what Wick said at the corner
I came to fetch my sister home. I brought a flask of tea, because she likes it sweet and the houses here never keep sugar, and I meant to be brisk about it. You can be brisk with family the way you can’t with anyone else.
There was a woman at the corner. Not from the street — you can tell, the way you tell a guest from family at a wedding. Calm. She’d been counting down the bin-strip, and she finished the count over her shoulder while she talked to me, easily, the way you’d finish a sum that had stopped mattering, and it came out one short and she didn’t mind, and I minded, and couldn’t say why.
She said my sister was resting now. She said it kindly. She said the street had only loosened what was already loose, and wasn’t that a mercy, to stop being held against a thing that didn’t even want you. I looked for the lie in it, and there wasn’t one I could lay a hand on.
I asked where she was from. She smiled and said she came and went, that there were other streets, that she’d be along Cundy way by the weekend.
I left the flask on a windowsill of a house that was letting itself go quiet, and didn’t go in. I told myself I’d come back.
I’m home now. I put the cups away and counted them, the way you do, only backwards, four three two, and stopped, and there were four, and I don’t know why I went the wrong way round, and I don’t know why I stopped at the one nearest the wall.
Pull a thread:
- Mr Ashe buys a photograph — Mr Ashe, who also travels the streets
- from the far side of the corner — the world beyond the corner
- the one who looked too long — the one who looked too long