Work in progress

The lounge floor is covered in polished wooden boards, but she knows that there are a few rough edges in the space between the big rug and the window, so she moves tentatively, her toes curled in a protective arch, like a caterpillar inching its way across a hazardous surface. (She supposes that all surfaces are hazardous for caterpillars, but she lets the simile stand in her head.) Although she can only see shadows and the pale, half-imagined ghosts of her insteps, she looks down as she shuffles towards the window. She can hear the dry skin of her feet sliding across the slick, varnished wood and, behind her, the steady chonk, chonk, chonk of the kitchen clock’s oversized second hand. The fridge hums and judders. The sounds you barely notice in the daylight, expanding to fill the night’s silence.

The car is still parked on the opposite bank, the headlights white on the water. Her flat’s window frames’ edges are cream-coloured in a sheen of reflected light, and there’s a broad wavering band of light on the ceiling. As she moves into the blur of light near the window, she steps sideways into the shadow of the window frame, feeling the winter cold that’s pressing against the flat glass. There’s a wind blowing down there, and the combination of waves and headlights is like a film show: the way the patterns ripple and change, dissolving and reforming nets of light endlessly, swallowing dark patches, always in motion, so fast and complex and unfixable that you can only capture – momentarily – little pieces of stasis in the constant flux of light and dark. It’s the same when there’s rain falling on the canal: she could watch it for hours, the shifting patterns of disturbance and stability: scattered splashes, ripples, and the wind-blown planes of water and spray. Mesmeric. Watching it, she drifts out of the concrete world of conscious perception, absorbing different rhythms and patterns; none of them capturable or repeatable. But the waiting, the watching, the sense that it might suddenly make sense, and be fixed in her mind – that’s what keeps her watching. And sighing.