Doors

Two women argue in a food, wine and DIY store on Peckham High Street. They are wearing plum semi-rimless sunglasses. The store assistant ponders over a crate of butterfly hinges. The contents of which has blossomed inexplicably. The store assistant picks out a hinge from the crate and tries to bend it closed. He tries all afternoon with the mosquito killer blinking a murderous blue and the giant African land snails curling and uncurling in their boxes and he cannot close it.

A mid-wife returns home from her shift at King’s College Hospital. She kicks off her copper hospital crocks and she thumbs through her mail and she finds every door in her house hanging open. Towels and cutlery and clothes hangers exposed. She struggles against an open door, shouting and squealing, and then curls up on the carpet in defeat. A mop leans out from under the stairs.

Double stitched footballs are floating in the Thames. Pouring unstoppably from open container crates. Spreading out for acres. Squeaking and slopping as they bump against each other. Men wander on the freight ship smoking. Others are in the dip boats dragging nets between. Herding a million footballs as though they were sheep. The sun is glaring on the water.

In Copeland Park, the lichen on a church and office and cocktail bar warehouse unit looks purple and alien in the rain. Three security guards are wrestling with the electric doors. It’s no good, one guard says and blows his nose delicately into a napkin. Upstairs, on the fifth floor, an office manager gestures wildly. Loosening his tie, he says, why are all the goddamn doors open. Nobody looks at him.

Car horns are roaring on the M25. All the vehicles are driving with their doors open. Swerving and screeching and colliding into one another. Suitcases and spare tyres and broken glass litter the road. Drivers yell at each other through their open doors, they say, pull over, for god’s sake, close your doors! People roll along the carriages like luggage.

In some grey garden city, outside of London, the wheat silo hatches are hanging open. Birds are gorging themselves on grain. A herd of cattle is escaping from a slaughter house. Escaping patiently and in single file. A man wearing headphones brushes blood into a gutter. Another man watches television in a small room. Cockerels and caged hens cluck and garble and leap out of their unlatched pens. Feathers fill up the air like smoke.

Commuters are covering their ears. Scrambling hurriedly up an escalator. A newspaper blows past. A tube train tears through Stockwell station and people are falling out of its open doors. There are voices in the dark tunnels shouting. There are people peering down from the street through all the open drains.

Bubbles gulp and wallop on the surface of the English Channel. Two joggers pause on the shoreline and cup their eyes and look out at the horizon. They watch the water roaring. One of them says, it must be a whale, it must be a whale, it must be! A half kilometre below, on the sea bed, fresh air surges upwards, escaping through the open hatches of a submarine.

On Rye Lane, a pensioner tears off his red waterproof and throws it over an approaching lion. He squeezes his girlfriend’s arm. The lion paws the coat sleepily from its eyes and watches the couple flee through the streets. Across the road another lion is entering somebody's flat. Its tail flickers through the open doorway. There are great apes howling somewhere far off.

Catering trolleys are falling out of an airplane. They are landing in Ruskin Park. Looking like meteorites. Or UFOs. They are falling into Brockwell Lido. Over the Japanese Gardens in Peckham Rye. Falling with the cups and saucers and in-flight magazines. The gulf stream is blowing in the cabin, storming through the open airplane door. The window shutters are rattling.

High tide thunders through the open Thames Tidal gates. It flows through the lumber yards and sourdough bakeries and gastropubs and four bedroom houses, it floods through the open doors of Bellmarsh prison. A woman is asleep on the top floor of her flooded home. She sleeps with her windows boarded up and with cupboards and closets blocking her doorways. The ice cubes are melting in her open freezer.

A Green Camberwell Parakeet prunes itself on a rooftop by Camberwell Green. Ash and smoke and takeaway leaflets blow out from a burning tower building. Fires spread from open oven doors and uncapped gas mains. Fire hydrants empty themselves onto the street. The Green Camberwell Parakeet lifts its head from its plumage and then pecks at a length of yellow wire that it mistakes for a worm. It blinks its eyes and ruffles its wings in frustration. Its feathers are the colours of cut grass.

We lay awake in our bed listening to footsteps. The wind stirs leaves and branches around our room. The duvet is spotted with rain and dirt and broken insects and if we lift our heads above the blankets we can see all the way through the house and out onto the street. Something is moving in the corridor. You close your eyes. You hope it is a fox. Please be a fox, you say.