“High Definition” by Mandy Taggart

Behind the green building at the far end of the Square, the sound is beginning again – a low, ponderous drone, that crouches and gathers itself beneath the thunder and blare of the city. They’re loading the next person onto the cart.

I lay down my armful of T-shirts and get ready to watch. They can rely on me, any time that I’m here. The other regulars in the Square don’t even look up any more, but I never get bored. They’ve been doing this once an hour, every hour, for the past six weeks.

The drone lulls and idles, hidden around the corner, while they guide the person on. I’ve never seen this part, even  though I’ve had the chance. The first sight has to be the grand entrance.

Now, the sound swells to a roar as the cart begins its approach from the far side of the building. Now, the slice of yellow paint pushes itself out from the edge of the green wall. I bite my lip.

And now the cart lumbers into view, sightless, ploughing a burdenous path through the tourists as they drift. Pigeons swirl like dry ice, hazard alarms yelp in fanfare. It will cross the Square, as always, right in front of my stall, headed for the plinth thirty feet beyond.

It’s the moment of crossing that I’m waiting for. My first chance to see the person they’re bringing. I’ve missed it a few times, dealing with a customer, or someone else who puts their head into my line of vision. When this happens, I can make myself be polite. I have a way of digging my nails into the palm of my hand that means it didn’t jinx me, to miss the first sight. I can still be sure that I’ll choose the right one.

Some of them have their heads covered, but usually the first sight is of a nervous profile, peering forward, sight fixed on the plinth. Each one, if their costume permits it, is fastened to the back of the cart by a black strap around one wrist. And this one, now. Here she is.

Normally dressed – that’s good. She has her free hand covering her face, perhaps to avoid being intimidated by the eminent company that she has elected to join. Weighty figures, rendered in granite and bronze, and now – well who, exactly? – in living flesh. The website would give me a name, or at least an alias, and a biographical sentence or two. I would then know more about this woman than I do about most of the statues.

My customers sometimes ask me what’s going on, and I usually quote from the flyer. “It is the artist’s vision,” I say,  “that, for one hundred days, the empty plinth in the Square will be occupied in hourly slots, day and night, by a series of ordinary individuals expressing themselves as they see fit.”  Places are allocated by lottery – so, in theory, it could be anyone. In practice, of course, it could be anyone who puts themselves forward. That’s a different thing entirely.

The people in the green building are very enthusiastic, I say: but my customers usually shrug, browse through my T-shirts for a while and then lug their cameras off somewhere else. They don’t see the point of it, or not the way I do.

The woman is escorted by a photogenic young man in green with an eager, PR smile. One of the shiny-teeth clipboard girls is poised in the front, saying important things into a walkie-talkie to distinguish herself from a figurehead. A security guard at the far end regards them all with the weariness of someone whose first pint is still five hours away. The Admiral, up on his column, is above such things.

I don’t know yet if she’s the one. The time will come, one day, while I’m here. It’s meant to happen. That’s why I don’t worry about missing them at night, or that the exhibition will end without them coming, or about the ones who came before I decided to choose one.

A tourist asks me the way to the Portrait Gallery My stomach is beginning to cramp again, but I grit my teeth and flash a smile. When I look up again, the woman and her escorts are standing together at the front of the cart, which is slowly juddering upwards, the woman braced against the rail.  Unlike some of them, who come equipped with placards, juggling balls, giant umbrellas, she has brought only a single bag, which hangs drably on the glossy arm of the clipboard girl. This one could go either way.

The man already up there stows away his saxophone as the platform draws level with the top of the plinth. A quick exchange of absent smiles, then he steps off, safe, at the same time as the woman steps on. I think this may be choreographed.

The erstwhile saxophonist looks quietly stunned. PR Boy has switched off his smile, and stares imperiously around the Square as the cart rumbles back to the building.

The woman is left alone on the plinth, curious, not yet in her public mode. Older than me – maybe forty – hair dyed purple but otherwise unremarkable. Plain jeans and a black leather cap that she looks like she doesn’t normally wear. She frowns, takes a few photos on her phone, then sits down and seems to be examining them on the screen.

Just an ordinary woman, no costume, no gimmick. Trying to detach from the crowd as herself alone. She still thinks that’s a good thing to do.

She should have learned, by her age. Someone should have taught her. But it’s all right now, because I’ll teach her. This is the person I’m going to choose.

Unaware of me, the woman glances up at the sunny sky and looks relieved. There’s no shelter up on the plinth, no concession to being alive instead of a stone statue. Many a glorious costume, many an intricate coat of water-soluble body paint, has disappeared beneath a hastily-produced Pac-a-Mac – if they were organised enough to bring one. It isn’t the sort of standing out that they bargained for.

I’m all buzzing, now. Fight or flight, they call it. I start scanning the area, working out a plan. The guard is leaning against a pillar halfway up the steps behind the plinth, and doesn’t have a clear view of the side closest to me. There are cameras trained on that side, but the people watching them are in the green building: at least a minute away, even if they ran.

I’m interrupted by a party of parochial teenage boys, who arrive and rifle through the T-shirts, snorting with one another at the more risqué slogans. A few of them buy one, pull it on over their clothes and swagger, proud of their new, braver, off-the-peg identities, while their teacher bemoans the trials of escorting them around the Big City. On discovering that I’m not, in fact, a real, chimney-sweeping Cockney, she is disappointed, assembles her cackling charges and shepherds them off towards some new point of interest.

The woman stands up. A shaft of sunlight crinkles the corners of my eyes and casts her briefly into silhouette. When her features fill back in, she’s pulling things out of her bag –   small, brightly-coloured things – and tossing them down with a flourish into the Square.  She smiles and waves to the people below. Still enjoying herself. I can wait.

The T-shirts are lying around me in heaps, discarded by the boys. I start hanging them back onto the rail. Proper Cockney or not, that teacher could buy my face on a postcard if she came back next year. The photographer didn’t want pictures of the statues, the fountains, the grand buildings, or even the lions. Said he wanted quirky details that got across “the authentic atmosphere of the Square”, or some rubbish like that. He also took shots of some Japanese tourists – who photographed him back – and Whiskey Pat, who sits on the steps with a bottle under his coat and provides an atmosphere all his own. I wonder if they’ll ask the photographer for a picture to put on the news.

The woman on the plinth is looking dismayed. Leans forward as if trying to hear what someone is shouting from below, then shakes her head and tips her bag upside down to show that it’s empty. One or two of her brightly-coloured gifts are flung back up at her. She flinches in shock.

My favourite one was a figure which arrived shrouded in grey silk and was bodily lifted onto the plinth. It lay there for half an hour. After this, the bundle began to move, and a seam in the silk began to split, gradually peeling open. There were flashes of bright orange and yellow inside. I waited to see what would hatch from the chrysalis, but there must have been a problem, because the cart with the next person arrived before this happened. They lifted the grey figure back off the plinth and took it away.

I wonder what I could have become, if my chrysalis hadn’t turned out to be made of stone. Officially it isn’t my fault: it’s the economy, thousands of graduates in the same boat. But, of course, we all secretly thought those things wouldn’t apply to me. The special one, the exception, first graduate in the family. That’s the trouble with standing out – people expect you to do something worth looking at. I don’t think they were disappointed when I moved to the city and let myself fade out of their lives.

The woman is scraping her rejected gifts back off the plinth with the side of her boot. I reach inside my bag and touch the blade against my fingertip, for reassurance.

The night before graduation, I dreamt about a giant, walk-in closet with row upon row of outfits, racks of hats, an infinity of dizzy shifting patterns and colours and only one of me. Each garment that I reached for writhed away from my hands, until I realised that they were alive, and none of them wanted me to be the one that would carry it into the world. I sat on the floor and watched a thousand phantom futures billow in front of me, then turned and walked naked out of the door. At the time, I thought it was just too much champagne, but now I wonder if it was a premonition.

The woman is pacing now, defiant, swigging something out of a hip flask, raising it towards Whiskey Pat’s corner in a salute of shared transgression. She has taken off her hat, and her hair glints synthetic purple in the sunlight. I feel my heart starting to rise in my throat and sling my bag over my shoulder, to be ready.

My stomach cramps again, and I feel a rush of blood. They told me it would have stopped by now. I cool my forehead against the metal clothes rail and feel the cacophony of the city rush into me. Groans, sudden squeals, spine-clenching shrieks of brakes and engines. And people, people, pushing and packing, dithering and fumbling, a hundred languages at every step, twenty years in Holloway if I were to shove one of them in front of their precious red buses. I gasp in polluted air and try to steady myself. And here comes another customer, phrase book open at the proper page. I don’t bother smiling now.

As he takes his leave – very politely, for someone whose new T-shirt features the Queen doing that – I see that the woman is speaking now, but without an amplifier no-one can hear her. There’s a live webfeed, but the sound is patchy. I don’t think she knows this – probably thinks that she’s declaiming something Deep and Meaningful. They probably spend ages choosing their words and music, in the hope that a little originality, a hint of mystique, will rub off onto them. According to the webfeeds, it’s usually Leonard Cohen or Dr Seuss.

Now. I take a step forward, but my ears start to roar and I step back. I wonder whose job it is to choose the music in the clinics. That’s not the sort of thing you think about until you go into one – the music they play as you’re going under. I don’t think it was random because it was a boy band, the sort of thing they think all the young girls would like. They put the needle in my hand and the boys were singing:  Baby, I’d be anything… baby, I’d do anything… baby let me know, oh-oh…

Oh.

Well, that taught me. I should have stayed in the boring club with the other girls, shouldn’t have detached myself, shouldn’t have attracted any attention. I haven’t told anyone, because they would say those things, and then I might do something to them.

I don’t know who did it. He’d wrapped a scarf around his face, so I wouldn’t know him if I saw him again. Could be anyone. Could be here.

Another cramp jerks my head back and I grip the rail to stay upright. The woman on the plinth has stopped even trying to do anything. No gifts, no performance. She could dance – some of them dance. Or protest, if she could borrow someone’s placard. Or sing without being heard, or scream until her voice ran out. But she just stands there, holding onto her empty bag, as if that could ever be enough.

The city chatters and fades in my ears and the world lurches. When my vision clears, I look up and see that the woman has started to tremble, realising where she is. I can help her. I straighten up and start walking towards the plinth.

I stop at the base, far enough away for us to see each other, close enough to watch every flicker on her face. Someone barges past my shoulder and I stagger for a second, then I find my voice.

“HEY! DOWN HERE! LOOK AT ME!”

The woman looks down, starts to smile again, then stares as I pull the knife from my bag and raise it towards her. The bag drops from her hand. She tries to step back, then remembers that she’s too high, exposed on the plinth, with nowhere to go. I see the whites of her eyes as she darts them around, trying to work out whether to jump, or dodge, or lie down, or what. She thinks I’m going to throw it.

“HEY, BITCH!”

It isn’t working. She should scream. She was meant to scream.

The security guard yells and starts trying to shove his way down the steps,  shouting into his walkie-talkie. I don’t have much time. As I raise the knife and aim it towards my stomach, the woman finally screams.

More shouts now, feet clattering like applause. A voice nearby asks if it’s part of the show. And then something thumps into my back and the knife spins away across the pavement. A smell of leather and a heavy grip round my shoulders.

As the Square shudders in the corners of my eyes, there’s only one thing left that I need her to tell me.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

She shakes her head. It’s worse than I thought. She doesn’t even know.

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Mandy Taggart is from the North of Ireland. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in “Spilling Ink Review”, “Cobalt Review”, “Creative Writing Ink” and “Backhand Stories”. This piece was inspired by Antony Gormley’s “One And Other” public art project which took place in Trafalgar Square, London, England, in 2009. However, all characters and events described are entirely fictional.