He stands on the corner of East Bank Way and Fabian Way, in the long winter shadow of Swansea Dockers Sports and Social Club, his tragic, asymmetrical body a cautionary tale of what might be.
The traffic is slow. It’s the usual blockage: cars, vans, buses and trucks, turning into Quay Parade, ignoring the yellow cross-hatched box that says to new drivers, “Do not enter unless your exit is clear”, but in the hurried world of nine o’clock deadlines, a warning to be ignored, along with the cheery horns of the oncoming traffic.
He can see the movement of lips behind misted windows.
“Fuck off,” they’re saying. Everyone says that at eight-forty-five on a Monday morning.
Pedestrians scuttle by, raising umbrellas as the bright sunshine turns to dripping clouds. They avoid his gaze. They don’t want to know why he’s there, or why he’s smiling the lopsided smile of the obviously disturbed. They don’t want to know why he’s swaying back and forth, back and forth. They don’t listen to his mumbled maledictions. They don’t want to get close enough to smell his rank body, or the fetid, drink-laced breath they know he possesses.
For a moment, he’s back. His smirk widens. He wipes a grizzled hand through his cockatoo hair. Thunder rumbles: a truck’s wave of rainwater washes the smile from his face. Staggering backwards, he curses and reaches for the half-empty can of Superlager hidden in the folds of his dirty and torn jacket. He empties it into his mouth with feverish enthusiasm. It barely makes acquaintance with his throat before it joins the dozen other cans he hasn’t pissed against a wall.
The empty can slips from his thin, knotted fingers, blue with cold, and red with drink. He looks at his scabbed, wounded hand, raises it to his face to touch the livid red split in his cheek and the swollen lips that once dwelled, lost in a dream, on her warm, soft skin.
He wants to say her name, but it has disappeared in the tumble-dryer of his head. A pantomime of the unlikely raises its lurid face once again. Could he clean up? Could he win back his place in her affections, his station in life, his dream made real? Finally, he wonders: where is she now? He didn’t know. Too many years. Unbridgeable time, each moment an erected barrier, a game without frontiers in which the prize is his desolation.
He closes his eyes and listens to the traffic’s thunder. The rain thickens, the wind begins to tug at his emaciated frame, and his swaying slows to a twitch. He no longer feels the cold. He feels nothing but the sodden clothes clinging to his bones like a funeral shroud.
Taking a deep breath, a last breath, he takes a hesitant step, then a stride, then another, his eyes still closed. As he steps into the path of an accelerating Porsche SUV, he thinks, “It was a good life, once…”
