The streets after dark

I got off the taxi early today. It was 2am and the streets were still lit. I said goodbye to my colleague, with whom I shared the cab. I said I wanted to buy something to eat at the 7-11 but I really got off because I needed to walk.

Here where I live there are few cars this late in the night. I think this as the taxi drives off behind me and I enter the 7-11 where a middle-aged woman stands behind a counter. She is wearing a badge I think but who cares about her name? I decide I'm not hungry and buy a bottle of chrysanthemum tea. She asks me if I want a plastic bag and I say no.

I am electric with nervous energy. I leave the shop into the equatorial night. It is warm and humid and its frequency is the cricket call. It is also calm, stiflingly so. You need that sometimes because the life of a sub-editor is an exciting one. Especially when there are breaking news and you have already busted offstone for 20 minutes but the newspaper computer system was written by angry, underpaid robots with a touch of Downs' Syndrome because it opposes all human logic. You need it to work now now now holy shit.

By "I" I mean the other subs. The only emergency I got was when I realised one of the copytasted cartons on my page had already been used in another paper yesterday and I had to do a rewrite 15 minutes before offstone. But you feel it. The panic surrounds you. There is tension. There is yelling.

That's why I need the glorious, sleepless night. On neighbourhood roads there are no human sounds but the clanks of my footsteps on drain grilles.

There is no danger walking here. This is Singapore. You can't even get chewing gum on your soles. Well, to be fair, recently there was a robber on the loose. He had a knife and had robbed several people in the area. I was not aware of this until he was caught. I don't think there are too many other weapon-wielding criminals lurking nearby. Even if there were, I think they would be asleep, like most reasonable people.

A few cats cross my path. None of them are black but I'm not superstitious (touch wood). I pass a temple, a large ornate Chinese one that was standing across the road from me. It was bright and workers are walking about carrying chairs and tables. It seems an act of worship had recently concluded. By now all the believers were probably tucked in their own beds, maybe dreaming of whatever they prayed for. In dreams all things are real.

I walk on. A tall Indian man crosses my path. I feel, I admit, a tiny bit of fear, probably more than if it had been a black cat. Latent, inherent racism? It doesn't matter if the conscious brain understands that people, like cats, are mostly the same regardless of coloration and the differences don't have that much to do with melanin content. The reptilian part of the brain never forgets a prejudice. Unsurprisingly, the man does not, in fact, lunge for my wallet.

I was thinking this when suddenly, a massive roar overpowers the combined song of probably hundreds of crickets. A chopper whips past a bend, revving its motor as it went. Such noise from such a small engine! However, the roar has its own velocity, disappearing as quickly as it came, and the night is silent again

I am approaching the exercise park. Just a few days ago when I walked there at a slightly earlier hour the benches were filled with couples, men and women holding each other, whispering words of no significance except in the universe that exists in the space between two hearts. There are no lovers tonight. They have all gone home. There was only one man on a bench in a far corner of the park. Like me, he was alone.