3


When somebody swallows, the tubes that connect the inner ear to the oral cavity for a moment close and cause sound to pause. Silence: the vocal cords like leaves twinned swing inwards to close over the trachea, halting breathing, halting speech- blown less by, within, a stilling wind, blocking up all the ways that that which is being swallowed might go on, having been brought already to this point of deletion, held at the precipice of the gut’s first turn, other than that which is left open, which goes down, that it need only fall.

Out of fear perhaps he gulps. The hose is still nowhere near its full length’s stretch, and coils of it still clutter the space below him as he feeds it through each frame, climbing. He is high up, it is almost night. It doesn’t come easy. C’mon, he says, c’mon. The flow of water will be disrupted if there is a twist in the hose, and given the hose’s power this, he was warned, and he has learned, could be dangerous; so he follows the coil, letting it lead him in in order to keep it smooth. He moves fast. In so much space, there is the sound of him panting; the scant discing tilt at once balletic and strange of live coils lower down in the hose sometimes touching the scaffold pipes; light taps of his fingers’ tips on steel cut against its grain. The weight of the water tanks once filled will stabilise the seating stand. The last of them still empty are above him in the uppermost tier. He climbs up and across, scaling diagonals, constantly coming back on himself, soothing a fold out of the hose, pulling length into it, keeping it moving. Winded, he stops to catch his breath and at his side the zipper on his pocket glances the metal and pitches like a sting, wheeling into the wide hum of held sound, cutting to the heart of him. He can pull himself up through one frame in two motions, and get back down in one. To cross laterally, he has to loop the tip of the hose around his neck and with his two hands on the beam above him slide across. The sunset is dry and orange. He has become attuned to the way in which the hose moves but his familiarity has only taught him to be patient. He stays with it, makes space, tries to glean how long it will be until it will relax and he can take it where he needs to take it. The soul is a puff of warm vapour, he is like a drill-bit. The hose and him with it is a long way out. From where he first took it to where he has now brought it, there is the length of the gangway before the scaffold itself. When he brought it through the barrier stands had already startled falling; more have fallen since. Coils turn and release below them, and they nettle and sing. He feels casual. What concerns him now is how a coil might become a twist. Each barrier stand has the same rounded rectangular shape and grid fill. In the sunset the silver thatch shivers like a shoal of cheap fish. He watches them kick and thinks of a cresting wave at its break becoming tangled with itself and never breaking and then he thinks of a field of grain and he wishes it: catch fire. Above him the remaining tanks green and white in their silences respire into their smooth ceilings and out of fear perhaps he gulps. He goes on, ranging wide and slow. Water presses the fabric of his shirt and his shorts into his skin in wide sprays that like moss cling to him and at their darkest, like a bruise might, shine. The next tank is

above him now, he goes the long way round. His shins are cross-hatched with grazes and bruises and as he moves the shallow splits in his skin open and close, flashing lines of bright red against a fuzzed velvet screen of skin blackly arenulous and, settled with dust, faded forwards, withdrawing into a oneness that is away from him, and he is afraid of the wind.

He does anything, he is paid by the day. The light is fading slowly; softened at its edge by grasses let to overgrow the world as now he sees it is firelit. He is moving backwards again because he must have made a mistake. Slow he spirals back silently past a hanging sleeper with closed eyes and an open mouth and he, not wanting to make a sound, holds his breath, keeps hold of the hose’s head, and when again in unwinding the mistake he made he is brought again to face the scaffold’s edge, to look again out towards the long grass curling in on everything else ready to split, he catches the face of another man looking up at him and then the flash of his jacket when the floodlights in the park come on all at the same time. The floodlights are hooded so as to pour light only into certain places and the scaffold takes little of it, and what little it takes won’t spread; it pools in places and filled, clarified, they repeat with the exhaustion and fluorescence of flecks of packaging in a compost heap. They pedal towards him in a lax cascade that unbalances him, and for the first time he feels weak. The darkness muddies the frames as he looks down; the descending height expands as though dragged, as though made of cotton got wet. Someone shouts: do you need help, and he says no. C’mon, he says, c’mon. C’mon, he says, let’s go.