D. Holdsworth
Someone switched on the jukebox and over towards the middle of
the pub a few people started dancing. And then a few more joined
them. And then a few more again. People who had been up all night
dancing started dancing. People who had never danced before
started dancing. People who would never dance again started
dancing. Over at the tables, folk spontaneously turned to people they
didn’t know to share their amazement. The world was healing – first
from the virus, now from the crash – and it was time to celebrate.
Tentative at first, and then with growing confidence, people dared to
touch each other. Hands high-fived, voices laughed, bodies brushed
against bodies. It was time to dance, it was time to trust. At the bar,
someone called out ‘Drinks on the house!’ – and it just seemed the
most natural thing in the world that no-one should pay.
Inhibitions melted, jobs were forgotten, friendship and love surged
in every heart, debt no longer existed, and money no longer
mattered.
She looked like she had stepped off a beach. She had flip-flops on
her feet and a canvas bag slung casually over one shoulder. She
wore a flowing, ivory-white, linen skirt, which flexed elegantly around
the revellers, like a yacht tacking through a summer breeze. Her hair
was long and mocha-coloured.
“Not thirty minutes…” The old man was looking at a remarkably
handsome gold fob watch. “More like 24 hours.” He looked up,
smiled, closed the lid of the fob watch and deftly slipped it back into
the pocket of his tweed waistcoat.
Safely out of hyperdrive, the bulk carriers glided smoothly into four
orbiting rings around the Earth. One ring of carriers set off to orbit
around the Equator. A second around the Greenwich meridian. And
two more were spaced evenly between the others, orbiting diagonally
around Earth. The four rings of carriers criss-crossed each other at
two points above the Equator: over the Gulf of Guinea, just off the
West coast of Africa, on one side of the planet, and over a large
garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean on the other.
There was a balletic synchrony in the movement of these hulking
vessels. In the tentacles of lesser navigators, there could’ve been
carnage at the crossing points. But such was the skill of the
Jagamath, they handled the navigational dynamics with wellrehearsed expertise, and the bulk carriers glided past each other like
well-behaved traffic on the roundabout of a mid-sized and generally
sober English market town. The odd hiccup or cross face, the
occasional toot of a horn, but nothing to give serious concern.
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