… it rolls to a rest, like a camera in water, on some scene of Hopper’s imagining- the untongued tension, taut as a lampshade and crouching, potent as a bared-tooth dog. A child with bulbous, blue eyes and made-for-teevee blond hair waving its hand, like an outstretched, tensile bat wing, over feathery reeds, beneath peach trees; the idyll clenched in the tension of knowing something must go wrong. Or a teenager, hat spun backwards, rifling through the technicolour candy boxes in a Korean corner shop, or a woman with a tea stain above her left eyebrow and stolen-raspberry juice on her fingers, waiting for her late husband. He might not come back tonight. And the dinner, making slow chromatic progress from orange to brown to umber to charcoal, will stand as revolting evidence of his infidelity. Perhaps he doesn’t think; perhaps he cheats himself, perhaps he pretends she isn’t there waiting; he likes to believe that the eight o’clock soap opera is enough to hook her mind away from the thoughts of him with another woman, with her legs splayed and head bent back. A teenager drinking an oversized coke on the corner, stroking back his hair affectedly and plumping up his eyelashes with a dirty fingernail. Trombone music cavorts out of the window above, tapdances in the street, fights in through the sealed glass doors of the furniture shop, pollutes the soft atmospheric jazz album the manager slotted in that morning before leaving, car keys performing flips around his forefingers and flicking the underside of his chin with the topsides of his fingers; a gesture of contempt for the aproned workers staring him sullenly off. One of them sits down heavily on a wooden table as he closes the front door. It’s glass, but somehow the aural boundary provides sufficient separation to forget his watchful eyes. Customers are few. The furniture shop is like inhabiting the garden sale of the dead; structures that aren’t going anywhere, structures that sit up boldly and ownerless, rank with fresh varnish and waiting. The staff wait too. People come in to stroke surfaces and to get away from the rain. They ask meaningless questions out of embarrassment for their presence in an empty shop, performing funny little foibles; bending their necks forward in a turtle-mimic, stroking down the already-obedient hairs of their right elbow, clearing their already-clear throats with gargling coughs, pulling at the back of their necks. Assistants and waitresses, deal-breakers and priests, these are the people trained to this bodily grammar; it is perhaps one of the few performances in which the actors are unconscious of the volume of their performance…