‘Were you ever a spook or old bill?’
The question was jarring.
‘No. Why do you ask, do I look like I could be?’
‘Maybe. You carry yourself differently, you watch everybody and you’re doing it now, but….’
‘But?’
There was a long pause, traffic moved on the road, people either ambled or hurried on, the traffic lights turned red, giving the wet road a new and luminous aspect.
And the silence continued.
The lights turned green again and finally he spoke.
‘You’re here but you’re apart, it’s the way that the spooks in particular look at things. Let me ask you a question and don’t look round.’
He looked at me, pale eyes in a lean weathered face, faded fatigues that were spotless, clean shaven, sober, articulate and very well read.
‘How many people are on the other side of the road, how many are obvious tourists, how many are sleeping in the doorways and how many are just shoppers?’
‘Twenty three, or there were anyway, eleven, two and around ten.’
‘Which one looks like they need the most help?’
I confessed that I had no idea.
‘Woman with three shopping bags, she’s tired and is just stood there, she was when you walked up.’
I’d been making a point of talking to this man for a while, giving him small sums of cash to help him buy food and pay for his laundry.
He was astonishingly well-read and could quote verbatim from philosophical works and broader, more accessible works. We had once had a conversation about De Montaigne and cabbages.
He spoke again.
‘You’re a decent bloke but you’re closed off, you somehow seem like you have a different first language and that you’re translating it in your head when people speak.’
I watched him as he rummaged in one of his packs, coming out with a paper bundle tied with string.
‘This is for you. I didn’t buy it, I found it, I’m pretty certain that all of the pieces are there. It’s a bowl, I reckon it was expensive, but it’s broken so they threw it out.’
I stared at him.
‘Don’t open it now, you might drop the pieces, take it back to your hotel room and if you decide to keep it, find somebody who can tell you about Kintsugi.’
He saw the look on my face and laughed.
‘Kintsugi, it’s not a fighting style. Look it up, I won’t be here for a month or so, so you won’t need to be embarrassed if you don’t do anything.’
He handed the oddly shaped package to me and went back to looking across the road, the woman with the bags was gone.
He smiled at me.
‘See you whenever.’
And so I walked awkwardly back to the hotel with my package of broken ceramic, feeling it grate together as I moved, until finally; I stood in my hotel room and dumped it into the bin.
And, feeling brave, I walked in the opposite direction to find a bar, drinking alone and playing with my phone. I’d given up trying to read my book, I was too preoccupied with replaying our conversation.
Sometimes I watched people and I decided he was wrong about me, I could spot the cracks in people from a mile off, their body language, the intonation of words, the glances in other directions.
The bastard.
I was cataloguing weakness.
It’s what I did.
Sometimes I’d help people but it wasn’t my default position.
I shrugged, fuck it.
I drank some more, went for an Indian meal that was mostly lager and went back to the hotel and my bed.
I slept badly, with strange and fractured dreams that made absolutely no sense, places and people blurring between time lines so that an event that occurred in Chennai was taking place in a garden in Essex, a dog crossing a river in Australia when he’d walked across that bridge in Cheshire.
I woke up early and disoriented, I had a long drive ahead of me and only a last minute afterthought made me take the package from the bin and put it in my rucksack.
Where it stayed for days.
I eventually unwrapped it while I was listening to somebody lie through their teeth on a conference call.
It was an earthenware bowl, a lustrous brown on the outside and a vivid red glaze on the inside.
There were a lot of pieces.
I put them onto my filing cabinet and left them there for a day or so before deciding to look up some YouTube Kintsugi videos.
They were fascinating, the concept of making something new from something broken seemingly uniquely Japanese.
I didn’t like the idea of having to have a special humidity controlled room though, nor having to source so many niche materials.
And so it was that Amazon was my friend.
There were a bewildering array of kits and I bought the best one that I could, IF I was going to do this, there was no point in doing it badly.
And so it was that on a quiet Monday afternoon, I started the process of trying to repair the bowl.
I sorted each piece and used a bit of masking tape for each one to laboriously find the matches, numbering each one until I had a completed bowl.
All the pieces were there, but the rim of the bowl seemed to be deliberately uneven, making me worry as to whether I’d got it right.
I did a search for the bowl.
£290.
Fuck me.
That was a lot of cash for a bowl. I wondered where he’d found it and how it came to be that there were no splinters missing at all.
But that didn’t matter, I was committed to having a go at this thing now, despite feeling that it was somehow performative and stupid, like shouting ‘Free Palestine’ at a bus.
I’d chosen gold as the colour of the adhesive rather than platinum as it seemed like the red would set it off best.
And so I fitted the first two pieces together, I’d cleaned the enamel with alcohol and lightly wiped the jagged edges before brushing a very faint layer of gold epoxy on both edges, holding them together for fifteen minutes or so.
Then I left the pieces in my office, had some dinner and a glass of wine before watching some crap TV and going to bed.
I didn’t read before bed that night and I crashed almost straight away.
And woke up sobbing at 4am.
I’d dreamt of every friend and relation that I’d loved and lost, to cancer, to aneurysms, to suicide, accidents, heart attacks and old age.
Every single one, back to my childhood, I felt broken and lost, and I didn’t sleep again that night.
I pretended to work during the next day, paying no attention to issues or people, the strange dream preying on my mind.
I fitted pieces three and four that afternoon, taking even more care, seeking perfection in the fitting of the jagged pieces.
And that night I dreamed of lost loves, those that I’d driven away and those that just left because they wanted someone else, someone that wasn’t me.
I dreamed of small, casual hurts, given and received, phrases that demeaned me for saying them and words that cut deep before being buried inside.
And I woke, scared and ashamed, not crying this time but filled with a bone-deep hurt for what I’d done and what I’d hidden deep away.
And the days blurred.
I know that I worked, I know that I must have made some sort of sense, but I had no recall of anything, even minutes after a call or meeting.
And I was starting to have waking dreams, my first dog walked beside me, being patted by my grandad as we wandered a field that existed only in memory.
And as the days went by, the bowl nearing completion at a steady, slow and inexorable pace, I felt as if I’d been fractured myself.
I could almost see the layers of armour that I’d built around myself, the bulletproof glass of the visor that I stared through at the world, and I wondered if I were going mad.
I was close to the end, but I was scared to finish, what if that would be the end of me?
A week went past, I was a ghost in my own life, haunted by my own past, visions of people and events going back so many years.
So, so many.
And so I fitted the last piece, drank myself into oblivion and waited for whatever horrors that I’d see in my dreams.
But there weren’t any.
And I awoke feeling….
I couldn’t describe it.
All of the events of my life were still there, but they were part of me now, not something buried.
I wondered what the fuck was going on and I resolved to talk to the soldier when I could.
If I could ever stop smiling..
A few weeks later, I waited for him to take his place on the cathedral steps, I was sat waiting for him with package.
He looked at me.
‘What’s that?’
I opened the package and showed him the finished bowl with its golden seams of new life, mounted in a lucite case.
‘I’ve put shockproof gel in here so it won’t hurt if you drop it.’
He smiled.
‘It’s your bowl, it always was, it just needed to be remade, speaking of which, you look different.’
‘I think I am.’
‘OK, same questions as before?’
‘Fourteen, eight, one and five. The man in the half length coat is struggling with a number of things.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘I did, he told me to fuck off.’
He laughed and laughed and laughed until I joined in, laughing until there were tears in both our eyes and I was doubled over.
‘Welcome to the world’
