Bollard

I know I am not doing much of what most would call clear or good thinking. That does not mean I am stupid or blind. In fact I see and hear and smell far too much, especially here in the middle of the pavement on Oxford Street at the shoppers crash past me, reeking of their sweat and perfume and food and breath and fabrics and their computer thoughts. There is barely a centimetre between them but they rush around me like rapids around a mossy rock.

I wish I was a mossy rock, not a hunched man. For a second a cool peace descends and the rough overcoats are surging water embracing me, stroking me smooth.

Then I swallow and taste my mouth and its stink of fags and cheese and onion crisps. I remember in the bus station for something to do so as not to look strange, I popped out for a fag and popped in for a packet of crisps. I did this five times so five fags, five packets. The crisps were almost two pounds each and they were not Walkers or Tesco own brand so they didn’t comfort me as I’d hoped. Thick and brown and it said the name of the cheese on the packet and there weren’t very many and no little dusty  bits to lick off my fingers and my fingers tasted of fags anyway.

So when I swallow all that slime, all the time I spent at the bus station rises up in my throat and I know I am not in a cool river shaded by trees, I am clinging desperately to a stone bollard in the middle of the pavement on Oxford Street and despite the horror of this I know I must be grateful because at least I have the bollard.

The stone is creamy grey against my lips, and smells of exhaust but because it’s stone I know it is old so I can trust it. Just above where my arms wrap it there is a strip of golden reflective plastic all faceted and shiny. It’s like a crown, an announcement of the dignity and safe harbour offered by this bollard.

Without it I would be swept with this herd of baying animals to God knows where. I cannot bear to turn my head and see where they could all possibly be going. On and on, probably, down into tunnels and over bridges and into side streets until every space everywhere is packed with damp flesh, breathing in and out in place.

I must have made a sound or a movement because a young woman grabs my arm with a hand like a flower and leans her face down into mine. Words come out like a series of high pitched yawns. I flinch down away from her into my bollard, trying to condense down into it and escape. She blasts me with a chemical stink of roses and her yellow hair looks light as air and the blood is pumping just under her skin so I can practically hear it. Where do these people get all their life and pinkness. I know I am all grey, grey and yellow skin like an overboiled egg, rotted brown eyes and clothes and sprouting hair from every hole and the stink of fags and crisps and I must not let her prise me off. Even if she wanted to she is much too soft and weak to hold me back from collapse as this stone does.

So I continue to hold on. Eventually the nonsense words fade and she washes away, as if she were a little stick that snagged on me for just a moment. In my mind the stick whirls merrily downstream toward the precipice, all unknowing. I hold on.