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I can see a slow-motion image of the beer, frothing from the top of the can, a coil of it rising up like smoke, hanging in the light a moment before spreading flat into the grass and spraying across my lap.
I don’t know where that comes from.
I don’t know how I could possibly have seen these details.
The fizz of the beer popping into sparkles of air.
Blades of grass straightening themselves as the liquid soaks into the soil, the damp patch on my skirt shrinking and fading and drying in the sun.
The brightness of the light.
There was a woman leaning out of a high window, shaking a blanket.
There were some boys over the road having a barbecue, pushing a knife into the meat to see if it was cooked.
There was a man with a long beard, up a ladder at number twenty-five, painting his windowframes, he’d been there all day and he’d almost finished.
Each frame was gleaming wetly in the sun, a beautiful pale blue like the first faint colour of dawn and it had been nice to watch the slow thoroughness of his work.
There was a boy in the next-door garden, cleaning his trainers with a nailbrush and a bowl of soapy water.
I can see all these moments as though they were cast in stone, small moments captured and enlarged by the context, like figures in a Pompeii exhibition.
The woman with the blanket, interrupted mid-swing, her attention snatched away, the blanket losing momentum and flapping gently against the wall.
Her arms still stretched out, her lips still pursed against the billowing dust.
The blanket hanging down towards the ground, like a semaphore.
Somebody said oh my God.
A boy on a red tricycle rode into a tree.
His feet slipped off the pedals and got caught under the wheels, tugging him from his seat and down towards the ground.
I can see him, falling sideways, his leg about to scrape the concrete, his head about to hit the tree, his tricycle tipping onto two wheels and his attention clamped into the road.
His head kept turning as he fell, and when he hit the ground, he could only lie there, watching, like everyone else.
He can barely have been three years old, I wanted to run to him and cover his eyes but I couldn’t move so he kept on looking.
A man who’d been washing his car lifted both his hands to the top of his head, squeezing them into fists.
He was still holding a sponge, water crushing out of it and down his back but he didn’t move.
Somebody said oh shit oh shit oh shit.
But mostly there was this moment of absolute silence. Absolute stillness.
It can’t actually have been like that of course, there must still have been music playing, and traffic passing along the main road, but that’s the way I remember it, with this single weighted pause, the whole street frozen in a tableau of gaping mouths.
And the boy from number eighteen, moving through the locked moment like a blessing.
It seemed, or at least it seems now, that everything else was motionless.
The beercan caught between the hand and the ground.
The blanket not quite touching the wall.
