Invisibles (extract)

London was drying out in cold sunlight, crackling, creaking, sucking
itself back in after the bloating of water. Miriam felt the movements
and breaths of the city quite strongly- the breaths were slow,
irregular. She could always sense the coming of thunderstorms - London
would intake sharply and hold its breath all day, letting it out only
when the last purr of distant cloud-smashes had receded beyond its
boundaries.

Vince was walking in the park, alone, enjoying the smell of late
autumn. He was thinking how Miriam was unlike anyone he'd met. She was
so normal. Nobody was normal anymore, everyone was trying to be
extraordinary. But not Miriam - she even smelled old-fashioned, and
that was nice. He walked with people who were one step ahead and he was
determined to keep up with them. How weird it was that his view of the
world was one left over from twenty-two years ago, when the last shapes
and movements had vanished from his eyes. Sometimes he thought that he
could feel pity, and he hated it. Although it had its uses - he had
been told by a lot of people that he was good looking. Women thought
this made him vulnerable, and he could use the attitude in spades. They
always left when they grew dismayed by their inability to help him. He
needed help, God knows he needed it, but not in the way anyone
thought.

Vince sat on a bench by the lake, listening to the sound that the water
channels made as they flowed into it, and thought of floating. Miriam
made him float - a crazy trick, worth experiencing again.

Parks were precious to him, where the city's trash didn't strangle all
that he could know, where he wasn't fighting through fumes and stench
and people, people. The opposite and the same as his music - opposite
because silent, the same because he knew where he was. He knew the
grooves of every piece of vinyl, where to drop the needle, so
everything fitted in a neat way that it never did in life where
something or someone always fractured the rhythm into a thousand
pieces. His music was touch and love.

Variation was a tricky thing - he always wanted something new to make
up for the monotony of sightlessness. He'd amuse himself, when he had
the private space and time, by lying on his bed and conjuring up the
shapes of women that he'd known. Rina, whose spine was a little twisted
due to a congenital weakness; how that had made him shudder, and how
he'd hated himself for being judgmental.

Pinching the flesh of Juliet's stomach, which drove her nuts - he could
never make her understand how he loved the feel of that skin between
his hands. Karen had said that he had a sixth sense. Vince might have
made a go of it with her, but she had to go back to Denmark, and he was
too lazy to follow.

The whole 'sixth sense' thing annoyed him, if the truth be known. He
didn't feel blessed or compensated with anything. One thing that he did
know was that in life nobody was ever compensated. You just had to make
do with what you had, and Vince had himself.