The Big Smoke

This week sees the start of a new weekly serialised story by Stephen Emms: 'Happiness is An Option'.

Happiness, mused Archie Bryant, as he stepped out onto Queen’s Crescent market, was not worth thinking about: distant, glamorous, an aunt he had never known. It was Saturday lunchtime, and his memory rattled with unspoken phrases, unseized opportunities.

On the street, words cracked and split all around him. Mothers scolded infants, a teenage couple argued, and bull-necked sellers with ringed hands battled cheerily for trade: you could buy anything here, even a wig to wear as you hovered over cheap electricals or leopard-print trousers.

He sighed. Three days since she’d left, but still the sunshine flooded the pavement. He took a right at the flower stall, where kids attacked a couple of black bin-liners, taut as outsized testicles. By the basketball courts, a gang spread themselves over a wall.

He was soon at that petticoat of leafy streets beneath Parliament Hill. Climbing, the wind whistling away his hangover, he was pleased to find his favourite bench unoccupied at the summit. Heavy clouds staggered over the playing fields below, and beyond the sprawl, he could just make out the spectral outline of the South Downs.

Sitting down, he ran through the facts again. On Tuesday night their relationship had been fine. At a launch at the 176 Gallery, slugging back bottles of beer, Rose, face glowing, had purred, ‘I want a baby, Archie’, in his ear. But that night they’d collapsed into bed and, in the half-light of Wednesday morning, her mood had darkened:

‘Where’s my purse?’ It was only seven o’clock, but she was flying round the kitchen like a bag in wind. ‘Why do I always forget everything? What’s wrong with me?’ Before he could respond, she was downstairs, words clattering after her. Why, he remembered thinking, did it always feel as if the air was ambushed; as if their words, once uttered, conspired against each other?

And he hadn’t seen her since. Rose who, for five years, had slept by his side, face against face.

He sighed again, and leaned back. The sky was as grey as an old woman’s skin: it moves so quickly, doesn’t it, compared to time? Three days had seemed an eternity. About to leave, he spied a notebook lying on the ground: forgotten rather than abandoned, normal in size, a blue plastic cover. Glancing around, his fingers reached down. Marianne Templeton, read the girlish scrawl on the first page. Haircut, said one entry; essay work, another. Vicki & Al’s wedding. Baby Cecilia christening. Fix taps, sort clothes, Mum card, paint room. How reassuringly ordinary.

But he was curious; had it been left on purpose? Was she spying from the brambles? He dug out a pen and, on a whim, scribbled his name and email address in block capitals. A hurried addition of a smiley emoticon (he was a recent convert) made him grin too – for the first time, in fact, since Rose had left.

Yes, he thought, having struck the universal well of hope that our lives can be transformed in a second, this was fate. Stillness swayed – and then, as if to wash away the week’s pain, the rain started.

For part two click here.