Samples
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From ‘Gladstone’s Got Himsel an Agent…’, published in Markings, April 2007
It was a day when I wanted magic, urban magic, city magic. I wanted to be transformed by the strange and the irrational, but these things tend not to perform to order. Mystery isn’t a performing seal.
The old man taught me that. I had walked down to the Clyde because I had a fancy to see it steam, as if the waters were simmering and bubbling. I wanted to see the buildings on the far bank – the courts, the warehouses, the elegant lines of Carlton Place – appear and disappear as windows opened and closed in the screen of vapour.
But when I arrived and peered over the railing I saw the usual oily slick of flat water slurping past. I stood there, disappointed, and it started to rain, the droplets hissing and making target shapes on the slow-passing river water.
An old man - small, grey-haired, with lined, leathery skin – emerged from the shadows. This, I thought, was promising.
‘Whit are ye starin at, son?’ he asked.
I hesitated before answering. After all, the real reason would make me look absurd. In the event, I decided to be honest after all.
‘I was looking for magic – city magic. I wanted to see the river boil and steam.’
The man chuckled. ‘Ye need tae learn, son. A watched pot never boils.’
I turned again to look at the chilly, black, rain-patterned water. No change. When I started to walk away, the man had gone and I could not see him anywhere.
I walked back towards the city centre along streets mauled by snarling traffic that belched poison-breath. People glared at each other, jostled, pushed. I came to the old steeple at the corner of High Street and the Trongate. I had read a story once where the steeple - tall, slender, unconnected to any other building, never used or visited – had turned out to be a rocket ship waiting for the right moment to re-enter space. I longed, now, to see evidence of preparation for take-off. Then I could wait and see the massive structure rise and accelerate and roar into the heavens, becoming just a blink of starlight as it raced to regions barely imagined.
But there was nothing. It stood on the launchpad, inert. No crew arrived.
I strolled back along busy Argyle Street and began to feel happier. I remembered the old man’s words and, blocking out the noise and ugliness and anger I began to recognise lesser, pocket-sized miracles. A beaming young couple emerged from a jeweller’s, the girl studying the finger on which a tiny pinpoint of white fire blazed. A crowded bus passed and then paused at lights; standing near the front of it was a young woman, grasping a rail for steadiness. Inadvertently she had assumed a posture that was cool and elegant and casual, like a model on the front cover of a fashion magazine. Only better fed, I thought. A thing of grace and calm and beauty. The bus moved away.
© David McVey 2007
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