As you tried to moderate the speed of flow, your teeth gently bit at the edge of the beaker before you absent-mindedly replaced it on the café table. You stared at the sparkling top of the cool mineral water. The café itself – you realised – was slowly emptying of customers as the waitresses started clearing the tables, evidently hoping that you would soon finish your drink. They seemed eager to clock off and go meet their dates for the evening. But the scowls directed at you delayed your departure, thus encouraging you to continue deliberately and rebelliously, yes, gradually to make gulps sip.
You imagined that the bubbles rising to the surface of your drink represented the breath of someone drowning at the bottom of the soft plastic beaker. Someone or something. The beaker was, of course, too small a container in which anyone could drown…
“Hello, you!” You were interrupted from your thoughts by the arrival of a new customer who had just managed to slide in through the café door before any of the waitresses had remembered to turn its open sign to closed. A customer in the shape of an ex. You must have looked startled, as he smiled and sat himself opposite you, much to the consternation of the impatient waitresses. And he said: “Quite a thing finding you here. I spotted you from outside. How the devil are you?”
You smiled in return, if more weakly, taking a proper gulp from the rest of your mineral water so as to conceal your awkward self-consciousness. “I’m fine thanks. You?”
“Not too bad. I’ve been a bit of a hermit … you know … since…” You nodded. He hadn’t changed. Still the same whingey voice. The same hard-done-by manner.
“Excuse me …” said one of the waitresses approaching your table, “but we shut in five minutes.”
“Oh,” he said. “Can I have one of those?” He nodded towards your beaker without even asking what it contained.
The waitress scurried off to perform what was probably her most efficient customer-service since she had been given this job straight from school. You idly wondered what her name was. A piece of trivial curiosity to take your mind off a chance encounter with an ex. Especially this ex.
You heard the cap lifted behind the counter and the hiss ensue. The gurgle as she poured out the cool water rather than bringing the bottle and empty beaker to the table for the customer to pour.
“I saw you earlier in the library,” he suddenly announced, as the waitress plonked the beaker upon the table with a shiny splash.
“Oh,” you said. You had been to the library today. Reading a cheap Western to while away time till the next time. Did he mean he had seen you there and followed you here? If so, his claim to spot you through the café window rather removed the possibility of this being a chance encounter. And the implication of that was his earlier spotting you in the library not being chance either. Which had been the first chance, and which the subsequent plan? Perhaps he had been following you ever since the break-up months before. You must have appeared distracted, because he continued to talk, amid a rather sniffy appraisal of his beaker’s contents: “I’ve got trouble at home.” His eyes remained averted.
“I’m sorry to hear that. By the way I can’t stay here much longer. I’ve got a date.” You lied, you knew.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean…” he continued, as he blew his nose on the serviette. “You know, my place has got lots of problems. The whole building is rotting around me. I spend most of my day out and about. That’s why I was in the library. I saw you there, but I wasn’t sure it was you. You half-looked at me, but seemed different, strange. As if I didn’t know you at all.” He watched the bubbles of his drink rising in relentless replacement of each other. You wondered who the devil had drowned in his drink. He grew hypnotised and scarcely noticed you get up from your seat. The waitress without a name quickly hastened over and cleared your beaker.
“Can I walk a bit of the way with you?” he asked you, now getting up himself.
“Well…” You were at a loss to think of an excuse. Once upon a time you had both been so close. You felt guilty to tell any more lies. “Just to Union Street, if you like.”
“Oh, you going that way, are you? That’s convenient. So was I.” The waitress with no name opened the door for both of you after you had each attended to your respective duties at the till. Scowls were still in abundance, however, from the circling waitresses. The day had been settled. But tips not left.
The sky was cold as you left the dying warmth of the cafe’s interior. A sense of mould or mildew was prevalent in this area of the city, sloping roofs scarred with weathering, glass-fronted blocks smeared over with earlier runny noses looking in through them from the outside only to discover nothing on show. You disappeared towards Union Street with its mock mansions and over-tall chimneys, the ex’s slouching figure in your wake. You prayed for a date, one you could palm off as your excuse to say goodbye. But, of course, there was no date to rescue you … and the walk continued beyond Union Street towards Dodge Court. The towers of the approaching business centre replaced the chimneys and cast long shadows in the gathering gloom, as sleet slanted across the slates of the terraced roofs of now lower buildings: twouptwodowns huddling around blind corners that the business centre had not yet reached. You soon realised, of course, where you were both heading. His place. His own mansion. Not a mock one, but real.
There was the familiar dripping gutter just above the front door. You had not been here for a while. Nothing had changed, except the name of the waitress in the café who had no doubt flitted from job to job hoping her reputation of putting her hand into various tills did not follow her. You wondered, meanwhile, if everyone in life was escaping the past. It was Ok for a gutter to drip, but to drip just above the front door was a real piece of bad luck, especially if the owner had no ladder. You felt the dripping coldness slide down your back from the open scoop at the back of your collar. You watched your companion try several keys to unlock the front door. Indeed, nothing had changed.
Eventually, the code was cracked, as it were, and the door groaned inward upon its hinges. There no longer seemed to be the necessity to speak. You simply followed where he led, rather than the other way about. You were no less reluctant to become involved with yet another ex, more potential sex, but fate seemed to have decided otherwise. No need to talk, but talk he did: “Union Street is a strange place to meet a date.” You nodded, although he was still leading with his back to you down the dark hallway. From alleyway to hallway with no door between. The reluctant door had merely been his endless fantasy of miming a transition to take you indoors when in fact you both remained outside and open to the elements. The sky was now not only cold but black, starless as the names that made them stars. The impenetrable mansion bulking its shape against the the shadowy topdrop of its own roof.
Air was faintly, icily luminous. This was his place indeed, his place by the water butt. A dig-in where he stowed his belongings. You sat beside him, oblivious of the wet stony ground. You no longer had a will of your own. He smiled a teethful smile. But then you saw he must have taken his empty plastic beaker from the cafe, the bottom end of which he placed in his mouth and then proceeded with the grip of his teeth to make its open end gape rhythmically, clownishly – as a ludicrous rubbery orifice. You couldn’t help laughing, despite the powerlessness of your mind to feel the effects of laughter, as you watched the night’s many dates shadowing in pairs past the alley’s end amid laughter and joy, weeping and rage. At least he was currently busy with the task of making mawkish faces in an attempt at meaningless mummery. This took away the danger of any one particular face, any one particular mouth. You felt as if you should be sparkling with happiness at his attempt at good-natured, if slapstick, humour. An attempt to woo you back. But, from beneath the sparkles, you knew, with each new face he made, you simply knew, because the law of averages was not an average law, that he would soon make your face, too. An ex-you with its own teeth and cowboy hat.
#
You quaffed the cool water with a mighty swallow, then restoppered it. You had been raised on Western films where a cowboy kept water in a water-bottle with a plug top … kept it swung from a saddle when facing the dry gusts of air from crudely statuesque mountain outcrops. As the horse snickered beneath you, it was almost a religious experience to cherish the water as well as its anachronous container … lingeringly unstoppering the plug, then slowly taking a swig while, with an almost audible spasm of the adam’s apple, you eyed the approaching darkness of a black and white world.
But you were in colour. While the dusk tried to make everything grey. You couldn’t see how much more you could have done: the ex had left you, not the other way round. This ex had never been the right one for you; but fondness, even love, did not always take into account suitability. You had shed a tear or two, much against your better self’s attempts to be a cowboy in a cowboy hat in the tradition of the black and white faces who screened your imagination. Getting on a bit now, it was not surprising that you could remember watching Roy Rogers at Saturday Morning Pictures You watched your stoppered container become a beaker opening and shutting its mouth.
Christmas, when things had been at a particular low. You thought of the past as time you could never regain … time misspent rather than lost.
“Moseying towards journey’s end, eh, Tex?” The voice was hidden from sight. It was the dry gruff voice of the ex.
You hadn’t called yourself Tex for many years. In fact, it was as long ago as childhood that you could remember calling yourself Tex – when you were familiarly seen sporting the Davy Crockett hat lovingly sewn from remnants by your grandmother … as people then could actually countenance dressing in live animal furs.
“Yes?” Your voice was a few octaves higher than normal. Nervousness.
“Take a swig of that cool water before you go, won’t you, Tex?” The voice dipped to a more friendly undercurrent of grounded certainty that you imagined would be company when you were nailed in your final box, come credits time.
You wondered if death would be conscious of itself as death, in which case it wouldn’t be death at all. Your own words weren’t quite those words but meant tantamount to the same meaning. You cradled your beaker. Given a whole new turn of events, this beaker might have been a real baby. A baby with a body bearing its own name … or rather to continue its own name into the future, making death seem less important … less final.
You had been surprised at the speed of night’s sips and gulps as the city’s black-out was almost complete; you imagined that the now blurred edges of the nearby park’s trees were statues and its statues were trees and the increasingly fewer co-pedestrians were moving as mobile tussocks or cacti. Ghosts from your childhood dreams. When saloon bars were transposed mansion with a tether-bar outside for snickering horses. During those ancient days in England’s 1953, street lighting was never so common and cars had to be left parked with their side-lights burning.
“Go on, Tex. Feed it. You know you want to.” The voice was insistent, yet maintaining a pervasive air of friendliness … an ambiance of black noise barely mumbling above the hearing threshold. A hex, not a hoax. An X, not a baby beaker’s whiny twitter.
Luckily, Westerns in the old days were never truly horrific … never wholly benighted. Never wholly overshadowed by mountains masquerading as mouldering mansions. You did not see the eyes opening around you like grounded stars at kerb level and at street corner. You tried to unblock the furring in your throat by slowly sipping a container’s contents. But it was warm milk, not cool water. There remained, meantime, more tills to rifle.
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