09.58

The hole was about four foot by three foot. You could just about fit a wheelie bin in it sideways, which someone did. It was just there one morning, in the middle of the road with an air of inevitability about it. Initially, people shrugged and then backed up the road so they could go around. I think the potholes had inured people to the idea that there would just be holes in the road. So when this one arrived it wasn’t anything big. Probably not even the sort of thing that you’d mention at dinner in the evening. It was just a big pothole.

They rang the council, but I think they bypassed the police – again, that speaks to the lack of drama about it. It just was. What was the point of getting the boys in blue around, for something as mundane as a hole. A large council works van arrived two days later and some lags in luminous jackets stood around and looked at it really hard. I saw one of them drop a spanner into it. He just stood at the lip of the hole and dropped it in. As with everyone who came to see the hole he wore this benign expression on his face, like the sort of expression you get when you’re filling in a form. The tiniest bit of puzzlement, but more a sense of officious concentration.

He wouldn’t have been the first to drop something into the hole, because at that point someone had already pushed the wheelie bin in. That might have been done as a means to stop someone from falling into the hole, but it could just as well have been done with that same intent as the man from the council and his spanner. Just how your tongue probes at the ulcer.

By day ten it was about fourteen foot by nine and the tip of a car was in the process of disappearing into it. There was some consternation about that initially. It was someone who had parked to go to the airport and they’d come back and found the front of their Fiat in the hole. They saw their car at a weird angle and lifted their hands to the side of their head but then as they approached the hole, they calmed right down. The queues were there by that point, one north end and one south end, and they even waited their turn to look into the hole. When they got to the front I remember seeing their face. They looked appeased, as if looking into the hole had given them something more valuable than a mere car. It had given them an answer. The person dropped their coat into the hole and stepped aside to allow the next pilgrim to receive their blessing.