This Street with Looking Glass Eyes
‘Bring me back great stories,’ Andrew’s sister says. She is sitting up
in bed her arms clasped around her knees, blue eyes
waiting for him to sweep them clean of any dreams. ‘Bring me back a big slice of the city in your
rucksack.’
‘With or without pepperoni,’ he jokes. Then he
leans over, kisses her cheek and picks up his keys. He files away the tall
order she has presented him with and head out the door, pulling his parka more
tightly around him as he hits the cutting air. He makes his way along the
street. People are already moving in and out of the day. He heads towards the
shops, walks by the square where the homeless are
scavenging the bins of the homed. They pull out chicken bones, empty pockets of
pita bread; upend a can of coke to see if it still has a dreg of sugar left
inside. He burrows his way through the aisles of the supermarket; buys what’s
needed to keep flesh under their skin and heads back to where she is waiting
for him. How thin his sister, how very sad her eyes.
‘What have you brought me?’ she enquires.
‘A bowl of fresh morning air.’
He curves his
hands and holds them to her face. She feels the cold of the new day on his
fingers and caresses them before she secrets her own back under the duvet.
He sets up a tray for her, cheese from the new
cheesemongers, bread still smelling of the oven it was saved from, some wild
acacia honey. He takes out a fresh napkin depicting a scene of girls and
bridges and blue weeping willow, tucks it under her chin.
‘My very own restaurant,’ she says, as she
plays with dripping bee sweetness onto the bread, moves it around the plate he
has placed before her. Stocks and shares fall on the other side of the city.
Mortgages default. Businesses fold in on themselves while she cuts the bread
into little cubes; stacks them into columns three squares high, playing with
them like a child; pretends she doesn’t see his frown, his threats if she
doesn’t eat. She knows that she is pushing her luck with him
Finally she takes a mouse-bite out of the
wheaten loaf.
‘Where are my stories?’ she demands, lifting
the napkin to brush crumbs from her mouth. So he tells her, embellishes the
things he has seen on his domestic expedition. How there were archaeologists excavating ruins near the top of the square. A woman in a high-vis
jacket was sweeping soil from the bones of an ancient bird with a small paint
brush while a man numbered shards of plates that still held a tracery of leaves
and vines. Another turned to a collection of battered drinking vessels with the
memory of some magic potion. Some day it would teach the world to sing.
‘All those things you can see in a single
trip,’ she says.
‘It’s simple,’ he replies. ‘All you have to do
is look.’
Extract from forthcoming short story collection: Hellkite
