On the walk into town today there was a man playing guitar and singing Where Do You Go To My Lovely.

 

From inside a bin.

 

Only his fingers were visible, his voice muffled.

 

Somewhere else there was another man. He dropped a tennis ball from his top floor window at my feet, and stared down at me with something not quite expectation in his eyes. ‘I have millions,’ he says, still staring, ‘don’t worry about it’, when I ask if he would like it back. There is a long, long silence, which he fills with words. ‘This must be the strangest conversation you’ve ever had’, he shouts down from some distance above. I don’t say anything, and think about running away. If he has recreated Romeo and Juliet, then I must be Romeo and he Juliet.

 

And yet another man. He sits on the floor. I am looking into the crown of his head, only also avoiding it. I imagine not knocking but walking straight in and finding. Past the full-stop after the finding which is the small lump at the back of my throat when I imagine imagining finding what finishes the sentence. I imagine finding a hot wall of sticky seeping air, and a foot, and two more feet, and another one, chafing and toes flexing, unflexing and flexing like the salty forever backwash of the very shallow edge of the sea.