Thursday Night In Spring

Of course in the Northern Hemisphere Guy Fawkes Day would be cold and dark and autumnal: brief glares on a freezing November evening, actual bonfires, something warming in a hip flask perhaps. In your city, it’s cold and dark too, when you finally decide that oh fine, it’s just once a year, and suit up in your hoodie and your shapeless windproof jacket and head out over the hill. It’s cold and dark but it’s spring now, definitely now it’s spring, and as the sun slips away you walk through the sudden wildflowers, all along down the steeply perched houses on the hill.

It’s light late, past eight when you hurry out, and all sorts of everyones are coming along with you, along the narrow streets on a Thursday night in spring, definitely spring: kids and their parents, entire flatsworth of students, people who know people who live on the hill so they don’t have to go all the way into town and can watch the show from indoors. You get caught up in a gaggle of little girls who are peeking into windows and wondering aloud what it would be like to be a cat, concluding enthusiastically that it would be awesome!. There’s twenty minutes until the big display over the harbour but the first fireworks begin to spit and frizzle out of the dim gardens as you zigzag down Grass Street.

Everyone’s down by the waterfront, everyone’s out: families telling each other to stay together, couples in knit hats hugging for warmth, a guy in a wheelchair at the edge of the pavement, phalanxes of be-hoodied texters. There are parties at all the Oriental Parade flats, justifying their rents, people have dragged couches and blankets out to their balconies or to the waterfront path itself. Some girls on the beach laugh and scream and insist they’re going to actually jump in the water and you’ve counted five languages so far.

You walk, you keep walking. It’s too dark to really see anyone; you’re supposed to meet friends, maybe, soon, later, but there’s no point in looking for them, not now, not yet. People are sitting on the roofs of the boat sheds, the way you did your first November here, people are smoking and laughing and shivering, people are holding their children up so they’ll be able to see the display when it finally gets started. You pull up your own hood and smile for no reason: for spring, for fireworks, for having decided to wrap up warm and come out after all. For the fresh evening, for everyone running around screaming and losing and finding each other, for walking alone in the dark.

Bang boom crash, says your city, ooohhhhh ahhhhhh oohhhhhhhhh. Its upturned face blooms and fades under the shattered drifting lights. The sky goes dark, the embers float down, and your city explodes into applause.