anyard i

The wardrobe mirror in their room swings you out beyond the precinct and the swimming pool with all its voices in the roof. The fire station’s across the road and the ambulance service like a soap though you never hear a siren. You stand on the balcony of the maisonette. Look down that road you used to know, and there you are with your mum, wheeling her tartan bag from bingo or sitting in the indoor market at a table with glass coffee cups, never closer. That winter your friend is seventeen like you but somehow has learned to drive. It’s a Saab, just about, a car, white like the inch-thick snow and the windscreen wipers don’t work. But it goes all the way to the Rifleman Volunteer on New Years’ Eve, where a girl in Lincoln green and tights in this weather whispers in your ear. When you lie in the road, it’s summer again, a book, a tan, a dayglo tent and a dozen bands of new to the world music. A joss stick, a lava lamp you take the top off and climb in, it isn’t what you expected, looking out, happy. You wear a jacket with chalk in the pocket. Someone pulls a lanyard into a noose. It’s as exciting as they say and suits you, already your hair. A shoulder bag briefcase with dry markers and marking, you wake two stations past home. In a raked theatre they write down dates, lines you flourish to remind them, how did someone

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