After my appointments in Bristol on Tuesday afternoon I got a cab back to my hotel in Clifton, got changed, and slowly walked back into town, enjoying the wonderful light and the surprising quietness of the streets, which were largely deserted. I didn’t cover a great distance, but I was still getting my bearings, walking a kind of convoluted, figure eight, cats-cradle route. After a while the streets began to get busier, and I noted that I was swimming against the tide of Bristol’s student population, who were finishing up at University for the day and heading home. I divided my attention, as I walked, between the views across the city and the people who crossed my path; enjoying watching each person approach and file past, quicker than I in their desire to get home and put the day behind them. Some alone, others in two and threes, chatting, shoving and clutching at each other as they passed, preoccupied with their thoughts, their conversations.
A couple approached slowly, both dressed in black. They were positioned close, but something about their body language told me early that they were arguing, and by the time they pulled level, the girl had pulled her arm away from his and crossed the road, clambering up to the raised walkway, continuing alone for a time. The boy waited a bit then sprinted after her, falling into time with her steps. I stood, watching. Unless they whispered, as far as I could tell they exchanged no further words, but looped their long, loose arms back around each other’s waists. Another couple, their body language so different, were dressed in identical tracksuits, talking intently. A girl walked by swinging a bag and fingering her telephone, her eyes lovingly smudged with eyeliner and mascara. And three more girls, ordered from right to left according to the severity of their fringes, floated by in a way that suggested they would be amazed to be told they had shared the pavement with anyone at all.
I envied their purposefulness, their having somewhere to go. That’s the problem with being alone in an unfamiliar place – you tend to just drift, fill time, speculate on the evening ahead, not knowing what it holds. One’s mind is never in the present; it hovers moments ahead, visualising conversations or incidents that will never occur. People become symbols, or else characters in an imaginary play. Up ahead the road dipped, and I began to descend, wondering where I would end up. And another person passed by, and this time, catching my eye, offered a smile. Too startled to return it, I nevertheless basked in the memory for a good fifteen minutes, glad to be acknowledged – feeling that I had been included in, welcomed into, the city’s shape.
