LISTEN

I reach for the buzzer than suspend the move glancing to the building next door. There is building work going on. There's sand and stone heaped up outside in the street and wooden slats going over a pit in the pavement and into the open-fronted space that is going to be the room next door. I ask a builder, "Is that going to be a sandwich bar?" He says "Yes, but we're going to remove that sign that says "sandwich bar" and replace it with another one."

The fountain in the courtyard of the children's centre is working. It's been plugged in and frothy water tips from one metallic cup into another. This water is lit up in each cup by an underwater light. It catches on to the froth making it white and shiny. As I get closer to the water I can smell Indian food. I start to salivate but when my fingers become immersed in the lighted water the smell disappears.

Once in the building I sign in with my name and the time. It is 1.15pm. I take the lift up to the second floor which is the top floor and cross through the Occupational Therapy Room that has been booked this afternoon by another therapist. There's the ball-pool with red, blue, yellow and green plastic balls. These balls are hollow and some of them are crushed. Some of the children like to crunch down on them, using their jaws like heavy industrial cranes that implode and dismantle them like buildings. The room has a slightly contained and stuffy atmosphere. It is padded with blue mats, a swing tilting back and forth gently as if a child had only that instant, vanished.

Next door the floor has been taken up. All the furniture is heaped into a corner and the bare bones of  the wooden support slats starts to reveal a symmetrical pattern like the criss-cross map of a chess board. There are indents between the slats stuffed with the soft insulation that is normally invisible under the floor covering. This covering usually offers a level surface for crossing from here to there and back again and this is usually done without too much thought. Because some of the floor has been removed I need to step carefully along the narrow lines of wood in order not to slip into the immediate give of this softness that is rising and enlarging.

Carefully I make it over to the other side of the room and go down the metallic stairway which is pinned onto the outside wall of the building. I reach the ground floor in this way by a different route.

The building is silent. I put my knuckle to a door but instead of knocking I listen.
There's a low level hum like the sound of a tractor or a tank and it's getting nearer. It stops and starts, stops and starts and it soon becomes evident that it is moving in the same cadence as Standard English. Soon it drowns out the silence and even in the gaps between it's advance, I sense this hidden form looming and preparing itself on the other side of the wood door. I fling the door wide open and a small child with its head pressed sideways against the concrete floor is gazing with wide eyes into a red plastic bus. He is looking through the back end where the back panel has been wrenched off or has fallen away. He is making engine-like noises and they reverberate around the empty room as if divorced from the throat and diaphragm of their original source.