Observatory Mansions Read Free

using only his squinty eye, that eye was supposed to slowly repair itself. I do not think it ever did. The other passenger was a man in his forties, stunted by timidity. This man was a poet, he wrote beautiful odes to trees, flowers and country animals which he had not seen since he was a child. He was reminded of them by photographs he found in the city library. And it was the city library where the bus would drop him. And myself too.
    The day of the arrival of the new resident was during school time and the sad bus was full of children. Some of the children were inevitably female. And some of those female children were inevitably pubescent. These girls would usually sit by the bus driver and stare at his hairy arms and talk to him, lift their skirts, make him laugh, encourage him to pinch them.
    We passed the shops, the burger restaurants, still quite new to our city, with their clean plastic signs. We passed thelarge supermarket, one of three we have here, each of which employs an army of pathetically thin, pale girls with peroxided blonde hair. What exotic delights there are to be found there: ostrich steaks, pulped papaya, a drink called Sex on the Beach. En route to my work that day I saw a curious sight, something new. A vehicle moving slower than our bus was blocking the traffic in the opposite direction. This vehicle was cleaning the streets. It is a fact that our city is dirty and repugnant. It is a fact that dust covers every object moving and stationary. This vehicle was in its slow but methodical way attempting to remedy the dirt of our city. I had never seen a vehicle designed to shampoo streets before and neither, judging by their reactions, had the other inhabitants of our city. The vehicle was new, it glistened. People stared in wonder at the machine and carefully stepped over the clean path it left behind.
    After the school exodus and peace came the library. The poet and I descended. There is no darkness but ignorance, said a stone above the library’s portal. And by this threat bent people’s backs and kept the opticians in business. I walked to the door in the library labelled GENTLEMEN, for such a type am I, and behind the locked door of a cubicle, readied myself for work.

The work .
    There is, in our city, in the centre of our city, that part of our city most populated by people with a little excess money, that part of our city where people who are not from the city are most likely to visit, a plinth. A statue plinth. A statue plinth lacking a statue. A statue plinth which once had letters on it naming the statue that once stood upon it. The statue had gone, the letters on the plinth had been erased.
    It was on that statue plinth, in the centre of the city, that I worked. The words erased on the plinth could perhaps havesaid my name, for no one else used it but me. Had it said my name, it would have said: FRANCIS ORME. What was the work that I was employed in whilst standing on that statue plinth? I was a statue, I pretended to be a statue. For this occupation I earned enough money to feed myself, to feed Mother, to feed Father and even occasionally, when I felt the need, to feed a man named Peter Bugg.
    I wore white. White cotton gloves, as has already been admitted, these I always wore, but, when busy at my employment, I wore whiteness everywhere, not just on my hands. White linen shrouding my body, a white curled wig to conceal my not-white hair, white trousers, white shirt, white waistcoat, white tie, white face. I painted my face white every day before work commenced. I blotted out all those little moles, freckles and the swollen bottom lip that signified Francis Orme. I stood without identity, a statue of whiteness.
    I stood two feet from the ground, elevated by my plinth. Beneath me was a tin box in which coins were placed as the day’s work progressed. One other thing is necessary to mention: in my right hand I held a white enamel pot. In that pot was a small stick of white plastic with a wire