Saved by American Apparel

You step into my path, saying, ‘The bank is shit? The bank is shit. The bank is shit.’

Unsure if you’re some undercover Socialist Worker, I pull down my hood and crane my neck towards your mouth: ‘shit’ morphs into ‘shut.’

The closed doors and empty kiosks make this ridiculously obvious. But the world has socialised me to be polite, so I nod and smile and say yes.

‘You want to walk?’

Your story isn’t the one I’m after; it isn’t the safely-amusing adventure I’d imagined would fill this twenty minute gap between leaving the office and meeting my friend; but every other face is glued to an i-Phone, and so again, I say yes.

We walk through the salt-n-miso vapours from Wasabi, Trinity’s latest lab-like culinary offering, swerve around a pack of teenage girls leaping for one last look in Primark before it shuts.

I wonder whether anyone notices us, and if they do, what stories bloom in their heads. Perhaps we’ve been set up by mutual friends and are now cursing said friends; perhaps we’re long lost relatives, silently calculating our percentage of shared blood. Or is it as obvious we don’t know each other as it is the bank is shut?

You ask me am I from Leeds, and when I say no, you incline your head deeply: ‘Ahhhh. You speak good. You speak very good.’

You mean I’m southern? I sound like the TV? I sound posh? I’m far too uptight to say any of this out loud. ‘Thanks… I guess.’

‘You like tea? Coffee?’

‘Yes.’

‘You want we get?’ You nod towards a decidedly somnolent street of shops selling shoes and watches and glittery greetings cards. In London, the city that gave me the voice you claim to like, a street would only sink into as deep a sleep as this at 5am – if at all.  And that’s all it takes to slam down my internal shutters, for the homesickness to swell in my throat, for me to realise it’s just the same old story and I’m an idiot to have thought otherwise.

‘I have to go.’

The sky still holds its watery weight but I lift my hood and power-walk towards Briggate.

I don’t dare look back and I don’t dare stop until I’m buffered by three or four layers of sweatshop-free neon. I’m in American Apparel.

No, you won’t find me here, amongst the high-waisted skirts and polka dot crop tops. And that’s when I notice the assistant, glancing at me through her hyper-straight fringe, as if I am dangerous.

No one messes with hotpants

You were running from that cheating tranny in Gipton.

Or your boyfriend.

Or both.

You were curled tight as a fist at the back of the bus, knocking your knees, tap-tap-tapping on the window on which someone who was here before both of us had scratched the word BOOM!

I was stretched across the two front seats, pretending that the empty aisle between us was sound-proof, pretending to read a book about two made-up characters who should be together but for reasons both tragic and ridiculous, were not – or not yet, at this point, a thumb’s width away from the end. Your words kept breaking into my ears and into my brain and I was no longer sure whose story was whose.

By the time the bus swung towards the once-glossy Queen’s Hotel, you were telling whoever was on the other end of your phone that you couldn’t decide between hot pants or a skirt this Saturday, ‘because I’m gonna show that bastard I’m not like all the other slags at Yates or whatever he said because I know he said he never said that but he did, I mean I don’t remember, but it’s the kind of thing he would say, apart from, he’d say it worse, and you wouldn’t be able to make out the words he’d be so fucked.’

The engine died and the driver cleared his throat in that tone we all know means: get the fuck off.

You sprung from your seat and although I wanted to see whether there was any cheating tranny or boyfriend waiting for you outside – I could already imagine him in a wig and Madonna cone boobs – I wanted slightly more to trace the minuscule emotional changes that would have taken place in the lives of these two made-up people by the end of what was a particularly agonisingly teasingly long sentence.

The only reason I could find for choosing this made-up story over yours was that the author had promised me an end – an end I could feel just the other side of the blurb. Half of me felt guilty; the other half reasoned that you probably wouldn’t want me to hear the end of your story, anyway: yours had only spilt into mine by accident.

But when I caught up with you – and about thirty other pairs of tired shoulders – waiting for the loop road to stop looping so you could keep walking or running or bouncing or whatever it is you were really doing, I couldn’t help smiling when you said: ‘Ok, ok, hot pants then. No one messes with hot pants, not even him, eh?’

This City’s Roaring Edge

You are leaning over the railing that protects us from this city’s roaring edge; I am eating salad with a plastic spork.

‘Can you help me?’ you ask, throwing your shoulders as near to the traffic as your bones allow.

Your question coincides with a particularly enthusiastic gust of wind blowing off the rubble-patch that was once the International Pool and which I wish, every time I wipe its gritty off-blow from my eye, still was. It also coincides with a particularly awkward-shaped mouthful of smoked tofu.

‘Can you help me get home?’

I want to tell you that there is International Pool graveyard grit in your beard.

I want to ask you where your home is and why you decided to pause and reverse your journey away from it on this flimsy pedestrian bridge that hardly anyone uses and we both know why; our ears are flooded with the racket of people moving, moving, moving.

I want you to know that there was a time when I would have sat down beside you and stayed there until the fear got too much. But I am an adult now, and this is Reality.

‘No.’

Some nights, as I am rushing towards the cardboardy comfort of my Ikea bed, I see you; you are still here, still at the roaring edge, the second to last person I will see today, and I smile at the gap in the railings to the left of your head, knowing that your question is no question, that you know something I may well never learn: how to be still.