Soap Street

If I had the conviction (and, perhaps,

the budget of a major television network to fund

that level of conviction) of The Wonder Years

I could make the sweeping statement that

somewhere around the age of eight

“Alison Heslop’s answer changed my life forever,”

but instead, with this being more adjacent to life,

and this being me, I’ll enclose it in the usual

quasi-ironic speech marks and try

almost my best to believe it into meaning.

Anyway, I don’t remember the answer

spoken or even the question – none of the

words of this incident matter; rather, it was

the manner in which she raised her hand

with her palm flat and all five digits open

unlike the usual way we had all learned

to push our first finger higher from a fist,

stretching further when we needed to communicate

particular enthusiasm, and something about

the casual grace and softness of this set my

little brain turning in ways it couldn’t articulate,

as she showed me, even within the constraints

of classroom space, there was a means to

make an everyday ordinary gesture different.

Down on Soap Street I always walk along

the wide central grassed reservation which

is only partly because they haven’t finished

both pavements yet and I probably won’t

alter the habit when eventually occupied

buildings feature on the left and the right.

Down on Soap Street I see the hoardings

advertising life in Plymouth’s coastal quarter

and divide a deeply irregular city into awkward

fractions that can’t be denominated into quarters

and the words ‘work,’ ‘live,’ ‘play’ are all the same

size and the pictures are all smiles and sunshine;

and, of course, selling versions of aspiration

is entirely fine and this is a fine place to make

more fine housing where people can walk

into the city and can look out at the island,

where soap will be readily available in every

bathroom and sometimes a bottle of handwash

will be preferred but will represent a lost

opportunity to place some pretty ceramic

dish to contrast the colour of the bathroom suite.

Problem is, if you read the sign at the end (or

beginning, I suppose – it is a no-through road)

of the street, you’ll find you’ve left the city entirely,

crossed the border to the territory of a private company,

because, in small print, Soap Street is a ‘private street’

meaning theoretically I could always be asked to leave

especially when they notice the damage my large

feet are causing to that regularly tended grass

or when they notice that I’m walking the route

just for pleasure rather than for a deeper purpose

and that I’m on the grass to very deliberately

exaggerate such trespasses, as I exaggerate

those who trespass against my wishes with

trite advertising of lifestyle choices which

ignore the reality of the current Millbay situation.

And I blame Alison Heslop’s answer for every

one of these thoughts and every one of these

steps, for both the noticing of difference and

the adoption of ignorable gestures as defiance,

though I can only apologise for the clumsy

nature of my sentiments and my movements as

poor tribute to the (nostalgically lit) (and possibly

sexist) remembrance of her delicacy and poise.

Apologise too to whoever in the chain of

planning and development has the best

intentions for the future of Millbay and only

wants to write a more positive story for all

nearby as we move into the second quarter

of this twenty-first century, who didn’t want

their ideas rendered in billboard visions

apparently borrowed from the 1980s

wearing the colour palette of the better

loved 1990s. Later, through adolescence,

Alison Heslop came to a sharp dislike of me

(for reasons—probably justified—not relevant

enough to drag into further lengthy parentheses)

though I like to believe our memories of each

other ended more nicely when I unexpectedly

(in sixth form now) volunteered to dance with her

to Dancing Queen when for one reason or another

her proper friends were taking a break from

Durham Rugby Club’s cheaply-hired dancefloor

but I was there briefly intruding into their group

and Abba are in the hollow bits of my bones

from all the times the tape was played in our first

family cars on long trips on holiday roads and I’ll

happily admit to liking any one of their songs

and appreciating the second language of extended

metaphor. We provided each other with cover

in the disco lights, together briefly and not quite

having the time of our lives and I didn’t confess

how years ago, for a couple of weeks, I very

self-consciously copied her different method

of raising her hand to make a contribution,

thereby making it no different after all.

David Rutherford is a writer of poetry and prose from the UK. He has poems published/forthcoming in a number of journals, including Carmen Et Error, Overgrowth, and Belfast Review. A novella, Notation, was published in Big Fiction Magazine and an audio prose series is currently being released monthly on Bandcamp.