Blades of grass straightening themselves as the liquid soaks into the soil, the damp patch on my skirt shrinking and fading and drying in the sun.
The brightness of the light.
There was a woman leaning out of a high window, shaking a blanket.
There were some boys over the road having a barbecue, pushing a knife into the meat to see if it was cooked.
There was a man with a long beard, up a ladder at number twenty-five, painting his windowframes, hed been there all day and hed almost finished.
Each frame was gleaming wetly in the sun, a beautiful pale blue like the first faint colour of dawn and it had been nice to watch the slow thoroughness of his work.
There was a boy in the next-door garden, cleaning his trainers with a nailbrush and a bowl of soapy water.
I can see all these moments as though they were cast in stone, small moments captured and enlarged by the context, like figures in a Pompeii exhibition.
The woman with the blanket, interrupted mid-swing, her attention snatched away, the blanket losing momentum and flapping gently against the wall.
Her arms still stretched out, her lips still pursed against the billowing dust.
The blanket hanging down towards the ground, like a semaphore.
Somebody said oh my God.
A boy on a red tricycle rode into a tree.
His feet slipped off the pedals and got caught under the wheels, tugging him from his seat and down towards the ground.
I can see him, falling sideways, his leg about to scrape the concrete, his head about to hit the tree, his tricycle tipping onto two wheels and his attention clamped into the road.
His head kept turning as he fell, and when he hit the ground, he could only lie there, watching, like everyone else.
He can barely have been three years old, I wanted to run to him and cover his eyes but I couldnt move so he kept on looking.
A man whod been washing his car lifted both his hands to the top of his head, squeezing them into fists.
He was still holding a sponge, water crushing out of it and down his back but he didnt move.
Somebody said oh shit oh shit oh shit.
But mostly there was this moment of absolute silence. Absolute stillness.
It cant actually have been like that of course, there must still have been music playing, and traffic passing along the main road, but thats the way I remember it, with this single weighted pause, the whole street frozen in a tableau of gaping mouths.
And the boy from number eighteen, moving through the locked moment like a blessing.
It seemed, or at least it seems now, that everything else was motionless.
The beercan caught between the hand and the ground.
The blanket not quite touching the wall.
The boy with the tricycle a flinch away from the tree.
A gasp in my throat, held back, like the air in the pinched neck of a balloon.
And it all seemed wrong somehow, unreal, unconnected to the sort of day it had been.
An uneventful day, slow and warm and quiet, people talking on their front steps, children playing, music, a barbecue.
Id been woken when it first got light by the slamming of taxi doors, people I knew at number seventeen coming back from a long night out and trailing slowly down the street.
I hadnt been able to get back to sleep, Id stayed in bed and watched the sun brightening into the room, listened to the kids running outside, the familiar rattle of the boys tricycle.
Later, Id got up and had breakfast and tried to start packing, Id sat on the front step and drank tea and read magazines.
Id gone to the shop and talked briefly to the boy at number eighteen, he was awkward and shy and it didnt make sense that he would be the one to move so instantly across the street.
It rained, towards the end of the afternoon, suddenly and heavily, but that was all, there was nothing else unusual or unexpected about the day.
And somehow it seems wrong that there wasnt a buildup, a feeling in the air, a premonition or a warning or a clue.
I wonder if there was, actually, if there was something I missed because I wasnt paying attention.
The silence didnt last long, people started rushing out into the street, shouting, flinging open windows and doors.
A woman from down the road ran out towards them and stopped halfway, turning back, shaking her hands in front of her face.
The man up the ladder made a call on his mobile before climbing down and leaving the last frame half-painted.
There were people I didnt even recognise coming out of their houses to join the others.
But me and the other girl, Sarah, we just sat there, staring, holding our mouths open.
If wed been closer, or younger, we might have held hands, tightly, but we didnt.
I think she picked up her beer and drank a little more, and I think I drank as well.
I cant remember, all I can remember is staring at the curtain of legs in the street, trying to see through.
Trying not to see through.
After a few minutes, the noise in the street seemed to quieten again.
The knot of people in the street loosened, turned aside.
People were looking to the main road, looking at their watches, waiting.
There were people I didnt even recognise coming out of their houses to join the others.
But me and the other girl, Sarah, we just sat there, staring, holding our mouths open.
If wed been closer, or younger, we might have held hands, tightly, but we didnt.
I think she picked up her beer and drank a little more, and I think I drank as well.
I cant remember, all I can remember is staring at the curtain of legs in the street, trying to see through.
Trying not to see through.
After a few minutes, the noise in the street seemed to quieten again.
The knot of people in the street loosened, turned aside.
People were looking to the main road, looking at their watches, waiting.
I remember noticing that there was still music coming out of half a dozen windows along the street, and then noticing that the songs were being silenced, one by one, like the lights going out at the end of The Waltons.
I remember a smell of burning, and seeing that the boys opposite had left their meat on the barbecue.
I could see the smoke starting to twist upwards.
I could see faces at windows.
I could see people glancing up, looking at the one door which was still closed.
Waiting for it to open, hoping that it might not.
I dont understand why it seems so fresh in my mind, even now, three years later and a few hundred miles away.
I think about it, and I cant even remember peoples names.
I just remember sitting there, those moments of waiting, murmurous and tense.
People striding to the end of the street, looking up and down the main road, stretching to see round the corner.
Turning back to the others and raising their hands.
The old man from number twenty-five, the brush in his hand, dribbling a trail of pale blue paint, walking towards the closed door.
Rubbing his bearded cheeks with the palm of his hand.
Knocking.
The distant careen of a siren, the man knocking at the door.
Chapter 2
A taxi drifts into the end of the street, its engine clicketing loudly as the doors open and half a dozen young people spill brightly out onto the pavement.
There is a pause; payment is made, the doors are slammed shut, and the taxi moves away, out of sight. And they stand there for a moment, blinking and grinning and waiting uncertainly, a tall thin girl with a short short skirt and eyes smudged with glitter, a boy with beige slacks and a ring through his eyebrow, a girl with enormous trainers and army trousers and her hair dyed pink and they are walking down the street, slowly, blissfully, their heads full of music and light, their nervous systems over-stimulated by hormones and chemicals and the exhilaration of the night.
A very short girl wearing nothing but shorts and a bra, her toenails painted the same violets and pinks and greens as her fingernails, she claps her hands, she looks at the sanded bare windowsills of number twenty-five, she says look they look naked, she looks at the tins of pale blue paint, the blue spilling down the side of the tin, she looks at the brushes and the scrapers and she says its a nice colour its going to look nice but nobodys listening.
A boy wearing an almost clean white shirt, a tie looped loosely around his neck, he jumps up onto the garden wall of number nineteen, he balances on one leg, he says shush shush can you hear that and when the others stop and say what he says nothing, can you hear nothing its nice and he topples groundwards hoping the boy with the beige slacks and the pierced eyebrow can catch him.
On the other side of the street, in an upstairs bedroom at number twenty-two, a girl wakes up and hears someone talking about the quietness of the morning. She listens to the loud voice, it sounds familiar, she sits up in bed and puts her glasses on and looks at the people in the street. She knows them, some of them live at number seventeen, she wonders where theyve been as she takes off her glasses and gets back into bed.
In the downstairs flat of number twenty, an old man with thinning hair and a carefully trimmed moustache is lying awake, listening to the noises outside. His eyes are open, frowning, focusing on what he can hear. He is listening for tell-tale signs, the crisp sound of a can being crumpled underfoot, the tinkle of a dropped bottle. His eyes sweep from side to side, concentrating, searching. But he doesnt hear anything, and as the voices fade he closes his eyes again, turning face-down into the bed, away from the light, hoping for a little more sleep before the day begins.
Outside, the boy with the white shirt opens the door of number seventeen and the others follow him inside, whirling slowly around, gathering the objects they need to keep them safe, cartons of fruit juice and bottles of coke, bars of chocolate and tubes of crisps, tapes, CDs, cushions, duvets, cigarette papers, cigarettes, candles and burners and matches and drugs. And in the back bedroom they are settling down and they are talking, the tall thin girl with glitter round her eyes says dont be so fucking daft man itd go all over the floor and down your legs and that, and she giggles and turns to reach for a drink and as her face catches the candle-light her skin sparkles like shattered glass in the sun.