overlooked – still he knows, deeper down, that this is the room’s true and secret name. The City Room.
It has grown far beyond its origins, this city. He built the first crude settlement with small wooden blocks, originally the playthings of an earlier generation of children, some of them plain and some painted primary colours, but all stained and faded. Most were just bricks, but there were doric columns, too, and cornices and broken pediments to crown town halls and triumphal arches. Once these were complete, he glimpsed further possibilities, and a dusty cardboard box full of thin metal plates and girders that bolt together with the help of a spanner provided the city with rail tracks and fortifications.
The game must have lasted weeks – certainly as long as he can remember – but his grandmother has not objected. She doesn’t understand the importance of the city, of course. He would try and explain if he could, but instinct tells him these things can’t be communicated. He knows with absolute clarity that the model city is far more remarkable than anyone else can understand. It must in fact be more important than anything else in the world, but he can never admit it, because when his grandmother or someone else looks into the room and sees his creation spread across the floor, it makes him squirm. Only when he is alone can his mind move through the streets and buildings he’s created, imagining the textures of their reality. This gives him a strange pleasure. He likes to perch on the floor, barely able to keep still, and hold it whole in his mind, letting the image deepen. What secrets. He floats in a warm capsule of possibility.
He has not grown; he is slight and tender, not like the boy from upstairs who has a greasy face and a forehead bristling with stiff fibres, and who would kick the city into rubble if he knew it was here.
He remembers a time in the upstairs boy’s room. The window looked into the shared back garden, where the frame for a swing drowned in weeds and a tract of rough brown grass ran down to a decrepit fence. The light out there was failing. The bonfire had been smouldering all day, its gymnasts of smoke somersaulting upward through the branches of the trees. In the room no one had turned the lights on. He could sense the upstairs boy’s father moving around downstairs somewhere, but he did not know where his grandmother was. He had to pretend not to be disgusted at the meaty smell of the room. Meaningless objects, strange furniture. The bed was not like his bed, and the toys were fakes intended to deceive him, manufactured evidence of a world that didn’t exist. There were comics as well but they were too strange to look at directly.
The upstairs boy, who had a large yellow spot in the back of his neck, collapsed on the floor, then got up again to kick over a chair, and came close, making gluey clicking noises. Nonchalantly, an arm grappled around his neck, fingers thrust themselves into his hair and a leg hooked behind his knees to try and bring him down to the floor. He had to fight off these attempts while pretending not to have noticed them. Time was strange in here. He knew that the scene was in some way permanent, pinched out of sequence: it is still going on, somewhere, in the inturned landscape of houses, waste grounds and streets where memory begins. In that loop of unevent he stands in the room with the upstairs boy prowling and grabbing, and a presence moving around downstairs, and the muddy, darkening garden lying under the window.
The city has spread and mutated, using whatever materials it could find. Roads from strips of cardboard, expanded polystyrene packaging for brutalist architecture. Once, abandoned beside some bins, he found three beautiful bricks of weathered yellow clay. They looked soft enough to crumble, but they chimed when they touched. They were rough and solid in the hands and two together were almost too heavy to lift. His grandmother helped
It has grown far beyond its origins, this city. He built the first crude settlement with small wooden blocks, originally the playthings of an earlier generation of children, some of them plain and some painted primary colours, but all stained and faded. Most were just bricks, but there were doric columns, too, and cornices and broken pediments to crown town halls and triumphal arches. Once these were complete, he glimpsed further possibilities, and a dusty cardboard box full of thin metal plates and girders that bolt together with the help of a spanner provided the city with rail tracks and fortifications.
The game must have lasted weeks – certainly as long as he can remember – but his grandmother has not objected. She doesn’t understand the importance of the city, of course. He would try and explain if he could, but instinct tells him these things can’t be communicated. He knows with absolute clarity that the model city is far more remarkable than anyone else can understand. It must in fact be more important than anything else in the world, but he can never admit it, because when his grandmother or someone else looks into the room and sees his creation spread across the floor, it makes him squirm. Only when he is alone can his mind move through the streets and buildings he’s created, imagining the textures of their reality. This gives him a strange pleasure. He likes to perch on the floor, barely able to keep still, and hold it whole in his mind, letting the image deepen. What secrets. He floats in a warm capsule of possibility.
He has not grown; he is slight and tender, not like the boy from upstairs who has a greasy face and a forehead bristling with stiff fibres, and who would kick the city into rubble if he knew it was here.
He remembers a time in the upstairs boy’s room. The window looked into the shared back garden, where the frame for a swing drowned in weeds and a tract of rough brown grass ran down to a decrepit fence. The light out there was failing. The bonfire had been smouldering all day, its gymnasts of smoke somersaulting upward through the branches of the trees. In the room no one had turned the lights on. He could sense the upstairs boy’s father moving around downstairs somewhere, but he did not know where his grandmother was. He had to pretend not to be disgusted at the meaty smell of the room. Meaningless objects, strange furniture. The bed was not like his bed, and the toys were fakes intended to deceive him, manufactured evidence of a world that didn’t exist. There were comics as well but they were too strange to look at directly.
The upstairs boy, who had a large yellow spot in the back of his neck, collapsed on the floor, then got up again to kick over a chair, and came close, making gluey clicking noises. Nonchalantly, an arm grappled around his neck, fingers thrust themselves into his hair and a leg hooked behind his knees to try and bring him down to the floor. He had to fight off these attempts while pretending not to have noticed them. Time was strange in here. He knew that the scene was in some way permanent, pinched out of sequence: it is still going on, somewhere, in the inturned landscape of houses, waste grounds and streets where memory begins. In that loop of unevent he stands in the room with the upstairs boy prowling and grabbing, and a presence moving around downstairs, and the muddy, darkening garden lying under the window.
The city has spread and mutated, using whatever materials it could find. Roads from strips of cardboard, expanded polystyrene packaging for brutalist architecture. Once, abandoned beside some bins, he found three beautiful bricks of weathered yellow clay. They looked soft enough to crumble, but they chimed when they touched. They were rough and solid in the hands and two together were almost too heavy to lift. His grandmother helped
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