We stood at the top of the concrete steps. The city lay at our feet like a badly glittered Christmas card. There was a wind blowing somewhere, fenced out by the lights and bustle. The crowds seethed, swelling around the little wooden huts selling scented things and pastry, intoxicated and oblivious. I felt I could have reached forwards, fallen in, and not a soul would have stirred. They would ripple around me and swallow me whole without so much as an intake of breath. And I would be sick. If I stepped in there amongst them, I believed I would be violently sick.
        “You ready?” he asked.
        “Just a minute.”
        The wind began to reach in. I felt it slipping downwards from the clouds like a spilt drink.
        “Come on,” he said, taking me by the elbow. My body was numb, and not my own to command. Like a stiff porcelain doll, he brought me down, and into the playpen. And there we stood on the fringes of the mass of movement.
        “They’re life-size,” I whispered, and he nodded solemnly beside me.
        There was a fountain bubbling nearby, its water slick black in the evening, submerging little globules of reflected light. The sloshing that I heard was half-fed by intellect. All my ears picked up was white noise of a slightly pleasing nature.
        “Come,” he said again, and led me on. We drew near the markets. I could smell pretzels, cinnamon, and the spicy tang of hot drinks and mulled wine. I listened. I listened hard without hearing. I could zoom in on any conversation at any stall, in any corner. I could eavesdrop like a fiend. But I couldn’t hear the words at all. The world was talking, and I was listening from a different room.  
        “Turn it off,” I muttered. A couple cast a glance in my direction. I felt their eyes, all eyes. I felt like I was in the way. Bodies pressed in. My view was a sea of shoulders, my feet permanently trodden on or on top of someone else’s. I couldn’t breathe, and my chest heaved in and out so violently that I was battered by waves of dizziness, each one knocking out more air than the last.
        “I’m here, remember? Hold on,” his voice broke out from somewhere diagonally across. I focussed on the grasp of his fingers on my upper arm.
        “I can’t,” I said weakly. He didn’t reply, but continued to lead me on, pushing through the solid crowd. I felt rude. I must have been rude, shoving my way past so many people without apologising. I wanted to shout out “Wait! I haven’t apologised to that man in the grey coat behind us, or the woman with her two children, or that old man back there…” I was overcome by an irrational need for etiquette, and it was making me uncomfortable. There was a mantra in my mind. You were always polite. If all else failed, you still said please, thank you and sorry. You were always polite. When did you start being rude? You were always polite. You always said sorry.
        But they never said sorry back. It’s like the time after the argument, when one acknowledges their fault, and the other is supposed to meekly follow suit. A mutual surrender, a truce of sorts. But here was I, rude and apologetic, and nothing came of it. The couple glanced out of curiosity, and the crowd pressed inwards from a lack of space. They were all whispering. They were all talking in that separate room of theirs away from me but they didn’t give a damn. I kept thinking you have no idea. You have no idea how close I came. You have no idea how far I’ve come, how hard it is for me to be here, fighting for a space to exist in. You have no idea how alone I am, right now, in the biggest crowd in the city. Why don’t you see these things?
        But these thoughts were blasphemous to something. Some place where the morals I held were unfounded. A place with a need for manners and font size 11. I knew they were wrong thoughts, bad thoughts. I knew they would take me back to that place where the door to the real world is painted the same colour as the four walls. I’d been locked in there for so long that I had lost the ability to respond properly. I couldn’t love, and I couldn’t be moved to anger. A perpetual annoyance resided under my skin, and that was all. I’d wanted to die. I’d desperately wanted to die.

“We’re here,” he said, coming behind me and clasping my shoulders with his hands.
        The water gushed down from the bronze woman in the fountain. I could see clearly now, the trees with twinkling lights, the hot dog stand and its dense ring of customers, struggling to fight over the sauce with restraint. There was a merry-go-round with its artificial music, artificial lights, and artificial horses, mouths frozen open in protest.
        “We went round three times, and daddy almost fell off…”
        “You wanted mustard right?”
        “I found a stall back there selling these wonderful…”
        “Where did you get the hot chocolate?”
        “I’m just going to pop over to the…”
        “We’re here,” he repeated. I looked over my shoulder at the dark figures moving en masse behind us. The fairy lights twinkled around them. And in the distance, I could hear a fountain.