Another session of seeing how the words fit together in the fading of the day. There’s a cooling breeze off the sea and the boys (plus one girl) are, with some intensity of focus, playing their evening round of endless football. Bright eyes in sweat stuck dusty faces. Some old cowboy at the bar is telling anybody who wants to know that UK prime minister David ‘Pinky’ Cameron has been arrested, though what he’s been charged with is not entirely clear. Surely he wasn’t really trying to sell the Colonel a nuclear bomb or was it merely a junior chemistry set with the added extra of a smudged leaflet on bomb making techniques. Or more likely wanting to get in first with a special deal for a cut-price air force. Perhaps the paperwork on that old drugs offence has caught up with him. Like the poor old rich man, Silvio the Crooner, there are bits of Velcro hidden away in hard to reach places (even for underage prostitutes) on which old crimes are hooked.
Did you see Zoe leave town on that white horse – was she wearing a blue dress – what sort of dress was it, what sort of blue, a washed out cerulean blue??
Ah, if only I was younger . . . even the imagination can’t quite make it, let alone what we kindly refer to as the physical body. It’s possible that the physical evaporated some way back. The artist looks at his pencilled, charcoaled lines, rubs at them with a blackened thumb, then thins them with a lump of gristle (at least that’s what it looks like), thins them to a mere suggestion of the human, what we call spirit (perhaps) – a Dawkinite non-concept – can you see St Richard, he’s staring out of the corner he’s painted himself into. He thought all discourses could be reduced to one: his, of course.
A woman, tallish with straggly hair and a crooked smile, blue jeans and a rare silk shirt, stops by my table and tells me, Zoe was dressed in black when she left on the white horse.
Can you see the future, I ask her.
Sometimes, she says.
I wish I had a pipe and tobacco to light as she hesitates over her next line.
Sometimes, she continues, it smacks you right between the eyes.
Yeah, I say, shrugging as I say it, thinking, don’t commit yourself and for God’s sake don’t add, I know what you mean. She’s sort of pretty, though I guess she’s a bit old for pretty. Is attractive a better word? She’s certainly attracting me.
Would you like, I start to say, but I’m too slow (so what’s new!) and she’s gone.