The Market of Closed Mouths

     The television switched itself on sometime after midnight. No crackle, no warning, just the blue flicker bleeding through the room like cold aquarium light. A DVD menu rotated endlessly before finally settling on a song I should have recognised. That was the disturbing part. It moved through me with the familiarity of a forgotten favouritesong, something buried deep in childhood corridors and morphine dreams. But no, I couldn't remember it.

*I am here for you.*

The voice was soft, almost maternal.

*I am here for you.*

But it did not comfort me.

We were standing then in a market square somewhere in the north of England, one of those exhausted towns where the sky always resembles wet concrete and every building appears to have survived something catastrophic. I have always hated the north. Not openly. Quietly. Privately. The hatred comes from not understanding it.

The people there feel sewn together differently.

Not community exactly.

Something older.

As though generations never properly separated, but folded back into one another repeatedly until bloodlines became rope.

“It’s a strange place,” I said.

“To outsiders,” she answered.

The market had already closed. Metal shutters pulled down like eyelids over dead eyes. I wanted to buy baby clothes from a lonely stall at the edge of the square. Tiny snow suits. Little knitted matinee cardigans in pale cream wool. Ridiculous things for a life not even confirmed to exist.

She became irritated immediately.

“You’re embarrassing me,” she snapped. “It’s only suspected.”

Suspected.

As though pregnancy were a criminal allegation.

I bought them anyway.

The woman serving us looked vaguely like Bonnie Tyler after a lifetime spent smoking in seaside arcades. Her eyeliner had collapsed into the wrinkles beneath her eyes and her voice sounded dragged over gravel. She watched me carefully while folding the cardigan into tissue paper.

Almost pitying me.

“What was the atmosphere like?” you asked later.

Strained.

Like everyone present had already heard terrible news but agreed not to discuss it aloud.

I noticed the clothing first. Scarves. Long dark garments. Very little western fashion. The streets felt divided into invisible territories, each person watching the others without appearing to look directly at them. Even the silence carried suspicion.

Then came the restaurant.

She wanted pie and chips. Of course, I thought to myself.

I needed eastern food, something with heat, cardamom, chilli, saffron, anything alive enough to distract me from the dread collecting in my stomach.

The upstairs restaurant was full, so they sat me alone downstairs beside a broken drinks fridge humming like a swarm of wasps. The food was terrible. Greasy lamb drowned beneath sweet sauce. Wilted coriander.  Roti like damp paper.

On the bathroom door someone had pasted fake Louis Vuitton wallpaper. 

Counterfeit luxury in a room that smelled of shit.

That felt important somehow.

Did you find the building?

Yes.

Though building is the wrong word.

It looked more like a supermarket abandoned during civil collapse. Vast empty aisles. Grey flooring. Fluorescent lighting that buzzed overhead with insect energy. Somebody was showing me around but I no longer understood why. The place was sparse, freezing cold, stripped of identity.

Then I noticed the glass doors.

Huge expanses of them.

Outside stood young men with their faces covered. Scarves over mouths. Eyes bright with excitement. One waved a weapon carelessly while another fired upwards into the sky. The sound cracked through the air like God snapping a branch in half.

And they laughed.

That was the worst thing.

The laughter.

Not rage.

Not protest.

Joy.

Pure joy.

I remember walking downhill afterwards trying desperately to find a route home. Streets twisting into unfamiliar terraces. The daylight looked wrong, dimmed somehow, as though the entire town existed beneath smoked glass.

Then I saw him.

The Arab man.

Standing beside his wife.

“What were they doing?” you asked me.

He told me to go with him.

She was instructed to face the wall.

Quietly.

Obediently.

Like she already understood what came next.

I remember apologising to her.

Not for anything specific.

Just apologising in general.

For humanity perhaps.

For men.

For inevitability.

Then the song returned.

*I am here for you.*

Again and again.

Only this time the light he carried was fire.

Actual fire.

Held too close to my face.

Orange swallowing everything.

I told him to put it down.

He smiled as though I had misunderstood the purpose entirely.

“I don’t think you’re ever going to get out of here,” you told me later.

“And you?” I asked.

You shrugged.

“Does it matter where we are contained? Here? Our minds?”

Maybe not.

Perhaps the body is irrelevant once the corridors inside the mind begin locking themselves one by one.

But then you mentioned Hart Island.

The island of the unwanted dead.

Mass graves layered beneath thin soil and salt wind.

“A million lost souls,” you whispered. “And all of them will eventually connect themselves to you. Then you’ll break spiritually.”

Outside, somewhere beyond the room, I could hear the television still playing that impossible song.

The same line.

Over and over.

Waiting patiently.

I closed my eyes.

“No,” I said finally.

“I will not. I will not break spiritually. ”