Pudong

Old wood is like wine.  In the grain, you can read the story of a hundred men - men who drive dirty steel cars and have heavy brown hands, and men who spend their lives in factories and dust to produce beautiful things for others.  The smell of old wood brings back memories you never had.

When time is on your side, you start to take notice of the things around you.  I've been noticing the floor.  It is wood, dark, rough-cut and scratched like a tired old face.

I try to imagine how far away I am from the closest person who can understand what I say.  It doesn't scare me, thinking this way.  But it makes me sad, all these millions of people.  I will never make friends with any of them, and we will never know each other.  Alone in a city of millions.  How different is it from walking alone through a forest?  Apart from the smoke and cigarette butts...

Outside the sun shines like a gold coin glinting in the light of a giant white halogen lamp.  The streets are an unreal grey, lit up like a film set.  This place is so new, it seems.  New metal and concrete stretched tightly over everything, taut and groaning.  Waiting at the edge of a road full of cars, I start to notice things.  Like the way my feet, white even through the dust and grime, look like aliens amongst the shiny leather and American sneakers.  My feet don't fit in.  Some people - like me - find it easier to be alone if they're hidden in a crowd.

I walk for miles, taking photos of cracks in the pavement when I find them, a postman in a blue delivery van, a child peering out of a third floor window, a small cat with three legs.  I turn it on myself once, watching my reflection in the lens blip out of existence and back again.

On a hill in the middle of everything but hidden by trees and broken stone walls, there is suddenly no-one, just me and three kids, maybe 18 or 19 years old.  They are smoking pot.  I wander over, my heart jittery, and ask them in my language for a puff.  It's silly, I know.  They can't understand a thing, and when one replies, handing me the joint cradled against the breeze, it's like singing, sounds without meaning.  I take it carefully.  They are rich kids, I can tell that.  Their clothes display a finely tuned disorder.  I sit down and inhale deeply, a few times, and then hand it back.  'Pateicos', I say, to no-one in particular.

By the time I get back I am breathing differently.  I wave to the girl in front of my building, who is standing there, straight backed in uniform, belt tight around her waist high up, shoes gleaming.  She sees me and smiles.  In my room, I take a mobile phone from my suitcase, hit '1', and lie back on my bed with only underpants on.  The fan cools the sweat covering my body.  I launch into conversation the moment the phone is picked up on the other end, and can't stop.

Later on, sitting outside on the steps with wet hair and a can of Coke, eating noodles and reading about Chinese martial arts and architecture, I feel that I am truly happy.  It is humid and the air is thick, like warmed-up pillows, and fragrant too.