Jo M Thomas
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Passage 24 - Apollo Arrives and the Sun ...

Passage 24 - Apollo Arrives and the Sun Leaves

Jan 24, 2022

The Apollo returns to the tower. It is the last airship of the day.

PASSENGER 1 : Bloody awful place!

Once this load of ungratefuls have been decanted, the ship will berth at the harbour.

PASSENGER 2 : Docking takes far too long.

I can already taste the soot, can't you just taste it?

CHILD : No, I won't!

PASSENGER 3 : And then we'll get you some nice sweeties?

a desperate parent offers.

The child shakes their head, and the parent huffs their own impatience; others chafe just as much, eager to dismount from the sky but unwilling to stay in the soot-soaked townhouses that pass for hotels.

PASSENGER 1 : I want to stay in a nice place, but there isn't one.

They sigh as they think of the High Wolds. The green hills, the quiet country house hotels; and all theirs if they can spend just one sultry, noisy night in the hive of factories and warehouses that is Under Smoke City.

And the hive still buzzes but certain bees slow with the coming evening cool. Take Jacquard Adams and his crew whose song has faded as their shift comes close to end, all now lost in their own thoughts.

JACQUARD ADAMS : He loves me

He loves me not

He loves me

He loves me not

He loves me! – my silly little fool.

He speaks too quietly for the others to hear him, over the furnace and engines and machines, secret.

The hard-working Carry Winters continues to work hard as she moves from office to Welfare library to research: the population, the industries, the port, the past, the geography, and the ecology of Under Smoke City: a self-imposed evening job. Watched by pictures of old Cloth-Workers, dressed in linens and wools and cottons and silks, painted in rich oils on fine woods, she wades through newsprint and leaflets and diaries and studious lifeworks and copied blueprints. A coffee, corralled in a traveller's mug, cools slowly at her elbow as if waiting to escape and spill, contained and frustrated.

CARRY WINTERS : Oh, the horrible things we've done to each other,

she says. There is nothing but empathy in her soft voice, but, just as it is with drunken old fools in the street, the feelings pass more easily than each fragile and fading page turns beneath her hands. So dies all fellow feeling, with half a heart.

Poor things,

she grieves meaninglessly,

dying for someone else's profit.

Lijah Corey rises from an afternoon of sleep for a milky tea and a slice of toast.

LIJAH COREY : More sleep, more peace and quiet!

The tea brews slowly.

Hurry it up!

he tells the silent mug whose content stays pale white.

Stupid, milk in first, idiot!

he mutters to himself and butters his crisp toast, white bread turned golden on a cooker hob while water boiled and to be eaten while he waits for his tea to catch up with him. Afternoon's end darkens the kitchen but he has several more hours before he returns to work.

But Marjory Proops prepares her own kitchen for her evening meal:

MARJORY PROOPS : Hair, teeth, my handbag, coat,

Everything cleaned nice,

Kitchen wiped down and tidied.

She nods to herself.

Follow her up the street towards the Welfare and you'll find the chaotic market place is starting to organise itself as those in need and those who deserve and those who paid their dues form a queue to receive a just-cooked evening meal. Roasted in ovens, boiled on stoves, brewed in kettles, toasted on griddles, the food the Welfare can't afford to supply is cheap but filling and is the only support available for many of them. There is a tipping jar, clean, glass, starving for pennies that could make the difference between their servers eating here or at home. The market flows and ebbs, packing up as if chased away by the queues and the dusk settling among the cobbles, soft like soot.

Marjory Proops purses her lips at that open glass jar.

MARJORY PROOPS : We paid, you begging fat cat!

and she takes her place in the queue as though she was the most righteous of angels.

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