Three

The podcast plays quietly in the background as he works, the dulcet, carefully-spoken voice of the narrator beginning to wind down the episode with a familiar refrain, “As you listen, imagine if you will what it would feel like to live in the rich heart of the world, knowing that the final days of empire stretched out before you. Imagine what it was to live in the end of days…” His chisel traces the curve and warp of the wood as he listens, slow incisions cutting sideways along the timeline of the grain, spent weeks and months of slow growth falling to the floor and folding into a messy, desiccating tumult of yesteryears. A grunt of satisfaction at his progress, he shelves his tools and walks to the window of his small workshop, looking through the glass at the small space beyond, the tops of a street bustle showing over his fence.

With the speakers fallen silent, the murmur of the city creeps, the sounds of hawkers and traffic, machines and weather competing to crawl up, over, and into his small sanctuary. He walks out through the yard, pausing briefly to see watch the blue sky above, before turning and locking the door. He unlatches the gate to the yard and he is in the world again. The smell of food carts and sweat, gas burners and rubbish piled in corners, dogs crawling between parked cars and cats prowling for prey. He loves the city for its endless variety, the small dramas of the daily lives of others acted out in public; customers haggling shopkeepers, lovers canoodling at the edge of crowds, parents bustling children in the small space between roads and commerce.

The city is small, but his people live at the edges of worlds, a place where strangers mingle among the native-born. They stop before passing through to the cities of real commerce, and leave behind the spice and aroma of far-flung towns or jungles. Prophets and poets walk the streets bearing strange philosophies, bards who whisper of the mysteries of long-dead kings, regaling his people with tales of creeping death and vines that grow only in the night, still and potent in the day, their tendrils awaiting the too-restful traveller. The death, they say, comes. With the impatience and vigour of the young man he pines for these places. “Death”, he thinks, “has been vanquished”.

He pauses from walking occasionally to listen to song or sales, an endless rolling maul of consumption and vice, money being tapped off cards or out of pockets, pleasures small and large rolled into the markets from the fringes of the world. He’s known but not popular, nodding to acquaintances, or waving to shop-keepers, a cliched montage of the home-town boy with a coin flicked to the congenial beggar and the jostled hair of the street urchin.

A whistle breaks his stride, and he turns towards the smile of a cart jockey, a long-known friend from his own days of sweat and adrenaline, his shoulders bent to the wheel of a city’s insatiable appetite. He waves back a smile and steers through traffic to take a low plastic seat among the dust and detritus.

“I knew you couldn’t resist, e hoa”

He barks a laugh, “You read it right, guess we’ll be looking at the usual”

“The yoozh it is,” replies the jockey, mixing oil and spice in the pan, “you off home?”

“Pretty much done, hoping to get this job sanded down and away soon enough.”

The carpenter glances over at the only other patron of the cart, an older guy, thin, a grey manicured beard, the look of a teacher or talker, himself raising his hand to drink the last of the broth, his blue eyes showing over the edge of the bowl.

“Mate.” He lilts, “howzat?”

“Grand. Just grand,” replies the gent, “always try to drop in on our man here. Best noodle this side of town.”

He smiles generously at the cart jockey, flashing briefly that blue-eyed twinkle the hallmark of a skilled orator.

“But that’s me,” he says, leaving the bowl on the small table beside the cart and rising from his seat before turning to wandering off on shaky pins, “I think you got this from here.” He says as he disappears into the pedestrians.

“He come in all that often?” asks the carpenter as the jockey passes him a steaming bowl of ramen, “Seems like a character.”

The jockey chuckles, “Bro, I have never, ever, seen that MF before in my life.”

The carpenter snort-laughs in return, looks sideways to the where the gent sat, and sees a slim volume, a book of some description, tanned with age and wear, left to sit next to the empty bowl like an unnecessary full stop.