Tonight’s was an ensemble dream. The entire cast disengage from their separate orbits and cluster into the centre, into me, into warm, dark space; black apartments, wine, blue metal windows and black laughter, wild laughter, leaning, smiling, knees and elbows pressed and welcoming on a dark table in a dark corner. Brighter eyes in darkness, like the windows. I dominate, dark and flexible, kneeling up, swinging with palms flat and gripping the table, bumping between them, wine dark glasses grown up between like weeds at twilight around gothic fences, I laugh and laugh and feel their heat and their eyes and the stretch in every muscle, my eyes are slits and my mouth is wide, breaking wider for more and more. We’re drunk, I realize. I lean and fling a grin, careering, around the corner on my right, where they sit quieter, just together, glowing embers. Jacquie and Jen and Steph are white neon statues huddled shoulder to shoulder under the shadows, merging and burning like strands of moonlight shaking in rough water – we forget they should be strangers, they forget each other, even themselves; they’re pushed together from either side of the crowded bench, squashed tighter and closer until they burst into a million stars which stretch majestic heavens into every space, space, space, nebulas and galaxies propelled with the yawning, insatiable vastness of love, love... They hug their glasses, elbows pitched on the table top. Steph’s sense, her pious, impatient face is abandoned by the evangelist engineers; cuboid concrete columns slipping from safety managed cranes, piled Bibles upset rain raucously on geometric pews, they rise and bounce and somersault and turn polka-dot as she giggles and giggles, inhabiting her shortness at last between warm shoulders, rolling, released, blissful, adored. Jen on her right abstracts herself, eyes orbing, neck uplifted as she really was made to do, absorbing everything through white willows of skin stretched bare and magnetic. Jacquie flops against her shoulder, free as corn shaking from her fringe, lets love and laughter liquefy and transport her from her mother’s mother hen and the blinkered barn yard awkwardness – she feels and overflows and the blue behind her glasses is sea spray she danced in ten years ago.
Mum is there for an instant. Weary and wise, more immortal in a rocking chair than we are on our knees. She suggests I smoke to calm myself. She goes back upstairs, a migratory habit. With the scrappy fag-end and a borrowed lighter as puzzled pieces in my hand, I stand flat and straight at the window. So the smoke can escape. But my hands are at my sides and the windows are vertical, unhinged panes, office block eyes from floor to ceiling. Down below, the streets are New York domesticated by Sheffield at 3 am. Waxy piss-pools spread from lampposts; creep over dirty bricks, brown puddles, gutters. Two sadder circles slowly illuminate as a solitary truck approaches. Its rumble never seems to leave the streets, dragging long minutes by in an infinite arrival and departure; the streets too straight and too silent for it ever too escape. The drone is unwavering. A deadly concentrated hum that is both a plea and a threat. I watched as I watched next to Paul at the ice rink, when the hour ended and the machine cleared the skaters off the ice, polishing the oval with a calculated elegance so absolute... that his skill and my amateurism were equally embarrassing, equally brief and unsteady, so much human fumbling. Lighter was fiddly and sharp, and the cigarette unravelled into street-corner crumbs.
