The square they did not clean

Text: an original contemporary urban-column-style practice extract.

The cleaning crew finished before the shops opened. Most of the paving had become pale enough to catch the weak morning light, but beside a drain remained one dark rectangle. Its edges were so straight that it resembled a word crossed out but still legible. I decided it was an accident. They had missed a square. The sentence felt satisfying: the work was nearly complete, and I had found the failure.

At lunchtime, I saw one of the crew return. Instead of cleaning the rectangle, she photographed it and measured its distance from a lamp post. “It’s the part we leave alone,” she explained. The lighter stones showed how the street looked after cleaning; the square preserved what had been there before. If everything were made identical, the difference would survive only in somebody’s memory. Her clipboard converted the blemish into a record, although the passing shoppers could not see what was written on it.

Three mornings later, rain and delivery wheels had begun to dull the lighter paving. The square itself had not altered, yet it seemed to have changed its argument. At first, it had accused the crew of carelessness. Now it questioned the speed of my judgement. A child jumped in and out of it as if it were a board in a pavement game. Another pedestrian stepped around it with an irritated shake of the head. The same rectangle supported both interpretations without settling either one.

By the following week, the crew had moved on to another street, but the square remained. The street offered no caption. To anyone arriving then, it was simply dirt that someone had failed to remove. To me, it was the one uncleaned part that allowed the rest of the street to be read.

Analyse the ways in which the writer uses language and structure to shape the reader’s response to the uncleaned square.

In your answer, consider:

• the writer’s use of imagery and contrasts
• changes in focus and viewpoint
• the effects on the reader.

Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.