the boy on lincoln street

I can’t recall ever seeing anybody on Lincoln Street before I saw the boy, although it may be that the sight of him has blinded me to the others in my memory. There must have been others. But what I know for sure is that I used to feel the same uneasiness walking along Lincoln as I did in deserted places. Absurdly, the fewer people there were around, the more I felt that I was being watched. I think this was because desertedness forced me to observe shit more carefully than I would have otherwise, and by concentrating on anything too hard there tended to be a build-up of a sort of vague fear in my mind, what the footy commentators would have called perceived pressure.

It was one of those neighbourhood streets you only walked down on the odd occasion, out of caprice or boredom, when you seemed to have developed a temporary intolerance to your regular route home from work or to the shops and back and didn’t mind taking the extra time. Were it not for the hill, you could have seen from one end to the other because it was very short and straight as an arrow. The streets it ran between were called Grant and Calvin and there was also a Wilson Court about halfway up the hill, backing sleepily onto an old wooden playground.

I’ll say that one remarkable thing about Lincoln Street was that there was a huge firewheel tree in someone’s front yard. There were no firewheel trees anywhere else in Greensborough as far as I knew, and I admit that on a few occasions I picked some of its spidery red flowers for Sarah, who was my girlfriend at the time I saw the boy. They were like the little scentless skeletons of umbrellas wrecked in a storm. Sarah was the type of girl who still got a kick out of receiving flowers, or pretended that she did, and I liked to think that the kick I got out of giving them to her was grounded in something more edifying than the link between flowers and fucking. This, I guess, was confirmed by the fact that I didn’t pick them very often.

Firewheel tree aside, Lincoln was a street built to the same blueprints as every other in the area; the squat yellow brick houses, the cement porches; the crooked letterboxes stuffed with junk mail; the kerbside trees with burnt flaking trunks and a V taken out of the top of them so as to thread the powerlines through; the name of a dead President. That what I am about to describe but don’t feel capable of describing happened on such a nondescript street is typical, in a way. For most people the past means certainty and the future doubt, but after my encounter with the boy I have decided that I think the opposite.