Imaginative and descriptive writing

The market wakes long before its customers do. By six the square is already a machine of noise and movement, though the sky above it is still the grey of unwashed sheets and the streetlamps have not yet decided to go out.

The first thing is the sound. A van door slams, then another, and a man somewhere shouts a name nobody answers. Crates come down off the lorries in a steady wooden clatter, stacked three and four high, and the trestle tables are unfolded with a screech of cold metal that sets your teeth on edge. Over it all, the gulls — fat, grey, unbothered — wheel and complain, waiting for the first split crate of fish.

Then the smell arrives, and it arrives in layers. Closest is the wet stone of the square itself, hosed down overnight and still steaming faintly where the warmth of the day has not yet reached it. Above that, the green smell of the vegetable stalls — earth still clinging to the carrots, the sharp clean note of cut cabbage, a barrow of mint that scents the whole corner. And under everything, threading through it, the smell of bread from the bakery on the far side, so frank and generous that it seems almost unfair, pulling you across the square before you have decided to go.

The traders move with the unhurried speed of people who have done this ten thousand times. A woman builds a pyramid of oranges with both hands, fast and certain, each one set so that no gap shows; she does not look at them. Beside her a man arranges fish on a bed of ice, laying them nose to tail in silver rows, and the ice cracks and settles under them with a sound like distant gravel. Nobody hurries, and yet everything is ready at once, as if the whole market shared a single clock that only the traders could hear.

The light changes while you watch. The streetlamps go off — not all together, but one by one, surrendering — and the grey overhead warms by degrees into a thin, hopeful gold. The first proper sunlight finds the top of the cathedral first, then slides down the buildings into the square, and where it lands the colours wake up: the oranges become genuinely orange, the green of the apples sharpens, the silver of the fish catches fire. A market that was only shapes in the half-dark becomes, in the space of a few minutes, a place of almost violent colour.

And then the first customers come. An old man with a string bag, in no hurry, who knows exactly which stall he wants. A young woman half-running, late for something, who buys a single apple and eats it walking. A child held up to choose a flower, pointing at the wrong one, allowed it anyway. The traders' calls change pitch now that there is someone to call to — warmer, faster, working — and the market stops being a thing that prepares itself and becomes a thing that performs.

By half past seven it is fully itself: loud, bright, crowded, smelling of bread and fish and oranges and wet stone, the gulls bolder now and the gold light hard and ordinary. You would never guess, looking at it, that an hour ago it was only a grey square and a few men lifting crates in the dark.

But I saw it before it remembered to perform. That is the thing about coming early — for one suspended hour you watch a place become itself, before the crowd arrives and it puts on its public face. The pyramid of oranges, built by hands that did not need to look; the fish laid in their silver rows; the bread reaching across the empty square to no one in particular. I came for the market. What I will remember is the hour before it knew anyone was watching.

Sunday night. Late. The last night.

I have been putting off writing this because writing it makes it real, and I have spent the whole day not making it real. I packed my room into eleven boxes and labelled them in a thick black pen, and somewhere around box seven I realised I was labelling them in a stranger's handwriting — too neat, too careful, the handwriting of someone trying very hard to be calm.

The room is wrong now. That is the only word for it. Everything is still here — the bed, the desk, the mark on the wall where I leaned my chair for three years — but with the posters down and the shelves empty it has stopped being my room and become A Room, a room that anyone could have, a room waiting for the next person. I keep catching it out of the corner of my eye and feeling a small drop, the way you do on a stair that isn't there.

Mum has been brisk all day. Brisk is how she does sad. She has cleaned things that were already clean and made a list of things that do not need listing and asked me four times if I have packed my charger. (I have packed my charger.) Around nine she stood in my doorway and looked at the empty walls and said 'Well' — just that, 'Well' — and then went to put the kettle on. I think 'Well' was the bravest thing anyone said all day.

I am not going to pretend I am sad about the house. The house is fine. The boiler is terrible and the third stair creaks and the bathroom window has never once shut properly. I will not miss the boiler.

What I will miss is harder to box up. The way the streetlight comes through the curtains at exactly this angle, so that I have read by it a hundred times when I should have been asleep. The sound of next door's dog who barks at nothing, every night, at the same time, like a town crier announcing that it is officially eleven o'clock. The walk to school that I could do with my eyes shut, that I will never do again after tomorrow, that I never once thought to pay attention to because why would you pay attention to something you do every single day.

That is the cruel trick of it. You do not get to know it was the last time until after it already was. I had a last walk to school weeks ago and did not know it. I had a last argument with my brother at that kitchen table and thought it was just an ordinary Tuesday. The lasts happen in disguise, dressed as ordinary days, and you only recognise them in the rear-view mirror.

The dog has just barked. Eleven o'clock. The last time I will hear it.

See — I did not even mean to write that. It just came out, and now I have made it real, the very thing I spent all day not doing.

I should sleep. The van comes at eight. There will be a great deal of brisk tomorrow, a great deal of 'Well', a great deal of carrying boxes down the creaking stair for the very last time. I will be fine. I am almost certainly going to be fine.

But for tonight I am going to leave the curtains open and let the streetlight in at its hundred-times angle, and listen for the dog, and lie in A Room that was, until this morning, mine — and let myself, just for tonight, not be brisk about it.

Goodnight, house. You were terrible. I will miss you more than I can box up.

The bus was late, which my grandfather hated, and being made to wait, which he hated more, and so by the time it finally hissed to the kerb he was in the particular bad mood that I had spent my whole childhood learning to read like weather.

'Sit by the window,' he said, which meant: I want to look out of it. I sat by the window.

We were going to the hospital. Nobody had said the word 'last' but everybody had thought it, the way you think a word so loudly you are sure other people can hear it. My mother had stayed at home with a face like a closed door. My grandfather had put on his good coat — the heavy grey one, the one with the buttons he could no longer quite manage, so that I had done them up for him in the hall while he looked over the top of my head at the middle distance, pretending this was not happening.

The bus pulled away. He watched the town go past with the flat attention of a man who has seen it a great many times, and I watched him, sideways, the way you watch someone you are afraid of losing — greedily, as if you could store them up.

For a long time he said nothing. Then, without turning his head, he said: 'Your grandmother hated this bus route.'

I had not known he was going to talk about her. We did not talk about her. She had been gone four years and her name had become a kind of held breath in the house, a thing everyone walked carefully around.

'She said it took the long way on purpose,' he went on, 'to spite her. She used to argue with the timetable. Out loud. In the street.' And then he did something I had not seen him do in four years. He smiled. Not the brief, dismissing smile he used on waiters and weather, but a real one, slow and private, aimed at something only he could see, somewhere past the window, in the long way the bus was taking.

'Did she win?' I asked. It was the only thing I could think of to say.

'She never won an argument in her life,' he said. 'She just never noticed she'd lost.' And the smile widened, and for one moment the bad mood was simply gone, lifted clean off him, and I saw — properly, for the first time — that the bad mood had only ever been a coat he wore over something he could not afford to show.

We rode the rest of the way mostly in silence. But it was a different silence now. He had handed me something on that bus, between two stops, without ceremony — a small grey button of a thing, easy to miss, that I have carried ever since.

At the hospital he would not let me do up the rest of his coat. He fumbled the top button himself, slowly, refusing my hand, and won, and looked pleased about it, and we went in.

He died on a Thursday, three weeks later, in the heavy grey coat I had asked them to put him in. And I took the bus home alone afterwards, the long way, the route my grandmother had argued with in the street.

I sat by the window. I looked out of it, the way he had. The town went past with its flat, ordinary face, the same town, taking the same long way it had always taken, on purpose, to spite us all.

And somewhere around the third stop, for no reason, out loud, in front of strangers, I started to argue with the timetable.

I did not win. I just did not notice I had lost.

I was eleven, and I had decided — with the total, unshakeable confidence of the comprehensively wrong — that the new boy was a liar.

His name was Tomas, with no 'h', which I held against him as a first offence. He had arrived in October, mid-term, which everyone knows is the worst time to arrive, and he had a habit of saying things that could not possibly be true. He had a dog the size of a small horse. His uncle had once met a famous footballer. He had, he said, seen the sea freeze.

The sea freeze. I remember the exact afternoon he said it, because it was the afternoon I decided to expose him. We were lined up against the cold wall waiting to be let in from break, and Tomas, to nobody in particular, said that where he came from the sea froze in winter, right out from the shore, far enough that you could walk on it, and that he had walked on it, on the actual sea, the previous January.

I knew about the sea. I had been to the sea. The sea did not freeze. I said so, loudly, with the gladiatorial joy of a child who has caught another child out, and I watched something close in his face — a small shutter coming down — and I felt, God help me, magnificent.

He did not argue. That was what convinced me I had won. He just looked at the wall and stopped talking, and the boys around me laughed, and Tomas-with-no-h was, from that afternoon, the boy who told lies about the sea.

Here is what I did not know, because I was eleven and the world ended at the edge of my own small town. The sea freezes. Of course it freezes. In the cold parts of the world the shallow water along the coast freezes solid every winter, far enough out to walk on, and people DO walk on it, and Tomas had come from one of those places, and had been telling, of all the things in the world, the simple truth. The dog was probably real too. The footballer, who knows. But the sea — the thing I had chosen to mock him for, the hill I had so gladly died on — the sea was true, and I was the liar, the confident, magnificent, eleven-year-old liar, too sure of my own small sea to imagine a colder one.

I learned this years later, idly, from a documentary, and I felt the whole afternoon come back at once — the cold wall, the laughing boys, the small shutter coming down in his face. I had to put down what I was holding.

I would like to tell you that I found Tomas and apologised. I did not. He moved away the following year, to somewhere else, somewhere with or without a frozen sea, and I never knew him at all, really, having decided who he was on the third week and never once revised it.

What I got wrong was not the geography, though I got the geography spectacularly wrong. What I got wrong was the certainty. I was so sure. That is the part that stays with me — not that I was mistaken, because everyone is mistaken, but that I was so loudly, so gladly, so comprehensively sure, on the strength of a small life and a single sea.

I think of Tomas now whenever I feel that old magnificent certainty rising — the joy of being obviously right, of catching someone out — and I have learned to mistrust it, because the last time I felt it that clearly I was eleven, and wrong, and watching a shutter come down in the face of a boy who had simply seen a colder sea than I had.

The sea freezes. He told me, and I laughed. I have been apologising for it, quietly, to nobody, for most of my life.

Oh, sit down, sit down — you don't have to stand there in the doorway like a stranger, it's only me. I've kept your room exactly as it was, you'll be pleased to see. Exactly. I haven't touched a thing. Well — I dusted, obviously, one has to dust, but otherwise it's just as you left it. The trophies. That ridiculous poster you wouldn't take down. I left it all. I knew you'd want it left.

You're looking well. You are. A little tired, perhaps — they work you too hard, I've always said so — but well. Doesn't he look well, I keep saying to your father, doesn't he look well, and your father says nothing, but then your father never did say much, did he, the two of you, peas in a pod, both of you, talking to me with your eyebrows.

I made the cake. The one you like. I made it on the off-chance, which is to say I make it every Sunday, just in case, because you never do telephone first, you just — appear, that's always been your way, and I wouldn't want to be caught without it, would I, what kind of mother would be caught without the cake.

There's a great deal I've been saving up to tell you. The Hendersons moved. Number nine. There's a new family, foreign I think, perfectly nice, they wave. Your school changed the gates. I walked past — I do walk past, on a Tuesday, it's no trouble, it's barely out of my way — and they've changed the gates to those electric ones, and I thought, well, he'd hate those, he always climbed over, didn't you, you always climbed over rather than wait, and I stood there a moment remembering you climbing over and a young man asked if I was quite all right and I said perfectly, perfectly all right, thank you, I'm waiting for my son.

I do wait. I want you to know that. Whatever anyone says — and people do say things, kind things, terrible kind things, with their heads on one side — whatever anyone says, I keep your place. The cake on Sundays. The room. Your father thinks — well. Your father has his way of managing and I have mine, and mine is to keep things ready, because you'll want them kept, won't you, when you — when you can. When you're next able. With the work.

You don't have to say anything. You never did. That's quite all right. We can just sit, the two of us, in your room, with the poster and the trophies and the cake going round on the plate, and I'll do the talking, I always did the talking, and you'll look at me with your eyebrows the way you do, and I won't ask the question I'm not going to ask, the one with the date in it, the Tuesday, eighteen months ago, the gates — I won't ask it, because you're here now, you're sitting there now, looking so well, a little tired, and the cake is the one you like, and I made it on the off-chance, every Sunday, just in case, in case you came, the way you've come today, the way you come every single day that I keep the room, and dust it, and set the place, and wait.

Sit down. You don't have to stand in the doorway. It's only me.

It's only ever me.

Afterwards is the part nobody describes. Everyone wants the storm itself — the drama of it, the wind that took the slates and the rain that came sideways — but the storm is the easy part, all noise and spectacle, gone in an hour. It is the afterwards that is strange, and it is the afterwards I want to tell you about: the morning the wind dropped, and the village had to look at what had been done to it.

The first thing was the silence, and it was the wrong kind. Not peace — recovery. The silence of something that has been shouting and has now stopped, throat raw, with nothing left to say. The whole place lay in it. Even the gulls, who complain through anything, had gone somewhere to be quiet, and their absence was its own loud thing.

I went down to the front while it was still early. The sea, which the night before had been a grey animal flinging itself at the wall, was now almost obscenely calm — flat, oiled, innocent, lapping at the harbour steps as though it had been there mildly all along and could not imagine what everyone was upset about. That was the worst of it, I think. Not the violence of the night but the calm of the morning, the sea's flat refusal to look guilty.

The damage was everywhere and it was specific. A trampoline, somebody's, was in the road, on its side, two streets from any garden that could have held it. A child's wellington boot — just the one, red, very small — stood upright in the middle of the green as if its owner had simply evaporated out of it. The fishing boats had been thrown about in the harbour like toys swept off a table, and one of them, the blue one, the Maris, had ended up wedged sideways across the slipway, her keel showing, exposed and somehow indecent, a thing not meant to be seen.

People came out slowly, the way you approach a body. They stood in their doorways in coats over pyjamas and did not, at first, speak. There is a particular way that people look at damage — not at it, exactly, but slightly to the side of it, as though looking directly might make it more true. An old man stood for a long time in front of his fence, which was down, every panel of it flat in the mud, and he did not touch it or photograph it or even sigh. He just looked slightly to the left of it, and then went back inside.

The light, when it came, did not have the decency to be grey. It came up clean and gold and ordinary, the kind of light you would want for a picnic, falling without favour on the wrecked boat and the lost boot and the flattened fence, gilding the wreckage as cheerfully as it gilded the church. The light did not care. That is what light is for, I suppose — to fall on everything equally, the made and the unmade, and to leave the caring to us.

By mid-morning the village had begun, tentatively, to mend. A man with a tractor came for the Maris. Somebody collected the trampoline. The red boot was set, by some kind hand, on a wall, in case its owner came looking — and stood there for three days, a small red question nobody could answer, until the rain came again and washed the answer further away.

Here is what the storm taught me, and it is not a comfortable lesson. We tell ourselves that places have moods, that the sea is angry or the sky is kind, that the weather feels what we feel. It is a lovely idea and it is entirely a lie. The storm felt nothing. The calm sea felt nothing. The gold light that fell on the wrecked boat felt nothing at all. The only feeling in the whole scene was ours — standing in our doorways in our coats, looking slightly to the left of the damage — and the indifference of the morning, its flat gold ordinary indifference, was the truest and the hardest thing the storm left behind.