How many words do the Eskimos have for snow? How many do the English have for grey? Not enough. It seems absurd to call the air grey although it tastes grey, it smells grey. It's heavy, every breath sucked slow through teeth like old soup.
The room is still and so silent it seems to buzz. Once upon a time a clock would tick, embarrassed at the quiet, but they don't bother anymore. It sits plastically above the door, mounted and mute and showing 4PM. If grey had a time it would be 4PM. A desert of time.
Lying on the bed you concentrate on breathing. Your jumpered stomach lifts and falls back and your breath gets caught up with the wind - not a violent wind, a soft suburban wind - so that it's difficult to tell where one stops and the other begins. Despite the gentle breeze outside your room is unusually warm. Just warm enough to be uncomfortable, not enough to make you remove clothing, but sufficient to keep you thinking about it. If grey had a feeling it would be this.
A sound rises from the street and enters through the small window above your head. If grey had a voice it would be this: two millstones grinding slowly. The weight of two worlds pressed close but trying to part from one another. The sound circles. Every so often you hear it stop and then the high peel of a child's voice lets you know you're listening to plastic tires running against tarmac. You picture a tractor. An orange tractor. The sound starts up again. On the clock the largest hand has slipped forward two minutes. It did this quietly and without emotion or fuss. It's 4.02PM.
The sound of daytime TV rises from the living room where your father sits slumped on the sofa. The muffled sound of deep baritone voices chased by canned laughter. It is strange to hear laughter trying to enter the house, squeezing its young body through the tiny holes of tired speakers. Late afternoon is no season for laughter. The bitter-sweet horror of bright summer days that march forcibly into November. How do they record a laughter like that?
This morning you read online that a building was burning somewhere on the other side of the world, somewhere in China. The building was having construction work done and the flames had started at its base before climbing the scaffolding and raging toward the sky. People had left their windows and hung from scaffold rails despite the rising heat and waited to be rescued.
You turn and look out of the window. The child's mother leads him back into the house. She has him under one arm and the tractor hangs from the other. On the far side of the road a man is opening the boot of his car and seeing the mother and child he waves. She throws him a smile because her hands are full and he shrugs knowingly because he understands what it's like to shepherd children. You imagine the three of them hanging from scaffolding and you know he would jump first.
The doorbell chimes. Unexpectedly. It's 4.17PM. Who would come out here at this time? You hear your Father stir but he doesn't get up. The TV has stilled its voice now, it has leveled to the steady drone of commerce. Somewhere in an office that will never catch fire a woman approved the hushed noises you now here. She had listened to them at her computer and felt nothing. What horror. The nightmare of feeling nothing and understanding that everything you live for is based upon passion. Perhaps she took a breath and told someone superior she believed in this 'take'. It just felt right. Through boredom or lack of time somebody said ok and here it is now. A part of your world. The ad space would have been bought ahead of time and that would have factored into the speed of approval. But it does feel right doesn't it? These human noises, these vowels and growls that blur toward nothing couldn't have been said any other way could they? And now its gone and a second spot rumbles into earshot. Another life, another held breath.
Your father doesn't move and you can sense the half pressure of a finger wanting to press the plastic-smooth white of the bell again. You swing your feet off the bed and onto the carpet. Carpets are suburban fake luxury. Carpets don't go to cities and they shouldn't enter bathrooms but on the occasions they do, what horror.
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