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Poetry
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| Consequence | |
| By alandavidpritchard | ||||||||
| 01 March 2006 | ||||||||
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An evocative slice of life with some deftly-drawn characters. We liked it. So this is how it happens then: a hunchbacked crow perched upon the pylon cackles obscenities at the hobo kicking a skull as if it were a metaphor along the street. The hobo aims for the goalposts of his mind but he won’t score. The girl with the scruffy face and tangled hair, the one who misses her cat, looks up once at the black bird scooping down onto the half open garbage can, and then looks away as the can wobbles like her restraint - its contents tumbling onto the already-littered pavement. The bird, squawking like a disapproving stepfather, flaps to the fence. The boy who lives next door, the one with whom she is not allowed to play, the one with the home-made stolen catapult, takes aim. Such is our scene. Such is the Saturday afternoon sun that it sticks to the flesh like the smell of sweat. Pensioners draw their blinds so they can better watch their televisions, eager not to miss the repeat of a conundrum on Countdown. The hobo tries to justify his lifestyle to the skull while the pavement wobbles before him. It is not a human skull. It used to answer to the name Titbit, but now bears the scars of the boy’s prowess, and explains the dried-on tears that the girl never wiped away. It would be fun to make the skull suddenly come alive and talk back to the human, but hobos probably have weak hearts. The girl finds a fragment of glass near her bare feet, and almost wishes it were a diamond. The crow thinks it’s a miracle the hobo manages to kick and stay upright, the skull thinks it’s a miracle it hasn’t shattered by now. The boy has chosen a rusty Pepsi bottle top. The teenager to whom the catapult had once belonged, had made it from the rubber of a tyre tube he had found at the scrapyard around the corner. He doesn’t miss it much. The boy moves out of the shade to take better aim. He watches the bird. The bird watches the hobo. The hobo stares at the skull, and the girl watches the pensioner drawing the blinds while the sun glares at them all. The skull of the cat which once belonged to the girl now sitting wondering what it would be like to have grandparents has tumbled into the gutter and cracks into five pieces. Five. It lands next to a weathered elastic band which the hobo mistakes for a bracelet. The girl holds the shard of glass to try to catch the light. The hobo holds the elastic band and tries to catch his balance and begins giggling at his mistake. The boy squints as he releases his missile. Had the pensioner stayed at the window, she would have seen the boy dart back into the shadows. The crow had gone by the time she got up to check on the commotion. All she saw, she said later to those who never tire of hearing of such things, and even those who do, was the little girl clutching her bloody eye, and the drunk man laughing with an elastic band in his hand. “Awful,” they’d say, “to have missed the end of Countdown.”
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