Peripheral Vision Read Online Free PDF Page B

Everything is going to be all right. The ambulance is coming.’
    I knew this scenario from American cop shows. Layers of mystery would unfold from this woman’s unexceptional tumble on a tram. Forty-two television minutes later, drug busts would ensue, or a paedophile ring would be smashed and the cleric would hang himself.
    â€˜No ambulance,’ the woman said. She used the lawyer’s arm to haul herself up, straightened her dress, and then waved him away. End of crime-show plot.
    â€˜Folks, I’m going to have to report a brake fault,’ the driver called out. ‘Might take a few minutes for the engineers to get back to me.’
    Up the other end of the tram another cluster of atoms was forming, atoms who were going to be late for work and who couldn’t decide who to blame – the tram driver, the lawyer, me, the woman who’d fallen to the floor, the transport corporation, the government. So they got off the tram. I followed. We trooped down the road to the next intersection, where the tracks of an alternative route snaked in twin wires toward town.
    Ten minutes later we set off on another tram, padded shoulder jammed against breast pocket. My arm pressed against the woman beside me. The back of my arm was gently riding her ribs, up and down, like I was playing a musical instrument with frets every few centimetres. One fret higher and my elbow would meet her breast. I couldn’t help imagining its curved bell shape moulding against my arm. I glanced surreptitiously at her face and saw that she was gaunt and beautiful and so heavily made up it was impossible to tell what colour her real skin might be. Her lips were a startling purple.
    Compared to the woman who had fallen, I was tall, but standing next to this commuter I was medium-sized. A medium-sized commuter on my way to a medium-sized job in a medium-sized city that I know too well.
    I thought about how if I stayed in this city long enough I would run into the long angular woman at a party. I would spend some time wondering how I knew her face. She might do the same. We’d smile at each other in an I-know-you-from-somewhere kind of way and we might banter with a few jokes and offer to get another drink and move on to a few words about how we happened to know the person who was hosting the party and then we would inch a little closer, laugh a little louder, touch a little more often until it was late enough for us to slip away. Or we might each go off and find someone else to talk to, or we might stand together uncomfortably for a while and then separately decide we were tired after a week of work and it was time to go home. But we wouldn’t take a tram. She would call a taxi or hail one on the main street near the party, and I would walk on, pretending I was a big man, not afraid of the dark and the desperate drug addicts lurking inside shadows, but further down the road I’d hail a different taxi, one driven by a man from Somalia who would ask whether I knew the capital of Somalia and when I answered correctly wouldn’t have anything else to say.
    Tonight, with a storm thrumming on the window of the cafe and commuters bowing into the rain as they hurry along the street, another tram story begins – with someone my friend knows. Sometimes, after work, I meet my friend who works in a government department writing policy on the punctuality and frequency of public transport, and we drink white wine and eat bowls of hot chips and talk. When we first sat down, the story she had told me was this: a man had begun to act strangely in her office. He wore gaudy ties to important meetings.
    â€˜Great wide lurid things with smiley faces and ducks and fluorescent stop signs.’ My friend shook her head.
    I said I wished someone wore ties that interesting to meetings I attended.
    â€˜You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It’s inappropriate. And he wears brown shoes with black suits, and he has greasy