by Cherry Potts
(I’m outside)
I walked the main street with my eyes fixed
before my feet,
bowed under the weight of my thoughts.
My heart was pounding.
Restlessly. Out of control.
(Am I going to die?)
I felt that death was close by. Waiting…
Tiptap – Tiptap – Tiptap
And then suddenly,
amidst the murmur of thoughts,
I heard the regular cadence of my own footsteps.
Tiptap – Tiptap – Tiptap
And slowly,
with each step,
Tiptap
my unsteady heart
Tiptap
found its pace.
(I have to keep walking)
And so I left the city that night.
MARKET
THE CITY’S HEARTBEAT
Emma Lee
The market is a measure of a city’s heartbeat. Usually smell hits you first. Hopefully fresh produce: earthy vegetables, a sweet note of fruit, a tang of leather and maybe a whiff of freshly-brewed coffee, a sizzle of fried onions, a smear of strawberries tantalise taste buds. Sounds are a second clue. Do stall-holders chatter and joke? Do they call out to attract passers-by? Do shoppers slow their pace to browse? Textures invite touch: a stiff net, a soft fake fur, the shine on a waxed apple, the silk on a satin orchid or the smoothness of painted wood. Sight reveals a whirl of colour, smiles, space for a breather from a nagging list of errands, a toddler jumping in puddles, laughter from gossips.
In some, the smells are marred by a sour note of decay under disinfectant, the freshly-brewed coffee can’t compete with a stench of rot. Stall-holders are silent and hunched with hands in pockets or cupped around a brew. Passers-by speed up: nothing to see here. Children whine and pester, reluctant to stop. Colours fade to neutrals: greys and beiges of institutions. Glares deter touching. Products are displayed under covers or still inside boxes. Pedestrians look at their feet to avoid catching another’s eye and notice the rubbish piling under stalls, the boxes of produce not unpacked and the unswept dirt. Unwelcomed, they turn away.
Today she feels upbeat, her stride confident, heels tapping to a heartbeat. She has a red jacket and ready smile. She buys fresh to cook a healthy dinner, stops to taste a cool smoothie, lingers over hand-crafted souvenirs. She pauses for a bouquet of silk carnations: nothing showy, but a splash of colour for her table, planned to inspire a sensual evening. She frequently stops to chat, share a joke and leaves on a whirl of inspiration.
Tomorrow she might be back. The red jacket swapped for a beige trench coat. Her steps ponderous. Her eyes darting so they never settle on one thing. She looks, but her purse stays in her bag. The hand-crafted goods have become cheap bric-a-brac. Her perfume is overwhelmed by the stink from uncleared refuse. She has forgotten her smile. Her shoulders sag. When she stops, both hands clasp a cooling coffee, a jumper sleeve is hooked over a thumb but doesn’t quite cover a damson-coloured bruise. Her heart is sluggish.
Tomorrow she might be back. Note whether you can smell perfume, whether she smiles and if it meets her eyes, if her walk skips. Is the city as healthy as it thinks?
CROSSROADS
FOUNDATION MYTH
Cherry Potts
You stand at the crossroads, or what was once a crossroads, before roads got too dangerous and complicated to cross, requiring roundabouts and underpasses, and you step aside, overwhelmed by the lights and the arrows and the sheer number of speeding metal death machines and retreat to the wall that overlooks the river. You stare at the grey metallic water, splashing gently in the wake of some boat that is already out of sight, beyond the bridge that you could walk across if you wanted to cross the river, but you don’t want to cross, you want to get across the mouth of the bridge and continue beside the water. There is an underpass somewhere, but you have yet to find it.
Somewhere, in the silt and debris at the edge of this river there is the print of the foot of the first woman who stepped into the waters and judged it shallow enough to ford, long before the river was squashed into this narrow, deep, rapid course. And somewhere, in crossing the broad shallows, she looked up and caught the glimmer of the tributary stream, and the sweet fold of the hill, the shaded slope and the open beach ahead, and thought – this is my place.
If you stand on this bridge at dawn on the longest day of the year when sun up and morning chorus and a soft breeze can still filter through the smog and noise, when the passing cars are rare and the hum of air-conditioning is momentarily unnecessary, you can catch what she saw.
You can imagine her putting down her walking staff and gathering her family, her clan, her tribe, and saying here is our place. No need to wander further, here is beauty, here is everything we need, here is defensible.
And because they stopped, and put up fences and then buildings, others, passing, also stopped. A pause to talk became a stop to trade, became a plan to stay with friends, became never leaving, building – and sometimes that defensible was put to the test as others came to steal and rape and destroy. Through those meetings and destructions and rebuildings their place grew, and over millennia it grew to this, the crossroads where you paused a year ago, a decade ago, longer, and thought, my place, and put down your walking staff and stopped to talk, to trade, gradually gathering a family, a clan, a tribe, saying our place, and building, and welcoming strangers like me, willing to share.
And that defensible sticks in our craw, and we regret that we still think it, all these millennia later. Sometimes you forget that you have not always lived here. Sometimes you need to step into the footprint of the first woman, and see this place, our place, anew, and put aside defence for the openness she saw on that opposite shore.
GO DIRECTLY TO GO
Rob Walton
‘No, listen. I saw this with my own eyes.’
‘Your very own eyes?’
‘My very own eyes.’
‘Shoot.’
‘This plane comes down at the crossroads when people are arriving for work. It’s eight, eight-thirty in the morning. The pilot wants to know which way to go.’
‘So he asks the people who are arriving for work?’
‘Whoah! What’s this ‘he’ asks? The pilot asks. Only the people arriving for work are mixed up with tourists and people who have been partying all night, and the pilot is getting contradictory suggestions. Being told to go north to the park, and ‘No, no, you want to go downtown’. Someone else says the river and another person talks about the boho area and the hills. One person recommends staying there and they will fix the pilot a coffee and some bagels.’
‘And none of these people ask what the pilot and the plane are doing there?’
‘Why should they? This is the city. Things happen.’
‘Did anyone see the plane land? Was it somehow just there? I don’t know. There are so many gaps.’
‘Sure there are. This is the city. There are gaps.’
‘And where are the plane and the pilot now?’
‘I don’t know. Some other crossroads? Some other city?’
AT THE CROSSROADS
Matthew Pountney
At the crossroads, an ancient roadway is caressed by apple-scented shisha and exhaust fumes as it mixes its traffic with the city churn.
An arch, not as majestic as its creators had hoped, hails the car-triumph of consumers. Shunted up here, forgotten on an island, and holding court with ping-pong tables and tourists as they bustle, their bags dangling.
The sun shines through the glass of the jelly statue mob, who recall all the fun of execution and entrails. Nuns watch on, hidden away, remembering the martyrs of that place.
Green summer parks draw us from the frozen relics, through avenues of plane trees and the glittering patience of hotels, while Sunday’s corner hecklers decry every prejudice but their own.
Old choices led here and new choices lead away.
CHANCE MEETINGS
Maja Bodenstein<
br />
I see her for the first time while I’m still a student, adrift in the haze of youth.
I’m on the subway. The carriage is half-empty, holding only tourists, nannies and me, all caught in the grip of stale air and mid-afternoon lethargy. The noise is deafening; I can only just hear the baby’s cry over the screeching metal of wheels on track.
Suddenly the dark windows light up: another train, on one of those rare sections where two tracks run parallel. They are so matched in speed that neither train seems to be moving at all; our trajectories are given away only by the tightness of travellers’ grips on the handrails, the shaking, and the noise.
Then I see her. We’ve never met, and yet I know her intimately – because she is me. She’s older, a little paler and a little more worn, but she knows me, too; her eyes say so.
She is dressed to go somewhere, either to a function or perhaps an interview. I wonder if there is someone in her life, to iron out her creases and to lead her to sunlight when she needs it. I realize I pity her. She opens her mouth, perhaps to tell me something – does she think she can bridge the airless void between us? I avert my eyes. I don’t want to know.
Then the tracks split, she’s swallowed by darkness, and I am left with only my reflection in the window.
*
A few years later, I see me again.
I’m on my way back to work after lunch. My office is near the famous scramble crossing, with its complex systems of lights and sounds. She’s on the other side, fidgeting, eager for the lights to change. My heart somersaults.
We pass each other at the very centre of the crossing. I smile, a little frightened she might not recognise me. But after all it’s another me; an earlier one. She is fresh, vibrant, burning with an elemental power that I don’t recall ever possessing. She is almost past, she still hasn’t seen me; I panic and reach out. My hand is inches from her electric yellow sweater when her eyes finally flick up to mine.
They bear a hostile warning. She refuses to know me, to know what she has become. Perhaps it’s a general resistance to a society that seeks to consume and shackle her; or perhaps she is repulsed by how I have faded, how my own resistance has eroded, and I have been absorbed. I am ashamed. My hand shrinks back.
The lights change again. Somehow, I arrive at the other side. I have already lost sight of her amongst the flow of the city.
I never saw me again; with each passing year, it becomes less likely that I will. I can’t help but wonder: What have I missed out on? What life could I have led if I had had the courage, the willingness to listen?
SIDE STREETS
THE ALLEYWAY I
Miriam Sorrentino
THE ALLEYWAY II
Miriam Sorrentino
BACKWATER
David Mathews
‘Do people fall in?’ The young woman called to him over her shoulder.
He had watched her, about his daughter’s age, peer in the windows of the houses opposite, all seven, as she walked down the street. She had stopped at the disused granary at the canal’s edge. The towpath was on the far side of the water, leaving her no way through.
‘Do they?’ She walked across to him where he stood outside his door with a coffee pot.
He shook his head. ‘Only once, years ago,’ he said. ‘But the new couple with two kids in number 11 want railings. At Number 7 they’d prefer a wall, but I reckon that could be worse than nothing, because people would walk along it and fall off. Every Friday we argue about it, and then have a drink.’
‘They have a playpen in number 11. I think I saw a rat, in the water, not number 11.’
‘We don’t get many. It’s not like a river that brings stuff with the current. With a canal you have to make your own way, and there’s no restaurant to attract rats. We had nine ducklings last week, with their mum, but they didn’t stop long. We could have a boat, but you can’t go far.’
Would she like a coffee?
They sat in the autumn sun on his two kitchen chairs by a square table.
She took off her straw hat, and looked at the sky. ‘This is like on holiday somewhere,’ she said.
‘Last week two tourists ordered espressos.’
‘What did you do?’
He had brewed them as ordered, good and strong, and given them cake. ‘Thank you waiter,’ they had said. When he let on that Number 12 was his home and studio, they insisted on paying him.
She talked to him as a child talks to an adult who shows interest. He asked few questions – his daughter had taught him not to badger people – but he learned that she liked busy places; ‘the buzz’, she said. She appeared to live out of town, but was vague about where, and did not mention a job or parents or friends, just the countless things she had seen that morning.
‘I could stay here,’ she said. ‘Quiet, but near all that’s going on.’
They did not exchange names, but were easy with each other, and she lingered until the sun went behind the houses opposite. He noticed her clothes were shabby.
Next morning he found sandwich crusts in the doorway of the old warehouse; other mornings a paper cup, an empty tobacco pouch, a sock with a hole in the heel.
One night he left a thermos and a cup on his table outside. The following morning, he came out early, hoping. The cup was still warm; beside it lay a coin. His window was smudged, just where she could have pressed her nose against it.
How would she be when the weather grew cold?
ALLEYS AND DUMPSTERS,
IN BETWEEN, SUNNY DAY
Patty Tomsky
We walk in full sunlight but people can only see us if they’re sad. I don’t know why some of us stay. Have you ever heard a voice come up right next to your ear? And no one is there? That’s one of us.
If you want to, say a quick prayer that it never happens to you. Counting bricks for centuries, some of us, and moving with anger past babies and people and stores and under a sky from which we never feel the breeze.
I reached a girl the other day, she turned around, she’d been on a shortcut between the giant dustbins behind the pub where she works every weekend. I watched her for a while before I screamed at her back. She felt it. I saw her put her hand up behind her neck like people do when they feel us. Or feel me, at least. I don’t talk to the others. I’m afraid.
So, when the sun is bright if it’s cold or warm out and you’ve stepped off this busy sidewalk because you know a back way and then the next thing you know you want to die or begin to remember the dead you’ve lost or pass through a pocket of ice in the air, don’t run. You can’t get away.
Seeing us is not like seeing a person, but a cut-out from the sky or a black shadow moving across glass or metal in a back corner of the city where hardly anyone goes but strays or rats or homeless people searching for a place to sleep. Some of them talk to us but we don’t talk back. We can’t.
If I knew a way for you to avoid becoming like me, I would tell you. If I knew a way to stop being someone like me, I would do it. I have forgotten my name and the shape of my face but every once in a while, I see a pair of arms I half-remember or, like coming up from deep water, a face from before. I cry but we don’t get tears to spend here, so it burns my throat and makes me want to hurt you and all who are like you, so numb to everything, so immune. All I have is the sun and soft cooing of pigeons and a longing to know who to touch, how to shout, to get back in, among the breathing.
LOST AND FOUND
Catherine Jones
Walking through the side streets of this city, I have seen: 123 gloves placed carefully on railings or walls, waiting for their other halves; 49 individual lost shoes, not counting those strung over trees or wires outside houses; 30 coats hung up on a bush or a fence; 23 mobile phones on the floor (of which 12 smashed); 16 broken and abandoned umbrellas; 7 children’s stuffed toys, unloved; 4 lost wallets; 3 abandoned children’s scooters; 1 bunch of keys; and a prosthetic leg which someone must be missing. But why would you go back for what you’ve left behind wh
en this city seems so hostile? Locks are changed, new phones and umbrellas bought. Life goes on. 123 lonely gloves linger in cupboards and drawers.
DANCE WHERE NO ONE WATCHES
Cath Holland
We met on the final warm night of the year in a bar near enough empty, and well away from the hipster hangouts. The place had sticky carpets and a DJ playing 1990s songs from his iPod. A low-lying cloud wrung itself dry and speckled the windows as you bought me wine. Happy hour had been and gone yet the barman chucked a third of a bottle into a pint glass, plonked it on the bar and said ‘Three Fifty’. There was no please, no thank you but I sipped my drink and enjoyed the quiet buzz.
We stepped outside. Taxis honked horns and rubber tyres rolled as they drove past, sound-tracking the tongues of moist light licking the side street. I wondered what the flat grey flags tasted like, bleached filament-white by headlights. The drama of this side of town was a film set, the pavement patterned with flattened rounds of chewing gum, urban glitter. I’d never danced before, not properly, but the wet varnished the ground into a dance floor, just for us. You took the lead. My joints oiled, belly drawn in, spine straight and chin high and happy, I learned fast, heels clicking in a percussive shuffle. I didn’t mind when the rain came back later, the sly type that soaks right through. The soft punch and plop of each raindrop brightened my face, and washed the sweat from my brow. It darkened my hair and thickened my eyelashes, made my dress cling.
We drew out the hours, stretched the minutes and seconds every which way and that, to make them last. I asked if you were coming back here again. You smiled ‘of course!’ and meant it too, for the seconds it took to say. But you knew, I think, we can’t recreate perfect things. Best to keep them safe instead, well thumbed by time, soft around the edges.