. She cries out, then concedes. A small black boy is by the side of the bin by the wall. My bike is next to the bin on the other side. Then comes the bench where I sit. He is watching me. When I look back he moves towards the centre of the square with his back to me. He flips up a coin and lets it fall on the paving stone. He does it again, throwing it up high and then moving back suddenly to let it fall and catch the full impact as it almost bounces before settling again. It is a pound coin and because of its density and compactness makes a thud rather than the clang of a thinner, wider brass coin such as a two pence piece. He does it again. And again. A pattern is begining to emerge. "Heads" I say. He throws "Tails" he says. Then again, throwing it less high so that he is bent over it as it lands to see the result and again and again so that he is crouching over it now, it barely leaving his hands before falling; He alone speaks; "Heads, Heads, tails, Heads, tails, tails tails, Heads, tails" faster and faster until the coin barely stops for a reading. It is only just landing, his voice sometimes pre-empting the fall. It is spinning in the air, he commentating on it like an anouncer at a horse-race where horses are neck and neck each craning beyond the other, no defintie position established. Winner and loser is arbitary. Suddenly in the freneticness of his own commentary he is literally, bodily, blown out of this centre court and swiftly he moves through the bracketted spaces of the two rings of park which are broken in places where the benches lie and the steps join up until he vacates the park gates and crosses the road by a block of flats. The woman is still talking on the phone, pacing back and forth. An old man crosses the outer rim of the park and goes to the bench next to the one taken by the two black men. A woman reads a book, resting it on the wall as she sits on the steps of the outer perimeter just where the lawn starts. Every now and then she glances up, noting the scene, including my position over from her in the inner circle. I notice three large shoots dispersed evenly amongst the red flowers and green foliage of the central display. Gradually it dawns on me what they are. They are corn, not yet ripe but already under way. I go over and feel one of them; the individual pieces of corn under the sheaves of leaves.

Now the boy is back. He is on the wall between the outer and inner perimeter and is picking his way past each interuption of clusters of flower. He stops before each one, as if trying to work out a difficult problem. Then tentatively tries out a route, around and over, edging on, one way then the other, making of each crossing, an occasion. He is doing it for us to see but the game is that he never looks up out from his activity. Half-way round, where there is a gap in the wall where the steps follow through from one level to another he jumps down. I supose he is going to resume where the wall follows on but he doesn't. He leaves the park. A motor bike with no sound dimmer goes round the ring road that encloses the park. It thunders through distorting it's own emanation as the speed of it tears ahead of its own sound. The sound keeps getting layed one on top of another though not quite catching up so that there are jolts where it dies away, then interupts itself, tripping on its own spectacle. All the people in the park follow it through. For the first time we look at each other. A man with a bottle of beer lounges in the outer circle opposite me. His form is blocked here and there by foliage. He gets up with his bottle half-finished and goes. A squirrel crosses the wall where the boy had been, in reverse, jumping the obstacles in a continuous move. A woman in a luminous yellow jacket sits down across from me in the inner circle and lights a cigarette in the sun-shine. Her bike lays across most of the seating so that she is squashed in a corner.

I close my eyes. Think about the corn. Open my eyes to see the woman with the book looking at me. By now I am directly in the sun. The boy returns, calls towards the playground and three small children emerge out of the gate and follow him out the park, across the road and towards the flat. Half-way across the road they all stop to turn and look at a man and a dog crossing in the opposite direction. When the man and dog have passed and are someway along the road going into the other direction, they resume their walk and then disapear inside the flat-fronted building. The woman with the blonde hair has entered the playground where a small child hanging on to the legs of a tall man, turns at that moment. Five adults come in with one small child who seems to be floating. Adults and children are moving around the coloured structure. Children are fed in and out of it. As I go down the steps a boy glides in front, his stomach flat against a skateboard. I wheel my bike out and disapear.

The colour red

I am lying on my back in the park just where the sun cracks on the tree. It is windy so the light keeps going on/off on my face. I look up between the other trees that give way to one another down the slope, either side of the path. The black kite is up again. It's white trailers fluttering, unevenly cut, in the wind. when I get up to walk diagonaly over the grass until I am finally back on the path, I need to step over the string. I follow the string through with my eyes over to the green lawn in the middle where the kite is now laid out. Looking down the grassy slope where I stand watching the trains go past one another in the distance there is a man carrying a bed on his head by the side of the canal. I think of the colour red when I think of him but cannot remember if the colour is from his shirt or shorts. People are playing tennis down in the courts. It seems slower than would actually be possible in order to keep the ball in motion. Maybe that has something to do with the low lying sun sinking through the trees. Now that I think of it I think the colour red comes from one of those players down there, not the man with the bed hoisted up over his shoulders after all.