lights and sounds.

They huddled together, crowds of them battling the intense cold. In spite of warm jackets, scarves, mittens, subconsciously they knew that the warmest they would get was when surrounded by other people. Puffs of warm air streaming out with every gasping breath, their bodies pressed closer to one another for warmth, while their pride kept them from it.
 
The stairs leading up to an office building were covered with a thick blanket of groups and individuals. The groups were much snugger, friendships and family ties ensuring they would last the night without too much shivering; the individuals fit themselves in between the groups, breathing into their hands, shoving them back under their arms. Every one of them was waited, knees knocking, teeth chattering, feet stamping.
 
It was Chinese New Year. Looking out among the hundreds of people crowded around the square, black iron fence surrounding the grass and ancient trees, the crowd couldn’t have been more than twenty percent Asian, let alone Chinese. It was London, and here was an excuse to race to the Tube Stations towards China Town, fill the streets and restaurants and, especially, the supermarkets; as if the supermarkets were closed every other day of the year. That night was a night for foreign food, far eastern ethnicity, and, most of all, fireworks.
 
Underneath the overhang which protected the people on the stairs from the buffeting, frigid wind, two policewomen stood, presumably warm in the centre of the crowd and neon yellow vests.
 
The fireworks began abruptly at six p.m., and although everyone had been waiting for it, no one had really expected the intensity of the lights and sounds. They commenced with the launching of small, bright rockets which cracked like whips fifty feet above their freezing audience. Pinwheels high up on wooden poles had fireworks which trailed sparks and spun them around, turning them into white hot circles of light.
 
About five minutes through the excitement a line hanging between two trees burst into a shower of sparks, the individual fireworks igniting from one end to the other. They shockingly bright illumination fell upon the crowd like a floodlight, and everyone in front of another person became just a dark silhouette. It was like a waterfall of lights, pouring down on the grass, turning the world into bright and shadow.
 
It was after this that the large firecrackers began. Strings of them hanging down from poles went off like machinegun fire. To the Chinese there not London born and bred they were reminiscent of funerals, the sound never quite loud enough to raise the dead. Somewhere in the masses an old man heard the noise and watched the flashes of light and remembered.
 
They continued to go off, thunderous like the games of ninepins Rip van Winkle heard, bright like Hephaestus striking Zeus’ lightning bolts on his forge. A thick smoke, red and orange and brown began to billow out from the square, muffling the flashes. The bursts of light were like the flash from a dozen muzzles, the dissonant sound like modern warfare. Dozens of minds imagined that this was the closest they would ever get to an actual battle.
 
An eye twitched, and amid the booming like giants’ footfalls a heart beat in unison with the staccato discharge of the firecrackers and stopped. A man’s wrinkled face relaxed from the panic that had so gripped it moments before, and the mouth parted slowly to release a final breath, barely visible in the wintry air.
 
After the final two, a grand finale that forced glittering light from the ground up into the heavens, the crowds began to loosen. Blood was forced back into extremities and hundreds of minds, slowly draining awe, remembered how cold it was. They left the square in droves, pressed up against each other like salmon spawning. The crowds whose path took them in the direction of the old man flowed around and onwards, water against an obstacle it could not go over.

Purpose in every step they left for their homes, to be satiated at a restaurant which served £4.95 buffet, for a few warm, smoky hours in a pub, to go on with their lives.