A far flung globule of spittle looking neptune green stings the pavement on the threshold between his morning door and the outer morning and he is otherworldly today; working on the buttons of his coat with fingers like oak roots taking small forevers to thread the whorled catches through the stitched slits 'good morning' a passerby on this thin stretch of grey raised street grunts as their shoulders touch and he flubs an answer to his state with the same though it is not true. The scum of streetlight froths on his shiny black shoe and his mouth warps an expressive moan. He becomes less than oak more papery thin the tissue undefinable pulp on the cold wetness of the paving slabs. They seem to quake beneath him, loose as dream teeth, and proceed to slide open like recumbent crypt doors as if, were he less prepared he might slide beneath them interred in some permanent personal sewer or forgotten mausoleum.
Both eyes glint at the weak winter sun and he almost trips over the blue cocooned legs of a street dweller, they look upon each other and the automaton of the gritty left hand rises towards him. He checks his mental clock for his hour of lateness, he is already out of time. His imagination whirring wildly for a worthy excuse to explain his protraction for another Monday, so much so he cannot consider a worthy excuse for his lack of alms. He sits. They stare. Placing eye on eye, watcher on watcher. It is a cold day says the streetman as his eyes dribble down our Worker Bee's collar. His head nods. 'I've been on this street for as long as the cement in these roads and it has never been this cold' His head nods. 'But then again I believe I've said that every year, hotter summers and bitter winters. I suppose this one seems colder as I've got no music.' Worker Bee asks what he means by this. The man holds up the wood and wire of what once was a guitar. The brown neck is intact and the rest is far from. In a crash between cyclist and juggernaut and the rider is taken beneath the wheel; this would be the leftover; the indecipherable abject body known only as human by the scruff of the vertebrae.
Care to tell what happened?
The streetsleeper's eyes glaze over, sure; was hanging out here playing a funny number about a one legged syphilitic dwarf and had the tone and rhythm broken over my head by a cloud of angry young birds. What they were so angry about I could not tell. Maybe my caustic troubadouring was too close to home. Worker Bee nodded, our itinerant went on, 'we are in a strange time, not that we haven't been before. I've never seen the city so worked up and I'd be one of the ones to have seen it. I have always seen our country, our speck of dirt in the blue as this clever apiary, more particularly a concrete hive when I'm concerned with London. Lately it's as if the bellows from the bee smokers have stopped pumping and the bees, shaking their furry little heads have begun to wake up to the coldness and in their new awareness, they are to swarm. Now, I know every man likes to think he is living in the End Times or that juncture of history where there may be no following and maybe I am not saying that; but there is a togetherness coming and it is a rotten one; a... - Mobile Vulgus? Worker Bee chimes, yes the nomad says, the cult of the mob.
A droplet explodes at his foot and ripples out in the reflected sky, he wonders if this is the first to fall, vanguard of new cloud joining its kin and the un-kin of grit and sewer water summoned from the bowels of the city. Who could tell of its significance and its cardinal position upon exodus? Would it take a ranger of old or something more absolute? A god in its fat omnipresence perhaps? The sheer absurdity of such questioning makes Worker Bee map his own being onto this fallen bead, where is the I in the dirty flood of a thousand, speeding through space at velocities unknown? He shakes his head. Better to concentrate on his feet, placing one in front of the other, avoiding the cracks as he was habit to do as a child. After these many years of growth, he still realises the little pleasures in his circumventions.
He studies his timetable, the cyclic routine of week on week that he has warped on this odd-morning, his office would not want him now. And maybe not tomorrow he hopes in his secret parts.
He takes the short route back home, down the alley where he is sandwiched by high wooden fences and on the other sides of these ramparts stalk two mad dogs baying and barking at his unseen presence. He pushes on a knot in the wood and it falls through, he looks through and spies a giant Newfoundland panting on the other side, Boatswain against the boards. He continues on with no other thought but his feet till home.
He closes his front door, shutting out the sound of the pushchair babies and mothers on their mobiles singing hymns and screaming at their other halves, he takes off all his clothes and climbs beneath his duvet. The world outside the window shuts itself down, he enters oblivion.
