Break.up by Joanna Walsh

Author:Joanna Walsh [Walsh, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2018-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

4th May

Next morning I’m waiting again, this time for the coach which will take me on to Budapest. My fellow travellers – a scowling fat girl in an off-the-shoulder sequinned T-shirt and gleaming leggings; two thin women eating cold McDonald’s from brown paper bags, a number of blocky, shaven-headed men smoking and drinking Coca-Cola – are hulks of solitude. We are all heaving around what’s inside us with no common language, no hope of an exchange. The coach is late and we are all bored and the waiting is not at all like waiting at the Larissa station, although I was waiting there too, and for longer, and with less certainty of arrival.

The station cannot properly be what it is supposed to be for us as long as the moment of the train’s arrival is not there. The dragging of time as it were refuses the station the possibility of offering us anything. It forces it to leave us empty. The station refuses itself, because time refuses it something… How much time is capable of here! It has power over railway stations and can bring it about that stations bore us.

Heidegger, ibid

Then three Hungarians arrive, who look out of place. The two girls are round, but on the hips not the belly, and they are not dressed in anything tight, or black, or shiny. The boy is wearing hiking shorts, and the shoes of all three are lumpy brown pastries. Their drinks are unflavoured, unsweetened. One of them has a bag with the three-arrowed symbol for RECYCLE, and the word, NATURA. That’s it! They’re North-western Europeans. I haven’t seen anything like them for a while.

The coach arrives and we drive over cobbles then concrete, through the rings of stained grey apartment blocks that circle Sofia’s perfecting centre. We cross the point at which the monumental pulls away from the everyday. The roads are broken up, something’s pushing through, the outer city invades the inner. We stick in traffic by a ragged street market: each stall selling one kind of veg, and not much of that, its shopkeepers balancing goods on hand scales, stalls set out on scarves, on bits of carpet, on the bare pavement, stalls selling odd objects someone gathered together with I don’t know how much hope of a sale. Old women leak in amongst the posters of business girls and casino girls – SEX! FUN! LUCK! MONEY! – trickles of black coming up through cracks in the pavement.

Small puffs of clouds: the first I have seen since Paris.

I take some of my sky photos but I’m getting sick of my point of view. Telegraph poles, new-builds, dereliction, train lines, tramlines: avoiding one cliché, I’m stuck in another, if it’s possible to be stuck in an aesthetic of change, of movement.

The photos have become a task, and the task has given me something to do – like buying the notebook, which I never managed to track down – but it has also numbed me. Putting something down can do that.

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