Apricot Press

People, Passing, on Tyne

By Ian Johnson

Miss Keeble makes herself small in the corner of the school’s empty staffroom, nursing her tepid mug of tea, her glazed gaze unpicking the half-finished jigsaw on the communal coffee table, completed in fragments by transitory teachers.

Within its uneven borders, their blessed river glistens like scales on a sated snake. The watercolour vista, touched by imagined sunshine, shifts and pulses and convulses in a fathomless rhythm, threading two cities—dividing and defining the fraternal twins of Newcastle and Gateshead—identical only to strangers.

Seven bridges of centuries gone leer their consent as the mighty Tyne muscles through to the bitter North Sea nothing—their splayed legs schemed to give peaceful passage for hulking freighters and ten-inch guns as bloated shipyards played war once-upon-a waning empire.

This was where inspiration had struck Miss Keeble over her morning caffeine – to teach her children physics through industrial wonders – learning by doing. Mastery of nature. Then informing now. Those brush-stroked segments of river and bridges, made intact by many hands. That vast blue sky – impossibly anonymous – left in broken pieces.

A cleaner rattles Miss Keeble’s peace, noticing the bottle of wine in a sparkly gift bag beside her. ‘Is it your birthday, pet?’

‘No. It’s my last day.’

‘Eeee, you’ve just started!’

‘Well… I was only maternity cover.’

‘Aye, I know what that’s like. I’m jacking this in. I can make a damn sight more on the tills in Aldi. I used to clean ower the infant’s building. I loved them bairns. They’re cheeky buggers, these pre-teens, mind. You must find them hard to manage?’

‘That’s what they said.’

Miss Keeble had put the spent matchsticks and string aside, opting for breadsticks and strawberry laces across a gap in their desks, bearing the weight of chocolate slabs.

The glee, uncontained.

The connection, longed for.

‘Now EAT THEM, children!’

Twenty-nine, fine.

The thirtieth, choking?

The EpiPen, entrusted, abandoned by the bin. Mistaken for rubbish.

The children, screaming. The adult, floundering.

The twin blades of an air ambulance chunk-chunk-chunking.

The harm, none done. The apologies, profuse.

The cleaner nods her confusion away, craning over the neglected puzzle. Her crow eyes glitter in recognition. ‘Me great-grandad worked on them shipyards.’

‘Mine too.’

The cleaner lingers, wringing a dishtowel. ‘Aye, they had no choice, you see. It were the grit and graft you were born into or nowt. Ey, if they could see us now!’ she twinkles and winks. ‘I’d call that jigsaw finished, if I were them. It’s pointless trying to fill someone else’s sky in.’

***

The High Level Bridge ratchets across the postcard expanse, its Victorian bones rod straight – three piers, six spans, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da – providing a kinetoscope, once for men of means on slick rails only, roused to peep through.

The Tyne Bridge arches its steely spine like Atlas to bleary commuters from the carriages above, hurtling to another tide for the first or thousandth time, feeling awe in belonging, even in everyday despair.

Miss Keeble – now plain Fiona – veils her puffy eyes. A woman with a trolley trills ‘Snacks and refreshments,’ at her elbow. Fiona points to a Diet Coke.

The woman lingers in the aisle, wringing the silver can. ‘Is home far?’

The gentle interrogation stirs Fiona’s embers, bellowing her chest. Squaring her shoulders. ‘No. No, this is home. I’m just… getting away for a bit. Visiting friends.’

‘Oh, nice. A change is as good as a rest! Here you go… have that one for free. The fridge is knackered, so it’s a bit warm.’

She leaves Fiona to the vanishing sprawl.

Down on the quayside, sheer glass buildings twinkle and wink. Bars and bistros lean at the rust brown murk with deft, dainty fists. Grit and graft and short, thankless lives give way to mindfulness as deed and currency.

This wasn’t a city of rivers or bridges or sky. It was for people – broken and rebroken and rebuilt – starting in the corners.

Photo credit: Jack Foster