Walk in the city (Aberdeen in 1992)

Walk in the city (Aberdeen 1992)
by R. Eric Swanepoel

(First published in New Writing from the North, Issue 2, CAC
Publications, 19 Berryden Road, Aberdeen, Scotland)

It's Saturday, a grey day and intermittently raining, but you feel you
must get out and stretch your legs, so you leave your first-floor flat
and walk down the stairs, trying to dodge your neighbour's cat which
seems to spend its entire existence on the stairway, its only
excitement when someone comes or goes, and you're never sure whether
you ought to let it out or not, so you don't and then you can't be
blamed for anything, and you use both hands to open the door - the
handle clockwise and the safety latch knob anticlockwise, and it's
strange, you can never remember which way they go - and you keep the
cat in with your legs, and so you're on the wet pavement and smelling
the cold damp air and the exhaust fumes of the BMW which has just
passed, a big car with a well-groomed blond woman its sole occupant,
and you can tell she's listening to the stereo because her
nail-varnished hands are beating time on the steering wheel and her
eyes are unfocussed and then your attention is diverted by the old
woman crossing the side-street, her back so hunched under her grey
overcoat you can't imagine her ever seeing the horizon, her gaze
perpetually on the fag ends and the gobs of saliva - and why do people
do that? it's not as if they hawk up great big gobs of mucus from
tobacco-raddled lungs because they're often as not just wee islands of
clear bubbles on the rain-wet pavements and they don't believe (surely
not?) in the evil spit gods which the Chinese are supposed to, and
there aren't enough Chinese in Aberdeen to produce all that spittle
despite the hordes of Chinese restaurants, all with their tawdry
lanterns and television sets, like the one across the road advertising
Chinese and European takeaways, and you imagine going in and asking if
you can take away a small European as you are infertile, and you wonder
if the Chinese have the same sense of humour as you do, or for that
matter if anyone does, and so you laugh to yourself and are almost
pushed off the pavement by a couple of leather-jacketed roughnecks from
the oil rigs, all masculine vigour and aggression with their out-thrust
elbows and their coarse laughter and they're on-shore for a fortnight
and have money to spend on drink and women and they bloody well mean to
have a good time and fuck you if you get in their way, Jimmy, and you
side-step and think smug thoughts about how ultimately unfulfilling
their lives will be and then you wonder whether you're not secretly
envious of their lack of inhibitions and clear-cut attitudes to
existence, but then you think they're just as repressed but in
different ways - can you see them in an art gallery admiring a
Pissarro, par exemple? - and you laugh again and walk on and there's a
toddler solemnly counting his three lollipops with that special gravity
that kids have that makes you want to ruffle their hair, and he looks
into his mummy's face with a question on his lips, and you catch part
of the reply as you walk past, "...and wouldn't it be a good idea to
keep that one for tomorrow?" and just as you're feeling that there's
hope for the world an over-dieted bottle-blonde with an orange, sunlamp
complexion and dark glasses and pink jumpsuit slinks into your field of
vision, and for some obscure reason you think of African famine victims
and feel queasy, and then a gaggle of partially ruck-sacked students
emerge from Cafe Ici, in their shapeless cardigans, and they could be
mocking a lecturer, or discussing philosophy or talking about X's
love-life, and they all look so young and fresh-faced, despite the
hedonistic existences they manage to lead most of the time on their
supposedly paltry grants, but you don't begrudge them a penny, filthy
parasites - again you smile at your own humour, and then you're
suddenly aware of all the faces around you, of all ages and stages, and
alternately you feel very close to everyone, and very far away: just
another face in the crowd, or an alien observer, but you will shortly
interact, as you enter Presto to buy some potatoes and bread and milk,
and also some chocolate because you feel like indulging yourself, and
discover that Presto is very full, and in the middle of all the turmoil
and the kids clamouring for sweets and the mothers getting
short-tempered and slapping them and them crying at the injustice when
it was the sister's fault, you spot the couple in love - they'd been
choosing tomatoes but are standing there in front of the tomato stand
completely lost in each other's eyes, and you wonder how long it'll
last (the look and the love!), and go about your shopping, and you end
up, eventually, in the long, long queue and you cannot understand why a
supermarket in the middle of a city, in this day and age, doesn't have
a barcode scanner, and you wait bloody hours while the buzzer goes and
a poor harried junior shop assistant goes scurrying to look up the
price of some untagged item, and the whole queue steams with
impatience, and to fill the time you look at the folk at the cigarette
counter and try to see whether they look unhealthier on average than
the rest, or more wrinkled, and certainly a fair few of them are
scarcely pretty and one's got a cold and another's coughing away
nicely, but there's a lovely young lass amongst them with a great mop
of glossy black hair, though it's a pity about the heavy make-up, and
she's one of the semi-punk heavy-metal leather lot by the look of her,
and she pockets her Regals and heads out into the drizzle and you
picture the bleak home she comes from and the excitement she gets from
her nights at Radar's and Caesar's Palace and you wonder what she'll be
doing in twenty years time, but then it's your turn at the till and the
shop assistant looks very hassled so you smile at her life-worn face,
but she doesn't respond, and that's your bit of interaction, and you're
on the pavement again and heading home and looking at the faces in the
buses and most of them are looking out, and you wonder what they're
thinking and then the well-shaped legs of the young woman in front and
her neat shoes draw your eyes and you smell her perfume as you pass
her, for she's turning into the cardshop, and her beautiful closed face
is superbly made-up and then you know she's either a hard-as-nails
jetsetter businesswoman or accountant-type, or a very junior typist,
and not your type at all, not the unselfconscious lover-of-life that
you'll possibly never find, and then the smell of chips becomes
all-pervasive and you resist the call just to test yourself, and wish
you'd worn waterproof shoes, and you pass the cinema and see that
there's actually a film that you'd like to see and make a mental note
and suddenly a stubbled, brown, ravaged face is uncomfortably close,
"Look, I'll tell you straight, I'm an alcoholic and dying for a drink,
can you give me something?" and you give him ten pence to get away, and
feel horribly guilty, but try to comfort yourself with the memory of
the day you'd a long conversation with one of them about the merits and
demerits of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he ended up convincing you that
they did no good, and you were as well giving him the money, but still
you feel uncomfortable, perhaps you should have given him nothing, if
everyone did that...and you're back with the cat round your feet and
climbing the stairs and soon your wet shoes are off and you're waiting
for the kettle to boil, and you wonder whether you actually saw
anything out there, or just projected your prejudices, and then, for no
obvious reason, you have the feeling that you're entirely, completely,
yourself, and sunburstingly happy, and you wonder whether it's possible
to share that feeling with someone else.