thinking about the time he met her properly, besides seeing her in the street and sometimes saying hello, the time at a party round the corner when she’d stood and talked with him for a long part of the evening, and hadn’t seemed to notice his blinking and hand scratching, perhaps because it was dark or perhaps because she didn’t make him feel nervous by acting as though he was, the way most people do. They talked a lot, and laughed, and poured each other drinks and he’d felt comfortable and good and real with her, and she’d touched his arm once or twice, and looked him in the eye without saying anything, and although they hadn’t kissed he thinks probably they could have done. It was there is what he thinks. And she’d asked him to walk her home because she felt tired and a bit uncomfortable and so he did and she held onto his arm for support, held on quite tightly because she said the pavement was moving like on a boat and she said sorry I’m not normally this drunk honestly and laughed. She laughed a lot, that night. And just before she went inside he said, very quickly, do you want to go out sometime, for a drink or something or? And she’d grinned a big squint-eyed grin and said yes yes, Wednesday night, I’ll come round Wednesday night and we’ll go somewhere and then she’d gone in and closed the door and he’d gone home and barely slept until dawn.
Next door, in the back bedroom of number sixteen, a young girl is playing by herself. She has a picture book with removable sticky figures, she is removing them and replacing them, standing them on their heads on the tops of houses, making them swim in duckponds, dropping them from a height and seeing where they land. She is waiting for her father to wake, so she can have breakfast and get dressed.
He rubs at his bloodshot eyes, the young man next door, he piles up his collection of things and squeezes them into a coffee jar, writing the date and his name on a sticker on the lid. He thinks about that Wednesday night, waiting in, trying to be relaxed, waiting for the doorbell, checking that it worked, putting music on and off. Sitting outside at midnight and realising she wasn’t coming.
He pulls the large floor-rug to one side and lifts up a loose section of floorboard. His brother, when he’d emailed him about it, had said well she was probably just so drunk she forgot, that’s all it is, go and talk to her again, she’ll still be up for it, but he’d never been so sure, maybe she’d forgotten or maybe really she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d been too embarrassed to say anything to him about it. He remembers the next time he’d seen her, how she’d looked at him vaguely and said hello and looked away. He remembers how beautiful he sees her, the way she walks, the way she lifts her head when she laughs. How easily they’d talked together that night, the touch of her hand on his arm. It could have been there is what he thinks.
He places the jar between the floor joists, nesting it among the dust and the cables and pipes like an egg, a bundle of memories waiting to hatch into the future. Tomorrow he will pack his bags and move to another house a few streets away, and he is reluctant to vanish without a trace. He replaces the floorboard, lays the rug over the top, returns the bed to its original position.
Today, he thinks. He could go and talk to her today. Say excuse me I hope you don’t mind me asking but do you remember that night, that party? Say excuse me but, really, I am actually very much in love with you. He smiles at the impossibility of it, blinks, scratches the back of his hand.
He puts some bread in the toaster, he walks down the stairs and out into the street. There is hardly anyone out yet, except for the art student at number eleven, and the boy on the tricycle, his head down, rattling and racing along the pavement. He looks up at the clear sky, stretching his arms, turning and briefly looking at the closed front door of number twenty-two. He hears the kerchang of the toaster and goes back inside, leaving the door open.
She opens her front door, just a little, just enough, and she hops down her front steps, the young girl from number nineteen, glad to be out of the house and away from the noise of her brothers. The television was boring and strange anyway, it was all people talking and she didn’t understand. She taps her feet on the pavement, listening to the sound her shiny black shoes make against the stone, and then she strides along the pavement with her fingers linked behind her back the way she’s seen her father walk when he’s walking with the other old men. She watches her feet as they spring between the paving slabs, enjoying the bounce and the hop of it, counting each step, stopping when she gets to twenty because that’s as far as she knows.
She looks up, balancing on one foot, and spins around and around and she can see a spiral blur of sandy-coloured houses and blue sky and streaks of red and blue and yellow from people’s curtains and all the colours spin round and when she stops suddenly it all carries on spinning for a moment and she feels dizzy. She sees a man sitting on his garden wall, a young man, and he is looking at her and smiling. She looks away quickly, and counts twenty steps back towards her house, bounce bounce, not stepping on the cracks.
The man sitting on his wall, outside number eleven, he is drawing a picture of the street. He has pens and pencils and rulers and erasers and a compass and a protractor, and he is drawing a very detailed picture of the row of houses opposite, trying to get the correct perspectives and elevations, trying to capture all of the architectural details.
That is what he wants to get onto the page, all the architectural details. For now there are just a few lines, faintly etched and erased and re-etched, between a scattering of dots and noted numbers and angles. He wants to do a good job of this today. He’s been told that his drawing is weak and that he must improve it, and he doesn’t want to lose his place on the course so he is trying very hard. He begins to measure the widths of the houses, squinting along the length of his arm, looking for the correct proportions. These houses are very different from the houses in his street, of course. The colour, the shape, the way they are all joined into one another, the height of them, it is all different from his village at home. But he likes them, there is a pride to see in these houses, in their age and in their grandeur. He knows that they were built over a hundred years ago, and that they were built for the owners of the textile factories, houses big enough to have servants squeezed into the attics and cellars, houses rich enough to have stained glass over the doors and sculpted figure heads amongst the eaves. He wonders about the people who lived in these houses first, the rich gentlemen and their elegant wives, their cooks and butlers and footmen, what they would say if they could see their houses now, shunted into the poor part of town, broken up into apartments and bedsits, their gardens mostly unkept, their paintwork mostly crumbling.
But still he thinks, even if they are not what they were they are still good houses, in a good street with wide pavements and plenty of trees for shade and life. He measures the distances between the ridges and the eaves, calculating the angles, and as he looks towards the far end of the street he notices that the hop-skipping girl is standing right behind him and is looking at his skeletal drawing.
He looks at her. She looks at the paper, at him, and back at the paper.
It is the street he says, and he waves a hand at the row of houses opposite, I am drawing your marvellous street, and she giggles because his accent makes marvellous rhyme with jealous. Where are the windows she says, in a very still and quiet voice, and she rubs her finger on the page.
Not yet he says, smiling at her, first I draw the walls and roofs and then I will draw the windows and doors and all the things. She looks at him, and at the page, and across the street. Where is the dog she says in the same voice, and she moves her finger across the page to where she thinks the dog should be.
Okay he says, I will put the dog in for you. But only after the windows he says, and he smiles at her. She looks at him, she turns around and skips across the road.
He watches her for a moment, he takes a pencil and sketches in the lines of the rooftop, the ground, the eaves, carefully, hesitantly, joining the marks of the measurements he has made. He looks from the page to the building, he sighs and he pulls at the loose skin around the corners of his forehead, it is very difficult he is thinking.
