STORIES FROM SONGS

Francesca Baker Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks WATERLOO SUNSET Eight million people live in this city. I watch many of them, every day, buzzing around the train station, spilling out onto the streets, making their way to and from the river. So many seem to be sleepwalking, rather than living. They hazily move with purpose, unaware of anything around them.

The only thing that unites them in feeling is the river. Whether a cast glance or a long and lingering gaze, it captures everyone.

Once I saw a vision standing on the bridge, looking into the murky water. Beneath to heavy eyebrows her kohl lined eyes were like night skies, so thick and heavy that no stars could be seen. If we had ever met in person, as in face to face rather than me watching from my balcony, she would have looked straight past me. She seemed to be wearing my grandmother’s coat, or at least one remarkably like it. My eyes followed the buttons down to the hem, flapping in the breeze, folding upwards like the corner of a present tantalizingly uncurled. Her left knee was bruised, and I immediately wanted to administer care to her war wound. I noticed the bag hanging insouciantly off her right shoulder matched my scarf. I remember thinking how heavy the bag must have been. She leaned with such compensating pressure to the left that it can’t have been good for her. I worried for her posture. I am her secret admirer.

There is a couple that I only see on Friday evenings. At the end of every week he waits for her. In winter he is dressed in a dark brown coat, in summer he goes just with a shirt, and in the intervening seasons the coat is swung over his arms. I have named them Terry and Julie. Terry’s hair had a slight ginger tinge, meaning that on warmer days his scalp was like the sunshine on a cloud. I am unsure as to whether they are conducting a relationship of love, or an ongoing and apparently unfruitful negotiation. I hate it when I see people kissing in public. Not genuine love and warmth, but when it is a display of affected affection, peacock love. Terry and Julie rarely kiss, but when they do, it seems real. Watching them every day, I have come to realise that, a bit like a Warhol spectrum, a person could be glorious technicolour or a faded negative, or somewhere in the middle, flashes of colour, which sometimes go out of the lines.

On the river banks sit men and women I have come to recognise. For them Waterloo Bridge truly is home, cardboard boxes sheltering them, pennies chucked in a hat paying their salary, discarded sandwiches their sustenance. Although the hundreds of people who walk past the Big Issue sellers and bitten and decrepit homeless people form a majority, the one or two that acknowledge their existence lift spirits even of a lonely observer like me.

There are always signs of nice people. When rain thunders down and strangers huddle under improvised umbrellas, or a gentlemen smiles at a sobbing girl and reminds her that genuine goodness still abounds. And the wonder that passes over tourist faces as they gaze into the Thames, the river entrancing them, is a gentle reminder of my luck. I take a gulp of tea from the stained cup as I rest my shoulders on the paint flecked window pane as I remember this.

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