IV
He takes a left out of the estate, walks past the supermarket with its tail of people growing into the car park, then follows the road to its end, where he sees a small alleyway set between a pub with a crumbling façade and an empty laundrette. After walking a little way up the alley, it opens out onto a vast green. A neat square of Georgian terraced houses with dignified windows and proud black doors hem it in, and beyond them a cluster of tower blocks peer over the tops of the trees.
All the while, in his ear:
I have been waiting
a long time
The signal is not very good, only capable of 5G, and the speech comes to him spliced and stuttering.
it’s the same
curse,
causes
tree’s leaves to
turn
black?
Despite being tucked away in a busy part of the city, the green is empty. At the far end of the field is a bench in the shade of a thorny telephone mast, with wires splayed in every direction. He has to mount a subtle incline to get to the bench and where it is, slightly elevated, he can see out across the city, see the quiet roads, the cranes frozen in steely ascension, their corporate canopy extending east. Henry avoids the bench because there is someone sat on it. He paces off the path, listening.
Let me free you
I can save the land,
Turn back everything
if not too late
She is wearing a green, brown and yellow diamond jumpsuit and a caramel coloured trench coat. Her boots are a polished black, each with golden buckles on the sides and a green stripe midway up the tendons of her feet. The pigeons flock around the bench writhing over one another to eat the crumbs she scatters among them. Once in a while, one of the pigeons hops sporadically onto her outstretched arm to nibble the grain directly from her hand, before falling back into the kit.
trapped in a mobile phone…
from 2020
How do I free you?
Simply destroy the phone. Cast all the pieces into a fire.
When Henry looks back at the bench she is looking at him. She asks him to sit and he nods. The light is almost gone on the green, and it is getting colder. The voice on the phone is silent. He sits as far away from the pigeons as possible. He slips the phone back into his coat pocket and they talk for several hours, about Henry’s family, about the curse, about the times. As the sun sets, the woman on the bench seems to fade with the waning light. Her outline becomes luminescent, the evening sunlight refracting through her as if she were water. As Henry listens, her speech takes on a thinness, lapsing into focus with his consciousness.
it seems odd to have to tell you this.
really quite odd
seeing as we’ve been breathing
the same air for the last two months
(or however long it’s been)
I really want you to know this.
I really need you to know
that this is not going to last forever.
That just as everything has its beginning,
it has its end.
By nightfall she is gone. Henry sits in silence a moment, the memory of the phone witch’s voice in his ears. He is jut about to leave when he pauses - turns back towards the bench. He reaches into his pocket and places the phone where she was sat, then starts back down the hill.