the ones who come to watch
I’d read it took the weight off you, here, and I had a weight, so I came. There were others. You knew them by how they didn’t look at each other — the way you don’t look at someone crying on a bus, except all of us, the whole street of us, with our hands in our pockets.
Most of them ended up at the far wall. Someone had started leaving things there — coins, a little saucer of milk gone skinned over, a folded note tucked into the mortar — and once one person leaves a thing you have to leave a thing, so I left a thing too, though no one told me to and I couldn’t have said who it was for.
A man counted us, going past, lips moving. He got a different number coming back. I heard him do it twice and the second was less, and he looked pleased, the way you’d look if a sum came out kinder than you feared.
The weight did lift. That part was true. I stood at the wall where they say a door used to be and the brick was warm and something in my chest just — eased, the way you put a bag down without deciding to.
I came back lighter. I keep meaning to ring my sister and I keep not, and I can’t think now what it was we used to talk about, only that there was a great deal of it, once, and that I don’t miss it, and that the not-missing is the lightest thing of all.
Pull a thread:
- the film student — the film student, another watcher
- Mr Ashe buys a photograph — Mr Ashe, who sells the tours
- Halloran — the street being watched