They started across the street. Even before halfway more had joined. By the time they reached the other side, well, just before the kerb because they had crossed the street in rather a long diagonal line, a crowd it seemed were crossing too. They stopped, as I say, a little before the kerb and, after looking down at what seemed their hands, they turned towards the middle of the front line as if waiting for something.Then it changed. They were searching for something, like a crowd straining to see what was happening but prevented from moving out of their ordered rows by some unpredicted force. Craning their whole bodies and looking and, if seen from above, looking like a coat hanger or boomerang.

Shoulders suddenly hunched in shrugs as they looked at their neighbours yet not quite glancing at faces, just moves in the direction of. They turned their hands upwards at thigh level, a little out from their figures, as they shrugged not in unison. This a loosening, as they turned around to stare at the sky, at the blank spaces between their feet, spaces which were increasing in size now as people made hesitant steps, semi-circles, quarter circles. Soon the tight banding loosened enough to be unknown to any newcomer, not that there were any.

Almost as quickly as they'd arrived the street was left. People leaving alone; in pairs. Loose groupings not more than three or four, until all that remained was the street as before and, if you'd been aware of the previous situation, three people appearing to form an unequal triangle in the road. One wandered off to a slight street nearby where he walked up then back again in this slow repeat; feeling the walls as if feeling his way. I don't know if the street was an alley with a dead-end or if there was another reason why he didn't leave it but walked backwards and forwards feeling his way.

The man still standing before the kerb, near the original other side of the road, hunched his shoulders in a roll not a shrug, moving his brown overcoat forwards on his body as he did. He stretched out his arms, before doing so he unbuttoned the coat so it triangles outwards as his arms lifted. His face was oblong, a little red with slow rolls of weight at the bottom half, like W. C. Fields, if any of you have seen his films, or the older men in the silent movie Lulu. I don't know why these old things come to mind, perhaps it was the street looking so similar to, yes, almost straight from a movie lot. He turned his palms down when his arms were outstretched, pulling at the ends of the sleeves as if testing their length. Swiftly, I almost didn't catch the movement, he took off his overcoat, held it in front of him then folded it. This musn't have been what he wanted to do because almost as quickly he found a hanger and draped it over this. As he held the overcoat in front of him, hooked on the fingers of his outstretched hand, reaching up probably afraid of dragging the floor with it, he looked around, searching restlessly for something. He moved barely a footfall and hung the coat over one of those oblong boxes, electrical or something, you find in the streets.

Brown coat, you don't see that colour now. I wonder if the dye is still used. Are their rows of it waiting for a re-birth?

His shoulders looked very straight and flat, as if sensing this thought he made them even flatter; moving his shoulders so that I almost saw invisible hands smoothing his jacket, pulling, in the perfect centre, a straight line from collar to hemline. He soon forgot this manoeuvre though, appearing to search again, looking around. Perhaps wondering why he was here. Then, with a gesture seeming of largess, he felt in his jacket pocket, reached in to those hidden buttoned pockets high up on the chest and, after some checking, through envelopes, possibly documents of some kind at any rate, he pulled out a newspaper folded in three and then half again. On part of the structure unoccupied by his coat he opened the paper out, complete and wider than the box; stretching his arms to smooth black pictures. Absorbed slow, insistently engrossed whether on ridding the surface of wrinkled creases or on the articles was hard to tell. His fingers moved over the surface in steady rhythms; read across each blackened image. His back bent, street-light falling on the curve, seen from a distance.

The third occupier of the triangular station, the one to the left, their moves crossing

Bodies of Difference
A Different Body Experiences
A Different Universe