The absence of Robinson

We sat embarrassed after Robinson had gone. The earnest conversation killed the evening like a slaughterman's bolt and we left. In the rain we found that we were walking in the same direction. Neither of us had the energy to say an excuse and, like prisoners around a yard, we walked looking ahead and not at each other.

One or the other of us would mention him. Robinson in West Street bars. Robinson reading in the Peace Gardens. Robinson sitting under the mirror that now reflects nothing.

We thought we saw Robinson in a car coming off the ring road but he didn't wave, didn't stop. Crossing the Porter Brook, a phone rang, either yours or mine. We looked at it, hoping for Robinson, but the number was withheld. I answered it, or you did, and we listened silently to a recorded message about payment protection insurance. Press 1 to speak to our helpdesk. We hung up.

I saw Robinson again, walking the streets, alone in the dark by the derelict factories and the converted warehouses of the Cultural Industries Quarter. He stopped to light a cigarette by the entrance to a yard under smokeless chimneys and dark windows, mourning the absence of something, memories of a city that used to work.

Hole in the ground

Our future awaits us in the past. Our present doesn't look like the future we were promised. Our past is in the future.

This wonderful hole in the ground is now an old-fashioned road.

Nighttime in the little city

It's nighttime in the little city. A man thinks about the things that she said. A light drizzle hangs in the air. A man wishes he was sleeping in her bed.

Eating a plum in the park

"Is there anything as joyous as eating a plum in the park?" I asked, as the juice dribbled down my chin. The woman didn't respond but I could tell from the look on her face as she ran away from me that she didn't agree, or that she wasn't in the mood to consider the joys of eating a plum in the park, or that she was of the opinion that eating a plum in the park is a joy to be embraced alone on a bench and not talked about, just a silent man and his plum.

I ate my other plum alone on a bench in the park, just a man and his simple joy on a sunny autumn afternoon. The juice dribbled down my chin and I wondered silently if there is anything as joyous as eating a plum in the park.

Riding the paternoster

Nighttime in the little city

It's nighttime in the little city. A single woman cuts pictures of wedding dresses out of a magazine. The leaves fall from the trees. A man goes home to nothing.

Crimewatch

I had run a few clicks on the treadmill and was damp and aching with the vigour of the young man I remain to be. I left my sweaty clothes in a little pile on top of my trainers whilst I used the shower. When I returned, my underpants had gone. Nothing else. Just my underpants.

There was nobody around, so the scoundrel had already escaped with his prize. I didn't see who was hanging about before my shower because I wasn't wearing my glasses. This wretch could have been watching me for weeks, plotting his grand theft, choreographing his movements to minimise his risk. Perhaps it was a gang of them like in Rififi, each with a special skill, working together to grab my precious gruds with the hooked handle of an umbrella and stuff them into a tupperware hidden in the false bottom of a briefcase.

I returned to the scene of the crime a week later, hoping that the depraved rotter would be a man of regular habits. I had written the falsehood "I have a fungus and crabs" on the label of my pants just in case he struck again and, instead of having a shower, I hung around the hairdryers looking as inconspicuous as a large man in a small towel can look whilst peeping round a corner. Sadly, my stakeout was a blowout. The underpant thief remains at large. Don't have nightmares.