STREET OBSERVATIONS - The Invisible Person

As you passed her it was the hand gestures that caught your eye. The woman stood with two hands opened out just so, in a Virgin Mary like supplication, the shoulders shrugging, fingers bent back and then as if being counted, wagged then pointed towards a destination, coy fingers pressed gigglingly tight against the lips. All the facial and digital signifiers of derision, exclamations and enjoyment expressed in a mere few seconds,in complete silence. Not addressed to me, or to anyone in the street, but to this entirely imaginary person who stood before her in her minds eye, with whom she intently. mutely was conversing. Her eyes never looking directly in any living person's direction, This was not street theatre, nor mime performance art. It was one lonely woman half living in this and another world totally divorced from everyone else. One where she could be heard and chat freely, endlessly if needs be. These ghosts who were always reliably there for her, available at any time of the day. Awake, even in the broken hours of evening

She'd found her spot on the octagonal seats round the base of a beech tree. Aesthetically positioned at the conjunction of four busy city streets, before the steps of an old bank. Now a bar and grill trading off its former position of good fortune. There she sat sequentially forming and smoking her own cigarettes. Her practiced tobacco browned fingers betrayed a lifetime of rolling her own shag, twisting and pinching the end, and letting it rest precariously smoldering between the twin beaks of her lips. All the while continuing with the same gentle gesturing of an ongoing polite conversation with the voiceless companion without form, who seemingly sat just to her left.

It was hard to discern what her true age might be, probably in reality her mid fifties, but street life had prematurely distressed her face, by ten, maybe twenty deeply wrinkled years. Spindly legs without much muscle left, disappeared up behind the damaged pelmet of a tan coloured suede mini dress, above it a bare mid riff, with a white crop top slouching down on one shoulder. Yes, she didn't dress her age, but then why should she need to? These clothes were comfortable, its the height of the Summer heat, and here on these benches she could ochre her limbs, Briefly disguising the winter pallor of drained poor health that lay beneath. 

On a casual glance you noticed her long peroxide white hair tied loosely in a stiff bunch. Which she swished backwards and forwards in the animation of her mimetic conversation. On closer examination it was clearly a wig. You could see its wavering loose edges, the hairpins, the hair and the scalp beneath a sickly yellow green colour, the consequence of frequent home bleachings, gone wrong. Scorching the suppleness out of her own hair, turning it lifeless, brittle, reduced to shaven stumps. The wig, a resplendent facsimile for a misremembered fulsomeness of hair. Cut, woven and shaped from the head of someone else.

Why was she stood here now? Well, who knows really? I doubt even she knows. In the past, maybe she'd professionally worked these streets, until drink or stronger intoxicants took the competitive edge off her trading profile. Though that's not the sole reason why you end up on the street. These days where the causes of destitution is a highly competitive market. Hard times undoubtedly fell upon her at some point, and now even this 'performance' is not for real, not for anyone, anything, anymore. This melodrama she's acting out, is cut off from whatever was its primary purpose or place of origin. The existential reasons for surviving this far remains a mystery, long buried. Going through the motions of a life no longer lived, of friends not real or really friends, a charade that you had to take a wild guess at, what it actually meant.