I leave our untidy flat for work. Sarah doesn’t kiss me, she is too busy getting ready for work herself, and seems harassed this morning. Perhaps she has a deadline. As every morning, I walk to work wondering if I should move on. As every morning, I come to the conclusion that the office job is easy and pays well enough. The people I work with are nice enough, though running over the same interactions, sharing the same thoughts, becomes tiresome. Even my boss is tolerable, if a little dour. Besides, I feel a part of that place. Why move on when it could be so much worse somewhere else? I walk past the station where there is a homeless man leaning grim against the black iron railings. He asks me for change. I wave to him and he smiles as I put the pound coin into his grubby polystyrene cup. This time, he holds onto my wrist. I must make some kind of face because he speaks to me. ‘Don’t worry, guv. I just wanted to say thanks.’ I nod to him and smile back, begin to pull away, but he stops me and pulls himself closer. ‘Meet me here tomorrow morning. I reckon you deserve something.’ After walking on for a few steps I have to consciously compose myself. He has brought me out of myself, and I have to climb back into the box before I reach the office. All morning I’ve been thinking about the tramp. I haven’t got much done at work, in fact I don’t remember doing anything. There is a buzzing in my ears. What makes one life more valuable than another? I wonder how he became so far removed from me, when once we could have been babies in the same play pen, born at the same hospital. Does that tramp bring a glow to peoples’ lives each morning? Do they pay him to expiate their guilty wealth? We’re monkeys, born in the trees, but your tree died. Have a banana; I will not invite you up. I place the letter in the envelope and take the pile to the girl who uses the franking machine. ‘Here he is.’ She makes a face to a girl passing by that I don’t recognise, but I know she is joking. ‘Good morning. How are you today?’ I ask. ‘Alright.’ She replies. A smile barely graces her lips and she looks down, unable to meet my eye. She’s a demure girl, shy, but I think she likes me. I hand over the post and she grabs for it, flustered. Her hand brushes my own and she pulls away, spilling some of the pile of post off onto her desk and the floor. The buzzing in my ears grows louder. ‘It’s okay.’ I say, as she bends down to pick it up. I pick up the post myself, waving her away from it. She stands over me looking mortified, poor girl. Some people are so awkward in social situations. I arrange the post in my hands neatly; all corners aligned, and hand it over to her. ‘There you go.’ I tell her, and flash a smile. Her answering smile is somewhat forced, she must still be smarting from the humiliation of dropping the letters. ‘Don’t worry.’ I say and clasp her shoulder, though I may have only embarrassed the poor girl more, she can’t quite hide her awkwardness and laughs as if she isn’t sure if I was trying to be funny or not. She seems too far away. Her lips, as she laughs, contort her features, pulling them out of shape, like imaginary gravity craves her smile madly beyond where her bones should allow. I wish I could remember what she said to me next, to hold onto her last breath since some black hole halted the meaning of her expression. But that buzzing in my ears is too loud to hear the meaning of anything. I haven’t done much this morning but I’m going to lunch now. My boss watches me leave, and I see the way he’s noted it. I think he has noticed me today. I am not in the box. Perhaps I was never in a box. What box am I talking about? Ideas that were clear have become opaque since that tramp touched me. Whatever, I shrug on my dark coat and walk away. The tramp, who is usually there still on my way to lunch, is absent. I had wanted to ask him more about what will happen tomorrow. I’m not hungry; a thick chocolate milkshake will sustain me for the afternoon. It is difficult to make the vendor understand, this damned buzzing is making me deaf. I arrive back at my office building, climb two flights of stairs, hang my jacket in the usual place and sigh. I no longer want to climb back into that imaginary box. June is the first to see me as I enter. She is a middle-aged woman who mothers me a little. She shakes her head, mutters something like ‘tosser’, I’m not sure. I follow her, wondering if she is having a bad day. Then June turns to confront me, her hands folded underneath her large breasts. ‘What were you thinking?’ she asks. I shake my head slowly. I wonder what she was talking about as she leaves in disgust. The next person I see, as I make my way between the flimsy cubicle walls, is Gary, my slowly balding boss. He is wearing a sober expression, as usual, but this time it seems more serious. He stabs his thumb towards his office and I follow him in, closing the door behind me. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ he asks. ‘Jenny told me what you did,’ Who is Jenny? I think. ‘Look, I don’t want to make an issue of this, and I’m pretty sure you don’t either. How could you ignore her like that? Jenny is a person, another living soul. Don’t you understand?’ He sees that I don’t. I don’t understand at all. Gary lets out a deep breath, looks at his desk. He looks defeated, but becomes resolute ‘In this office, we all walk in step, I don’t think you have what it takes anymore, I really don’t.’ He shakes his head, trying hard to convey a deep sadness. ‘Consider yourself sacked. You’ll get two weeks pay and it’s more than you deserve. Now get out.’ I try to protest, but he begins to physically push me out of the office. I hook my hands tightly around the edge of a desk. ‘No.’ I say. ‘No’. And hands are all on me, such sinister hands. ‘No’, I protest, but I see a beak about to rap my knuckles and I let go. The hands hold me in the air, six bodies, but many, many pairs of hands. They deposit me with finality onto a carpet like between-station static. I look up from the carpet, my team stands over me. They all wear looks of disgust that I cannot understand. One of them I don’t recognize, (do I?). How, in a team of six, is there a seventh member that I do not recognize. Or do I? The buzzing is so loud that it almost hurts. I don’t know anymore. Was there another team member? Is this Jenny, who told Gary something about me? I want to ask, but as I am about to, Jenny, for I’m now certain this is Jenny, speaks. ‘There is no excuse you can give.’ She says, as flat and dead as concrete. As one, they turn away, and walk between the flimsy cubicle walls muttering to each other. I watch their white-shirted backs turn a corner as though marching in step, and they are removed from my sight as if they never were. The workers near me stare artificially at their computer screens. I walk back to the office entrance and collect my dark coat, swing it onto my shoulders, and descend the narrow stairs to the ground floor. I wonder what just happened upstairs, but I remember those backs turning the corner, leaving my sight, and I have no wish to follow them anymore. I have no wish to confront Gary, who looked as though he could get violent. And that beak? Was there a beak about to rap my knuckles, or wasn’t there? I don’t recall anymore, and fear the beak could have been a figment of my imagination. What else has today have I imagined? Clearly, I am out of step, as Gary said. For a couple of minutes I stand at the bottom of the stairs, waiting. Then I walk through the glass doors and out onto the street. The street is crowded, but everyone seems so far away. They are untouchable, and the gulf between souls seems insurmountable now. We are stars in the firmament, with eternity between us, each lighting our own way. Ye Gods, these people are dancing! I look to my left and spot a woman coming down the street, small leather shoulder bag, long coat, boots. Bottle-blond, make-up can’t cover her wrinkles, and the grey of her thoughts is apparent on her face. I watch her deliberately. The way she walks -- she flops from heel to toe inexpertly, occasionally adjusts her shoulder bag without thinking. She looks at the ground. She dances, meanders without thinking, to the beat of the crowd, who trace steps around her. I draw her route in my head, and the route of the other people she passes. It is a tapestry. These souls move in step, and the only constant is the monuments we have built around us, the buildings we have raised as a tribute for when we are gone: all this time we have been building tombs. As I walk along, I begin to think that perhaps I have been given an opportunity. The tramp is still not at his usual spot in front of the black iron bars at the station, and I carry on towards the flat that I rent with my girlfriend, treading carefully between the lines of the paving slabs. I get to the black door and push in my key, open it, walk into the shared hallway. I check the mail on the small hall table with the dried flowers in an earthenware vase but there is nothing for us. I open the door to our flat, shrug my coat onto the nearest chair and pull a book from the old case next to it. The books inside it are old too, with thin pages and musty dust jackets. I pick out a sixties translation of The Master and Margarita and flip to the chapter in which Jesus is brought to see Pilate. The fantasy of the book was what drew me to it after a friend described the cat and the wild single-toothed man I imagine looks like my uncle Peter (he died, you know, of a respiratory disease, but used to travel with Morrismen, playing medieval instruments. I always liked him, his humour, his stoic distance.). Scouring those passages, rereading them, it is dark before I notice that Sarah has not come home yet. I feel hungry, and go to the kitchen, where I find the note. It is short and bears little of the residue of affection we once knew. I must confess that I am unsurprised that Sarah has left me, and only mildly perturbed, without understanding why. After eating mackerel on toast and reading more from Bulgakov’s masterpiece, I run a bath. I have forgotten to turn my alarm off for the morning, and so get out of bed. I hear the six-thirty train leave the station and remember the tramp. I wander the flat, hearing the other occupants of the converted house leave for work one by one. The kitchen is clean, my bed is made, and no jobs wait to be done. The morning is not for Bulgakov. I wrap up in my coat and walk down the street, over the bridge, around the corner, past the hurrying train-leavers all participating in the unending rhythm of finding money and wasting time. There is the tramp; grubby coffee cup, dark beany hat. He nods to me but does not smile, and walks away immediately. I follow. We walk for an hour or so like that in silence, past bright red bricks – that hide suburban secrets and lies and the trauma of those who are doomed to want more, yet cannot understand that what they truly crave is contentment -- into less and less desirable parts of town -- where these epitaphs we have raised to ourselves have become dirty, undesirable, yet so honest in their analysis of human need, that they defy the superfluity of town halls, theatres, churches to impossible deities, the saintly plastic façade of the imaginary heaven that is sold to us in shopping districts -- until we eventually come to an instance where the pebble-dash is cracked -- and the truth of humanity is pasted all about; there is sweat in the houses, semen in the bushes and blood, urine and intoxication everywhere. It is not lost on me that I am in step with him, as I am out of step with those train-bound luminaries of a society which I now believe is imaginary. Eventually we gather in a dingy dead end separated from a deserted park by a stained wooden fence that is missing the vast majority of its fence panels. There are four men there, as scruffily dressed as the tramp who brought me. I realize they are waiting for something, and wait with them around a fire in a rusty barrel. How clichéd, but how vital! It has not been long but the sky is darkening now. The fire must have been fed when I wasn’t watching, it reaches above my head. I look around for someone to come from the nearby houses and complain, or for a policeman to move us on. None does. I stare into those flames before me, mesmerised, waiting, thinking that Jesus was just a man who believed that people were good. The next morning I buy myself a coffee in a polystyrene cup. When I’ve drunk it, I sit down on the pavement in my dark coat and wait for night time. These people are monkeys, imprisoned in their trees. Keep your bananas, you are not coming down. The people dance past me. Me, though, I can no longer experience the music, and so the dance is bizarre. I am warm enough if I walk around, and there will soon be enough in my cup for something sustaining. I watch the people dance past and wonder if one life is freer than any other. Now the music is silenced, I can think freely and I can hear my heart beat, and I realise it is all I’ve ever wanted.
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