Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
Home was not, let's be clear, like this for Jack. When home had been pinned down to a particular concept it was not a bazaar of the strange, buried feet under the sky until the murk of oily gray underside of buildings was the equivalent of cloud. No sunlight here, not even the watery kind he had grown up on. But home wasn't something Jack was particularly attached to. He had uprooted early enough that he he had no coordinates, only a compass. Jack didn't belong anywhere, that was the point. He'd acquired moss and the trappings of having stayed so long in one place the lie had become almost truth. But there was an expensive and expansive divorce ongoing even if the compass was a little battered in the between years.
He rifled the papers, riffling through articles that made the underworld sound as prosaic as that above, complaints, small-scale mysteries - to those that articulated secrets in back-alleys, presumed knowledge on behalf of the reader that Jack didn't bloody have at his fingertips, far less the backstory. He had missed the candle-wick flare of curiosity, of appetite whetted on the crumbs of something bigger that it was a certainty existed somewhere, so long as you looked for it. The notebook was back in the office, this was a recce, not a carefully constructed interview piece. Whether it was boredom, old age or the misery of guilt who bloody knew, but it no longer mattered if Cat turned up or she didn't. There was a country's worth of sight to see, and he dropped the newspaper. There was more here than reportage on what was here.
The small boy didn't surprise him. Jack knew he stood out, the way he had in Calcutta. Too bloody clean, too new, too fresh to blend in and the children had swarmed in Calcutta, outstretched hands and cacophony of voices asking for what had to be a toll for the tourist, for the dust fresh on his heels. Now, Jack reached for his wallet before the boy had asked to see it - and christ. He patted jacket pockets, dug a hand into denim, found bugger all and rueful now, followed the line of the small boy's hand to the shape of a woman on the near-by roof of a stall. Raw, then. Rube, in a market full of experts and full in the knowledge that further in and faster wasn't bloody cautious at all, and god knows he'd talked a good game about putting caution aside. The market smelled like oil and spice and refuse and Jack laughed because whatever else was there left to do, when she flung herself head over heels in balletic display, appreciation for the show. He dug a handful of coins from the lining of his jeans' pocket and shoved them into the little boy's hand in thanks for the direction and took off after her.