INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 Read Online Free PDF

be about itself – the act of making it – more than any excitement or rancour about the game. I hurry past with my head down. I know their attentions could be transferred in an instant from the football to me.
    When they look at me, what do they see? Not the reality, but a rumour, a cheapened, pirated image from that same TV screen: vagrant, raghead, scrounger, cheat, immigrant, shifty-eyed Ay-rab suicide bomber . Most of them don’t know what these things are, not properly. The television has told them that they are harmful, and that is enough. They are with their friends, which makes life easier, even when it’s hard. None of them have yet been forced into a position where thinking for themselves could mean the difference between life and death.
    Their motiveless aggression is almost a comfort. For these young people I am simply a brown space, a foreign-made receptacle for their various frustrations. They don’t care about me, only what they believe I might represent, and I feel glad. Being attacked for who you actually are is a hundred times worse.
    On some days, I might almost feel sorry for them.

    I walk as far as the canal. It is now full dusk. The concrete stanchions of the road bridge soar upwards into the darkness like the forelegs of some monumental beast. The street lamps along the canal’s edge turn the carrier-bag-infested surface of the viscous water to an orange soup. Beyond the lights, the towpath, swallowed in blackness, extends indefinitely.
    It is a dangerous place, the towpath, it is beyond the pale. If I were to be killed there, or badly beaten, no one, least of all the police, would express surprise.
    Asking for it, aren’t they?
    Stupid foreigners .
    Yet still I stand at the kerb, daring myself to walk between the stanchions and on to the towpath, for no other reason than to prove to myself that it is my right to walk where I choose. What have I come to this country for, if not for this?
    I scrape my shoe against the dirt, a glinting mixture of topsoil and cinders and broken glass. I’ve heard it said that the frisson of active transgression soon becomes addictive.
    “I wouldn’t go down there, if I were you.”
    I jump inside my skin. I believed myself alone. It is disconcerting and a little frightening to discover someone has been sharing this space with me all along. The voice is a woman’s. I stare at the figure before me. There is something familiar about her, but it takes me a moment to realise that it is the woman with the shopping cart I saw outside the Border Agency. She is wearing the same too-big overcoat, and a dark woollen cap pulled down low over her forehead.
    Seeing her here is surprising, almost ominous. I don’t know why that should be, but it is so.
    You thought she couldn’t speak, didn’t you? Go on, admit it.
    She loves to goad me, Marielena. She claims my best work is mostly the result of her goading. She is not here, of course she’s not – her voice is my own wishful thinking – and yet there is truth in what she says, that it was easier for me to believe the woman with the trolley must be stupid as well as homeless, to assume she has mislaid her voice along with her sanity.
    I am no better than the youths on the high street, yelling obscenities at the television screen and lobbing dog shit at passing pensioners. How easily we convince ourselves that those who have fallen into the mud have nothing to say.
    “I didn’t see you,” I say to her. I realise my words are true in a multitude of ways. The act of speaking to this stranger unnerves me. It comes to me that other than my ritualised encounters with the Border Agency and my fumbling conversations with shopkeepers and library staff, these are the first words of English I have exchanged with another person since I first arrived here. I savour the words again inside my head, hoping the woman can understand my accent. That she will not laugh, or turn on me like the street kids.
    “The canal path is a low