Communion Town Read Free Page A

stiffened with vegetation and the streets seemed unreal. We had slipped into a strange kind of time: a kind that, instead of passing, accumulated. I remember pausing one afternoon in a small triangular park below an office block, nothing but some trampled grass, a drift of daisies and a rusted-up fountain, and having the most curious sense that as long as I stayed on this spot the city would remain poised and safe, not a mote in the air moving. When I passed that way again I couldn’t find it.
    We all did our best to return to normal life – to do so, we assured each other, was nothing less than a principled stand – and soon enough the commuters were again streaming in and out of the ornate arches of the Communion Town metro. The city doesn’t stop, however appalled. But I had a suspicion that the busy citizens were no longer quite so convinced by the performance in which they were taking part. I couldn’t shake a sense of – what? I suppose the fragility of everything we were about.
    On the streets the city watch were swollen with seriousness, their automatic weapons perched high on their chests and their eyes scanning. Life was less convenient than before: it was common to have your way blocked by bulky torsos and protuberant holsters, and to be instructed to take an alternative route to your destination. Most frustrating. I don’t pretend that my experiences correspond with yours, Ulya, but we all have mixed feelings about how things have been lately.
    The watch stopped me once on Impasto Street when I was already late for an appointment, and I swear they enjoyed making me wait. They were lumpish types, two big raw hams in uniforms, and when they saw I was getting impatient they visibly settled down to savour their task. They took their sweet time establishing where I was going and why. I showed my identification, but they ignored it, conferred for a while, then told me to touch the wall and patted me down. I barely restrained myself from asking ironically whether they thought I looked like a Cynic; who knows where that might have led. At last one of them laid an oversized palm between my shoulder blades and pointed back the way I had just come.
    ‘You see that street, sir?’ he said. ‘Would you mind walking down it?’
    I spent the whole night going over those words. I took a late run to calm down. Maybe it doesn’t hurt to be reminded now and then that the city can clobber you whenever it likes, but the odd thing, it occurred to me as I pushed myself forward with my head bowed under the streetlamps, tarmac filling my vision and grit scraping between my soles and the pavement, was that just for a moment I had been on the side of the malcontents. As I had walked away I’d been half-mad with resentment. That can’t be right, can it?
    I ran through the small streets around my place, encountering cars, dark and crouched with their headlights up, waiting, their intentions obscure. It was one of those stifling nights when the lamps only smear the murk and, run as I might, my past opened up underneath my feet: I found my legs working in emptiness and I drifted like a balloonist over the depth of my personal time, seeing straight down to the bottom. Long ago, I felt, I had been the victim of some fleeting violence, of no great importance to the perpetrator but enough to leave me bent and scarred, sculpted casually into what, now, I’d always be.
    When I got home I was glad I’d left the flat in darkness. My eyes had adapted, so I opened the windows and left the lights off while I drank a bottle of beer, listening to warm rain beginning to fall. The spattering steadied to a hiss, spreading coolness through the air and releasing the smell of school football pitches from the park across the road, and as it grew heavier it made a sound-map of the trees and glass roofs nearby. I swigged a cold mouthful and placed the bottle on the table: a bubble swelled and broke at the lip, and a tiny catastrophe of froth worked