In the
middle of the night, the humidity relieved by a cooling breeze, a girl in the flimsiest of summer dresses gets off the bus
at the same stop and asks if she can use my phone because hers is dead and she
has mislaid her boyfriend. Sweet voiced.
Sweetly perfumed. She stands too close to me. Is it my imagination or can I feel the heat rising
from her body against my cheek ? She also
gives off that other scent ... of one who will
never know when to stop drinking.
Coming
homewards in the afternoon, a very black skinned woman is sitting in the seat
across the aisle from mine. She is tall
and muscular and has the up-turned-est
nose you ever saw. She sits erect, head
back so that the prominent cheekbone extends in a long horizontal line from the
middle of the ear to just below the eye and you can see her face's every sinew moving beneath the skin. She is
knitting, with ferocioius dedication. Extremely
long slender fingers drawing thin scarlet wool from a carrier bag in her lap
and row after row of tiny identical stitches forming with unflinching
certainty. My mother used to knit,
freestyle, artistically, and so I watch, fascinated now, with both pleasure and pain.
Wearily, I
open the door of our empty flat and discover a fat envelope from Spain, addressed in a lively
script to Señor Tristan Forward, and I am rejuvenated.
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