Fiction
Living Thread / Saskia Marisha Fischer
Image by the author.
Fuck abjectness, I say, pulling the door towards me.
And fuck the dank of cramped limbs, I tell the lock as I turn the key.
I’m off out to commune with the city, soak up some free love. I’m gonna get lost, dissolved in live currents of bodies desire energy.
I bounce down the two flights of stairs and out of my building.
Once on the common, I remember that things aren’t how they used to be. Not at all. I worry about what I might find, out in the world again. Three days in the cocoon have dulled the brittle angst that drove me in, fleeing the new constellation of rules, responses, and rage. I look back at my block, clutching the gate. The trees on the estate wink encouragingly in the midday sun. Ok, onwards! I decide to walk to the park, see what’s happening.
I head towards the grass’s edge, to an enormous London plane. In the south, midsummer and the plants in the city’s few parks have already made their way from spring bounce and sparkle to kneeling shades of beige. Do I miss the cityscapes of home, now that I know such a luxury of green? Not the scarcity of sky from broken pavements that track through urban canyons. Nor the rubbish rich streets in which my body sunken resists, insists on stretching away from asphalt to light. Oh that light! So promiscuous on the upper floors. The apartment buildings, their residents terraced from basement to loft in strict patterns of skin, income, and origin.
I look around. Here there are trees everywhere and open spaces; now is the time of deepest green. I stumble on the plane’s web of ground limbs, and stop. The grass across from me is pocked with clumps of young, excited bodies, naked limbs and painted eyes. At first contact, the scene repels and attracts. It rushes all thought away, all prior state, with its throbbing, too bright symphony of laughter and leer, of beats and bobbing blank heads, eyes shielded from the light of the day after the night that still hasn’t ended.
Leaning against the tree, I let the chatter come to me. I’m on the hunt for curiosity, for points of affinity to cook some fire back into me. I slip with ease into my pose as lurker, though I do feel a little freaked by the unmodulatable volume of it all. Here, it’s as if there were no record of the years to come, of the cycle’s inevitable turn and the season of falling and decay. It’ll be midsummer and maximum power right until they’re arching over their zimmers. How many of us will make it that far? A travelling beam of refracted sunlight slows at my face. Agreeing to a pause, my eyes, blinded, shut to all thought. An arm swings into mine and urges them open, a body passing by. I grin as I see that it belongs not to a child, limbs wild in play, but to a middle-aged woman. She skips and sways around her friend and they curl down the path. I burrow into the echo left by their laughter.
Atoms lit and tingling, I turn for a first nibble at the group nearest me. Around ten people in their late twenties, early thirties. Most of them white, likely wealthy given the area’s general demographic these days. They are loud, though their speakers boom, making it hard to decipher their words. So I flit from the surface of one figure to that of another, absorbing texture, posture, and movement. They’ve been up all night and are still having a good time. Some look dimmed in the haze of the comedown. Others, passing up the joint, feel more fragile, eyes bulging too keenly out, words and gestures jerking this way and that. Every now and then one or more of them crackle into laughter. I pick out the words bang, flow, and biscuit, but not the sentences they are delivered in. Minutes pass, perhaps an hour, with my attention drifting to and around this closest clump.
And then my shoulder twinges in complaint. I’ve been slouching for too long. With a hand on the tree I straighten myself. Roll my head back till eyes can follow its trunk all the way up, losing focus in layers of leaf, bough and blue, a perfect patchwork. Thick tears suddenly pool in my eyes, pulse down my cheeks as I return to the ground, now washed in grief. I am filled with sorrow for the beauty of the tree. For the fragility of the webs I imagine stitched of living threads between our feet, connecting mine with its and every living being’s. Fine mesh weaving its layer of the earth’s thick carpet. Feeding and holding us, mesh into which we dissolve when it’s our time to rejoin our busy roots. Cheek to bark, I stretch out my arms and squeeze its trunk.
Oy oy! Hello there Ms. Treehugger! yells one of my group.
There’s women and children here. If you please, bit of consideration, snatch of decorum!
Little farts of bully cackle splatter round his pack.
That’s a very public way to be conducting one’s romances wouldn’t you say? I mean, this day and age and all that.
I let go of the tree. My hand in its safe touch, I turn to look at them. I can’t see the yeller who’s blocked by a young woman wearing leather and shades. His voice is nasal and harsh, his accent of those who have it all at their disposal: sex, cash, shelter, status, health. And yes, there he sits on this fine summer day, in a copse of women, I see only one other man.
I’ve no idea how to respond. It’s been days since I vocalised sound; how long since I kissed a string of witty words into the air? Declining the invitation, I continue to stare in their direction, hoping to get a look at him. My blankness seems to unsettle them. Fiddling, they fill the quiet left by voices held waiting. A couple turn for a quick glance in my direction, then pivot back without speaking.
Now again he comes at me: Ms. Treehugger!
Like a comedy actor, clears his throat: May I kindly request that you be moving on, say, oh, how’s about roundabout now? And while we’re on the topic of your sudden proximity, might I be so bold as to enquire what the fuck you’re staring at? And are you alright mate?
A smile opens my face, but without words, which I won’t now find, it only crowns my unwelcome presence. The shuffling continues, the chatter remains suspended with the exception of a few logistical exchanges. The beat, now spare, pearls the silence and the distances between them.
He turns back to the group, lights another cigarette; I relax. Hands in pockets, lean back against the tree, one foot on the ground, the other bark bound. I rejoin my musings, asking: what is it that’s missing here? There is a lack I sense but can’t locate. Though we have entered the age of Be Smart//Be Separate, they are, like most of the others around them, sitting at pre-BS distances from each other. One woman’s draped across another and the yeller, who I now see, has a woman’s head in his lap, a cigarette scores the air above it while his other hand lies on his neighbour’s thigh. Here is physical intimacy, the flow and comfort of many hours spent together.
One of the women almost shouts at the opposite end of the circle, can someone pass me the whiskey? This reminds me of my coffee which I take out of my bag. She has pricked the discomfort and released, attention settles in several bubbles of conversation. Someone gets up and stops the music mid-track, claims it’s doing their head in. Only the yeller appears not to slacken, his movements impatient, troubled.
Something falls from the tree above them, knocks his head, jumps into the grass behind him.
What the—what was that? What the fuck was that?
It was a large twig mate, says the head from his lap, utterly relaxed. Then, with a little energy laced with malice: I saw it come for you, shoot out the tree. Bam! She smacks her hands in front of his nose.
Well thanks for the bloody warning yeah, thanks a lot. I’ll remember that. Abruptly retracts his leg, evicting the head.
Ouch! she shouts. Sitting up, rubs her scalp, fluffs up dry blue hair.
Well, I need to get going, she says, standing, got a lot on. Stumbling amongst limbs and cans, she gathers her things into a large leather bag, then pulls down her skirt, lets out a quiet bye and walks off towards the market.
I watch the knot unravel. A low mutter radiates from each person as they stir, rise and stoop to pick up their stuff, invoking Sunday chores and obligations. In five minutes, they are all, except the yeller, gone. He sits now in a pool of bottles, squashed cans, empty wrappers, a cigarette butt floating here and there.
Unmoored, his drunkenness blossoms. Arm buckles and he lets himself fall back onto the ground, forces a lungful of air out his mouth. I fix on his gaze, unsteady, which is held jealously away from me. A moment later, he sits up again. This time, stares straight in my direction. Once his eyes meet mine, they slip down to the side, then straight back up. He shoots the back of his hand across his mouth.
I fold my arms behind my back and look down the long row of planes that leads to the market. Dwarfed on the path beneath them, a sunflecked procession of people and dogs, bikes and buggies, endless stream moving to and from, beside, into and beyond.
These trees are two hundred years old, my voice announces.
Can you imagine the things they’ve seen, the picnics and fights and breakups? They must’ve shuddered more than once with the crack of lightning on brick or bullet against bone, say in one of those fierce demos that were happening at the end of the time before. And what about further back, during the last century’s wars? I learned that this whole area was pocked with bombs, but seems as though the trees held on. What a lot of things to have lived and to store in the meat of your body. I pause, take a breath. He’s no longer looking at me, his head has drooped to the side, his eyes half shut. What propels me, is the source of my urgency? I quiet the habit of digging for a name and go on, pitch tightening.
And in the era of the commons, before the fences and roads and houses locked all green into park or garden boxes? Before even the trees. There would have been sheep here and foxes, fruit bushes and hawkers. If—my breath quits. In the grass behind him, I pick up a faint movement. Cans are tinkling as they roll into each other and crumpled paper, pushed aside, surfs the blades. The twig, keeping low to the ground, is cutting a path towards my interlocutor.
Time to go. I bend forwards and down, sway from side to side letting fingers caress the ground. A foil wrapper flashes white; the twig, upright, now wears a metal bracelet. I rise, released, and turn towards the prostrate yeller. The twig advances. A few centimetres from the hand that holds a half-smoked rollie, it stops.
I start walking away, towards the market which is closing. I hear him mumble: Oh really? Is that so? Absolutely fascinating I’m sure.