The market, worn thin and over-warm tired, squats down in the city's old heart, ringing with calls, ringed with stalls that lazily display the biproduce of the factories – (misshapes and offcuts that aren't worth shipping) – and food, from the High Wolds, and cheap goods brought back across the lake: knick-knacks, trinkets, glittering love-hearts, lighters, alarms, cutlery, perfumes; the heavy scents of laced rose-water, the strong scents of cooling pastries, the bright scents of sweets, sun-hot metals, work-warmed bodies, steam-soaked exhausts, soot-ladened clothing dried on the outside line, sweat-sharp shirts just released from factory shifts, the day-dried pissing spots by the pubs, tear-stained and snot-coated blood from truants falling or fighting on unforgiving cobbles. The market proves itself as city hub each afternoon. Despite most visitors merely passing through. A moment's glance at this or that, some necessaries bought while on the way here or there, not even a look at the town clock. And the Welfare Hall watches over all the mad scurrying, firm, set, devoted.
The song and crush and movement and scent-soaked breeze and thick back-of-the-mouth taste of the old market place in spring is a foresight of summer, lost, to those complaining of the heat, in the rush and race and hurry and haste from place A to place B or the trials and tribulations of getting those passers-by to purchase the food stuffs or the tat or the unwanted cloth.
OLD ABRAHAM : Oh the finest of the finest sailors,
The stoker scuttles for work.
OLD ABRAHAM : Now when Jack Tar heard Sonny Jim's fair cries
Mixed in with the good Captain Flynn's own sighs,
And so Jack lost his mind in fiery anger –
She was his only girl and his anchor,
But the charming pirate Flynn had the better luck
So sweet Sonny Jim gave him the chance to...
He hurries through the hurrying city to stoke a sleeping engine. Late for shift, early for it, it doesn't really matter. He has a long history, watched and accepted, of hard work and many hours, being a good worker. He will be forgiven. Age and his long work at least give him that. Younger workers new to the life, older workers new to the job. They dream of having such a luxury, security for life, a reliable flow of money, to be trusted if not respected by their employers. Instead they scurry to someone else's clock; bodies ache; they must prove themselves daily and yet fail, fall, pick themselves up. Old Abraham's coal-caked heart breaks for them and for snow.
CAPTAIN FLYNN : Persons with manners,
snaps the addled Flynn,
do not haunt old captains.
Passers-by cringe away. Flynn doesn't notice in his rage: his blind eyes follow and focus on people otherwise unseen on the sun-warmed stall-crowded carbon-coated cobbles of the milling market place.
PASSERS-BY : There's some people should be neither seen nor heard,
say these cringers, proper as a priest. Their sniffs and dutiful looks of disdain. Hard and harried, they only care that he may be in their way, so they hiss and mutter and stutter responses that make no difference any of them, that don't interrupt their busy movements, their business, their sales, although their thoughts remain caught like clothing on a sharp bramble-thorn hidden among the rhododendrons.
RIVER KHAN : I am so sorry, my love,
River mutters to no-one.
He stumbles, carrying brown-papered overstuffed sandwiches and mystery meat pies back to the Iskander workshop, and wends his way; laden and rolling, his thoughts caught on Jacquard rather than Maryam, he considers a future without the Iskanders' money and support, turning his back on his career for love and watching every penny he might ever make roll away like fine springloaded clockwork. This was not part of his plan, precisely fitted together like cogs.