CALENTURE

There comes a time in everyone's life when they must take a step back and take a long, hard look at themselves and what direction their life is taking.  This moment has surely arrived for Bratihwaite.  Over the course of the summer each day has been same.  In the heat of the noonday sun he takes his position in the same seat on the same bench in City Square and there he waits.  Around 4 o'clock he rises, sharply, as though bitten by an insect, and off he sets.  His path is always the same and always he careers through the city like a man possessed.  From City Square he crosses into the central business district where all the banks and the legal firms and the accountants have their offices, then he doubles back to pass through the regenerated shopping quarter, with its pedestrianised arcades and boulevards, then he heads north to the part of the city where the municipal buildings lie - the courts, the hospital, the university, town hall, gallery and library.

Every day the same.  Tracing the exact route over and over, like a child trying to learn its letters.

What's it all about?

He's trying to find her.  He's trying to find the girl again. 

What girl?

The girl he was following that summer afternoon.

Eh?

Best explain.  It was early summer.  The sun had passed its zenith; the hottest part of the afternoon had arrived.  Braithwaite was slouched on a park bench, doing nothing other than watching the world go by.  A woman laden with shopping paused in front of him to readjust the grip on her bags, the polythene handles slippery with perspiration.  She was red in the face and her light summer blouse clung to her, writing a deep, sweaty 'V' down the length of her back.  He watched an elderly couple totter by pulling a tartan shopping trolley.  In dun-coloured macs they were dressed for an autumn afternoon.  Another woman, with a drawn, listless expression turned and suddenly became animated as she shouted at the two children lagging behind her.  As soon as the elder child was in range, she cuffed him across the head with one hand while from the other cigarette smoke drifted upwards from yellowed fingers.

And then the girl passed by. 

Braithwaite rose to his feet and began to follow her. 

Why does a man follow a girl?

Any number of reasons.

Such as?

He is a private detective.  Her husband suspects her of being unfaithful.  The detective spends his days and nights shadowing her.  He goes everywhere she goes.  Sees everything she sees.  He has no wife of his own.  This kind of job makes him wistful and equivocal.

He wants to rape her.  There are too many people around.  He has never raped a stranger before.  He doesn't know if he has the courage.

She reminds him of someone.  Maybe it's a sister, his mother, a girlfriend.  Maybe it's a girl he knew at school, the one that never noticed him.  Never knew his name.

She's dropped her lipstick.  He picks it up and calls after her.  She doesn't hear.  Doesn't turn around.  He is scurrying after her.  All he wants to do is return her lipstick, but she won't hear him.

She is the mother of his son, the son he hasn't seen this last six months.  The son the judge said should be protected from his father.  Why did she have to get the police involved?  Surely she didn't believe he would harm her or his boy?  He needs to speak to her, to clear the air.

There are any number of reasons why a man might follow a girl.

And for Braithwaite?  What's his reason?

If you were to ask him, he wouldn't be able to tell you.  Without knowing quite why, almost against his own volition, he found himself rise up and follow her.  As she padded along before him, her movements were languid and elegant and somehow feline.  In the hazy afternoon sun her outline was blurred and indistinct.  The delicate material of her dress fluttered gently from her body and her syrupy hair bobbed and swayed across her shoulders.  Braithwaite concentrated his gaze on the fudge-brown skin of her back as it flexed, taught and rhythmic, between her shoulder blades.  He couldn't see her face, but he knew she was beautiful.

So all he wanted was to see her face?

Maybe not.  Maybe that wasn't it.  There was her smell too.  It was something he wasn't immediately conscious of and it isn't something he'd be able to describe, but there was a smell about her that somehow sensitised him to all the smells of the city.  Smells he had always been vaguely aware of, but never so acutely.  Passing a bakers' he became conscious not of the wholesome smell of freshly-ovened breads, but of the sweet, fatty odours of unwanted pastries and neglected cakes sweating in the late afternoon shop window.  The hot broth of exhaust fumes from a passing bus.  There was the acrid stench of slow-cooking, processed leather from a shoe shop.  The rich, hoppy smell of beers sighing from pub doorways.  He even became sensitised to the stale, dry smell of clothes shops - the machine-spun odour of florescent-lit fabrics.   And as wasps hustled the overflowing bins filled with confectionery wrappers, fast food containers, half-eaten sandwiches and burgers, empty drink cans and newspapers, he had to hold his breath to avoid the cloying stench of sweet decay.

He followed her across the city.  She padding serenely before him, flip-flopped feet and thigh-length dress, while he careened after her, ducking and weaving to avoid the oncoming flow of pedestrians, who seemed to act with one mind, intent on obstructing his path. 

She padded past the art gallery, a sheer sandstone façade, windowless, and began to mount the broad flight of stairs that lead to the library.

The library is also built out of the local sandstone, but dates from the previous century and is a testament to the ostentation of Victorian civic pride.  Wide doric columns support a frieze of bas-relief carvings representing munificent scenes from the lives of the city's elders and sponsors of the building.  This creates a deep, gloomy portico that shelters the large wooden entrance doors.  Four massive alabaster lions sit on high rectangular plinths, a pair either side of the steps.  Each has succumbed to the slow violence of the city's indifference, every year their sculpted forms further eaten away.  The once-muscled torsos and luxuriant manes have lost their definition; the alabaster bodies ingrained with soot; jagged claws have wasted to stumps and the proud features, chiselled by craftsmen, are now the dotted eyes and slashed mouths of a child's hand. 

She reached the top of the steps and disappeared into the gloom of the library portico. 

And he followed?

He did not.  Braithwaite hovered at the bottom of the steps, unsure of his next move.  Something stopped him.  He took a seat on one of the benches directly facing the entrance.   Without really knowing what he wanted from the girl, he waited for her to re-emerge. 

And?

She never did.

Every day now it is the same.  He wanders the city in the heavy, dirty heat of the summer looking for the girl.  Every afternoon he pitches up at the library and takes his seat.  As afternoon becomes evening the traffic noise at his back begins to abate and the sun to set, pinking the sky and allowing the torpid fog of heat to slacken.  Waiting intently on each new swing of the doors he never notices how the deepening hues cast by the vanishing sun have further dissipated the wasted contours of the sad stone lions, transforming them into nothing more than pink sugar mice.

[Back]