Starts

or What Do They Do In the Afternoons?

The old woman was sitting in front of me on the bus. She was about to press the bell. Her hand was wrapped loosely round the metal pole where the button was, her long fingers moved, or trembled – you couldn't say which – over the button. Was she trying to press it now? Was she capable of doing so? Her restless fingers appeared to move independently of one another, as if in animated conversation. She had a shopping trolley and I helped her off the bus with it. We walked up the street side by side. She had a good pitch. She had been robbed, she said. She was honest. Why, only the day before she had found a purse in the street and handed it in. She had no money for food. She produced identification – a pensioner's pass, with her photograph, and waved it on front of me. I don’t often give money to beggars or buskers but I gave her a couple of pounds. There was a moment when it really didn't occur to me that I was being taken in. Frail but agile, her skin like loose hide, all of her darting about in a random way as she looked up at me, so utterly used up, empty like the ancient shopping trolley. I peered inside it, at her invitation – the plastic-leather interior was dark and wrinkled, like a dried-out uterus.

Ten minutes later, coming back down the High Street, she was speaking to someone else, a smartly dressed middle-aged woman who looked deeply concerned. A 'loan' had been mentioned. "Good Heavens no", the middle-aged woman said, "I don't want the money back". I had a sudden thought – I could follow her. I could spend all day doing that. I could spy on her – after all, I'd paid her. I could have no idea where she would take me. I started down the street behind her. She was about twenty yards in front. She accosted a couple more people, without success. But I grew bored. It had only been an idea to play with briefly and I had other things to get on with.

The second-hand bookshop I went into was next door to a church; in fact part of the church building. It was very tidy and well-organised, and quite unexpected just there. It sold theological books. But then I found a little book on Ancient Greece. It didn't cost much, but really how could I justify buying it? I already have so many books at home I haven't read. The text was an introduction to Greece; it had been published in the Twenties and was really of no interest. But I liked the photographs. They were black and white, very plain and still. I thought, I could buy the book and tear all the pictures out. This seemed sacrilegious - to destroy a book like this. It was something I had never done before in my life. The problem was not financial – the book cost so little, scarcely more than a Sunday paper. I bought it, I took it home, I cut it up and put the photographs in a drawer. I could not decide whether I liked them or not. Were they perhaps not rather dead, in all their stillness? I realised (and was this what had attracted me?) that there were no people at all in any of the photographs.

There are the rituals of deferred gratification, the endlessly postponed epiphany. The cup of coffee. A newspaper. Some cooking. I thought I’d phone M. to see if she’d got her book back. She particularly valued this book. The woman who wrote it had written a book about not being able to paint; this one was about keeping a diary. The point was, hers was the original edition, most of which had been destroyed when the publishers had been bombed in the Blitz. A well-known painter, who was a friend of hers, had bound the book for her and lettered the spine and painted a small picture on the cover. She had been a painter once; now she taught Art History and one day she lent this book to a student. "I can't think what came over me, lending it like that", she said. The student kept failing to return it to her; eventually, in desperation, she went round to where the student lived to try and get it back. Her student hunted all over the house for it and in the end she said she would 'divine' for it. She got a piece of string, with a weight on the end, and went round the house, pausing here and there, holding the piece of string and seeing how the weight behaved.

The average American, I read somewhere, uses 323 kilos of paper a year; the average Ethiopian half a kilo. Why is it that, whenever I want to write something down in a hurry, there never seems to be any around? So that it ends up being written all the time on odd corners, and scraps.

There is a screen. There is a line straight down the middle. The image bends here, then it straightens out again. You are looking directly into this fault. A dry spirit, moving about, passing through cracks, interstices, sliding round paragraphs of buildings, a blur, in the dust of a photograph. Or, feathered, like an arrow proceeds to its target.

A body that bisects open divides, you pass through, as if through a softening door.
When they raise their arms, these small tufts that grow there, markers; that scent, it sliced into you, an abrupt perfume, the acrid undercutting the sweetness, in the same way as it cuts into you, across the pit of your stomach. Imagined, the tongue, going down to the root of the flower.

"A tin of chickpeas and a packet of pitta breads".

Making love in the heat and silence of midday while the word processor blinks away in its room upstairs. And afterwards, coming away from all that yielding, out again back into the bright glare of the day.

Envying all those 'others', out there, so safe, so complete inside their clothes. If I could have two selves – and keep one for myself. Instead, there is the watching, this basilisk stare endlessly composing its sentence.

‘So we buried the pianist’s body under the elms, and the lid of his piano a huge black leaf. Blameless slept through the rest of the year.’

A brilliant late October day. The Lion of Judah: he stands at the top of the steps beneath a crumbling Victorian portico. He shivers in his colours, inhales deeply, breathing in an aroma of fallen leaves and distant half-imagined bonfires. It’s a street of enormous Victorian houses; a group of Orthodox Jews, the Hassidim, are standing under a plane tree, six men in conversation. I see one man lean forward and make a sweeping gesture in front of his comrades; I'm reminded of some mediaeval disputation. This part of north-east London is where their community is based. They are dressed in their broad-brimmed fur hats, shiny black coats and white silk breeches, their side locks hanging down. One has a cigarette; the smoke curls up into the still afternoon air. Another, with a week's growth of beard, leans excitedly forward. Further up the street, a council workman, a young man in pink shirt and ear rings is sweeping up rubbish. The house he stands in front of is covered with Arabic inscriptions. Before long the children will come, in red-painted minibuses, carrying their Korans wrapped in cloth, the girls all wearing headscarves, for their evening reading.

Opposite the 'Hebrew Book and Gift Centre' I notice a bookshop that wasn't there before. The owner is trying to fit a new letterbox. He moves aside to let me in. He's wearing a tweed jacket and shalwar – baggy trousers. He is bearded, white with a ruddy complexion. Evidently a convert. His wife is seated behind the counter with a child on her knee. She has a hawk-like profile and wears a blue chador. “Yes I'm sure it's the milk”, the young man says. “I don't remember where I read that.” He waves the carton about. He has just come into the shop. He is talking about his baby who keeps vomiting. This man is White as well with a turban wound inexpertly round his head. “You shouldn't give him milk”, says the woman. “You should give him orange juice.” The young man seems taken aback. “Orange juice? Real orange juice?” “With water in”, says the woman. “Or honey”, says her husband. “You can put dill seed in the milk”, he adds, and then continues “I'm sure I've read it somewhere. There's some herb you can put in the milk.” It's as if they are trying to start all over from scratch, but have only hearsay to go on. “Yasmin is much better now”, the shopkeeper says. “It's only when they get ill that you realise how much you'd miss them.” The shopkeeper gazes fondly at his wife and child. The young man seems about to leave, but is having difficulty. “How's business?” he asks. The shopkeeper is non-committal. “We need more books”, he says. Looking at the chaos on the shelves and spread all over the floor, this seems hard to credit. The young man finally goes, and I purchase a copy of ‘Martin Rattler' by R.M.Ballantyne, I'm not sure why. The woman looks surprised as well, as she takes my money. Perhaps this sort of thing doesn't happen very often.

Looking back down the road outside you can see at the far end and on the other side of the main road, the entrance to an enormous Victorian cemetery now gone completely wild. The gates at the entrance are in the Egyptian style, massive columns sloping slightly inwards at the top, with a shallow design of lilies engraved round the top. One evening, I saw a builder's van parked just where I am standing now. 'Tefnut Builders' it said on the side. You see what you see. But it is as if someone has composed this, for you, standing there by your shoulder. Further along, from another of the Hassidic buildings, comes a subdued but powerful murmur, and I glimpse a press of bodies swaying in unison.

Back home I wrote this down and there it lay abandoned it on the page. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. The thing about it is what you have to leave out, which is almost everything. Going out, on errands, pretexts, you begin to notice them, other denizens of the afternoon. A man just sitting in a car, a glance exchanged as of hostile recognition. Looks are spilled. What are they all up to? That’s what I’ll call it I thought: ‘Elsewhere in the afternoons.’

Late March, fractured showers and municipal blossom. Bubbles of pinkish polystyrene blown across the puddles like discarded blossom. At first I thought it was blossom and looked round for the cherry tree. There was no tree, just this scattering of an illusion across the thin, wind-beaten sheet of water. A cut grass smell, the first mowing of the season, the swathes of cut grass already turning blue-grey. The smell was evocative of summer to come, but what bothered me was this; that smell, supposing it were artificially manufactured, on the 'prawn cocktail crisps' principle, and you caught a whiff of it, all these self-same sensations would be evoked, albeit through a totally artificial stimulus, and what would be the difference?

Going into junk shops, checking over the furniture, the books. But we have all the furniture we need. In imagination I furnish empty rooms, cheaply but effectively, for non-existent lodgers. And the books. Here, a chance series of titles suggests a single discarded library; in this case books on Christianity dating from the late nineteen forties. Someone's interests, for a moment still visible on the pavement. Believing I could make something out of nothing going out in the afternoons like this and hunting round.

Dressed entirely in black, and wearing dark glasses, there’s a man leaning on a wall by the main road, standing stork-like on one leg, the other leg tucked up behind him. Leaning, waiting and waiting. But the Lion of Judah? I look out for him on the way back, but he has disappeared. This is the time when starlings used to gather here in the plane trees in a great chattering crowd before flying off to their roosts in the home counties, but we don’t see them now, and above where he was standing the two halves of the sky have closed.

Another Saturday, and in the Turkish shop the assistant was complaining about the beggar outside. The beggar sat cross-legged on top of a solid Council litterbin and, to everyone who passed, said abruptly, "Have you got 20 pence?" That was all, nothing else, no extenuating circumstances. It must have been a couple of weeks later, as I was crossing the road; I suddenly pulled back, hearing a voice behind me. Something about 20 pence; I thought he wanted change. So I turned round, my hand reaching for my pocket. A car swerved and a driver swore and I had all but been run over. Then I looked again. It was the man from outside the shop. "You're begging", I yelled. It was said on impulse, I was indignant as well as shocked. And he replied (or was it my own voice I heard?), in a tone that was likewise indignant, but at the same time utterly reasonable "No I'm not". I turned my back on him and crossed the road. At least the old lady gave you value for money, I thought as I walked away. If I ran into her again and gave her £10, would she tell me her life story?

Copyright © John Welch, 2010.