Waiting

It’s late to be coming round, knocking on people’s doors; still I’ve nothing to do but wait, so it’s no bother.

The dark kind of caught up with you, you say? That happens come autumn, doesn’t it? Dusk’s always been my favourite time of day. Noon is always noon, never mind how long the day is, but dusk shifts around; you’re never quite sure where its edges are.

You want to know what I think? About this place? Why’s that then?

There was a time this place didn’t exist, you know. You’d go underneath it, through the tunnel, but otherwise everything skirted round – cars, buses, people. Later on, you could sneak through the fence, stand in the mud and watch them building. They didn’t seem care about you being there. Not like now. These days it’s harder to squeeze through the gaps, though that might be my age. There are more uniforms, and more danger signs. I guess it’s all that health and safety. People didn’t use to bother so much.

I’m not so sure it exists now, even with all of us on it, and the village and the park and that football place. Even with the Sainsbury’s and the car parks and the school. What do I mean? I just mean it’s the kind of place that keeps changing; it slips out of reach soon as you try to touch it. It’s the river that does it. What’s the saying, you can never stand in the same river twice? Something like that. Apparently the land between low tide and high tide belongs to the queen. Anything you find there – bits of rope and rusty nails, broken pottery and unlabelled video tapes – it’s all hers. That would make me feel queasy, owning something that only half existed.

They think I’m a witch. I guess they’ve told you that already. The woman who sits at her window, looks at the river, and waits. I guess they want to find a story to fill up a space. It’s not like I’ve got bunches of herbs hanging from my kitchen walls. It’s not like I’ve got some bank of knowledge they can’t understand. Maybe it’s because I live out here, on the curve of the river, on my own. Maybe it’s because I walk at night, round behind the dome to the moonscape on the other side, with its graffitied concrete cylinders, its chemical smells, its floodlit, dirty machinery. Maybe it’s because I’ll play in the leaping fountains in front of the screen and not bother about the guards with their blue jackets and frowns. Maybe it’s because I like to wear strings of colours around my neck, and curl my hair into a cascade of grey on the top of my head. Maybe it’s because I laugh too loud. Who knows.

I used to be an actress. Perhaps that’s why I moved here, for the theatre of it. I don’t go to the concerts in that place, but I sit by the wall with its plants clinging on for dear life and the water whispering behind me, and I watch the crowds pour from the tube, along the walkway – their bodies mirrored upside down in the glass above them – into the gaping mouth of the dome. I stay there until everyone has been swallowed up, except for the security guards who stamp their feet, hug their arms around their bodies, fix their eyes on the white walls and imagine what’s inside.

I remember the hush in the theatre just before a performance, just before the curtain lifted, redrawing the line between here and there. I remember the feel of thick make-up over every inch of my face, staring in the mirror at a different version of myself. I remember the squeeze of a corset, the rub of borrowed shoes, the odd weight of a wig. It’s a funny thing, acting. You take a chunk of time out of the real world, lay it on a velvet pillow, treat it like something precious.

And afterwards? What do you do with yourself afterwards? When you’ve wiped off the make-up and changed back into the jeans you bought in the January sales? That’s why I left in the end, I started looking in the mirror and not knowing if it was me or someone else.

Sometimes I’ll come back at the end of a concert and take my seat on the far side of the square. The audience stream in a moving, bubbling arc, back towards the underground. Their feet don’t see the silver words beneath them. I have a pocket watch for telling space. 1924 – pip,pip,pip… They don’t know that behind the curved hoardings, with their pictures of multicoloured faces and famous pop songs, there is an empty space, where grass creeps up between stones and buddleia blooms pink amongst the grey. They don’t know that if they cut a hole an inch thick they wouldn’t be in the same place. You can’t dig deep here. There’s nowhere to go.

The women totter on thin heels, their hands grip others’ arms, men’s, usually, but not always. None of them notice me, there’s no reason why they should. I sit and listen to the ebb and swell of their voices, the rhythm of their feet across slabs of stone. I wait until they’re all gone before I head back home.

Look, it’s properly dark now. Pretty isn’t it? All those lights across the water like boiled sweets. Peaceful too. It’s like being in a bubble, walking round here at night, like there’s some kind of protective film between you and the rest of the world.

You’ve got to go? It’s a shame that, I was enjoying talking to you. There’s not so many people interested in an old woman everyone thinks is a witch. What do I think it’ll be like? In twenty years, in fifty years, in a hundred? Didn’t I tell you I was waiting? We all are.