lemon, orange, lime; the broken, foreign tastes of summer filtered through crushed ice and plastic cups with half-moon lids and squat straws. I joined the queue, and stood behind a pair of tired looking middle-aged women; in front of them, a couple stood with three children, one in a pram and the other two still in their school uniforms.
The music in the air was tinny, dull and I was thankful of that – a man and a woman were singing together, or rather they were talking with a backbeat; from what I could go gather, he had cheated on her and she had cheated on him and somehow it was all her fault. I stopped listening after a few moments.
It took a long time for the family to get their order; I assumed that they were ordering one of the new flavours or something complex, with syrup and cinnamon and all the other flavours that the place reeked of; the parents had their coffees with milk, whilst the children had theirs plain black, and they greedily reached out for their cardboard cups as soon as they were placed on the side. The younger child in the uniform couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, and her hands could barely fit around the grande-sized cup. Before her parents had finished paying she had brushed a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes, and raised the coffee to her lips like an addict. She had a worried, desperate look that made me feel a little sick, but I blamed it on the sugar in the air, the artificial sweetness pumped into the atmosphere. When she pursed her small lips against the small opening of the cup, I could have slapped it out of her hand; her entire face seemed to relax, her nostrils flared a few times as though she was secretly furious, but her eyebrows lifted and her eyes glittered and she looked somewhere between quite pretty and a shivering drug addict – I knew that she’d break hearts when she grew up, if hearts still existed in ten years’ time.
The parents looked tired, exhausted, and the father wheeled the pram over towards a nearby table, followed by the children, as the mother brought her and her husband’s drink over. She had a strong jaw that I couldn’t really see in the children’s faces, but his slightly upturned nose and pale lips were definitely there.
The two women ordered coffee and tea and cakes and a biscuit each and they cracked a few jokes with the barista about how stressed they were and how they needed the break and they couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, but stared at her as though it was her duty to stop them and tell them it was too much and to send them out into the afternoon with a single coffee and nothing more. She didn’t – she brought them everything on a little black tray and they paid with ten pounds each and squabbled over their change on the way to their table, and I could easily imagine them clawing each other’s eyes out over it and never speaking again over a few pounds and pennies – I could imagine everyone in the room acting out that same little battle; from the haggard, addicted-family to the barista to the man with the waistcoat sitting with his back to the door and furiously tapping at a tablet computer like he was caught in some ecstatic moment of raging creativity.
I ordered a cup of tea and she looked at me strangely before turning away to make it; when she came back I ordered a croissant as well, and her eyes turned a lot friendlier then. She asked me if I was taking a late lunch, and I said yeah; I told her work had been murder today. She laughed and looked around and said she knew how I felt. I paid her and told her to stick the change in the charity box, and took a seat by the glass wall, overlooking the centre of the town.
The college students had mostly finished, and some were already sitting on the half-walls that stretched and curved into each other at the marble. As a rule, it seemed, they wore black clothes and let their hair fall down in front of their eyes or had dyed it unnatural colours to flaunt their individuality. As I watched two of them rode skateboards a few feet away, before kicking them up and walking back before doing it again. I stirred my sugar into my tea, poured in the milk and stirred it with a long wooden stick and, when I looked up again, they were still doing it. They reminded me of Sisyphus.
I wondered what Victoria would think of them, rolling their youths away in the same few feet of stone, waiting for something to happen, waiting for the cameras to appear and make them celebrities, waiting for the devil to invite them to the crossroads, waiting for the keen-eyed professional to recognise their potential and offer them cool jobs that they enjoy, waiting for the moment that their parents’ minds would snap into sensibility and they would realise just how important their problems were, how hard their lives were and give them everything for getting out of bed in the morning and grunting and managing not to masturbate when they were in the same room.
I took a picture of my tea at a tilted angle to ensure that it looked artistic and put it through a few image filters, turned it sepia and vintage and cartoon-like and black and white and into a sketch and then deleted the edited version. I was thinking about uploading it onto Facebook, or maybe Twitter – I realised that I should get an Instagram account and amass a huge following and I could be rich and popular and spend my days walking around Wigan, taking pictures of the Hope Street sign and the scaled, metal face like that of a disinterested god that was our contribution to art. I could open a kiosk, in the half-empty market, and sell local pictures and learn to paint and learn to sell and make a fortune and everyone in Wigan would have one of my pictures in their home.
I could hear the man’s fingers tapping against his screen – it sounded wet, like his every connection left sweat on the screen; the modern alternative to bleeding on a page. I glanced at him over my shoulder, saw the animalistic urge on his face, the satisfied look of a creative expressing himself, it was in the angle of his lips, the half-lowering of his eyelids against the screen light that cast a hideous blueish illumination over his features and left shadows like dark valleys across his face. He looked like a skeleton, still riddled with contaminated flesh – an emaciated leper licking his lips and tasting his own rot and his madness turning him feral. It wasn’t too hard to imagine him chewing at his own lips until they were bloody wrecks and his teeth pointed out into the air. I heard the children shouting, and the tap of one’s feet slapping against the floor, coming closer and closer to me before it retreated back the way it had come.
I wished that Victoria would appear at the window – an angel, cast out of Heaven for her liberal views, for her belief that it was harder to live as a villain than be martyred as a saint. She would be my muse, my subject, and I would chase her across the world with a cheap digital camera, or a hundred single-use throwaways from every drug store that we passed – I would chase her from Manchester to Bangladesh, to Paris and Boston and Reykjavik, to Beijing, to Belgorod to a village of yurts on the plains of Mongolia – to the hidden tribes on lost islands and pulsating jungles that have never seen an angel before. I would follow the trail of her wings in the air to Edinburgh and Venice and Damascus, to Rhodes and Aleppo and we would skip out on Rome for fear that her features hung about the faces of the goddess of Love in her ragged temples, for fear that her beauty was mirrored in the fearsome darts and barbed arrows of Artemis; the stone-faced wisdom of ancient Athena.
If I knew a woman like that, I thought, we could make a fortune – wings or no wings.
It was raining when I walked out, a fine thin drizzle that didn’t seem to be water; it was more like a mist, a mist that parted as I limped through it. I could feel it on my face, but that was about it. I felt like electricity should have been crackling through the air, spitting in little sparks from droplet to droplet. But there was nothing but the scent of metal that I all but forced myself to smell.
I passed a pub; one of the pubs that Britannica had occupied just the day before, and the stench of weed overtook the thunderbolt air. There was a man, stood in the doorway, who would have easily fit into that crowd and perhaps he had done – I couldn’t tell one shaven-headed fascist from another. He was wearing shorts, I remember, beneath a thick, parka-styled coat – they were both splattered with some kind of white paint or plaster. It didn’t stop there either; it was on his head, a scar of it, dried, ran down the side of h
is face and it showed on his hands whenever he shakenly raised the joint to his lips. He didn’t glare as I walked past, nothing of the sort, he just kept staring into the middle distance and I remembered how strongly I felt the pull to stop, to talk to him and understand every iota of his being; understand his hatred, his fear, his love of all things white-skinned and shaven-headed,
I wondered what decisions led him there, to lean against the doorway of a rotten pub, on a Tuesday afternoon, with sunlight setting the wet air on fire, and the sky falling on our heads like wet, cold napalm, and the stench of his marijuana permeating his being. I tried to tell myself that he was a hard-working man, down on his luck; that he was dying and enjoying the last of his moments with a numbness that I could understand – that I, if anyone could, could understand. I tried to tell myself that I could die like that, slip away into the night with a beer in a plastic cup and a cigarette and a burning sky.
No hard-working man wore shorts like that; no dying man wasted his moments with that look upon his face, that slack-jawed hypnotism of hatred. Then I