[14] Schemers and dancers

I have to go farther each time to find a coffeehouse I don’t know. This morning I’ve crossed the river beyond the Great Wheel. There’s a basement on the wrong side of the Dream City’s river, rhum by night, coffee by morning, one more of those, but I’ve never been in this one, with a bar, no tables, and a bench along the wall under a vaulted window so that when I look behind me I see marching legs and when I look forward I hear them. This time of day in this quarter everyone is going to work, so I hear work boots, clunking muddy ones or whispering leather ones. Ragged cuffs, stained leather aprons, woollen skirts. There’s no snow on the pavements, but wait an hour, with that sky the wind will be carrying it, but not the clouds, to the city from the places these people were born. Everyone is moving, which tells me a lot, but it’s when they stop I take out a drawing tablet. I wait for people to stop and then pour their movement back into them.

After Emma sewed my head this morning, I hoisted the circus trunk onto my back and walked it into the studio – a flight of steps, an exposed catwalk across the roof, another flight to what was a glasshouse. I blinked at the light and counted the corners and stared through the four banks of windows. Day was breaking slowly from under a dense blue night, but I will always notice the light here, every moment, even when it’s only stars. Downstairs, I saw she’d arranged herself a display of competence. She’d pulled a soft chair from the parlour to the kitchen table and built two stacks of unanswered mail there and there, bills to one corner, draughts and letters to the other, a pen and a pot of ink at her right elbow that she would move over to the left when I was gone, and on the placemat in front of her a pair of little oval spectacles she would plant near the end of her nose once I left. Yes, mistress, three plus three is six. Her hair is almost under control, in a chignon with strands down the nape of her neck that I begin to stroke one by one. Johnny’s in a blanket-lined box on a chair beside her own, practising mouth sounds. Somehow she lifted him there without my help. He already says ooh and aah as if we really need to know, as if he’s summed up everything with every breath. She doesn’t look but I can tell she’s listening.

I don’t have to ask her what she’s telling herself, the same as she knows what I would tell her: it’s too late for me to start in the studio, though I’ll unpack and arrange my canvases and kit in the afternoon. I can make a drawing morning out there, but nothing worthwhile would happen if I started in the studio here. Unless I’m staring at a canvas with my morning tea, it’s a drawing day. And I haven’t seen the city for six weeks.

Now, in this basement hole, my head is in pain from the sharp echo of voices under the low ceiling, though I don’t feel the sutures she made. I’m drinking a brown one and watching everyone going to work, but I’m thinking about her, and about Johnny – whether they’re safe and what they’re doing together. I’m not used to wondering like that; I’m still learning how to talk to myself about my son. I’m meant to love and protect him, okay, but that’s easy – it’s overwhelming – and there must be thousands of things behind those two that I haven’t imagined yet. It’s going to be years before the little guy can take care of himself. On my own, I’ll always be okay, and Emma would manage in her own way, but when you take love out of the equation and think just about what he needs most, he’s someone I’m going to have to learn and wonder about every minute of the rest of my life. While I look at all the people around me, I wonder what they’ll want with him and what I’ll need to tell him about them. What way will this city want to have with him? It’s a question, and I’m no good at those.

I didn’t baptize him. The doctors told me after they pronounced Emma that if I was going to do it, better now. You don’t need a priest to make the sign for you. If the moment is necessary you can use any water as long as you say the right words, which are simple. But they took him away before I could, the first time I looked away. Then Emma opened her eyes again, and I wasn’t going to do it without telling her. So now, if I don’t want him to end in limbo, I’ve got work cut out.

I’m not going to have any secrets from him. He’s going to know everything I know. He’s going to know everything I’ve seen. I’ll sit him on my knee and just tell him everything any way he can understand, and then I’m going to let him go. Later, if he wants to argue with me, at least by then he’ll know what it means to believe something, and maybe how to trust what he tells himself when he sees something new.

I’m the only one sitting here. The rest are in a snaking line at the zinc counter, collecting salt rolls with cheese and having their coffee bottles filled. Little workshops line both sides of this street, but most of these people will be walking on to the factories. So tell me their expressions, which are tilted towards the threatening factory whistles and going more blank each minute. I know what poor folk are like. It’s a fallacy that rich people don’t notice the poor. When you grow up wealthy, the poor are all you see – there is no one else. Being what I once was, I cannot forget – this is a city full of districts full of strangers I recognize, a cloud of unstable earthbound desires. You sit in a room like this at a certain time of early morning, the moment before whatever these people must do next, and you have to remind yourself they’re all different from one another, and when you do you see that no one at that hour is connected to anyone else. They troop in and form their nervous line out the door, hopping in place, their faces closed, their stares tilted down and in, caught up in their yearning to vanish, and drop a copper coin on the counter and march out without looking at anyone else. You see them out the window, their legs in this weather like wisps of coal smoke in the wind. Cloth coats or loose jumpers, raw wool scarves tied at the throat the same way. Faces of one age. Some look right when they walk, some left, but it’s always down. Even this is a spiritual state, I tell you, but the people who inhabit it have forgotten they have spirits. This is the city that the people who live above it know nothing about – they theorize at best. This hour is what the world will look like one day when the future rules it completely. Right now the machines only grab most people some of the time. Ask me about machines and I can tell you a lot. I know machines – trust me on that. Trust me that I know machines and that I’ll never turn into one or perceive these people as wanting to be machines. It’s only that their human desires are being silenced by a more and more deafening world. They can no longer see for the noise the world makes. We want the world to make sense, to have a system. It doesn’t any more, though there must have been a time when a system was still conceivable or the crowd wouldn’t be going mad from its absence. We all used to be on the same way somewhere, and everyone sure there was something distant worth walking to, some common future if not here. Do you know how much that costs these days? Do you know the effort it takes to remember there’s a heaven? The knowledge it takes not be damned, and the power you have to invest today in preserving a memory like that? These people’s pockets have been picked empty by life, and they’re forgetting what they once hoped. No one knows now which direction is the right one. Heaven is either to the right or to the left, so they pick their chance and dash there, and it’s always their own direction, where no one else is going, towards the next clear field, an open space, a shadowed corner where they can breathe for a moment as themselves, before the whistles blow all at once and the world bumps them off their patch again. Their world is about to be stripped of all hope, their eternal future is invisible but breathing on them, and meanwhile, that steel winter sky is about to collapse. Look around, this hour. Progress has snapped the bonds that would have linked all these people. The old world is dying, and the sad part is there’s no new one to be born. Once the old one is wrecked, nothing better is going to take its place, but no one has imagined yet what the worse one will look like. The imagination for that has never been born in us. A community … remember what those used to be, then praise your luck if you can live authentically in the one we’ve been left with.

Does Emma know I tell myself this? Probably. Women are better at keeping secrets, and then they know all about men because keeping their own secrets teaches them how to guess men’s. I’ve given up trying to guess what hers are. I used to until I learned to enjoy watching her without trying to know. That night before? Even that one I don’t yearn just then to try. I know, only, that she’ll be wounded in her pride that I’ve seen her past boil over like that, and that she has to know – she must know by now – that I’ll leave her be to gather herself before ever I ask about it.

[ chapter 15 on 14 March ]