things move around

The tax guys are unusually industrious today. Mike - at least I think that’s his name - hunches over his desk-calculator, the fingers of his left hand dancing gaily. Often he lifts his head to glance at the screen of his laptop, and in his eyes I see a shining earnestness and a Corinthian vigour; or I would, if I could look into his eyes. But if I am at the centre of the clock face, facing North, then Mike is at one o’clock, facing East, and all I can see of his face is the baggy, saggy, flop of his right cheek, charred as always with a day’s growth, and his right ear, and his short brown hair, thinning slightly at the crown, and the beginning of his right eyebrow and the profile of his nose.

I take a swig of Barg’s Cream Soda and turn again to my own work.

Naturally I can’t get a straight answer out of my friend as to how was his holiday, did he see any family, recognise the byways of his bygone days, and did Shanghai live up to expectations? Instead he tells me about the fresh-caught octopus he ate, ink and all, and the one-legged man who served it to him. He describes at great length the sound of the lightning licking the shingles of his colonial B&B in Singapore, and the rain devouring the streets around him. He tells me that he will have to change his broker soon if things carry on. And all this he tells me without speaking. And all the while he maintains that oblique smile which is his customary expression, a smile which relies upon his eyes, lying in his wide, smooth face like obsidian pebbles on a wide, sandy-smooth beach.

And all his stories lie upon my desk like octopus ink or aurorae or mingled, tangled, dim fingerprints.

Needless to say, my predecessor and myself are not entirely dissimilar. As my employment here wears on, I find my work resembling his to a gradually greater extent. I find myself moderating the rhythms of my workday - my hot and cold drinks, my sighs, my reveries, even my farts - until they resemble what I imagine were his. Day by day my flourishes, my idiosynracies, become closer in style to those of my predecessor. Or is it that I see in his work more of myself? Certainly I admire his work now more than ever: some of his charts are exquisite in their proportion, their intuitiveness, their sense of balance. As I deduce more about his life and what manner of man he was (a very well-mannered man, that is), I am convinced that he and I - Stephen and I - have more in common than the superficial, more in common than two abject strangers, more in common even than two brothers. No, that’s going too far.

In fact it wouldn’t surprise me to find that Stephen kept a diary of his own. For what could he have done, in my position, other than what I do, look, and weigh up, and set down, and, from time to time, act?

Today the elder of the tax guys, the one whose name is not Mike, or rather, whose name I don’t know, remains in the windowless room while his colleague goes out to kill some sandwiches and some soup. The silence is punctuated only by the echoing ktank of piledriving in the middle-distance. I crane my neck and see that the old fellow has laid down his head on his desk, pillowed by his folded arms, his face turned away from the door, his frame rising and falling softly with each breath; to me he looks frail and inadequate for the rigours of the world with its armour of thorns, its attack stance, its arsenal of cudgels and knives.

This new year’s day, soft and slow,
snow falls across the hills
like a veil or a new vow,

deadening distant churchbells,
as we set out on our walk,
to low, dull mumbles

until larch and birch and oak
soak up the last drops of sound.
Neither of us speak,

but you seek my hand
in the pocket of my coat,
and I feel your knuckles bend

awkwardly in search of the old fit.
Snow falls, slow and soft,
thickening underfoot,

as I untangle fingers deftly,
mutter about being off the path,
and let my thoughts drift

like the sough of our breath
in midwinter air;
and silently I restate the myth

that a cool and civil veneer,
like a crust of frost, staunches
faithlessness. Near and far,

snow falls: by evening, ten inches
blocks our tracks from view
and burdens the branches.

My friend has gone on holiday; I don’t know how long for. Chances are he’s jetting out to Singapore, where he may have spent some years as a young man, if ever he was young, of course. In Singapore my friend will eat lizards and gizzards and spend all day hailing taxis with his extraordinary hands. In the rain he will sit under a canopy and drink Chinese beer, and in the evening he will listen to pitterpattering voices in the alley below his balcony and watch American baseball on satellite TV. Then on to Shanghai, a place where he has never been but where, he has heard, the people are full of lust. And then I should imagine my friend will return to the suburb of Kuala Lumpur where he was born, if ever he was born, and find asphalt on the streets, and a blood moon squatting over the city, speared by seventy-story skyscrapers, and a hissing sound like alka-seltzer all day long in his ears.