Some kind of
proximity
There was a bomb in the street.
I was not like it had not been anticipated – not after all
that had happened – half-detonated homemade masses of metal had been cropping
up for a long time, the sound of gunshots growing in regularity – as if
necessary to puncture the swollen summer air.
It was 12.03 pm and the street was a turbulent mass of hot
bodies, gaping and glistening like a swollen artery. I licked my lips.
‘Evacuate,’ the loudspeakers sounded in a northern drawl
perhaps emphasized to be reassuring ‘Everyone clear from the street as quickly
and orderly as possible, I repeat, everyone clear from the street.’
There were several desperate individuals in coloured jackets
attempting to physically re-enforce the message – gesticulating widely towards
the side-alleys which led to somewhere else in the exhausted organ of the city.
I watched a man dart down one, dragging two tiny, clamouring children.
‘Who ARE you?!’ One of them protested, voice crackling.
Clinging to the street was that strange metallic smell
so-similar to blood, though I could just about convince myself it was the metal
of the benches and railings slowly searing in the midday heat. Many people just
stood where they were, as if stunned. In an alleyway to my left – an alleyway
which appeared artificially widened, leaking bricks like a broken mouth – a man
cradled a woman evidently in the midst of a panic attack. Her tongue hung thick
against her lips, saliva dribbled down her chin.
‘You’re smudging all your make up when you do that,’’ The
man said.
‘Kiss me!’ She whimpered.
It was the noise of the street which was so greater than
movement; high-heeled shoes scoring along cobbles, the mumble of the loudspeakers
mixed with the nasal cries of parents to their children, pigeons banging their
wings in an attempt to gain floor space.
An elderly couple shuffled in front of me.
‘This better not spoil the soaps,’ she remarked emphatically
to her husband, her lips lingering over the single syllable of ‘spoil’, like it
was a word she said often – like ‘Don’t spoil the children’, or ‘that fruit has
been spoiled.’ Yes, the type of elderly woman I anticipated took great pride in
her preserved ceramics, her cutlery, her fine cut-glass fruit bowl – a fruit bowl
filled with those fat apples with an almost bloody varnished sheen, with
glitter in their skins but which collapse in the mouth. That seemed to be the case
for many people that day. Many young women were sporting the navy neckties of
one travel firm or another, rubbing rouge hastily on their cheeks and lips – yet
those lips quivering nervously, the skin daring to mottle where the concealer
was wearing thin.
The elderly lady turned to me suddenly, motioning towards her husband.
‘He’s seen bombs go off you know,’ Her eyes glittered at
this apparently confidential information ‘Just off Normandy, the war, you
know. Horrible big things.’ She appeared
to grin over a line of poorly fitting false teeth, her liver-spotted hands
clenching and unclenching wildly. ‘But, you know, when it was all over, they’d
grow vegetables in the bomb craters and all sorts.’
I nodded to her, as if in thanks for this confession, and
felt the sweating flesh fold under my neck. I grimaced weakly, grimaced at the
slow trickle of hands and feet, people pouring from shops with bags and bags,
hands crammed with goods…
‘Do you know the quickest way out of here?!’ A voice
shrilled – intoxicating in its hysteria – perhaps only centimetres from my
ear. The source was a young woman,
barely an adult, clutching desperately at my hands, my wrists, with her little
white shaking fingers. Her face, when it froze to look up at me, was distinctly
doll-like, so much so, that that stillness of jaw, that glassiness of eye,
seemed almost be the craft of porcelain. For some reason, quite unbeknown to
myself, I put one hand against that perfect face.
I couldn’t say anything. The street was like the chiming of
an old clock – composed with wave after wave of uncertain sound.
‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ Gasped the elderly man in front of me,
as if there was sudden crushing pressure
upon the paper-bags of old lungs. He became a scarp of beige amidst the general
bustle, a mere scrap of a man which screamed and screamed. His saliva dropped
hot onto the cobbles, the colour of beer.
‘Come on, come on…’ His wife mumbled to him coaxingly. She
turned to me apologetically, still smiling ‘Ah, he’s just tired you see, we’re
tired, we’re all tired.’
Her exhausted hair shimmered in the sun. It reminded me of iron
wool, but immersed in a thick, white paint. My clothes crumpled. I felt the
young woman’s arms around me, one hand roving against my spine in concentric
circles, the other still fast to my wrist, her lips moving like moth-wings against
my shirt in a kind of prayer. My hands were somehow stationed, full of her long
brown hair. She started to cry.
Another siren sounded. People scuttled – she dived and ran,
like steam from the kettle becoming water, rushing to escape the heat. I barely
noticed. I craved tea, the regularity it provided, the solace when slinking
home on a Saturday afternoon. I checked my wrist. She had taken my watch.
A man stayed sitting on a bench as I kept in with the clot
of the crowd towards a junction leading away from the street, his leather
brogues snapping together in an expression of impatience. I cast him a
deliberately interrogative stare.
‘The pictures!’ He laughed numbly ‘Just think how much
they’ll pay for the pictures!!’
His hands rested against his bulky camera, hands like hams
slick with nervous sweat – one hand at each side, like two innocent bodies
flanking the long dark coffin. His eyes were drained, but determined. I felt
sick. Pigeons screamed in the gutters.
*
They say the bomb went off about 1 pm. I wouldn’t know, I
wasn’t there.
Some 11 people died – sometimes I wonder if amongst the dead
were the elderly couple. They displayed the names of those unfortunates on a
memorial they built where a bench had once stood – I eat my lunch there most
days, sometimes paring the names together, sometimes not. In the crater, there grows
a shopping centre and little else; some artificial rockery, a clock tower. It
saves on buying a new watch.
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