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.