Communion Town by Sam Thompson

softness that plunged into me and drew me into itself, and at that very moment the first phrase of a new song dropped into my head. I caught her waist and rolled her over and drank until I had to gasp for breath. I tangled my hands in her hair and gazed into her face until we both breathed together. We moved together. A warm chord sounded. I filled my lungs. We were making a discovery, and it grew ever more remarkable, this disclosure of what each of us had at heart. All I needed to know was the way it unfolded, the song.

The City Room
    In from the street, through the hall and down, one palm making a squeak on the bannister, his feet pattering softly on the stairs, he can go at such a speed and still be so quiet. As he enters the dim corridor his eyes crowd with blocks of a colour that doesn’t have a name, a colour that no one else has discovered.
    He steals past the open kitchen door, as quiet and quick as he can, past his grandmother who is standing at the sink cleaning a chicken and listening to the radio news. In his cupped hands he hides what he has stolen. He wonders what the canal man will do. He would take it back if he could, but he knows he’ll never be rid of it now.
    The blocks of colour pulsate: they take their shapes from the doors and the walls, but get detached and drift free across his vision. The kitchen window is open, and in the distance the city murmurs its invitation. The autumn is laced with leftover summer. Without turning from the sink, his grandmother puts her sharp knife down on the counter. That is not a toy.
    She has a straight back, a handsome nose bent like a knuckle and hair dark as lead soldiers. She wears wool stockings and lace-up shoes. When they go out into the city, she haggles with market traders while he stands with his fingers twisted into her skirts. She knows all the people in the district. She chats to the greengrocer who sells them string bags filled with apples, and she jokes with the large, straw-haired woman who checks out books for them at the library. Whenever she takes him to the open-air swimming bath she greets the old ladies on the benches, and when they hear music from the bandstand in the park they can stop and listen for as long as they want. She rides the buses as though she owns them. She likes to press his face with her cool palm. Where she first came from, he has no way of imagining: he has never considered what she is like in herself.
    He passes the kitchen and continues down the corridor, which runs the length of the basement flat. Her room faces him from the far end behind a door with a scrollworked brass handle. It is full of water-damaged books, boxes of ancient letters, clothes from long ago, significant jewellery. Once, late at night, he took himself down to wake her because he had stomach pains, and found her sitting upright in bed, awake. The green-shaded lamp on her bedside table shed light on the book open in her lap. The clock pronounced a slow nocturnal tutting. From this, he formed the impression that she does not sleep. She is always there in that room, upright in that bed, at all times of the night.
    Halfway down the corridor another door stands ajar. Rather than move it on the hinge he eases through the narrow gap. This room holds things from his grandmother’s past: insectile armchairs, a hard horsehair couch, a cherrywood rolltop desk owned by someone long gone. The windows look into slots of brick which are open at the top to let in the light.
    The floor in here is covered with an elaborate model city, and he used to believe that the room was named accordingly: the City Room. He now knows that he misunderstood what his grandmother was saying, and that really the room is the Sitting Room. And yet, although he burns with shame to recall how often and how blithely he must have got it wrong – he imagines his own piping voice making the mistake over and over, and he can sense how it must have sounded to her, a lisping childish fault to be kindly