The Long Way, Because Nobody Was Waiting

The weekday loop is twenty-two minutes, because twenty-two minutes is what fits before I have to be somewhere. It ends at the corner by the shuttered press shop, where we turn right and go home.

On Saturday we go straight on. I have never trained this. I have never said a word at that corner. He simply arrives at it, does not slow down, and continues — and on a Tuesday he arrives at the same corner and turns right without breaking stride either.

I have tried to work out what he is reading and I do not think it is me. I am not walking differently; I have checked. I deliberately walked the Saturday way on a Wednesday and he turned right and I followed him home like an idiot.

The best I have is that Saturday sounds different. The shutters are down at the press shop and up at the tea stall, there is no school gate, and there is a man who sells fish on Saturdays about eighty metres past the corner who is not there any other day. He is not going for the corner. He is going for the fish.

The bench by the water tap holds four and is occupied from about six fifteen. On a weekday it is three men who have known each other since before the flyover, and they are done and gone by seven because they have things to do.

On Saturday it is a completely different four. Younger, louder, a phone on speaker, and they are still there at half past eight when we come back past. I have never seen a single member of one committee sit with a member of the other.

I asked the tea stall about it, because the tea stall knows everything, and was told that the weekday men have sat there for eleven years and the Saturday men started during the monsoon two years ago, and that there was no incident, no argument, nothing — the weekday men simply do not come on Saturdays.

Which is a completely satisfactory answer, and I resent it slightly, because I had constructed something much better in my head on the walk over.

The rule is one. Not one good one — one. Once it is taken the phone goes back in the pocket and that is the walk.

The effect was not what I expected. I assumed I would spend the walk hunting, and for the first week I did, and those photographs are all bad. Then I started holding it back, and holding it back means not deciding, and not deciding means looking at everything for longer than you otherwise would.

Most days I now take it in the last four minutes, near home, of something I have walked past nine hundred times. The gate. The shoe man's stool before he arrives. Bruno waiting at the kerb in the particular way he waits.

If I had allowed myself twenty I would have twenty photographs of the interesting thing that happened, and no photographs at all of the street I actually live on.

Six years, every Saturday, no exceptions. Not a scrap, not an offcut, not the head of anything. He is friendly to me and completely indifferent to the dog, which I respect enormously and which Bruno has decided is a temporary situation.

The hope is undiminished. He sits. He sits square on, at a polite distance, in the posture of a dog who has read something about negotiation, and he holds it for as long as I let him.

I asked once, in the second year, whether it bothered him. He said if he fed one he would be feeding nine by October, and that there had been nine, some years ago, and that it had taken a season to undo.

Which is the correct answer and also the reason he is the only stall on that road with no dogs at it. Six years of a completely consistent no has produced a small, quiet patch of pavement, and Bruno and I stand in it every Saturday like fools.