Gift

Some things it is impossible to think. They dissipate and bleed out all the colour before they can even be noticed. There is this background buzz that rarely approaches. And on that day, with the lost limbs of fatigue, I had spent some time in the library beforehand, scanning over the illuminated texts that rose like sulphur and gold into a luminescence that seemed both there and not there. Figures shimmering and blending in the shadow -light, rising up from the page and settling back down but not quite synchronised with the surface page; somehow tumbling and bubbling back up like the pockmarks, cuts and sears of contorting plastic in the dying embers of a once fierce fire. I`d been with the children before and they too had danced, creating sinewy passages  out of the  stoppages and constraints of real objects borrowed in to the realms of tragic and  heroic sorrow and regeneration; tunnels and passages, ramps and plateaus,  enclaves and rays of sunlight. I played two chords onto the guitar over and over again and yet this repetition was marked out by the children themselves- their stops and starts, hesitancy's and forward thrusts; up,down, in, out, form side to side and and in the knotted formation of these opposing strands, a rotational leaning that was a meeting and a coming apart in a single gesture.

I had let the the bicycle roll me over the buzzing Euston road. It had continued to trail along side-streets, stopping and starting at random in the pockets of traffic that buffeted one another like gusts of wind, nudging and nearly touching, accelerating and suddenly halting, frightening and passive at the same time. Then I`d noted how the bicycle had rolled its way into the park. Well, not really a park, for it was a cemetery with gravestones whose white reflective surfaces were blanched white, the etching of names and words, only slight rivulets like the channels that run across our finger tips giving us our unique identity but read by no one.
They are there but not there- irrelevant but  brought into play in any kind of forensic investigation or criminal case. But on this particular day they played no part at all.

Rather I took my self to a bench, letting the bicycle roll to a halt and propping it against the back then slumping down so that this old planked wooden bench seemed to encapsulate me on that sunny Autumn day. There was the statue of the pink lady, her features scrubbed and erased by centuries of weather systems that had buffeted her and the other stone ensembles where  once this graveyard was on the periphery of London town, a good ride out from the business of the time which did not then touch this solitary field of quietude and death. Now the trees were mature and vast with trunks that five people hand to hand could not close a circle around. And the falling leaves spread out on the wet grass were like dappled patches reflecting the agitation of light  and shadow in the trees up above with their impossible branches held at horizontal angles  as if defying gravity, knotted and bent , bifurcating and splintering in their own excess, with rivulets of growth. Now the leaves, darkening to brown, were losing their grip and disengaging from the living wood to go their own way towards decomposition.

I sat quite still some distance away form the path that spiralled around a waterless basin with stiff taps that one man tried to get some water from. But with no luck. Around the loop of this stone basin, people from opposite directions gauged a passage of least contact, so that some went one way and some the other, like train tracks splaying apart before re-converging further along the way. This meant that by a careful atunement to speed thresholds, there was no meeting. This took skill and coordination on the part of strangers who carefully felt one another in the dynamic passage of this movement that they for this instance, shared.

I sat unable to focus on very much; more aware of the slures and accelerations in this chain of events, then on any individual with features of their own.

Then a figure approached. He had been sitting several benches away and remained simply a darkened patch in the background shadow somehow dissimulated into the dappled rays of light and dark all around. I did not raise my face to his until he was right before me, standing an arms length away, a man in dour clothes that offered up no colour even in the direct hit of the sunlight. And he had left a pile of stuff on the bench from where he had started out, as if the bench was truly his home base and he had no other- just this crumpled heap that was his bags of belongings and now this outreach extension, no less clear in demarcation- a random haze- that had gathered itself  almost as if by falling, into this coincidental stance of a body before me. I don't remember his expression and his age seemed unfathomable. Had he had grey hair or dark? I don't know. Maybe a scraggly beard but am I making this up with the formation of this story in mind?

In any case he stood before me and there seemed to be this hesitancy that was both there and gone in the duration of a split second and yet tumbled and lent itself to every surface shape in that cemetery- the trees, the stones, the pink statue and the passing figures around the basin. All these were there and not there- soft hazy shapes that provided the occasion for this approach. But I do remember a strange sense of him observing me and yet me not really knowing what was there at hand. Then he asked me the time and in the command of the words my wrist was already drawing closer to my face and I mouthed the words "Two-O-Clock". This gesture tumbled into his own gesture in which he extended an arm and released into my hand a small bottle that he had been holding firmly in his palm. Perhaps he said  "Do you want this?" and perhaps I said "Thank you" but It is hard to really separate out the gesture and the words from one another because they seemed all of a part- more like a simple reflex or a ripple that comes before thought and has no intention outside the deliverance of an act or a completion of a circle.

Then he returned to his bench and sat back down amongst his bags. I held now a small plastic vessel of liquid yogurt  in my hand which the label said was flavoured with banana and mango. I turned the vessel over and over examining it, then putting it down ion the  bench at my side, staring off into the distance through the leaves, onto the path. Then glancing back around at the vessel I took it back up in my grasp, turning it, reading it, the pale light liquid with just a hint of yellow rocking back and forth like a lazy tide in its milk-bottle containment. It was sealed with a blue plastic lid and, like a forensic investigator I tested the seal to see if it had been opened before. It had not. Again I put it down on the bench next to me and looked off into the space at random leaves on the grass and at squirrels busily picking up objects and drilling small cocoons into the damp earth in which to deposit them, then scattering up a tree as a dog suddenly approached as if out of nowhere.

I glanced slowly along the line of benches. The  man was sat there but he was not attending to me. He was in his own circuit of references and seemingly taken up with his own concern. This released a kind of small space inside me and taking back up the small yogurt pot, I broke the seal and quickly brought the rim of the container to my lips. I had been thirsty and the thick white liquid refreshed and soothed me. I felt it going down my throat and settling warmly in my belly. It felt too good and I quickly put back the blue lid turning it counter clockwise and putting the drink back down on the bench. I began to wonder if perhaps it was poison. Maybe there had been a way to make the seal appear unbroken. Maybe this drink had already been tampered with and I was  in the middle of a terrible experiment on someone else's terms. I again glanced over to the bench and the man was just sitting there, attending to his own concerns as before. This indifference gave me some hope. Slyly I made deft contact again with the bottle, like an alcoholic who covers the bottle with her hand and takes fast greedy slugs before pocketing the bottle or hiding it in the depths of her overcoat. I felt the beautiful sweet and creamy liquid sliding down my throat and a sense of well-being poured over me like honey lit up by a sudden breakthrough of sunlight. I felt bathed in this sweetness. But again  it appeared all too much- too absurd that this down and out should give me this milk drink with no strings attached. I began to feel sick and my breathing started to halt, to feel caged in in the bracketing space of my chest and clenched diaphragm, so that I was sure I would spit up this drink as so much excess mucus that was defiling the passages of breath so necessary for life itself. I felt this as I scanned the pathway. Who would witness this great wrong done to me? Who would also witness the shame of my own mess-making as a counter-flow to this unwarranted intrusion?

But nothing happened. I stayed on the bench. I occasionally picked up and put down the small yogurt pot, taking tiny sips with pursed lips and succouring the flavour as a bee finds a drop of nectar in the last flower of the waning summer. And finally the pot was empty. I placed it back down at my side and I felt to get on my bike and pedal as fast as I could out of that park and back into the floodgates of traffic and noise, the vibrations and pulses of a thousand footsteps that in waves and shifts crossed a terrain without really noticing the interruptions and the opportunities that at another level were attended to with careful precision as if by a scorned lifer that could  not talk about itself or remember having done anything at all. But I stayed sitting there on the bench for some time so that the event of the yogurt pot came to meld into a thousand other details that came and went in this patterning of autumn sunlight and haze. Then dropping the empty container into the rimmed opening of a nearby bin, I took my bike by the handlebars, glanced and breifly smiled at the man on  the far-away bench and sat squarely back on the saddle of the bike. In the blink of an eye, there had passed  a brief acknowledgement; a gesture given and received as the man met my glance. Then again I was on my way, the man still sitting there on the bench surrounded by bags in  that 17th century cemetry in the midst of an unstoppable metropolis.

THE WAITING

Her face tipped up to the lights attached to the artificial ceiling. The shredded vertical blinds tilted by a pulley system so we can look out but no one can look in. Her face absorbing the light as her mother’s body shadows her own, smothering her attention. Peck-like kisses here and here and here all over her upturned face. She swivels her upturned face this way and that way, tilting manoeuvres so as to keep the light pouring onto her face evenly wherever her mother’s shadow may fall. She puts up with it, sighing, catching my gaze as I too swing this way and that in the waiting room before my turn, before her turn because our therapist is caught in traffic on the bus.

There’s the hum of machinery, the whirr of mouths moving. Papers are falling. Fingers tap onto a key board allocating positions to the white screen that only the secretary can see. People come in, in ones and twos. The ones take up the most space their eyes eating into the interim where knees reversed in sitting seek out the knees of their opposites across the room far off through the medley of chairs and low tables. Perhaps we are all calculating wait-times; perhaps all absorbed in the self-same graininess of matter and air as nose to nose in the mediated light it comes up against us.

The girl with the upturned face is making small short sounds like a whistle which begins as if mid-way through a journey and ends before arriving. The sounds are rolling the occupants of the room into a sense of deep equanimity despite the wait-time; the closure of the waiting space which remains static, frozen in which no-one seems to leave no one seems to return. I sigh then look around to locate the sound not recognizing it as my own until the woman by my side does this thing again; freezing and listening, than swiping a look, jostling and returning to her own bulk. I do not look but close my eyes to hear the whistle of the girl once again. When I open my eyes the girl is looking through me to the blinds behind. It is soft like tiny footprints and there is no resistance. Yet even as she does this her face remains still and at that instant reveals in the upturned version of absorption, the light from above. It is quite possible that these two versions happen together super-imposed and somehow rooting one another.

The therapist comes in. She has on a coat with the bright fabric of her dress showing below the rim. She walks with barely a break in her step so that mother and daughter understand through her words and her careful glance that they are to follow her. They attach themselves and magnetically become part of this pulse through the open glass fire-door disappearing down a corridor.

There’s an immediate absence. I hold my breath. The woman besides me glances and looks away. I wait. A woman approaches me and sits beside me with a clip-board. She tells me I am held in a queue due to late running.  The woman tells me the therapist has to perform a difficult procedure with the one after next client. I make a calculation as to a reasonable span of time for the making of this procedure even though I do not know what it involves. I give a time. The woman counters this with a 30% cut in time. I say that I will go and get a tea and than return. The woman tells me not to over-run the time or I will miss the spot and someone else will fill it. I get up and let myself out of the Porto cabin, begin to turn away from it as if my appointment had already been and gone.

I am beginning to walk across the empty car-park. It is empty because it is disused with loose gravel and wilting plants growing and dying where the tarmac underneath has been pushed and pock-marked between the action of the water swelling and shrinking, freezing and thawing over and over again. There’s a heap of discarded wood and old furniture stacked up against a cage which contains large plastic wheelie bins. There’s building work going on in the far corner where access of material is being navigated across this desolate patch into the back garden of an adjacent building. There are men up on the flat roof, others hauling things from the truck. But they are distant and mainly out of my perspective. I am heading for the junk furniture. All around me, lining the perimeter of the car-park, there is the old brick and stone Victorian hospital. It is hollow, toothless, makeshift plastic flapping in and out in the uppermost windows inviting a gaze into utter blackness that can not be followed.

There’s a discarded stairway in the pile of junk. A self-sufficient unit of three steps up, than a platform and three steps down again that has been ripped out of its oaring and deposited onto its side. I want to turn it right side up, making it useable even in a car park where you go up and down and really get nowhere. And I do so quickly without thought then immediately I go pounding up the steps, pause at the top and than descend down the three steps on the other side. I do it several times than walk away.

I walk off glancing back at this vacant platform before entering the main building at its mid-point slipping between the closed fire doors that used to open automatically but now need to be shoved with the body contriving to move and push at the same time where the shoulder makes contact with the door. I am in the main hall where the chocolate and drinks machines are placed. There is an the elaborate high ceiling with part stucco and a small balcony; really like a ball-room whose past glory is totally ignored as if it were an inappropriate boast for this part of London.

The machines are not working. I understand this because of what the woman tells me who has lost her money and can not get a refund; neither by banging the machine nor by asking the man at the front desk who just rolls his eyes and says come back next week. She says but you won’t recognise me. He says without looking up, yes I will. She is adamant of an injustice and in the growing crowd of women around her, her injustice swells and plays back to her. She cannot leave the building because her husband is upstairs being seen and she could be needed at any moment. That is what they told her.

I walk off heading though numerous fire doors that in this internal labyrinth swing open and shut on the touch past blue signs that say things in white like, Iridology, Foot Clinic and Walk in Emergency. Past the signs there are huddles of figures sitting in rows on chairs with their backs to me. Their backs all appear to curve as one though they are separated by four inch gaps on their individual chairs.

In the half light of this sunken chamber I feel that there is some kind of heat sensing faculty that I am affected by and that draws my gaze in this or that direction far beyond the zone I am in. I pass no figure on the corridors. Nor is there even the smell; those familiar hospital smells of disinfectant and human odour, present. Rather there is odourless dust; tiny particles admixing with the air wrapping around me entering and leaving on each breath. I am intermeshed; in it and of it. It guides me as if each splinter radiated the fall-out of a glow that independently was nothing but here in the contained corridors swells into something intoxicating. There is in this the whiff of the touch of humanness. But it is a touch long parted and now in this afterglow from a time I cannot place I am walking unobserved in this hospital meeting no-one.

I am at the end of this corridor at a junction that now branches off into slimmer and slimmer corridors. My hands are cold. I am continuing in a circulating left-hand spiral. Through another set of interjecting fire-doors the silence spreads. The air is heavy, turgid and empty of life. It is dust-ridden. There is no smell and it is choking.

So I give myself over to the waves spiralling upwards in that left-hand swing of the banisters until I am vaulted up stair-well after stair-well as if under a high wind. On each landing there are off shoots of more corridors. Each is sealed permanently behind another fire-door with yellow glass that shreds and pulverises the long stretch into an emptying haze. The blue and white signs appear as before but now at these upper levels they say things like, Learning Disabilities, Back up Support, Occupational and Recreational Team. There are no heat induced bodies for my sensors to pick up on. I am getting dizzy mostly with the colour mismatch where every landing is painted in a different colour- red, blue, green yellow purple, mauve as if this would cheer the people up and keep the ascending march on track one step after another.

I climb ever more resistant to the norms of protocol, more blinded to the ruling of keeping on and going to a destination of ones choosing. I push against fire-door after fire-door lumbering against them with the bulk of my body, shouldering the panel, flesh re-shaped and smothered against wire-enforced glass. They are locked. So I push my face up against the glass now breathing and clouding the unoccupied passages stacked with fuzzy dismantled shelving, ceiling brackets and furniture fittings. Light from the windows of adjacent rooms is just visible through door-less slits.

I push at each landing swelling higher and higher, like a fly against condensation- soaked glass almost drowning in it far from inhibition. Finally one gives so easily I almost fall through than stand there on the threshold with a foot in the door. I jam the door open with a plastic sign that says Work in Progress.

I go into rooms sprouting off from corridors that are stripped, dismantled, hollowed. Everything has been taken down save for the plumbing systems and the sink and wash-basin of a kitchen. Fitted parts are piled up against the walls mostly dismembered into planks and strips and brackets. The windows are all bare, sometimes open, now and again with curtains or scraps of plastic tacked into place and flapping in the wind. All the lights are on. All are blazing in the rooms off from the dust-covered corridor. I think of the girl with the upturned face in the waiting room. I look down at the darkened carpet. I want to turn the lights off. Instead, standing back from the ledge I gaze out the window. There is the gravel of the car-park below. I stagger back not wanting to be seen in the vast empty room that has no use; where I have no idea how to use it; no right of occupancy.

At the other side of the corridor the door swings open so that I do not have to go back on my movements. It closes shut behind me so that I am on another landing.

I go down a floor. Glancing through the fire-proof doors on this level I stop. I am riveted there and my restless wanderings are consumed.

Dust gathers dense and tangible here between the strung up lights pinned at intervals along the bare corridor walls like celebratory baubles. There are ladders, wood panels, buckets of paint, unmixed cement in paper sacs and white calico stained and creased along the length of this floor. But more than this is the piercing of the silence. An unseen radio blaring out from one of the out-of-view rooms is so loud that it resounds down the corridor and through the rubber edged crack of the fire-proof doors. There are impossible voices rising on the radio-waves blanking out one another, cutting short into jingles, sweeps of song, laughter and the beginnings of phone-in topics. Now there is the scrambling of even this and the dial re-sets on a channel of garage music. It beats out a repeatable shifting emphasis. Than there is a melody sweeping though, synthesizing the separation for a body that is not there.

I remain on the other side of the door. The lights pulse in time to the rhythm seeming to entangle into a voltage seizure and delay than a rushed exuberance that dances, yes dances with the music. In the very point at which it cuts out; nearly dies, it re-ignites in short bursts of attention before again burning into whiteness, into nothing.

Moments later I return to the waiting room of the Porto cabin a few seconds before my name is called.  I walk down the corridor behind the figure of the therapist who guides me to my seat.

She takes my hand as I get up to leave, her hand colder and far more fragile than I had imagined yet nonetheless one that remains for several seconds without ending the contact. Finally an even level temperature equalises across the hands. I am led to believe that this is our last session. Before this as I sat down she had told me of being caught on the bus this morning. Than she says,

“But we all have to remain in this chaos somehow.” She has said too much and I have told too many fabrications due to the driving pace that words present as they lead us on and so set our lives in motion. She has long since discarded her coat and the exuberance of her coloured dress burns out.

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.

Acting on the memory of that path

Down by the lakes. Where the ice has melted. At the end of the bridge where a camera waits for a woman in black to run towards it. The thudding of the feet on the metal slat. Boats down below. The water did not freeze. I hear one of the camera men say "She is self-conscious". Many people filter by as the camera waits for the runner. The grass is sodden and squelches, the build up of ice having suddenly given way and seeped into the earth. All is moveable. Mud.

I let myself in through the gate and I am now sitting in the paddock seperated out by a waist-high woooden bar that is fixed for some distance, then cut, angled a little, fixed for some distance more and then cut until it describes a rough oblong inside of which are placed the remaining two black plastic tables with adjoining seating rivetted deep into the ground on concrete slabs. The third table has not been here for some time, burned to the ground. To get to my table I cross the pebble path that dips here and there into pools of mud water. I then veered off across the fields sinking ankle high into the mud on each step. I have eased myself into the seating, my knees under the table, my hands on the rough plastic surface which is built out of strats to resemble the wooden strats of its equivalent not put here purposely because of the changeable weather conditions and risk of fire.

There is water at my feet, the bottle tops and what-nots floating or sinking depending on consistancy. I pin my feet to either side of the puddle on the revealed concrete. Later with the sun directly absorbing on to the table surface and directly on my face too, I lean back, wedging my thighs against the inner moulding of the table so that my back is extended outwards and almost level with the table surface. My face is now far back. I push my fingers through the intervals of the strats gripping them from underneath. Then I let go. The pressure between the tops of my thighs and the moulding of the underside is incredibe. Flesh and plastic are jammed together. One slip and I`d be on my back. Right there in the mud.

I hear birds in the bushes, everything beginning to be up and running after the freeze. People are on the bridge streaming over it as the sun already begins to sink at three oclock in the afternoon on this Sunday.
I can hear the tap of the tennis ball, surge of laughter, group singing that swells and then dies, feet on the main path that runs alongside the canal awash with colour with dogs breaking free. Sounds are drawn out and linger in this wet perspiration that remains above and below ground and seeps ino the atmosphere, catches on the breath that only adds to it.

The marshes are a sponge through which people wade. A child lifts up her brown trouser legs and tiptoes deep into the mud with rubber boots to protect her. She is wearing a light pink quilted jacket that ends at the waist-line of her trousers. She is making slow progress, lagging behind from the adults up ahead and the dog with its large nose inches above the water. A couple slide under the bar and make it to the other table placed paralel but some distance away to the one which I occupy. He lies flat on his back over the length of the table top following the line of strats, his body at the far end bending over, feet unmoved, still in the mud.
The woman sits on the plastic bench her back to the table looking out into the long stretch of marshland, trains in the distance. Neither of them speaks or moves. Then they do. He is cradling her head in his hands his feet on the bench now either side of  her body. She leans far back and he peers over until they are kissing. They are a black silhouette, indiscernable apart, the sun in the background just above the trees over on the hill on the other side of the canal.

A pram pushes out through the foliage just past the man-made pond. It is running on uneven ground so it is pushed with a curt thrust until the body meets with the handle bars then again drives it forward cutting a groove deep into the clay. Sometimes there is a rolling back and forth to establish the level ground below the shifting muds so that the wheels become rotary diggers in order to build up momentum where the land slightly rises before dipping once again. That pram is pushed by a man suited in black. He wears a hat and a white shirt reveals itself beneath the black. He has a heavy set deep rich brown and full beard below a pale open face. He is a member of the Hassidic Jewish community well established in this area. Next to him but sometimes just behind is a woman who is holding a child loosely at her waist so that the body of the child swings freely against her loose and moveable arm and the outspread hand so that it is only at the hips that they are joined so tightly. She is struggling with heavy set black shoes below her stockinged ankles and a skirt wrapped and flapping over her knees. They manage to wade past the outer periphery of the fencing  that surrounds the tables and chairs. They are heading out beyond the place of the silhouetted couple, her head in his hands, where the ground opens up to marshland. Here there used to be a path and I think they are acting on the memory of that path even though it is no longer there since the big thaw after the ice.

He is pushing and jamming the pram over what is more and more like a constant river, not merely a puddle here and there. She has gone on ahead and is beginning to veer around the outline foliage where the ground is a little higher before it turns into impassable scrub avoiding the normal route of the path which is now underneath the water. Suddenly her black stockinged foot comes up, revealed as the shoe remains where she set her foot down in the mud. It is submerged in the the water that rushes in to fill the vacuum. She freezes with her leg in the air. Then she is laughing as the bearded man with the pram on the other side of the water looks on. By now I have turned around. I smile as well. Somehow they manage to continue and to disapear through the marshland between the scrub. The camera crew arrive and navigate the water and mud, hoisting the camera and its metal leg on to their shoulder to carry it over the breach. The woman in black who was the runner on the bridge has supermarket bags fasted to each shoe. They squelch and crinkle in the mud.
I cannot remember if they were there when she was on the bridge.

Some time later the Orthodox Jewish couple with the pram return the way they came. That probably means that further up there is no way of getting through.

Balancing

I stop by the bus-stop. Nothing seems to be occuring. The ice is beginning to melt. I lost my gloves earlier. The skin on skin gone. Each time I bend my forefinger the wound reapears, a fleck of red burrowed in the flesh, cracks like ice. It hurts. I have just retreaved money from the cash-machine. Since then everything is done in slow motion. The ice makes you test out each step- go a little deeper- bear the weight down and ponder somewhat. Everything is contained into where it is, settling into the tiny grooves where even the dirt and rubbish and flecks of disruption suspended in the ice-pack become a possible foot-hold. All that free floating stuff kicking around on a usual day, locked in and untouchable, except by the total pressure of a body mass, lingering on the path, hovering between propulsion and fall. Warming the ground. So it is that we face one another, one after another, like a role of honour.

At the bus-stop I have purposely not run to catch the line-up of buses that one by one now pull away the door seals meeting with warm bodies pressed right up against the glass. Outside it is cold.  There's a Vietnamese restaurent that I have my back to. Inside there are rows and rows of rectangular tables each with cleanly laundered and starched white table-cloths that folds at the corners like origami. Between the tables from the door to the counter, there is a walk-way left uncluttered for the waiters. On each table is a vase with a single purple flower the shoot of which is suddenly magnified where the water begins. There is only one couple facing each other across the empty table-cloth amidst these rows of tables. The waiters are all clustered around the counter at the far side staring out into the dark street below the bottles and bottles of honey coloured liquid above them.

The door flaps open and closed. It never quite opens or closes, like an invitation where nothing is settled yet.
I take it as a good sign out there with my back to the restaurent even as I glance and manoevre at each new temporary settlement of the door acting on its restlessness. Suddenly the wavering sense of that motion ceases. The interval has gone as a man- a waiter- briefly fastens the door- creating a seamless line with the window glass to either side.

I look away. Affronted. That's when I notice the woman, actually a tall girl pushing the small boy who is balancing and tipping on and off this hair-line point of balance. He is on a high metal bar that extends through the ice out of the ground, loops into this high length of horizontal bar and then descends again some distance away back through the ice and into the ground.  It looks like one of those things for attaching bikes to. Only taller. The boy is laughing his hood up around his tiny pinched face the collar of a red sweater showing at the top of his jacket high around his neck. He is tilting this way and that, sticking his chest beyond his hips and then quickly tucking it back in line. His feet and legs swing freely, stuck right out or tucked right under the bar, pulling on and off in counter balance from his rocking torso. The girl is laughing ecstatically, using her back to stop at the verge of collapse, that fall from happening. They are working as one in this push-me, pull-you contraption. There is another boy dressed in greys at some distance with his back against the glass of a shop. He looks on somewhat removed but still associated. Later when the first boy lets himself fall off , the other boy pins himself up there, but does not really let himself go. The woman; woman-girl jokes with him too but there is a sense of remove, as if the joking had to travel too far and fell mid way in that passage of time which remained too empty. Only here too there is a kind of tenderness even in the tentative non-starter that it becomes.

A group of Japanese crowd around the door that the waiter earlier made close. A man lingers and suddenly doubles up, folding in half, dropping his head and then raising it as his back again straightens up to meet the eyes of a man he is facing. He is bowing. With his right hand he manoevres the door, turning the handle and cracking the rubber seal in doing so that had created a wind-lock against the outside. He pushes against the glasss whilst now using his entire arm and shoulder to keep the door in place. Files of men and women who are gathering and continually seem to be streaming into a mass out on the pavement now filter in, the men giving way to the women who are the first to enter the restaurent.

A man with a dodgy leg crosses the road lifting and placing the dead leg by shifting and tilting upwards his hip on the side where the dead leg is. He does this by softening into the ground with his other foot and just before he needs to lift the leg, lowering the hip on the side of the good leg. Between good and bad, through this circular motion, he walks. The displacement creates this undualtion that is repetitive but never the same. When he is beside me a song comes into my head and I start humming under my breath. Fragments escape without me knowing it at first.The man tilts his head towards me once or twice and that's when I know.

The bus comes and I get on. I am sitting at the back where the girl and the two young boys are sitting, all three squashed into two seats. They are speaking Spanish. The atmosphere is eruptive as if all the manoevres and practices that went on between them outside have to go on in words and the catapult eruption of those words denied any space becomes a force. They are grabbing one another, thrusting forward and backwards, shoving and holding. Laughing, almost in pain. People on the bus- in the rows of seats that stretch out before us from the very back of the bus to either side of the long central aisle are looking down into their laps or mobiles. However there is a constant though silent re-emphasis of bodies as patches of double seating suddenly becomes available and people single out from one another to occupy them. Somehow they know with very precise timing that the seats have becomes available. No matter how far away they are or how inconvenient it is to brush past, the moment is seized; a removal and re-insertion takes place. There is this shifting topography which is beautiful to watch.

Something white shifts. It catches my attention as if it were an animal running to hide. It is the scarf that the girl has on her lap and that falls to the floor as she violently leans forward in one of the motions that is going to make up the play between these three. There is a pause. It lies there where it dropped. She carries on. I glance at it then pick it up and hand it to her. She takes it, a black smooth hand against the wool scarf, encircling it. She nods. I see a strenuousness in her face-a sensitiviy that is aghast with itself but continuously is there. A seriousness. And the boy by her side; the one with the red collar; he has the same look- that pinched look not just from the cold- a smile leaping out and escaping those confines- something choking between where he is and where he expresses himself. He moves his hands back and forth in front of him, opening and closing, rhythmically manufacturing a practice of space out of the pace of his breath and the movement between his hands. But the words keep pouring out- smothering over everything, with the bodies jerking back and forth, balancing on that bar that is no longer there to give reason.

Then suddenly -two words- this time in English, that the boy delivers in a dead-pan East london drawl where there is a defacement of all concern, an absolute disownment of anything mattering and those two words act like a full stop. A momentum caught and dropped. A deep depression seems to sink on to the outer skins of these children like a thin dew that is wet and sticky and cannot be removed. The girl actually crumbles up folding her long limbs into her centre and burrowing her face onto the shoulder of the small boy.

There are two men opposite the Spanish group. All through this- through the jerks and thrusts and now this leaden silence -there have been these two men, the one with glasses and a receding hair-line the other with stick-out fair redddish hair and a placid face. They continue to talk talking about their lives and their living situations and the one with stick-out hair at one point; at the point where I happen to catch into the conversation says: "I like where I live because even through it is in the city it is a quiet residential street with plenty of trees where nothing much happens. Some people might call it boring or dull but I like this quiet residential street and the fact that nothing happens and it is always the same whether I am leaving or coming back.." Then they get off the bus and the Spanish group spread out, making use of the now empty seats.

Reading Room

An orange boiled sweet taken from it's celophane wrapper and dropped. I look at the man, at the sweet, back at the man. He is a large man with limited motion. "Don't worry it's only a sweet", he says. I leave it there on the dark carpet and so does he. It is just behind his chair. I am  to one side of that chair. I continue reading my book. He his paper. A woman with a large suitcase on wheels is sitting down at the far end of the room removing her shoes and socks and putting ointment on to her feet. You can smell this piercing acidic disinfectant so that without looking up you know she is dabbing her feet with this stuff. You feel the sting.
She is talking in quiet looped tones. Her eyes are shot out. Before sitting down she'd asked a man nearby what time the library closed. Rain begins to punctuate a sound on the glass slanted roof up above. Past the flourescent regularity of light coming within this room it is dark. A man approaches the woman whose one leg is crossed over the other the folds of her skirt flapping around her raised ankle as she applies the ointment.
"I am sorry you will will have to go, you are disturbing the readers". A string of insults rising in tone the more insistant the man becoms begins to emanate form the woman's mouth. The man backs off, consults another worker but himself never goes near the woman again. A woman approaches as the exemplitives continue to come . "You will have to be quiet, you are distrurbing the readers". The woman  with the ointment says that she was being quiet before the man approached her. The woman librarian backs off after repeating this need to be quiet several times. Silence ensues with only occasional mutterings and the vigorous action of soaked cloth rubbing skin over and over again. I continue reading the boiled orange sweet in the far corner of my vision in my right eye. It somehow focuses me despite the brightness of the lights. Or perhaps it was the raising of tempers that did that. I am reading a book written by a man with "Locked in Syndrome". He was a fashion editor, then had a major "Event" as it is called and lost all motion, save for the blinking of one eye.
The other eye is sewn closed.  He wrote the book through a system of coded on-off blinks that allowed someone to transcribe letter by letter the accumulated words of each sentence of that book that he memorised in bundles before dictation began each day. He did it for his children so that he could pass on something to them. He too mentioned in the book that low-level anger about his conditon and the way he was treated allowed him to stay present and engaged with his surroundings and with his struggle to visualise this life present and the life now gone. The words became precious to me because of these limited but focused gestures that were brought forth and made into something that could be kept on a page then reinviroragted by the act of reading. That also added to the fact that I was able to read the whole book in one sitting.

Visit

Many times it had been like that and I don’t know why. I’m munching around the outskirts and these various indentations that keep tripping me up. No it was not always that way for it to go. Because least-ways first the foot ways and it not leaning no other way, went a way forward and not exactly stopping but I met a bench. I sat down. Comfort. It was comfortable ‘gainst my back, head against the board. I could afford to lean back and out there in the sunshine it was nobody’s business but mine and nobody’s in particular so I lay down. Head against the board. And I stayed there. And creatures twinkling before my eyes. And I had to turn the other cheek. But I didn’t mind. No not at all. And the next day I came back, and again and again.

It kept existing there for me. I can’t tell why. It’s maybe something to do with the perambulator where shovel loads of dirt kept arriving and what could I do? I had to keep on sorting. To remove the dust from the rubble, the dirt from the straw. The tiny filaments of glass rubbed into a powder in the water-glands between the crinkling of my fingers making some kind of a delicious soup. So that was my job. And I did it well. At least that is what I am told by the bright-eyed passengers that cajole a lift off me and have a bowl or two. In the oven it came out fine and all warmed up whenever it got to be made even earlier in the day. So we bit into the soup and ground down too what had not already gone that way.

Because processes of heat make for leisure time. So we just stir, stir, stir and yes it all seemed to kind of mush together. But don’t take your eyes off of it. No don’t do that. Because the encrustations arrive from underneath and then you’re in trouble. So I could stir, stir, stir see and it was a torpedo of an exhibition rightly placed for me and the others who became the helpers that if truth be told offered me the helping hand that I could not have done it all alone.

Going home was a drag after the mixing up of all the stuff of the coming together. So we hung around and burnt stuff scorching the grass like the bald patch on so many people these days so that it got to be like the right kind of thing to do to even up the space between ground and sky.

Afterwards there were plenty nails that fell out the wood once it crinkled to powder itself from the very extent of that heat, chasing away the rain. And bouncing it back up into a sizzle. The nails that dropped out were rusty and brown stuff met with the finger when I rubbed it. I licked my finger and that was another kind of ingredient that I discovered. Can you imagine the surprise when it got dark?

And the mist making the rust had gone by the morning. Instead there was a fence maybe taller than you on top of me but it was not wobbling down. Never to fall that way because of the sticks made of metal were plunged deep into the earth. And thinking about it there had arrived many holes before. We had lost things in the holes, even got legs stuck and twisted in these holes. But the holes didn’t give in. They had been made by some serious minded people and they meant a business which then arrived in the form of the metal sticks.

Simply put and simply this way we were on the wrong side. We had parted the area in which they had put the sticks up under cover of darkness and there was no going back. I looked back through to where it was still that place and maybe some of the rusting nails that we had put there in the middle of the scorched earth were still there. We had forgotten to utilize everything to the best of our ability because we thought we had the time. But there was none left. It was not on our side. And we had given up and the fence was put up. And there was no more meetings and conversations and they said the fence was the final word. And we never went back, well I did go back but there was nothing much to see except for more greenery poking out between the sticks tickling my nostrils. And the bench was only partially visible in the middle of all that. And that is when it happened; and I sneezed. And I heard footsteps running, yes I did. And I ran.

Base

Two voices are bantering I think over at the other side of the lake. But no they are actually coming from high up above the lake. This I know because I see the orange reflector jacket high up above at the very top of the pylon that the man is very gradually descending. Towards the bottom of the pylon it seperates out into four splayed legs set far apart and sunk deep into the mud spanning right across a wide stretch of water.
I lose sight of the man where the trunk of the pylon seperates out. Even where he flickers in and out of view I miss him and his bit by bit progress and in the end I never locate which leg he is coming down. I continue to hear the voices for some time.

Later, on the train there's a girl in a light grey rain-coat. Her hands are plunged into her pockets at either side of her as she sits with legs crossed and raised up onto the seat opposite. She flaps open and closed the grey folds of the coat she is wearing to reveal a polka dotted T.shirt of many colours. She is talking across to her father who sits silently over on the other side facing the direction that the train is going in and glancing out the window. She is talking in searing crescendos that break apart into laughter which suddenly cut short. There is very little response, the man appearing monosylable and retreating further into himself as his daughter rises in tone. She is talking about where she sleeps on a metal-framed bed in a dormitary style room. About being marked down and only getting one merit unstead of five because she missed one day even though she is a good girl in class. She says, "One day, dad. I only missed one day". She is anxious as she lounges casually letting the grey coat flap open then drawing it around her body tightly and shivering. Her face is open, plastic, maleable and startled. Her father admonishes her for missing a day of school. She seizes at the response, draws it out, tests it until it too fades and retreats. She had wanted to leave the train one stop earlier to meet someone her father knew whom she hadn't yet met. His voice quickens when she mentions that name so that she knows the power of that word and uses it again and again. Until in the end the power fades and that dies.

In the end they didn't get off. The train rolled on. They leave the carriage and go onto the platform at the next stop. I notice as they go up the steps that the girl is leaning heavily on one side so that she needs to hold on to the railing. Her shoulder and upper back are rigid raised towards her ear as if caught and flattened in a vice. Her father walks next to her on her good side.

Later at another platform where I wait endlessly through anouncements and lists of train destinations which do not apply to me, amidst the crowd that spills out of the train but immediately seperates out, is a young man that many people rinse through before parting.

He is staking out the ground far ahead with a stick that is always planted at an angle. He leans into the stick and then releases one leg at a time rolling his hips through a circuit in order to meet with it. One hand alone wraps around the top-most curve of this stick so that his entire palm is in close contact with its` uneven wood. With the forefinger pressed so hard against the wood that it actually bends backwards his little finger strays outwards entirely on it`s own, tracing the air in parallel excursion that adds further breadth to his claimed passage. His other arm is loose and rolls inwards and outwards at the joint of the shoulder in free motion. In doing so it is continuously opening the chest, increasing his breathing capacity. That compensates for the compromised breathing on the other side. Everything is contained and under pressure here because of his need to create a rigid traction between hand and stick and along the length of his arm, down the outer perimeter of the body to the foot that plants firmly into the ground then pulls up as if from mud before locking down once again.

The man wears a luminous blue jumper over his upper body. It is leant forward so that the centre of gravity is in an intended space just past the blue. Between a falling and a catching of that step the body runs towards the planted stick up ahead forcing an automatic swing and jump out of every placement. There is the staked out area for his manoevre which is entirely that of action. Every perterbation is thrown into play drifting beyond all seperate remittance in any one step. Unstead it becomes a hesitant severance. As something already escaped from itself it is only then recollected in a retrieval that is found in the bounce back up. The brightness grows. The play is there entirely in the jolts and stoppages of timed catchments that are almost always on the verge of being too late. There is spectacular travel in that timing and the man knows it.  He is no longer caught in each moment of self-containement but stretches out between various instances swerving into what he is not yet at, wrenching out of what he once was, in a slurr that possesses him.

He crosses the raised foot bridge over the tracks. A woman on the opposite platform holds a small table upside down to her chest as the train pulls in. Once the train pulls out most of the figures on the platform have been swept away and so has she. I am startled by her absence. Some time later I catch sight of the man in the luminous jumper who has just descended the stairs and is making his way in a circular motion, in the opposite direction against a crowd already forming across the tracks.

Many days later I have the rhythm of his movement playing out still in my body and thoughts.It seems to organise my own journey and the on-off premise between aggravation and loss of consciousness that I veer in and out of.

Earlier at the lake across the wooden make-shift bridge and past the notice pinned on the tree that read "Warning, Private Fishery. No Tresspassing by order of the Metropolitan Police" I stood for some time at the furthest extreme of the mud bank looking out across the water in the line of the sun interupted by thin clouds and the bright streaks across the water where a duck too far away to be visible carves a trail. I moved my arms around  trying to loosen my shoulder, relieve the tight sinews in my neck and face. Feeling like I was getting ill in any case and trying to ward off the inevitable in the soft light of the afternoon sun. Then just before darkness I made my way back across the wooden bridge and to the train station where I waited for a train to take me back towards London.

A flock of birds fly past against the flow of the train as it pulls out just after we have boarded.

Over the edge

At the time I didn't realise how ill I had become. It was a slow process by degrees. And even those small shifts created a vanishing aspect between the joints. I no longer articulated in the same way as I supposed others did, in which a memory compares one phase with another and draws conclusions. The park had become my everything; a bowl in which small figures rose and fell, coming over a mound and disapearing over the edge of the hill down that stark descent towards the canal at the side of which I used to work in a gated Special Needs children's project. Here you had to ring the bell to be let in or out, though one time a crazy man climbed over, bare-footed, saying he was looking for his shoes, then made strange hieroglyphics on the wall in the corridor from the wet mud covering his hands. He sat in the office and it was dark outside in the park along the canal and up the sharply ascending hill. The children had gone home but the staff were there. Even my superiors were silent and nervous, sureptitiously trying to dial for the police. I remember that I was able to talk to the man and he struck me as a sensitive man. Months later I had lost my job after trying to siphon off the best workers from the Special Needs children's club for my own project up the hill. That project has now closed.

From where I sit there is only the patterns of the small mounds that cut in from one another, allowing the eye to drift freely. After the descent, trains seem to collide, absorb one another and then part. There is a slight breeze and the leaves of the mature trees are already rattling in the early autummn. Warmth comes from the direct sun, then is replaced by a sudden cool breeze as if from a different level of the stratosphere suddenly plunged down. Over in the distance is the white house and on the flat lawn in front is an arrangement of white plastic chairs and tables looped by a low level metal fence where the the ends are bent over and woven back through one another and which has a small child-high gate that swings open and closed at one end whenever anyone passes through it.

I am perfectly still trying to absorb the sun for one last time or however many times are left before the warmth is drained from the light. My eyes are closed and I seem to be far back from the face which the sun like on any other surface, is hitting. I need to give it some time for the effects to be absorbed. It is altogether more evasive and more easily scared away than in summer.

That scattering in itself seems to become a way of noticing and over time because I am not going anywhere, it creates it's own kind of arangement of which I am not directlly the author of. It is more like the intermittant sun that passes over me, is enveloped by a cloud, then re-inserts itself to strike a different aspect activating first this portion than that creating it's own jointing in the on-off of this continual surfacing and dismissal.
How to follow it? Simply by remaining still and waiting to be enlivened or not. And so, very gradually I begin to recover.

Into the park following at first the path, a man introduces a large object. There are actually at least two objects but the way he is pulling them over the ground, heaped on to the wooden trolley with a rope looped around one end of the wood base then around his lower trunk, they are treated as one. A sizeable weight that needs shifting. On the cart there is an empty Pepsi dispensing machine with a blue background in speckled lighter and darker shades that give the affect of bubbles. The Pepsi logo is written upside down upon this background in red. On top of this but sliding at an angle so that one end nearly touches the pavement is another dispenser this one in yellow whose logo because it faces upwards, is not at first clear to me. Then in the progress of time I see that it says Shwepps. Gradually as the man hauls and tugs his load, leaning far backwards against it's weight so that only the heels of his shoes are on the ground and if the taught rope should break it would send him with practically no distance to go flat on his back, the vehichle moves.
I feel the strain down his neck, across his shoulders, along his back, buttocks, calves and ankles. It is apparent in his thighs, stomach muscles, groin and the veins on the front of his neck which are under strain down either side of his red exposed gullet. The back of his head is leant far back so that the grey tangled hair pulls off his face and snakes downward at times blacker where it is winding in and around itself, appearing moist, and at times lighter, the grey-fly away tufts of an older man.

I have never heard this man speak a word though he is hauling around goods from street to street on a daily basis and lives in a ramshuckle house one street from mine, the last series before the park, the marshes, the canal. There's a large pine tree beside his house whose branches are beginning to poke into the windows where the glass is smashed, the longer branches beginning to lean down on the top of the roof where tiles are dislodged and scattering.

The man is always walking backwards his back covered in sweat, his jeans halfway down his backside, dirt-covered pants digging into his flesh at the waist-line creating a red ribbon. On his upper body he has a mass of fragmented garments that compensate and stand-in for one another. Sometimes it is simply a mass of criss-crossing threads that he himself seems to have woven as a loose covering like a Cat's-Cradle around his tall and bony frame. He pauses often and at such times seems endlessly still because he neither gazes out nor in but simply waits for the exhuastion to take on a more workeable beat as his hard upper back heaves up and down. So he remains there until again he sets the momentum going and reverts to this pulling which he helps along by taking up the slack of the rope between the trolley and his trunk yanking it now and again, preventing the rope from chisseling into his waist as he turns just enough his two clenched hands inwards simultanously, so as to twist the rope around his hand joints. They cross at the lower width of his wrists revealing through that calculated double flexion the whiter undersides of his fleshy lower arms where his tattered jumper cuts out. The veins are blue and pumped up now all the way along from his wrists to his elbows. This part of him is the part where his technique is fully engaged and there is more expression, more placement of his on-going thought processes right here than in his face that is cast down in contrast to this opening out gesture that he performs with his two arms.

___

To begin again. I hear the rattle of the cart-wheels against the path. It does not go past me but over off in the corner at the far side by the hedgerow. No sooner do I look up than I notice the colours rising above the hedgerow, shifting. I do not see the man who blends in with the background and is not moving fast enough for me to notice a mis-match. In any case this mass of greenery is also moving. Being pushed and pulled this way and that, constantly re-aranged by the gusts of wind. That is nothing more really than an on-off breeze.

The sound cuts out. That is when I can pinpoint the vehicle. When again it starts up I see and recognise the man. No sooner have I done that and it stops again. I get used to it being stopped and gradually it fades out and that is when I skirt the low-level fencing where I detect another movement. The gate has just been swung open so that a small blond-haired child with scruffy hair has pushed his way through the opening on the other side of which there are the tables and chairs filled on this one last good day with people, children, prams and coloured balls, all crowded in amongst the food, the cups, the drinks.

Cutlery rattles and catches on the wind to reach even where I sit. The child who is wearing a pulled down over-stretchd blue sweat-shirt is probaby about five or six. He lurches one way while also seeming to gesture with his two arms the other way. That creates an opening in the stilted affect to any motion that allows it to remain even when it has gone. There's a kind of double-run. Something like seizure that than out of this hesitation and the missed moment of that vaccum, catapults action at incredible speed. The boy is being thrown around by the contradictions of his own body which at one moment wavers and at the next moment flies.
The man's cart starts up again, a sudden jerkiness that seizes and locks his back as a single surface and roots and twists the nerve muscles in the back of the neck. Then the thing is rolling according to it's own momentum. And the man and his part in it again fall out of significance. The colours-blue and yellow, the top colour slanted like a roof, begin to disaperar at first in part behind the growth then altogether. There is a pause and a suspension. This is filled, in part replaced, by the boys` lolliping manoeveres out into the middle of the field where he sinks behind a dip, rises again then sinks once more.

The boy then angles on to the weighed down almost crippled branches of a tree which is sprawling horizontally, shadowing the grass just at the point by the path where the man pulling the trolly a moment before disappeared. The boy begins to press down his feet to either side of the tree so that the entire trunk begins to move. All the leaves on that part of the tree are set in motion. He springs it up and down hard then as the momentum eases off, lies flat-wise on his chest against the bark of the tree, lulled for a moment by the movements he has set in motion that are gradually subsiding. I lose attention at the time when the tree motions smoothe out and the jolts becomes the more even swaying of the entire tree with the weight of the boy, length-wise, simply an add-on at a natural curve in the base of the tree.

I`m wondering when the colours will re-emerge. I`m trying to imagine how far along they are, cossetted in the folliage. Then just in front of the white house, on the path that travels inbetween that building and the small flat area where the tables and chairs are placed, the whole frame of the cart with it's load are suddenly visible. No one looks up from the chairs and tables many of whom have their back to the path. Then it is past and again only glinting through in part between cut-back foliage and incomplete hedgerows. There's an unevennness to the progress as the cart keeps grinding to a halt.

Then something unusual happens and unstead of the cart continuing along the path that rings around the small pond and eventually leads out to the main street, the man- though this is difficult-  pulls the cart across a final plateau which suddenly stops where seats with dense hedgerows grown as cover to wind turbulance are dotted at intervals before the descent; towards the canal, the marshes.

It is a lengthy process pulling the two soft drinks containers across that lawn which I happen to know is water-logged in the middle.

There is  a small dog that is ceaselessly running around the park it's legs and the lower half of it's short body thick with mud. It appears to have a routine because intermitantly it appears round from behind a tree, is swept past my bench to another tree which it circles, chasing squirrels before being eclipsed behind a mound or the shrubbery beside a path once again.

A boy with his dad bounces a ball hard against the stone path down over towards the benches with thick hedges. They come up along the path from the steep descent so as to suddenly appear. Each time the boy bounces the ball so that it jumps up high above his head his father snatches it out of the air then slams the ball down again and the boy runs ahead and catches it on the way back down for the second time or even several bounces later along the path where the father lags behind. As the father catches up, the boy whacks the ball against the pavement once again. Sometimes they both grab it from one another out of turn so that their steps weave in and out of one another even when they only snatch air in a state of seperation, catch up and clash. One thing always replaces another in this constant shuffling of elements.There is something spacious to their progress, along the path, in and out of step.

The man with the cart is travelling against the grain in which they move cutting over that lawn around which the path  loops. He pulls and stops. Pulls and stops. Finally the man is there at the edge of the descent and  having returned the cart to the path for one instance I see the containers outlined against the horizon, the slant of the yellow Shwepps dispenser suddenly catching the sun and making me blink. Then the angle changes and the colour fades out of the frame. It is a slow outline that I continue to watch until I am actually unsure wheter I am watching it or watching the space which it used to fill. But then suddenly like a last stuck piece that is suddenly sucked down a drain, there apears a marginal increase in glare just where the form has been sucked below the level of the horizen. There is this actual visceral sensation of a sudden absence which is known in that contrast- a kind of sudden exractor of substance in one simultaneous widening out.

The boy with blonde hair is circling the outer perimeter of the low-lying black fence in counter-direction to before. His finger runs along the looped top-end of the brocade work.  He slows. Stops. Then continues to the other end opposite to that tree he had once sat on.

The father and son with the ball get around to the part of the path just beyond the bench where I sit. Here at this point where the path drops off, the boy places the ball on the pavement and suddenly lets go.
It rolls away just as the father runs to catch up.

The small dirty dog which I know belongs to a woman with neat dyed fair hair stylishly layered whom I have not seen for many days and who often comes to the park to meet with elderly dog-owners continues to circle madly unable to stop even when I call  it.