I’m walking down the Hilltown in Dundee. It is steep going down, but not as steep as it feels when you are climbing up it. I see a young woman trudging towards me. Walking beside her is a girl chatting so fast it’s like all her words are speeding by like carriages in a fast-moving train. Something about ‘Jenny’s mum let’s her stay up ’, but I don’t hear the rest as I’m already further down the road as a rumbling car drowns out the girl’s voice. I keep walking down the hill thinking of the woman listening intently to the girl. The woman was straining to keep walking up the hill with two heavy looking carrier bags full of shopping. The image fades into the next things I see as I gaze out to the River Tay, just a narrow sliver of it, blue green, only a bit of the big river, but enough of it to conjure up a great distance of space and time and in its bright haziness a sense of childhood – how the world felt so vast then, so vast and so fundamentally good. That seems like a hundred years ago. I breathe in deeply, hold my breath for a couple of seconds, and I breathe out longer. A wondrous calmness returns to me, like childhood, and I grin as I walk and I hope no one sees me grinning. I let myself relish the luxury of being, walking, seeing the distance across to Fife.
Into the Wellgate shopping centre. Not busy yet, but with an indoor buzz of soft echoes of unclear origin. I walk past the big plate glass windows of a gym and shapes of machines and mats stretching into the darkness. There are a few faraway blurs that may be people. Nearer, through the glass, a tall man standing with a bar and weights at his feet, is staring out at nothing or perhaps at an imagined or remembered storm.
I walk on through the centre and pass several empty units, and a few shops waking up. Charity shops, with clothes and books in their windows, looking sleepier than the brighter, wide-awake shops which stock new things. And I pass by a small greenhouse with a paper sign: ‘Plants for sale, ask for details in the office’, but the office is shut.
Soon, I’m out again into the sunlight. No soft echoes here, only the cry of seagulls and the chatter of people passing by. Many people. Sometimes wary. Sometimes sad. Or amused. Kind. Blank. Two thin men, no – a man and a woman, no as I get closer it’s two women, both incredibly thin, one with a track suit and one with jeans and a short jacket, but all of their clothes are the same – with the kind of sleep-inducing dreariness of the saddest looking clothes in a charity shop. Neither woman notices me. Neither woman looks as if they notice anything. Yet, they are whispering to each other.
I go into the café and up to the counter. Around me a colossal chattering from many people already here. It’s loud in decibels but it doesn’t feel loud to me, as I pay for a drink and walk to a familiar seat and table. It’s one of my writing places. I open a notebook and I start to write. There is nothing in my mind but the words I write, but no that’s wrong, because there’s also bits of a world as the words fall one by one out of my pen on to the page and there’s a seagull crying, some might say its high voice sounds plaintive but today I’d say it sounds like an announcement of a sunny day and as I write those words I glance up and grin again as I did on the hill as I see a long queue at the counter and beyond those people there are crowds passing by on the street outside which somehow seems to be generating its own sunlight.
So many people and so many days. Ordinary. Extraordinary. I have long known those words can refer to the same days because any day can feel very different when the weather changes. Like when it’s suddenly not sunny, and a storm appears in full blasting rain mode, and you are in the storm, and you wish you were anywhere else, cold raindrops are slapping your face, like a hundred tiny hands gleefully slapping you, there’s no point trying to hide from that rain by turning your face, this is where you’ve got be, you have to trudge up this hill, on this day, with these bags. Did I remember everything? Bread, orange juice, washing up liquid, razors – not the blue ones that scrape my face off like sandpaper, but the green ones that when I shave the razor glides over my skin. Anyway, I’ll be home soon, in warmth with Isobel and the cat. But no, wait, that’s not this day. It is lashing with rain, but I’m not on a hill and I’m not alone. I am shoulder to shoulder with others standing together in the rain and we are standing at a barrier and there are many of us, we are standing together, and across from us there is a smaller crowd, all men. All snarling. Screaming at us. And I start grinning. I can’t help it. The men opposite look as if they are trying as hard as they can to scream loudly but no sounds are coming out of their mouths and I look around me and there are happy men and women and children and they are all smiling, and some are laughing. It may be rain or tears on our faces, but we are all smiling.
In the cafe, I look down at a page in my notebook. There is sunlight on the page and on top of the sunlight there are words. I look up and the long queue at the counter is just as long as it was. Men, women, and children. Smiling.
HARVEY DUKE 