meltdown hangover with which I started the day, buenos días to tomorrow’s). The route I hadn’t counted on was along the gravel path of the formal garden in the centre of the square with its lunching office workers and lurid flower beds and central statue of William III.
But that’s the way she must have come, because now all of a sudden she’s there and already absorbed in her work: a medium-built, young-appearing middle-aged woman in trousers, a sweater and a rubberised anorak that she has taken off, folded and placed as padding under her knees. I know from sniffing around there that she keeps a container of water and a plastic atomiser wedged between the memorial and the metal fence; she has unpacked spray polishes and bleaches with emphatic labels and bright child-proof nozzles and a variety of other cleaning materials which are standing by waiting to be used.
Even before I break cover and take the first steps towards her, I have a vision of her life and a distinct image of a place I have never known. (Grids of lampposts, rows of urns and statues aspoints of identity and continuity in the vast space. The smell of real cakes through the doors and windows of the bakery.)
The whole of the south side of the square is undergoing renovation and all the buildings there have disappeared behind a false front – a simple-coloured, billboard-sized façade cartooning the eighteenth-century classical façades it conceals. Wide orange mesh covers the spaces of the windows, and men in safety helmets are visible there in such numbers that I feel like a show put on for their amusement as I emerge into this hot and intricately enclosed space. Through the path of the bullet that killed Yvonne Fletcher, through the accumulation of energies, past the place where her hat had lain, photographed but untouched, for many hours, a predator closing and closing on the unalerted woman on her knees.
It is an attitude that prompts a rush of images – darkly radiant, churchly lit images from pagan ritual and the scriptures. Ecce ancilla Dei. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. The Madonna of Humil ity. Hundreds of associations in a few seconds from far away.
But, at this point, three images predominantly: A man stepping round a woman who is on her knees with a brush and a bucket and abjectly imploring to be allowed to go where he is going. A woman looking up, blinking against the light that has just flooded the cupboard where she has been forcibly shut away. A woman bent to the task of scouring a ring of dirt off a bath with the radio playing some hit from her youth in the morning after her husband has set out for the job both of them know in their blood he will soon be losing and the children have left for school. (No matter how strenuous our efforts to put a space between them and us, our own lives constantly invade us.)
There is a tin vase tethered by a chain to the railing at the side of the stone. Wisteria and lavender in a glass bottle. Primrose in pots placed in a tricolour basket. I’m almost there now, almost on the woman, but she still hasn’t turned or given any sign that she knows that I’m approaching. It is as I am about to bring my hand in contact with the knotty open weave of her sweater, register the start of alarm, that I notice it has grown as quiet as cancer.
Amid all the noise of the city, there is an echo, an experience of quietness which is almost African in quality. ‘Even,’ I want to say. ‘Even, stand up. Don’t cry. Forgive me.’ But it is barely dawn yet where Even is living, in a quiet subdivision near a lake. The woman glances back at me sleepily, trustingly, when she feels my hand on her neck and hears the sound of my wife’s name.
Chapter Three
Like many people of my age, I can remember as a boy squinting in through the window of the pub used most often by my parents – a popular local called The Duchess of Sunderland, in their case – trying to piece them together from the morselated images made
But that’s the way she must have come, because now all of a sudden she’s there and already absorbed in her work: a medium-built, young-appearing middle-aged woman in trousers, a sweater and a rubberised anorak that she has taken off, folded and placed as padding under her knees. I know from sniffing around there that she keeps a container of water and a plastic atomiser wedged between the memorial and the metal fence; she has unpacked spray polishes and bleaches with emphatic labels and bright child-proof nozzles and a variety of other cleaning materials which are standing by waiting to be used.
Even before I break cover and take the first steps towards her, I have a vision of her life and a distinct image of a place I have never known. (Grids of lampposts, rows of urns and statues aspoints of identity and continuity in the vast space. The smell of real cakes through the doors and windows of the bakery.)
The whole of the south side of the square is undergoing renovation and all the buildings there have disappeared behind a false front – a simple-coloured, billboard-sized façade cartooning the eighteenth-century classical façades it conceals. Wide orange mesh covers the spaces of the windows, and men in safety helmets are visible there in such numbers that I feel like a show put on for their amusement as I emerge into this hot and intricately enclosed space. Through the path of the bullet that killed Yvonne Fletcher, through the accumulation of energies, past the place where her hat had lain, photographed but untouched, for many hours, a predator closing and closing on the unalerted woman on her knees.
It is an attitude that prompts a rush of images – darkly radiant, churchly lit images from pagan ritual and the scriptures. Ecce ancilla Dei. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. The Madonna of Humil ity. Hundreds of associations in a few seconds from far away.
But, at this point, three images predominantly: A man stepping round a woman who is on her knees with a brush and a bucket and abjectly imploring to be allowed to go where he is going. A woman looking up, blinking against the light that has just flooded the cupboard where she has been forcibly shut away. A woman bent to the task of scouring a ring of dirt off a bath with the radio playing some hit from her youth in the morning after her husband has set out for the job both of them know in their blood he will soon be losing and the children have left for school. (No matter how strenuous our efforts to put a space between them and us, our own lives constantly invade us.)
There is a tin vase tethered by a chain to the railing at the side of the stone. Wisteria and lavender in a glass bottle. Primrose in pots placed in a tricolour basket. I’m almost there now, almost on the woman, but she still hasn’t turned or given any sign that she knows that I’m approaching. It is as I am about to bring my hand in contact with the knotty open weave of her sweater, register the start of alarm, that I notice it has grown as quiet as cancer.
Amid all the noise of the city, there is an echo, an experience of quietness which is almost African in quality. ‘Even,’ I want to say. ‘Even, stand up. Don’t cry. Forgive me.’ But it is barely dawn yet where Even is living, in a quiet subdivision near a lake. The woman glances back at me sleepily, trustingly, when she feels my hand on her neck and hears the sound of my wife’s name.
Chapter Three
Like many people of my age, I can remember as a boy squinting in through the window of the pub used most often by my parents – a popular local called The Duchess of Sunderland, in their case – trying to piece them together from the morselated images made
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