If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

But they do begin, and as the first smudges of light seep into the sky from the east, from the far side of the city and in towards these streets, they hold their heads high and their backs straight and step together in time to the slide and wheel of the music. They dance with a style more suited to the ballroom than to the bollywood movies the music comes from, but they dance all the same, hips swinging, waists touching, eyes fixed on eyes. The waiters have come across to the window, they are laughing, they are calling uncle uncle to the man in the kitchen who is finally beginning to clean up after a long night. They dance, and he steps out of the door to watch, wiping his hands on his apron, licking the weary tips of his fingers, pulling at his long beard. They dance, and he smiles and nods and thinks of his wife sleeping at home, and thinks of when they were young and might still have done something like this.

Elsewhere, across the city, the day is beginning with a rush and a shout, the fast whine of office hoovers, the locked slam of lorry doors, the hurried clocking on of the early shifts.

But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home.

He was the first to move, the boy from number eighteen.

He was up and across the street before anyone had blinked, before anyone had made a sound.

It was as if he knew what he had to do, as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity.

He moved off the doorstep like a loaded sprinter, and by the time I turned to see who it was he was there.

He was there and then it was over, and it was so sudden that I felt as though a camera flash had exploded in my face.

Everything went white, ghostly, like old news footage, faded and stained.

I couldn’t understand what was happening, I couldn’t believe what was happening.

I sat there, in the warm afternoon of the last day of summer, and I couldn’t work out what I was seeing.

I watched him moving across the street, the boy from number eighteen, and I tried to understand.

I don’t remember seeing it, not the moment itself, I remember strange details, peripheral images, small things that happened away from the blinded centre.

I remember the girl next to me dropping her can of beer and swaying backwards, as though from a shockwave.

I can picture the can hitting the ground, the weight of it crushing into the grass, the way it tipped to one side but stayed upright, like a half-fallen telegraph pole in a storm.

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.

The boy with the tricycle a flinch away from the tree.

A gasp in my throat, held back, like the air in the pinched neck of a balloon.

And it all seemed wrong somehow, unreal, unconnected to the sort of day it had been.

An uneventful day, slow and warm and quiet, people talking on their front steps, children playing, music, a barbecue.

I’d been woken when it first got light by the slamming of taxi doors, people I knew at number seventeen coming back from a long night out and trailing slowly down the street.