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I don’t understand why it seems so fresh in my mind, even now, three years later and a few hundred miles away.
I think about it, and I can’t even remember people’s names.
I just remember sitting there, those moments of waiting, murmurous and tense.
People striding to the end of the street, looking up and down the main road, stretching to see round the corner.
Turning back to the others and raising their hands.
The old man from number twenty-five, the brush in his hand, dribbling a trail of pale blue paint, walking towards the closed door.
Rubbing his bearded cheeks with the palm of his hand.
Knocking.
The distant careen of a siren, the man knocking at the door.
Chapter 2
A taxi drifts into the end of the street, its engine clicketing loudly as the doors open and half a dozen young people spill brightly out onto the pavement.
There is a pause; payment is made, the doors are slammed shut, and the taxi moves away, out of sight. And they stand there for a moment, blinking and grinning and waiting uncertainly, a tall thin girl with a short short skirt and eyes smudged with glitter, a boy with beige slacks and a ring through his eyebrow, a girl with enormous trainers and army trousers and her hair dyed pink and they are walking down the street, slowly, blissfully, their heads full of music and light, their nervous systems over-stimulated by hormones and chemicals and the exhilaration of the night.
A very short girl wearing nothing but shorts and a bra, her toenails painted the same violets and pinks and greens as her fingernails, she claps her hands, she looks at the sanded bare windowsills of number twenty-five, she says look they look naked, she looks at the tins of pale blue paint, the blue spilling down the side of the tin, she looks at the brushes and the scrapers and she says it’s a nice colour it’s going to look nice but nobody’s listening.
A boy wearing an almost clean white shirt, a tie looped loosely around his neck, he jumps up onto the garden wall of number nineteen, he balances on one leg, he says shush shush can you hear that and when the others stop and say what he says nothing, can you hear nothing it’s nice and he topples groundwards hoping the boy with the beige slacks and the pierced eyebrow can catch him.
On the other side of the street, in an upstairs bedroom at number twenty-two, a girl wakes up and hears someone talking about the quietness of the morning. She listens to the loud voice, it sounds familiar, she sits up in bed and puts her glasses on and looks at the people in the street. She knows them, some of them live at number seventeen, she wonders where they’ve been as she takes off her glasses and gets back into bed.
In the downstairs flat of number twenty, an old man with thinning hair and a carefully trimmed moustache is lying awake, listening to the noises outside. His eyes are open, frowning, focusing on what he can hear. He is listening for tell-tale signs, the crisp sound of a can being crumpled underfoot, the tinkle of a dropped bottle. His eyes sweep from side to side, concentrating, searching. But he doesn’t hear anything, and as the voices fade he closes his eyes again, turning face-down into the bed, away from the light, hoping for a little more sleep before the day begins.
Outside, the boy with the white shirt opens the door of number seventeen and the others follow him inside, whirling slowly around, gathering the objects they need to keep them safe, cartons of fruit juice and bottles of coke, bars of chocolate and tubes of crisps, tapes, CDs, cushions, duvets, cigarette papers, cigarettes, candles and burners and matches and drugs. And in the back bedroom they are settling down and they are talking, the tall thin girl with glitter round her eyes says don’t be so fucking daft man it’d go all over the floor and down your legs and that, and she giggles and turns to reach for a drink and as her face catches the candle-light her skin sparkles like shattered glass in the sun.
In the front first-floor bedroom of number nineteen a woman wakes suddenly. She looks at the clock, she looks at her sleeping husband, she wonders why she has woken. There is no noise from the street, the children are quiet. She eases softly out of bed, her bladder suddenly straining and full, she stands and she opens the door slowly enough for it not to squeak. On the way to the bathroom, she looks into the children’s bedroom and checks on each one of them, she crouches at the lower bunks and stretches up to the top one. She looks with sleepy love at the three of them, she watches their young bodies swelling and shrinking through her barely opened eyes, she holds her hand close to their faces to feel the warm give and suck of their breath. She murmurs a brief prayer for them and closes the door gently, soft-padding to the toilet, sitting and relieving herself and watching the shadows of pigeons flap across the bathroom wall.
The short girl with the painted toenails, next door, she says oh but did you see that guy on the balcony, he was nice, no he was special and she savours the word like a strawberry, you know she says, the one on the balcony, the one who was speeding and kept leaning right over, and they all know exactly who she means, he’s in the same place most weeks, pounding out the rhythm like a panelbeater, fists crashing down into the air, sweat splashing from his polished head.
She says once I was there and he got so carried away that he hung from the balcony by his legs, he had his feet hooked under the rail, and she remembers the way his face had stretched into a furious O, going come on let’s have some and she remembers his fists still flailing across the void like an astronaut lost in orbit.
A girl sleeps in the back bedroom of number eleven, her hair is pushed out of her eyes by a hairband, her mouth is wide open, the room is warm and beginning to lighten. Bird shadows pass quickly across her face but she does not wake.
A couple in their early thirties sleep in the attic flat of number twenty-one, wrapped loosely in a thin red blanket, he is snoring and she is turned away from him, there is a television on in the corner with the sound turned down, shadows pass through the room but the couple do not wake.
In the back bedroom of number seventeen, the boy with the white shirt and the tie says it was definitely a girl, she didn’t have an Adam’s apple, I swear, it was a girl definitely, and everyone laughs at him and he looks around the room and joins in the laughter and somebody passes him a long cigarette.
The boy with the wide trousers is quiet, he’s looking at the girl next to him, a beautifully unslim girl with dark curls of hair falling down over a red velvet dress, he’s looking at the laces and straps and buckles and zips of her complicated footwear and he looks up at her and says so how long does it take you to get those boots off then? She looks at him, this girl, with lips as red as the fire inside a chilli, she looks at the tight spread of him across the bed and she says
I don’t know I’ve never taken them off myself
and she smiles at the sharpness of his intake of breath, she watches his eyes trickle down from her face and roll down the rich geometry of her body.
And everyone else keeps talking, compulsively, talking across each other, talking about the tunes they heard and the people they saw and the next place they want to go. The boy with the white shirt and the tie keeps saying it was definitely a girl, and then he stuffs a pipe full of fresh green herb and the room quietens in anticipation, the conversation dropping, each of them suddenly feeling their minds too frantic, their bodies too tense, and they suck on the sweet smoke in turn, holding the pillow of it in their lungs, closing their eyes, stilling their voices.
And they think about daytime things for a moment, about rolling hills, or beaches, or playing football, or whatever it is they’ve learnt to think about at these times, and they breathe slowly and move for a moment into a kind of waking sleep. And if someone were to look through the window now, to walk into the backyard and press their face against the glass, cupping their hands around their eyes like a pair of binoculars, that person would see what looked like a roomful of people gathered together in silent prayer, and they would wonder who such a vigil might be for.
Outside, a taxi drives slowly down the street, the driver peering from the window, checking house numbers. He gets as far as number twenty-eight, and then there are no more numbers. He hesitates a moment before driving away, the sound of the car fading behind him like a trail of dust.
And now they are quiet, the girl with the army trousers trying to find a picture on the television, the boy with the pierced eyebrow holding a lighter beneath the plastic lid of a tube of crisps, a look of concentration in his eyes, waiting, watching the plastic soften.
