[15] The shadow boys are breaking all the laws

I don’t break things down right away, the details can always come later. I don’t look at faces until I’ve sensed something else. That man’s coat … that one … will tell me something when I look hard enough. It’s too light for this weather, but you can tell that a woman’s taking care of it. Those shoes? Heavy leather that hasn’t been polished in a week. Canvas trousers, the cuffs a little ragged, sawdust along the hems. I look up, and see a face that’s startlingly young for the age of his kit: soft and square, with blue eyes, the blonde hair still damp from a comb and touched with ice. The shoulders are broad, the arms hanging down at an angle to callused hands. There’s nothing beastlike about his face. He’s intelligent, but exhausted by thinking. He’s got his responsibilities, but they haven’t crushed him. When he pays for his milk and his salt roll, I follow him out the door. A lot of the time I follow one person to see where he goes compared to the rest of them. It’s how I try to understand the crowd, by seeing how it carries one person. Instead of turning left toward the Factory Outlet, which I expected, he turns right toward the Inner World, following the tram line with me five paces behind. The snow won’t be fresh again for days. You can almost taste the sky when it’s that pure of blue, from the way it lets the sun through unfiltered and turns the pavements a bruised white that purifies the world for an hour before it’s scoured darker by the wheel traffic, foot traffic.

The crowd this time of day is always two-sided – faces walking towards you, backs walking away, all mixed together, molecules colliding in a jar. The man has turned right. I’ve never feared strangers. Not when I’m among them. I have a purpose to protect me from the crowd. When I’m alone and just thinking about this, when I can’t see the faces, it’s different then and the monsters start grumbling. But to be part of the crowd and feel it brushing past me, and to be breathing the same wind and feeling the same ice pellets on my face … No. I’m not the ocean, but I can swim.

He boards the tram to the Inner World and stands near the front. I board the same one and stand near the back. People from the provinces look at the street fronts here and think that everyone’s an archduke or something, and that all the stores sell luxury goods, but then you walk through an archway or a carriage gate and see that most of those lead to warrens of workshops, pocket storerooms. He’s been standing with one hand in his pocket, gazing out the window at the ground in middle distance, his face a sagging mask, all his worries old. He’s looking at the near future, not into anything past. Faces reflect time, and his is about the hours to come. We pass Emma’s grandfather’s shop, then cross the canal bridge. When another passenger pulls the bell string, he moves towards the door.

I step down with him, only two hundred metres from our own gate, and walk up the steps with him past the back of our building. Emma and I pass here often: this street is one edge of an evening walk for us. A couple of little groceries, a restaurant, one or two more expensive shops. The narrow lane he turns into next is full of carts this time of day, and I weave my way through ten steps behind him. I know this passageway he’s just entered though I’ve never walked down it. It leads to a cabinet maker’s. Through there, a courtyard looms, the walls tilting in. A door slams, a lead window beside it rattles, the black lacquer sign overhead says Walther & Sohn. In I go, and smell the wood shavings, and look at the samples they have on display. Pedestrian stuff, mostly Biedermeyer copies. A pleasant room, though, dark but also warm from the coal oil lamps that flood every corner yellow. I push through a plank door at the back and into the cabinetry shop.

No one looks up. Five or six men are gathered in a loose crowd at the back around a desk, still wearing their coats, frost on their breath before the shop stove warms the room. I see five workbenches under a low ceiling, the carcasses of tables and chairs, stone walls hung with old tools. A boy is sweeping shavings into a pile near the back door. After a moment they look up at me one by one.

‘Are you needing work?’ the man at the desk says, but I’m looking at the blonde guy, who sees me for the first time, not that I interest him.

‘I’m looking for him,’ I say.

‘I don’t have any work either,’ the blonde says. ‘Too bad for you. Down the street at the framers’ shop, maybe they’ve got some, if you know anything about that job.’

When I step closer, I’m still nobody to him, but now he sees me as someone who isn’t part of his normal day.

‘I don’t need work, I’ve got plenty. I’m a painter.’ I’ve taken out my sketchbook.

‘We don’t paint furniture here,’ he says. ‘When we need varnishing done, we send it to Wallingers’ on Coal Lane. You can ask him.’

I raise a finger: A moment, please. I’m already drawing his face, not the one he’s wearing now, but the one he was wearing before he saw me. What does he see when he looks at nothing?

‘Mister, it’s a private shop.’ He steps closer.

‘Do you have a son?’ I ask him.

I see his surprise, and then the affront, but in the flash of a second between the two, there’s a gentle look buried deep that I’ll want to remember, the look but even more the way he buries it.

‘Is he all right?’ he asks. ‘Good. Then it’s none of your business.’

‘Keep this.’ I tear off the top sheet and offer it to him. A good twenty-second likeness. He glances down and then stares.

‘That’s a neat trick,’ he says. ‘Who are you again?’

‘I’m a painter.’

I’m working on the second drawing, but this time he’s wearing his cap. From what I just saw, I can tell you what I know – the balance he has to strike between the world out here and the one where he’d rather be, between one life and another. A tightrope you’ll never fall from but can never step from either. Yes, he’s a father.

‘I’ve got a son who’s six weeks old,’ I tell him.

‘Mine’s seven weeks,’ he says. ‘Does he keep you up?’

‘He sleeps like a lamb, for three hours.’

‘Just hope he doesn’t get the colic. What do you want, mister?’

I show him the second sketch, and this time he smiles.

‘Those are pretty good.’

‘That’s how you look when you’re thinking about him,’ I tell him.

‘Mister, what do you want?’

‘Nothing else.’ And I pocket my drawing tablet and leave.

[[ chapter 16 on 21 March ]]