London Calling
Evening had coaxed the city’s grey slab into hectic
life. Under a ribbed cathedral of sky and scraper, oncoming night offered
diffuse communion, priestless, unscripted.
They turned a corner and fell into step with a
procession in orange robes, drums whirling. Ahead, a pub rattled to the sound
of someone on a guitar belting out “Sweet Home Alabama.”
In a doorway, someone huddled, chewing on handfuls of
raw minced beef scooped from out a pile of cartons, their sheer plastic tops
ripped open.
They headed for the river and stood for a while on the
footpath. Silty edges slurped on a payload of grocery carts and driftwood and
bicycles.
They watched a seagull pluck an eel, long as the
gull’s torso, from out of the river. With a practiced snap, the bird thwacked
the eel upon a block of concrete and gulped it down. But the eel awaked in the
gut of the gull. The gull’s throat throbbed. The gull hopped, flapped its
wings, as though if it could take flight it would leave the eel behind.
They walked up a staircase leading onto the nearby
bridge. Slipping through a web of selfies that blinked against the skyline,
they walked halfway out across the bridge and found a spot on the railing. A
riverboat docked, was filled with passengers, and slid under the bridge. A few
of the people who’d remained on deck looked up and waved. Nobody on the bridge
waved back.
A child, perched on
someone’s shoulder, stared down at the vanishing boat and swivelled to see
where it had gone. The wide middle of the bridge, with its train tracks and
trestlework, blocked the view. The child appeared puzzled, then was distracted
by a blanket on which were spread colourful souvenirs.
Two dachshunds,
tangled on a lead, pranced and snarled, and their human tinkled a little call,
Come along now, Bart, come along now, Lisa. Then the dachshunds were lost in
the whir of leotarded legs that churned from a roaring group of men in corsets,
a stag-do crossing the sky in search of a pub.
They turned back to
the river. Mist forming on the banks curled up toward the glass and steel
towers. From around a bend of the river, the dome of St Paul’s
gleamed. The dome held old conspiracy with the water’s façade, that Venus
flytrap of secrets. The river gulped. The city was nothing more than a patina
of echo.
Then, slipping through their body, came an impulse. It
snatched their lungs, and what they did next had little to do with them. Ha ha,
they hooted at St Paul’s: ha!
What was it that had passed through their throat,
those slick hooked sounds that hissed along their tongue? The thing that had
ejected itself was no longer there, but they could still feel it moving along
their esophagus, brushing the insides of their cheeks.
Then the shout rebounded. St Paul’s had collected it
and thrown it back. The shout, when it returned to their face, was coiled into
a palm. It slapped them.
The evening turned crystalline. The silence, imposed
brutally and all at once by that dome, was a dare. Fear, sudden and total,
gripped their neck.
A thought slashed through each tendon all at once and
left them hanging onto the metal bar of the bridge’s rail. The thought was
bright and clear and it severed muscles from intention. The thought was simple:
I have no idea at all where or when or who I am.
The river gurgled. The air was thick and heavy. Time
to go. They scurried for shore.
It was unnerving to think of it as shore. Bridges
usually feel a simple fact of the city’s crust, a single scab over dirt and sky
and water, across which cars and buses and delivery bikes skitter.
But the bridge they stood on had become improbable, a
delicate suspension.
Even muscle and bone are figments of vast bacterial
cultures.
And each word is, at its simplest, a company of
ghosts.
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Shelly Harder is the author of remnants, intimology, zero dawn, and pinion. They hold a doctorate from the University of Oxford and live and write in London, UK.