BLESSING

The old Swan pub has been scrubbed. Its stick-on lettering removed. But I can still read the word S W A N where a lightness of the brick contrasts with the dark soot surround. The building is screaming light, escaping like sweat from pores. Loud music beckons then rebuffs out the open windows into the dark road; the stream of headlights that keep appearing and tipping past where the road glows from the tail ends disappearing far up ahead.

Black clad men sway and lurch dangerously into one another propped up in the shell of each other’s arms, their white shirts showing as the black yawns open from their dishevelled bodies.

There are soft furry animals in the street. Children dressed as bears, cheetahs and birds. Others are in elaborate silk, chiffon pink, white and blue party dresses. There are boys as fire-men, policemen, beggars and in combat camouflage with painted on moustaches on their soft downy upper lips.

I stagger around the cellophane wrapped and bound platters of sweets and presents carried at arms’ length by women walking earnestly towards opening front doors. Children pour in and out from the cracks of these buildings. They linger in groups, watching other groups up and down the street. The air is full of whisperings.

A small boy in dull everyday clothes walks beside his mother carrying a violin case by his side.

I am early. The lights are ablaze above the table decorations. My plastic bag is tucked away under a chair- the presents will not reveal themselves this evening.

I am an outsider. I feel foreign. My neighbours have not yet arrived. I leave hastily. Get on my bike and begin to cycle through the myriad streets of colour, sudden noise eruption and festoon.

There is an old man sitting on the wall opposite the library just before the light junction with a dry pulverised face and a clown’s wig of multi coloured curly hair on his head.

As I continue to cycle the colour begins to drain away until it is just an everyday Sunday evening and the bike is carrying me to a place I know so well that I am there without thinking. I pass a woman whom I think I know, smile and go past. The gates as I knew I would find them are closed and locked. There is white opaque plastic on the other side of the gates cutting off the view. In a gap between the plastic I peer. Where once there were buildings there is rubble. Where once there was a garden the rubble like a thick uneven scree from a deserted sea-less beach covers the ground- a new sediment. Even the contours of the landscape have been altered.

I remember for instance the gradual decline of the land so that when the rain came it sifted downwards watering but never clogging the roots of plants and trees that over the years had been dug into the soil one by one.

The land now is perfectly flat. A total erasure. Only the one nut tree at the far end remains beyond the circumference of a looped fencing that now demarcates the given area of the new development. An orange digger rests up on top of the rubble its shovel face poised mid-air tilting slightly.

I wonder if sections of the path still remain leading directly up to the nut tree. I can not tell from here. In the final plans evidently the tree was ringed to survive due to a long-standing preservation order or something like that. All else seems to have slipped through the net. Beyond that tree there is a thicket of Japanese knot-weed, a scourge for most gardeners but for us, with a garden of hyper-sensitive Autistic children affected by the sharpness of undiluted light and our own sensory volatility, it was a blessing to have this leafage that rinsed out and mediated cruel brightness. There we built a toilet- a hole in the ground with a loo seat on top and a tent-like structure around it. Edward would sit inside that tent looking out between threading fingers and the woven branches that supported the sacking from Brazilian cocoa bags and still smelt of chocolate. That was before they begun to smell of mould.

Peering through the opaque plastic into this levelled ground I feel a kind of lightness- an aeration slipping through my skin- as if the molecules shifted slightly from their oaring. As I turn I see the hair-dresser in the shop window where I used to get my hair cut, looking through the window back up towards me. His scissors are poised in the air above the head of a seated woman.

I cycle to the local park past the neat rows of newly planted spring flowers. I sit on a bench by the side of an artificial pond. Between me and the pond a looped path runs. Two swans are in the water their necks curving and un-curving, dipping down and up again, their tiny heads like single eyes on the end of a bendy string. My face feels blank- numb; scrubbed of all affect. People pummel past. We are blinkered- protective.

The Japanese Tsunami was one week ago. I have been transfixed by pictures on the news and in the web, of whole towns laid to waste; people sifting through soggy belongings. The little girl who had found her white party dress unscathed still on its hanger even as the house that surrounded was flung high and smashed to pieces on the surge of a great wave. She sits on a chair on the foundations of her house petting the dress resting on her knees. Her father stands by her side. The voice of an English girl over-dubs her Japanese voice.

“I only wish I could find my two kittens. That is really what I would like to find now more than anything else in the world”

A girl on a bicycle sweeps past me. Suddenly I take her in fully and find myself smiling. A woman on a bicycle follows behind. She smiles broadly. Something dissolves. I cannot put my finger on it.

I head back to the party. They sing loudly- lecture me on the need to light candles on a certain night. I ask if the open heartedness at the root of this Jewish practice can extend-To the Japanese for instance. It is left hanging.

The girls are all chatting and laughing, looking at pictures on a digital camera together. One girl is holding and stroking a wig dyed two shades laughing hilariously as if holding a volatile feckless animal. It is the wig belonging to one of their mothers.

The woman next to me has red rashes up her hands. She gave birth to her tenth child two years ago. The child climbs up on to her mothers’ lap from the ground where she has been running back and forth by herself. Her body is lurching forward as if she would take to the air.

Barrier

It is a magpie that is battling against the brick chimney pot. It can not go round yet neither can it go through. It is levitated there, almost static despite the flapping of wings balanced against the bulk of a body.


The Dixie chicken shop was the last one allowed to stay. It is shored up with red steel girders strapped into place at criss-crossing angles, buttressed with wedges of wood cut and inserted to make good the constant lean and sway of the end building in its changing weight distribution. This bares a reflection on the many changing temperature readings that crack and contract, thaw and spread not only the aged brick and mortar of this holding, but the London clay in which it is partially buried.

Beyond the chicken shop there is a large hole, a digger by the side, tunneling out muck and putting it to one side where it rises as a hill of loose earth, clods of clay and stone in equal measure, an inverse of the hole.

The tracks are being put down just behind this operation. They run the length of the absent buildings then tunnel underground when they come to the Dixie Chicken just before the turn in the road, which is in fact, a bridge. Behind the tracks there is a Pentecostal red brick building with a small Cross on the top and a flapping white banner attached to the outer wall that reads "Church of the Pentecostal reaching out to all the Community". Traffic continues to thunder down the road. Behind the church is the burnt out remains of a Victorian building, its roof blackened and punched in. Every side of the building is heavily caged in strips of dull silver metallic scaffolding with the struts of plank-wide walkways interspersed and looped around its body at meter intervals.

Rising above the road, past the main junction now sealed and boarded with blue placards to all but pedestrian single file commuters are the steel and wooden frames of the high rise buildings. Men in yellow jackets, picked out on this cold sunny morning from the buses and the streets below, can be seen here and there on this level or that. Most of the floors are now sealed enclosures with panels of glass running and wrapping around the skeletal blocks bouncing back out the sun on this particular day. But a few however remain open. Men stand daringly at the edges.

In the foyer the furniture is arranged into groupings. There are wide leather settees, low tables, then more settees. There is the distant echo of footsteps, the sound of voices and the occasional raised voice over at the bar. There's an unspoken rule of silence over around the settees. Some people have their lap-tops flipped open. A toddler walks around eyeing anyone with food from behind the sofas. He opens and clenches his hand. Then puts it to his mouth. Another child is being swung by the arms by two women.

The child keeps arriving in a different spot further from before. The other toddler runs behind this pogo step. Then overtakes and runs in front. They all disappear behind the black folds of a curtain that runs along the far back wall.

Uniformed Stewards approach. I am eating a green apple, saliva nearly escaping from my mouth.

The steward asks me to leave. They are clearing the space of all the furniture for an event later in the evening. Then he goes on to someone else. With each whisper somebody rises.

I go and sit down on a similar sofa above the foyer near the bar. Pink helium balloons are attached by long strings on to the sides of prams. Women and children sit together below this display.

There is another level below the bar that one would almost fall into if it were not for the low glass barrier at the end of the sofa.

There are more chairs and sofas down in the semi darkness at this level that I can see through to through the transparent smoke glass barrier. Crammed shoulder to shoulder on these settees are sleeping men. They are dressed in many layers with rough shaven faces raw from the cold. Some of them clasp cans of beer even in their sleep.

The event is a film showing of a concert given in Ramallah behind the concrete security wall involving people from both sides of the conflict. The Jewish Musicians unlike the Palestinian members of the orchestra, were ferried in with military protection, allowed to play, then ferreted back out to the airport where they were flown over the 4 meter thick wall before they even had time to change out of their formal black and white dress. They never got to walk in the streets at all or do normal things with the other members whom daily they rehearsed with and with whom they gave this moving performance "At the heart of the conflict". Everyone was nervous about this concert which was only just allowed to take place under these strict conditions.

I pass red suitcases on the way home. They are in a doorway creating a kind of wall- almost a barrier- behind which people stay.

The Violinist could not help herself; her camera paused on the gap in places as she was being driven to the airport. It was already evening but still the bulldozer worked.

The Bottle

Perfume boxes towering inside the shop. One on top of another. Two tone turquoise gold and blue-silver. Metalic sheen in the textured fold of individual boxes. Delicately coursing skywards, spread wide and seperated out at the base where length-wise other boxes straddle them and as the placement continues, further and further they become taller and narrower. The final two or three of them stand uppermost nearly
at the top end of the window- singular.

Past the window there's a counter behind of which are rows and rows of these coloured sheen surfaces. Panels that stretch for some distance then give way to other panels. The Purples, the greens, turquise and reds. Even some pinks that blink on-off between their colour and another. There's an orange section at the far corner deeply engrained with brown inscription on each compartmentalised block, lying head to head.

A man takes down a box, places it on the counter and with the other hand lifts up the lid. He slips out the glass bottle, holds up the pale liquid above his head to the window, then swivels and brings it down very lightly into the hand of the woman standing on the other side. He goes round to join her. She takes the bottle in her hand, presses her finger down on the white spray button so that the fine mesh of particles reach across the revealed vein of her extended wrist. She brings the wrist up to her neck, turns her head slightly to reveal brown hair that precludes her face, and smells.

The man stands back, composed and still. His lips never move. He does not so much watch the woman as trace the vapour as if listening to its widening exposure. When at last the woman hands back the bottle to the man, before he puts it back into it's box he does something. He sprays it infront and around of his face several times. His arms are fleshy and full- white with a propensity of dark hair just below the rolled up shirt sleeves. The woman is half turned away when he does this but her head adjusts moments before the bottle is put back into that box. The lid flap is tucked under. The man now has his hand lightly on the top of the box as if the box and not the counter supported him. He is talking to the woman. With both hands he now lifts the box up infront of his chest placing it carefully up there, in that vacuum that was first left when he took the box down from the shelf. The woman watches. It happens over some time.

Over to the other side of the shop and all the way through the back of the shop there are rows and rows of bottles up upon the shelves, boxes of cigarettes below. Sweets and confectionary extend from a rack out front. To one side there is another rack extending from the floor with a selection of salted crisps. The man behind the counter is swaddled in his merchandise. Customers; hard men over from the betting shop or younger men with some money buying in bulk, come over in ones and twos to buy the merchandise.
To make a bit of extra cash the shop-keeper leases out a counter that he doesn't have to use and the two arching windows.

The other window is taken up with a trader who sells small digital devices; watches, clocks, mobiles, batteries, computer gadjects, that kind of stuff. He prefers to work outside directly in front of the window which has been adapted, the elaborate bay glass window flattended to provide him with a small protected enclave off from the main street. The window that he now occupies is the twin to the other with the perfume merchandise. The doorway is an indentation that runs between the two.

Schedule

There is a van. It is parked outside of a building, right in the middle of that building at it's centre. The building extends both ways just behind the van as if growing out of that white van, bothways. It has unravelled into what it has become, a wide squat square building several floors high made out of red brick with square window-frames and balconies.   It runs the entire length of the pond in front of it. It has been there for some time. Maybe sixty years. It arrived after the war. After the bombing. Before the van ever got there.

The van is parked outside the doorway and every time I go by on the bus there it stands. It is hardly a van anymore. It is all fixed up and not going anywhere. Wires extend out of the windows and the back end and have made their way or been directed into the broken wire enforced windows of the twin doors that are always closed at the top of the white and peeling steps. That is the entrance to the building. No one goes in.

Inside the van I can usually see the head of a man at the wheel. He just sits there. He is not doing anything. Then I realise that no, that is wrong. He is doing something, though it is hard to tell from the bus because the building is set far back, past the drained pond in the middle of the common. He is watching television from a screen that has been hooked up above on an upturned wooden crate directly infront of the closed doors.
I expect the power is coming from the van which must be switched on and running on low energy. It is enough for the flickering picture which can not always be seen in the rain or dappled sunlight, the foliage of large fully mature trees arching over the double-decker buses, or the lingering falling of leaves later in the year. There is also the hubub of people getting on, moving through, getting off. The conversations and inconveniences of that journey on that day. Horns. Wheels. A siren blasting- deafening- that causes heads to swing around towards the road. A road that can be a death trap if you do not have your wits about you.

It is uncertain how many times I have passed that building before noticing that the man who barely moves his head is watching T.V. There is a bottle of  pink fizzy drink on another crate sometimes and some other bits and pieces that I cannot make out because they are always changing.

Even at night the building is dark. Apart from the T.V flickering and a single bulb always on, attached above the entrance. Windows are punched out. Blue board covers some of the doors. Ripped curtains fly in the wind escaping the holes of the lost window frames. The building is condemmed. Nobody knows when something is going to happen.

The building next to it is used for religious prayer. A van pulls up. A man gets out. He opens the back of the van and takes out a two litre plastic container of milk. He goes towards the building carrying the milk, soft curls to either side of his shaved and coupled head on a large frame.  He used to collect the kids down at the Special School and was always there ferrying them back and forth. He's a gentle priest.

Doors

I am carrying a rolled up blue mattress under my arm. It is tied up with a belt. When the belt is exactly half-way along the lengthwise of the mattress I can use the belt as a handle and hook my fingers under the rim of it, the smooth leather on the outside, the rougher leather on the inside where I pull it away from its contact with the blue material. The mattress for a while is perfectly balanced, wavering and tipping in the breeze but never falling so completely into one end or the other so as to pull into gravity. The baggage is a rolled up version of itself, the inner and outer ranging between the first roll and the last tuck caught and secured by the pull of the belt. It is a suitcase to be navigated along the narrow lane. Past the prison walls and housing clusters designed to detract from the stark fact of that gate that only opens and locks. Traffic is on the road. Well that is nothing new. I wait for the pockets of space between each engine blast. It's in the pockets that I nearly reel over no longer enfolded in the buffering of sound and fume. The bundle tilts haphazardly. I dare to go. I dare the traffic. In the slithers of vacancy, reeling from momentum, I stop/start with the bundle under my arm like moving up a hill and falling down again between the vehichles.

At the door, I open it, go inside have a look around. Leaflets scattered on the counter a bit of a mess.
The thud of base and rattle of snares comes up the narrow staircase or is it through the walls? It seeps through the space. The office door is closed. No one leaves their desk. Well one person does cross the corridor that I am going down but they seem not to notice or maybe they are not bothered. Am I an intruder or a guest? I can't tell. I don't feel like either. I am running dangerously close to the stair-well. To that sound of drum and base. I could easily be pulled down the stairs but hesitate and veer into the coloured mass beyond the open door to the left. It is startling and arresting. It is the studio. There are kings and queens on the walls made up of tiny blots of colour that establish themselves and are the reason for each addititive in an extreme hue far from their range. Far from their place of origin. This proximity of difference collected within the confines of king and queen creates a reckless order. I look up into the bare bones of this desanctified castle or is it a church?. Cold walls. Soft plaster. I leave. Go into the cafe,  pass someone on the way through who nods and passes beyond the door into the office. I am left alone. There is a piano by the side. I open it. There is so much delay between the hitting of a note and the sound that finally rises up or does not, that it is hard to draw a conclusion about cause and affect. What act has made what thing to occur. There are tables and chairs everywhere and more pictures on the wall. I place my mattress on a table lengthwise its ends potruding off either side. I go into the heart of the room.  There are pictures of children with large faces painted by children. There are these spiral maps too like snail shells that are portioned off into little captioned squares that get smaller and smaller the more into the centre you go.

I go over to the counter. Used cups line the surface. There is a small transparent glass display area. The lights are shining on two Kit-Kats, four Mini Twix bars and two Flap-Jacks. There are some small chocolate cup cakes in a seperate white dish. There's  a coffee flask which has perculated coffee in its round bowl by the basin past the counter. It's quarter full. Two coffee mugs are by its side. I look at the coffee, look back into the room, walk around the wall display in between the assorted seating and tables. Stop. Look around. Face towards the office door. Stop. Move towards the table where my blue mattress is. Veer around. Walk back over to the counter. Stop. Look at the counter displays. Half-turn back out. Walk into the middle of the cafe. Stop. Turn back towards the counter. Look at the transparent glass bowl of coffee by the basin. Walk through the small gap between the  outside counter and the back of the wall towards the coffee. Select a mug from the wash-stand by the side of the basin. Pour a measured quarter cup of this light brown almost transluceint liquid. Move back around to the front of the counter. Look for milk on the counter. Do not find milk. Walk back over to a table and sit down facing the window with my back to the office door. Put my hands around the cup. Drink.

Then I do something else. I get up and walk back over to the counter, I put my hand around to the back of the counter and into the display area pull out one single Mini Twix. I enfold it into the palm of my hand, feel the celophane wraper snug against my centre-palm and I walk back over to the table where my coffee is.  Half way though drinking my coffee and eating my twix I hear the door to the office opening. As the door opens I stand up gradually and look into the spiral drawing over my head. The little figures in the compartments of the spiral are standing up, sitting down, moving to and fro. Then for the next few squares nothing much seems to happen and the box is empty or just has a simple grid of lots of dots and lines.
But maye I am wrong. Maybe something is happening here but I just can`t read it. Other figures soon emerge. Then drift back through into the dots and lines. As I look from picture to picture I see that they are all done in this way, some in elaborate colour, some in black and white. Simple and complex yet all done within the grid of these ever descending squares. Squares that spiral into the centre. It must have been the project on that day.

Footsteps end. Silence. A silence that extends into the space. Remaining. Footsteps lessening.
A door opens and closes.

The road

The heavily varnished wooden table that I am seated at is reflecting the overhead lighting back at my face.
I am by the window, inches from the street. But the door rarely opens. To begin with I am the only one there.  Of course there are the men behind the counters. The waiters. Because I have placed my order at the counter all I need to do is wait. I begin to examine the rubber plant  in front of me. I`m tired not in a morose way that sometimes does come over me but in the ligaments through which my body is bit by bit pieced together or undone. It is altogether comprehenisve right now. That is why I am tired. Because the only way to make it so is to work it up in the use of these ligaments- to press them into substance somehow in every turn and against that which I fall, slump down, bounce back up, re-emerge. Isn't it exhausting for everyone? Of course it is though I never ask. But we all know it, the passers-by against the window-pane. It is cold outside. They hustle by with flesh backs covered in garments, pushing carriages, carrying things. Slow, and measured. Un-stopping.

I see an interuption of light as something presses across the inside of a glass window up across on the other side of the road. It is way up high above the shop windows in the small residential spaces up above where the unsigned tops of the buildings have not changed for a century as the traffic roars down below. Roars and stops, roars and stops at the junction of the lights that pre-selects and sorts the traffic into bundles that move on every so often. Red and green, the spread of the city.

I see the woman. Actually I do not see anyone at first. Something presses and is gone, presses and is gone, removing and letting back in light as it does so in this dabbing motion. It is a cloth that is doing the dabbing but of course it is an arm that is pushing the cloth into position each time. It is squashing the cloth up against the shere surface of the glass that does not budge so that the cloth crowds in on itself  fold after fold meshing between glass and hand- the palm of the hand directly against the cloth.

In the upper most frame of the sash window a small figure appears. She wears a pink dress that ends just below the knees. She must be standing on a chair or something in order to reach up so far. Her feet disapear below the frame of the window where I suppose the chair is. Now the cloth is not restricted anymore and freely she moves it so that the woman lends her full impetus to each manoevere. She is behind the cloth, swivelling and adjusting her entire frame, leaning into it, driving the motion from behind whilst also meshing into it through her body.  The cloth is raised and lowered rapidly never leaving the glass. Then it goes back and forth. Her arm lifts high above her head. It draws an arc. Then there is a fixation on a single point. It is is honed in on. The motion locks into a rapid up down, side to side motion that then blends into a circular movement.  It is beginning to widen back out. Then it finishes. The cloth comes away form the glass. The woman looks out onto the road. Then her frame blurs as she moves away from the glass.

TheTurkish pizza arrives. I thank the waiter.Then put a cube of sugar in the black tea. It disolves and sinks into a small indent at the bottom of the glass.The sugar can't be tasted. I take a spoon and scoop the granules up from the bottom and stirr them back into the moving liquid.

A man stands outside the restaurent facing the door speaking on a cell-phone. He is hunched from the cold.
I eat the pizza with my hands. Then I go to the market. I am amongst all these people. It is effortless. I have the shopping to do.

A small white lump of bread

Swans along the canal. White swans all piling in on top of one another. Diving and swooping into the litterd water. Necks jerking, thrusting deep into the water. Beaks tearing at the white piece of bread. Breaking off a piece, tossing the remainder into the air. Seagulls just above, just out of reach. Their caw caw calling, travelling over disant traffic. They are swooping and gliding on their own plane of circulation, just above the swans with their lower bodies submerged in the cold water.  Unseen webbed feet carry them here and there making use of the water and the resistant it gives to them. Swans butting into one another flapping, jostling, tearing at the one piece of bread which is being flipped between them. But one rushes to consume. The others wait, for an opportunity. They tear and butt at it when it falls their way. Rush to its place of landing even while it travels still in the air. Until the larger one arrives and they turn tail.  Their necks are dusty- dirt ingrained in the white close-knit plummage. Their breast bones, massive, the front of the ship steering and bolstering them against the counter-current of their own eratic food fueled movements.  The seagulls continue to turn, caw, cawing just above the small heads pinned on top of the outstretched  plummage which pay no attention to this circulation that never descends.

Behind the barrier a small girl holds the hand of her mother. They both are dressed identically in grey coats with black stockings. The child is a small version of her mother tidily standing beside her and has the same apprehensive and intelligent expression on her pale face. Her brown shiny hair, like her mother's, is tightly pulled back off her face. In her free hand she holds a transparent plastic bag and in the bag I glimpse a small white lump of bread.