some kind of extract

His weeks drew on, months drew on, his life drew on, but not in any profound sketches or rococo splendour, no, they instead were the strokes accumulated on the pavement of the chalk artist. Playing with perspective, sure, eliciting a giggle or smile of recognition from a passer-by and habitually magnetizing a 50p piece to a hat, but never did these carefully weighed chunks of time halt someone in their tracks or tempt them to revaluate their own life. Well, he’d think, ‘tolerance of drudgery is simply further evidence of my increasing maturity. Look at how the prospect of a phone rant with the electricity provider constitutes an event in my parent’s weekly calendar!’ He’d watch the thinly veiled elation that the news of this approaching chance to bellow, condescend to and correct a faceless drone in a call-centre in Bengal provided for his mother with bemusement; but also with a wistful understanding that further growing-up would one day instil the same sensation in him. After all, the wisdom of the eleven year-old proudly cowering behind a barricade against the fairer sex, passing the time in the company of the Beano, now seemed just as mystifying. Indeed as he snoozed past 9 o clock on the 25^th of December that year, happily rolling his back to face away from the intrusive dawn rays, he could feel his younger self standing aghast at the door, foot tapping in impatient disapproval.

The grand life-plan was failing to materialize from amongst the routines, with every fresh pay packet enshrining what his parents had repeatedly assured him. That platitude, ‘lifes not all fun, you know’ so ubiquitous during childhood that he had become averse to its implications, now hung heavy over every day. It mocked him in his yawning reflection as he rode the bus to work and emanated from the white spaces of the note that the senior safety advisor had fastened next to the rota, which read:

“NOT SHUTTING FIRE DOORS MAY SEEM TRIVIAL TO YOU, BUT IN AN EMERGENCY IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. REMAIN VIGILENT AT ALL TIMES THANKS, SIMON”

Then as he tried to exploit one of the few privileges he felt he was owed, of finding shapes amongst the clouds on the bus home, that same message smirked at his inability to determine the whale that the couple in front of him laughingly identified from a white blob.

Nonetheless he maintained an understanding that he had been given a weekly allowance of ‘moments’, which would enter his account conveniently at its point of exasperation, the zenith of tedium, and then just as quickly evaporate. This week it involved drowsily walking out into the garden behind his house, which oversaw the town built up in the valley, in the early hours of the morning for a smoke. From this point he felt consumed by the vapour in the air, and beneath his feet sensed the ground becoming dewy in preparation of the mornings activity. As the ash eat the length of the cigarette and the smoke spiralled around him, he came to think of it as a fuse that would detonate the day’s regularity. So he looked down across the valleys suburban streets, arranged in orderly formation like a rather harmless militaries parade, with cars in garages awaiting ignition and leaves creeping across immaculate lawns in the breeze. Watching, he then began to distinguish the steady advance of one vehicle along the lifeless avenue. With the ash nearing the butt he realised it was a milkman on his rounds, placing a bottle upon each doorstep with a nocturnal solemnity. The man didn’t take another puff on his cigarette, he wanted the moment to remain so, and with the cigarette symbolising what it did he could feel the heat of the impending discharge of boredom. So he watched and waited. Observing this spectre haunt the empty streets, glazed in artificial light, he was in rapture that he’d never consciously connected this poltergeists movement to the rows of glistening fresh bottles aligned each morning on the doorsteps he passed. Then with a tangible lurch, as though winded, he lost that feeling of elevation and, beginning to shudder, stubbed the cinders out beneath his heel and walked back shivering into the house.