The empty street

Last week the empty street I stood on. There were dense green bushes planted sourly in pavement cracks, the old shut-up 1980s office with coloured placards in the window. It was eight or nine in the evening and stifles were stiffening like ghosts inside. The road was grey and there was nobody on it. There were old grey terraced houses that lurked eitherside, swishy trees behind.
These big greyish domineering old mother matron houses, which are exactly like the dank parlour glumness of their inhabitants. Meaty redscrubbed washing-up forearms, grim dinnertime satisfaction, sepulchral gossips.
The scent of washingpowder on the back stone step which is damp from rain and worn like the stone of destiny. Combined with the sight of a billowing white sheet on the line which I bet still happens here in these sensible and common backyards, half-remembered by slimy kneepatch toddlers of yore. Sitting nobly on their proud arses.
In her room there were accoutrements set down in front of a little mirror, just a cloistered discreet mirror set modestly just right in the little corner alcove. Little pathetic feminine powderpuffs and potions in front, china clutters of objet d'art or maybe a dumb plastic comb, gathered there like a little temple of aching vanity. Even sadder, there were little pictures and things stuck on the mirror, as well as scraps of memento sensibly tucked away. Half like the thin dressingtable of the disgruntled circus clown who is really nevertheless a teenager girl stooping to fiddle and twiddle with bits of stuff to paint on an awful face.
When you see cosmetics in application the full wretchedness of it hits you. Those dumb screwings up of mouth and flickings at the eyelash. The powdery flicker of her birdish intensity and naked tragic wrist.
That intelligence most of all.