Problems, Problems

Midnight, a room above a dry-cleaner, rain finding the one gap in the guttering it always found. You pinned the lamp log beside the rail requests.

"There are two kinds of problem," you said, to Jonah or to the kettle. "A social problem is whatever somebody powerful says is one. Public friction, private misery, a public outcry. It's relative. A thing is only a problem when the right people dislike it. A sociological problem is a question: why do we call this a problem and that a convenience? Marian was asking the second kind of question in a building run on the first."

Jonah pinned a photograph of the scale model beside the lamp log. "So who decided Marian was a problem?"

"Nobody said she was. They decided her quay was nobody's. It comes to the same thing, only quieter."

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