The man is a pedestrian and waiting is a fundamental
part of his daily life. He does not drive or ride a bicycle or take giant leaps
on spring-loaded legs over rooftops. He walks everywhere and the rain knows his
shoulders well. He does not own an umbrella and why should he? The wind that is
a typical feature of his city likes to turn them inside out and snatch the
fabric canopy off the struts, leaving only a stick sprouting spines. He trudges
and waits and crosses the road and the puddles lap over his eroded shoes.
Through the holes in these shoes his socks drink the water, quenching their
fabric thirst.
If he had the money he would
relocate to somewhere warmer, drier, calmer, to a place where waiting is a
pleasure and not an imposition. But success is required for money and he has
none of that. He is a pedestrian by necessity rather than choice, and for so
many years has this been true that he often forgets the fact, forgets that he
would exist in a different manner if he could, and when he remembers he stops
and frowns, and this pause is an addition to the waiting. He waits for the
frown to disperse on his face and then he proceeds to the next kerbside.
The cars hurry past him,
metal boxes in which people sit with frowns of their own, velocity grimaces,
eyebrows speeding with their attendant faces to some temporary destination. The
road is a river of huge bullets that will knock him high or flat with the same
result. He must wait. The lights will change, if not this minute then the next,
or the next after that, and these minutes slowly accumulate, pile up, add to
the pressure of the raindrops on those shoulders of his, hunched a little more
every year. The traffic will stop, drivers will scowl as he crosses before
them, some will enjoy revving their engines to make him anxious.
Walking in a city is quite a
different experience from walking through a rural landscape. The rhythm here is
staccato, the ambler must constantly interrupt his flow, his measure, his
tempo, because of the numerous and unavoidable streets full of moving traffic
that must be crossed. The cars and lorries and motorcycles themselves care not
about his cadence, about the pace of a pedestrian, and the drivers and riders
and passengers of the vehicles give not the slightest hoot for the dislocations
in the joints of the one who must constantly stop moving and start again. City
perambulation is not walking in the purest sense. It is striving, not striding,
striving for a harmony that never arrives. Its music is dissonant and atonal.
It is a pain in the frame, a jerking of souls in their vessels.
Our pedestrian knows all
this and resents the waiting at each kerbside. He wonders how many hours, days,
weeks, even months, have amassed in this manner over his lifetime, not only in
rain but all kinds of weather, and he dearly wishes that he could obtain a
refund, have the waiting given back to him, all of it, every moment, perhaps at
the end of his life. And he wishes this so fervently that it becomes a prayer
that actually works. The pedestrian dies, an old man at last, worn out by his
attritional wanderings through the city, demolished by age, alone in his
bedroom one night with the beams from the headlights of passing vehicles moving
across the wall, for he has forgotten to close the curtains, and an antique
clock ticking on the bedside table, no need to give further details.
And his soul passes to the
afterlife, which is an unspecified place, and he finds himself arguing with a
nebulous authority there, an administrator of some sort, an officious angel,
and he requests repayment of the wasted time, the hours and hours used up in
waiting to cross streets and roads, in waiting for cars to take their turn
first, as if they are superior to him, those metal, glass and rubber
aristocrats that he must submit his human flesh to, and the angel negotiates
with him, but he finds himself unable to settle for anything less than every
single instant of the time wasted, and remarkably this boon is granted to him.
Who knows why?
Perhaps he is so favoured
because there is supposed to be some sort of lesson for him in the outcome? He
decides to be satisfied with his victory no matter what else transpires. The
angel has added up all the time wasted on kerbsides waiting and the final sum
stands at exactly four months, two weeks, six days, eighteen hours, twelve
minutes and thirty-eight seconds. These will now be returned to the pedestrian.
The walls of paradise gleam in the distance of the cloudy plain, but with the
tip of a wing the strange angel points away from them. “You must go the other
way, my friend, for the world and life are back in that direction.”
The pedestrian nods, because
this angel has no hands to shake, and he sets off across the featureless
landscape and his walking has an unbroken rhythm, the beat he has yearned for,
and he is using it to return himself to a second life where he will reclaim the
time stolen from him and cheat the traffic that cheated him. His step is
joyous. The clouds swirl around him and then they begin to part like shredded
drapes and he understands that he is approaching the frontier between the
afterlife and the mortal world. He breaks through the final wisps of mist and
at last finds himself facing the border and it is not at all what he expected.
It is a road, an immensely
wide road, and on the other side is the world but he is stuck on this side and
the road is so busy it is fatal to pedestrians and the traffic that speeds down
it in both directions is moving so fast that it is a blur, a scream. There is a
central reservation but it is so far away he will never reach it. This road has
hundreds or even a thousand lanes, each one an awful roar, yet he can see the
remote world beckoning to him, the smiles, the spires, the cafés, the flavours
and sensations he never properly enjoyed while he was there, and they are all
out of reach. With a sigh and a shrug, he resigns himself to waiting at the
kerbside until all his refunded time is exhausted. A cross man unable to cross.
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