LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, I’d stayed in bed and watched the sun brightening into the room, listened to the kids running outside, the familiar rattle of the boy’s tricycle.

      Later, I’d got up and had breakfast and tried to start packing, I’d sat on the front step and drank tea and read magazines.

      I’d gone to the shop and talked briefly to the boy at number eighteen, he was awkward and shy and it didn’t make sense that he would be the one to move so instantly across the street.

      It rained, towards the end of the afternoon, suddenly and heavily, but that was all, there was nothing else unusual or unexpected about the day.

      And somehow it seems wrong that there wasn’t a buildup, a feeling in the air, a premonition or a warning or a clue.

      I wonder if there was, actually, if there was something I missed because I wasn’t paying attention.

      The silence didn’t last long, people started rushing out into the street, shouting, flinging open windows and doors.

      A woman from down the road ran out towards them and stopped halfway, turning back, shaking her hands in front of her face.

      The man up the ladder made a call on his mobile before climbing down and leaving the last frame half-painted.

      There were people I didn’t even recognise coming out of their houses to join the others.

      But me and the other girl, Sarah, we just sat there, staring, holding our mouths open.

      If we’d been closer, or younger, we might have held hands, tightly, but we didn’t.

      I think she picked up her beer and drank a little more, and I think I drank as well.

      I can’t remember, all I can remember is staring at the curtain of legs in the street, trying to see through.

      Trying not to see through.

      After a few minutes, the noise in the street seemed to quieten again.

      The knot of people in the street loosened, turned aside.

      People were looking to the main road, looking at their watches, waiting.

      I remember noticing that there was still music coming out of half a dozen windows along the street, and then noticing that the songs were being silenced, one by one, like the lights going out at the end of The Waltons.

      I remember a smell of burning, and seeing that the boys opposite had left their meat on the barbecue.

      I could see the smoke starting to twist upwards.

      I could see faces at windows.

      I could see people glancing up, looking at the one door which was still closed.

      Waiting for it to open, hoping that it might not.

      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

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