Craig Dobson

Where the Big Street Meets the Small

In the evenings, she would sit on the balcony, her legs dangling through the railings above the street. Her aunt’s washing, dry and still, hung above her. In the room behind her, beyond the open doors, her uncle sat on his chair in front of the TV, still in his work clothes. Beyond him, in the small kitchen, her aunt made supper. The smells of frying onion and herbs, garlic and lamb drifted out, mixing with those of car fumes, tarmac and piss which rose up, thick and hot, from the street. 

She watched the bars and cafés on the main street beneath her. The people, talking and laughing at their tables, smoking, drinking, arguing, hurrying off into the city. Between each group of tables on the pavement were plain doors leading to apartments above, where more washing hung in front of open-shuttered windows and the sound of radios and TVs and children and shouting leaked out. She’d seen a woman crying for an hour one evening by one of the doors to the street, while the people walking by ignored her. There were fights, too, sometimes. She remembered being woken once by police lights flashing across her whole bedroom, though she couldn’t make out what was happening in the street below, and finally drifted back to sleep with the lights still blinking around her. 

Her aunt and uncle’s apartment was above a grocery shop on the corner where a small street met the main one. The small street led to an old garage yard behind corrugated iron gates that were always locked. There was a broken telephone kiosk not far from the main road, where people would pee. Watching them hurry there from the main street, she would wait to see the dark streams run from the bottom of the kiosk into the gutter. In the daytime she’d noticed these stains, leading from walls and doorways and phone kiosks all over the city, dried and stinking in the sun.

One of the houses halfway down the small street was set back. It had a front garden, overgrown behind a broken mesh fence which was fixed to a streetlamp. A squat fig tree grew in one corner, its ripe purple fruit falling onto the pavement, the raw red insides split open. Cats were always in the garden or fighting near it. The wall on the opposite side of the street from the fig was plastered with torn posters advertising the circus, and the paint on the only door was peeling. It had an old sign screwed into it, advertising massages, but no one came there now, though one day she’d seen a woman about the same age as her aunt come out wearing a yellow blouse and black boots with heels and leather trousers laced up the sides. 

When they’d eaten, she’d help clear away and then go back out to the balcony, while her aunt and uncle watched TV, discussing the programmes or laughing. Eventually, they’d both fall asleep, her uncle snoring softly. When they woke, she would have to go to bed, though sometimes they’d forget, and she would stay, still and silent, stealing the moments until they remembered her. 

At the weekend, it was busier. The voices were louder, and the bars and cafés full. Cigarette smoke and the smell of beer rose on the heat. She was allowed to stay up later. Sometimes, her aunt visited a friend. She would tell her husband to make sure the girl went to bed, but he would drink beer and watch TV and sleep longer. These were the best nights, the whole show spread below her, the air thick with people loud and dressed up, with music from the bars and from the taxis dropping people off, and light from the buildings shining in the drinks on the pavement tables, and phones flashing suddenly for photos and the headlights passing and cigarette lighters flaring in front of faces. 

On one of these nights she watched a couple walk a little way up the small street, slowly and laughing, the man holding the woman and talking in her ear. Soon they stopped by the wall, kissing and laughing. The man pulled the woman after him further down the street towards the overgrown garden and the fig tree near the streetlamp. The woman giggled and screeched but the man said “Shh!” and they laughed more until they were lost in the fig’s shadow. She watched but could see nothing. Another man turned up the small street from the main one. He was holding a bottle and not walking well. He didn’t stop at the phone kiosk. When he got near to the fig tree he shouted something, not angry, and from the shadow of the fig the couple laughed and the woman shouted back but not angry either. They ran out from the shadow towards the main road, still laughing, while the drunk man tried to call them back, and when they’d disappeared, he did shout something angry at them and was silent.

He took a swig from the bottle and walked to where they’d been. Half in the fig’s shadow himself now, he faced the wall and slowly leant his head against it. He was still for a while, but then began fumbling beneath his waist. She couldn’t see clearly because his front was in darkness, and she thought he must be peeing, just not even in the phone kiosk because he was drunk, but though she tried she couldn’t see the black streams running to the gutter, only his arm moving in the shadow. He didn’t take his head off the wall. She thought she heard him make a sound like crying but only a couple of times. Then he leant forward, pressing his chest and shoulder and the side of his face up against the wall, still and quiet now for a such a long time that she thought he was asleep, until he pushed himself away, said something she couldn’t hear, and took a long drink. He looked around him, then walked unsteadily back to the big street, turning beneath her into the lights and the noise until she couldn’t see him anymore. 

The voices there were loud and a woman was shouting at another woman in front of a busy bar and somewhere else a car horn sounded, and only down the small street was there some quiet, but after a while the cats there started fighting, and all the hot smells rose up again in a wave, making her head swim.

Craig Dobson has had work published in The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Stand, The Rialto, Magma, Agenda, The Frogmore Papers, Prole, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Neon and Southword. He’s working on his first collection of poetry.