Moving Finger - Issue 3 - Brunel University

quality. Perched there, wearing pink coat, clutching black handbag, passing judgement on
life, on lives. Beige, plastic-rimmed glasses, magnified small blue eyes. Her view on the
world, looking into them, deeper. Frown cut by exacting eyebrows, expression sharp,
condemning. Pale complexion, interrupting faint freckles, whisker-embedded chin, an old
lady. Bus pulls up. Balancing herself, allows people onboard, steps on, sits down. Bus
pulls away.
Jenny Steele
OLD MAN WALKING
Once a river, now stream-like, he meanders and chatters softly. Far from spring, his
autumn approaches by the day, but what is time to someone whose only clock is the dial
of the Cenotaph’s shadow in the dusky summer sun? Now he shuffles and whispers as the
wind does through the trees, the grass and his hair, wiry on the head, his frame bent as the
trees around him. The birds he passes pause as he goes by. It could be a silence of fear,
but the glorious reprieve he receives as the path carries him away suggests otherwise; the
birds, it appears, know something we don’t.
His face is gnarled, but satisfied. He is slow moving, yet balanced, the only hint of
danger coming from the solid circle of gold, sitting on the fourth finger of his left hand.
Time’s not as forgiving with precious metal as it was with passion and the gold is now
dull, tarnished, only serving to cheapen memory. The sole means by which it is held on is
the arthritic swelling of a knuckle, a constant testimony to pain.
She used to say his eyes were like the sea. Now they are the colour of puddles.
Through blurry vision he removes a neatly stitched hankie from his pocket and, ignoring
the tears, the man, half-river, half-relic, begins to polish the gold. As the lustre returns,
the last rays of sun catch the ring and a speck of sunlight dances across his face.
Phil Rothwell
MIDNIGHT
His black hair reflects the sulphurous lamplight as it bounces with his strides; its
centre part gives him wings that stroke the air at a leisurely pace like an albatross at high
altitude. His brown eyes shine with the white and red of Clapham High Street’s traffic as
the day’s litter blows past his feet on the autumnal breeze with the smell of kebabs, car
fumes and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The tube station casts a solid white cone of light over
the High Street’s kerb, spreading wider across the central divide to dissipate only feet
from the other side. A blast of warm air hits him at the tube’s entrance, blocking out the
traffic’s final roar. The horns become muffled and die to be replaced by the dull hum of a
machine that drags a blue-overalled cleaner behind it. The smell of detergent burns his
nostrils as the buffer - cleaner in tow – buzzes around him at the ticket machine.
He can see himself in a piece of black cardboard behind Perspex where there should be
poster. His navy-blue duffel coat and tan multi-pocketed trousers give him that workingclass
‘something’, he thinks, as he takes his ticket and change before heading to the
barrier. His ticket is pulled from him as he places it in the barrier’s slot. Dust flies up into
the air as the gates jerk open and the ticket jack-in-the-boxes out the other side. The
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