Goodman 005

Goodman creaks gently into wakefulness, his consciousness dredging its way back from infinity, back into this dark mind although not, until he opens his eyes, into this dark room. For long minutes he lays, eyes closed, listening to the sounds the world makes when it thinks no-one is listening. Calls from market traders to colleagues down on the stalls, rattle of bottles tucked safely in their plastic crates on the milk float, itself driven by a dour Welshman who, if you dared to stay and listen, would drone on about bloody Llandudno forever. Distant blasts of car horns, drivers angry at the traffic jams even at this unearthly time of the morning. He hears the float drone to a halt outside his house, the Welshman clunking a couple of bottles down on the step next door, then his footsteps fading as he takes his deliveries further away.

On Goodman’s face, drawn and unshaven, his formerly brown beard now grey as the dawn, he feels the cold morning air as it drifts into the room through the open window, carrying its random snatches of conversation and noise, leading them to collision in Goodman’s sleep-fuzzed head. Perhaps, he thinks, people in the country are listening too, only they hear sheep and cows, the caw of rural crows, as opposed to the big malevolent urban bastards that haunt the trees around the little landscaped area at the bottom of the road.

He opens his eyes. Still dark. Early. Much too early yet to stir from bed, to go out into that bleak, chaotic void that is the city. Not a void, of course, being full of all kinds of junk. Although a void in the sense of an unformed universe, being full of matter swirling everywhere, undecided as yet as to the form it would take. Conjuring, by random metamorphosis, a naked banker, a dark and sober pin-striped suit, a club tie and striped shirt then, over there, a copy of the Financial Times, a briefcase, a laptop. He closes his eyes again. He’ll be waking himself up if he’s not careful.

He coughs, just one cough like a starter’s pistol going off. Staccato. And at that moment, as though the whole world beyond his window had had one ear cocked for an aural sign that he was awake at last, everything goes silent. His eyes slam wide open in shock. Momentarily he thinks he might have gone suddenly deaf, two moths on joint suicide missions, plunging into an ear apiece at exactly the same time, two invisible fingers pointing into his brain, then the sounds flood back, normal sounds at normal volume. Car horns, crows, bottles. He closes his eyes again, tentatively, then coughs again, deliberately, just to make sure, then again, louder.

He turns on to his side, pulling the thin blanket up over his head, safe in his warm cocoon in the belly of the early morning city, and drifts back into sleep.

Outside his window, safe from Goodman’s drifting, probing thoughts, the chaos rises up again, a maelstrom of nothing and everything, undecided, unformed, but listening and waiting, always waiting, for the sleeper to awake.