The child watched as the windows opposite, up and down the street C-D, came to frame face after face, which peered out at the faces they mirrored, appearing from the sunlit cells opposite. The faces came, one by one, two by two; beside one another, stacked above one another in order of age or gender, supporting breasts and rubbing eyes, tugging back hair and brushing the early chill from their bare arms until a gallery of beings looked out in weary anticipation of the unknown blankness ahead.
With a lack of knowledge combined with an acclimatisation to the nothingness of their existence, the figures remained in their frames as if free will had been left behind entangled too tightly in their bedsheets for them to bother venturing back to fetch it. A lone four-manned vehicle trundled along succeeded by a billowing pillow of dust on the road between the Houses. All eyes followed, except for those of the child in the window of House C-10 who watched, still, the methodical march of the silhouette across the dusty concrete ravine.
As the warming light grew slowly towards its blistering peak, an air of difference, of excitement, even, whispered its way through the streets of Block D. From person to person, like a secret amongst schoolchildren, the buzz of the unusual meandered. Fed by the sound of vehicles in the road and voices calling out from the safe-watch towers, the excitement crept further up. When midday came, and the sun beat so unbearably violently that not a single face could be seen even at the windows, the inhabitants of the Houses listened nervously as the roads crunched and growled with a seemingly endless stream of traffic. Whispering to one another through cracked lips, in the many separate rooms, the people theorised and deliberated over the sudden explosive increase in the activity around them. They spoke of the New Country and of their expectations of it; they spoke of the lush green land they had seen on screens and projected onto walls just a short while ago in the Old Country. They spoke of the move and of the great ships that they would board. They spoke of their joy. They smiled at their thoughts.
Awakening in the late afternoon, as the sun bent lower into the clear hot sky, the child returned to its window, now cast in shadow, and saw the windows opposite now bleached with the brilliant glare. No faces looked back.
Below, in the dusty street, were parked coach after coach right along the way in either direction, as far as the child could see. And surrounding the coaches were the white-unformed New Country coordinators, their skin shielded coolly from the burning rays by the shadows cast by the stern, imposing Houses lining the C-side of the street. Startlingly, in a manner that woke the remaining slumberers, a bright voice broke out over the speaker-phones situated at the safe-watch towers, announcing to all the excitingly anticipated news:
People of the Old Country, come listen. Just as you have surely been hoping, your wait has come to an end. This evening you shall begin your short journey to the New Country, where all the dreams you’ve been dreaming will come true all around. Just look out of your windows and you shall see your New Country re-situation coordinators waiting to assist you in your travel to the ships’ loading bays. You’ll want to create as little confusion as possible so just take your time getting down to your coaches and you’ll soon be on your way. From your Chief Operator here at your Waiting Space, thank you and enjoy.
And so, with wide eyes, quick feet, and smiles glinting in the shadowed stairwells, the people moved in their masses. A million near-naked bodies stepped out onto the dust of the earth for a minute apiece, until they climbed aboard the coaches that awaited them, the coordinators standing, smiling, helpful, all around. Once the vehicles were packed and the Houses left empty and echoing the rumble of the firing of engines, the coaches set off up row after row of cloudy streets. All had vacated, bar one. The child in the window stayed back, in a stairwell, nursing an injured ankle, and painfully, gently, climbed back into its room, propping itself up at the paneless window to watch the coaches roll off into the now purpling horizon.
A slow stretch of time of waiting, of dozing and whispering and building of excitement later and the many coaches arrived in a series of marvellous concrete craters, a way north beyond the walls of The Waiting Space. The child watched from its window the darkening skies and the tiny stars that began to pierce through. At the craters, the many began to move as the coordinators led them from their coaches and then left in them themselves, heading back to the South. Standing and waiting for they-didn’t-know-what, the people winced as the sun shone its last rays of the day over the mountains to the East and, simultaneously, the craters began to move rhythmically as an ocean tide. Lowering its gaze, the child, now sat in its blackened window-frame, looked North to where he could hear the rumble of the ships as they started their engines.
As the blasts of explosives threw crater after crater of bodies into the cooling summer air, falling back in a hot scarlet sprawl into the vast concrete bowl, the child in the window, legs hanging against the blackening outside wall, considered the time it would take before the next shipment of the New Country assigned would take place. As the skies and streets all around blackened like tissue blotted with quick-spreading ink, the child, brimming with anticipation, slipped back from the window into the hard, cold room. The Waiting Space stood motionless, monotonously grey, in the silent starry night.
