Saturday, February 27, 2010

Must Have Own Canoe


Peter shifts the newspaper off the small dining table. Right! No good putting off the evil hour. He opens the laptop, catching his reflection in the screen. Not bad, really, for fifty-seven. His wife had hated the cropped hair – said it made him look like a thug – but the woman had run off with a bloody property developer who dresses in open-neck shirts and loafers: So much for her taste!

He angles the computer screen to get rid of irritating reflections. Nothing really feels right in this flat. He keeps banging his head on kitchen cupboards and striking his elbow on the shower walls. But no use moping around. Better get down to business.

“Seeking woman not afraid to get her hair wet,” he writes. Clarissa never understood his wanderlust, was more the sort of hotel-with-a-beach kind of girl, whereas he wanted to trek the Himalayas. Nothing to stop him now! He types energetically, trying to put the image out of his head of Clarissa and her tanned Lothario sipping gin and tonics on a sun-baked terrace. After paying off a mortgage and putting the kids through uni Peter couldn’t compete with a villa in Ibiza and a thirty-foot yacht.

“Someone for the weekends – a ‘cupboard girlfriend’,” he writes, wondering if that looks odd. It’s what he said to his daughter Gemma when there was that unfortunate business with the married man. Clarissa was all for having a first grandchild but, “You can’t just put a child in the cupboard when you’re tired of it,” he warned Gemma. Turns out Nature knew best in that instance; not that Clarissa didn’t get her grandchildren eventually. He smiles remembering the holiday cottage in Cornwall, all three grandchildren jumping on their bed in the morning. He doesn’t realize it, but a tear is rolling down his cheek. How do you fit a girlfriend into that scenario? How do you repair a life torn down the middle? “Buck up, old chap!” he says aloud. Getting maudlin. Life’s an adventure, carpe diem!

Weekdays he doesn’t have much use for company. When he finally looks up from his accounting clients there’s usually only time to rush down to the little Thai place before they close and order something from the sweet-smiling waitress. Other chaps might ask her out, but Peter would say an English girl is more reliable. “Decent and loyal,” he types. Someone with blond hair called ‘Ginny’ or ‘Sarah,’ who reads the Guardian and knows how to fix a Pimm’s.

Trouble is, even with a weekend-only partner it’s going to be difficult bringing anyone back to the flat. The sitting room’s all right, furnished with a few odds and ends from the house, and Emily came to help her dad hang curtains, but the bedroom’s a bloody disaster. “I suppose he’s got his canoe in there with him,” Clarissa is reported to have said, which is a typical exaggeration but the limited space around the bed is jammed with a sleeping bag, rolled-up tent and two backpacks.

He uploads a picture of himself in a furry hat among a group of smiling Sherpas. That should give a girl the right idea. He hears his wife’s brittle laughter. “I could be better at expressing my emotions and saying what I am feeling,” he adds, in the interest of full disclosure; “Can worry about unimportant stuff.” Like the roses he’d tended for twenty-five years. Would the new owners of the house know to cut them back before winter? “Divorced eighteen months ago,” he finishes up. “Hurt very much at the time, but over it now.”

Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Philosopher



Milky light bathes the bookshelves. It is late afternoon and the French windows opening onto the garden are drafty with birdsong. The vapors of varnished floorboards have not yet been displaced by the plump sap of summer. Philip smoothes the page of a book, words hopping like fleas around his fingers. He should get up and close the windows, pour himself a Scotch, but the peace is too precious. Poets and philosophers circle him, waiting for him to surrender into their ashen arms but something tick, tick, ticks inside of him. Is it his wind-blown heart or is it the hope that standing on illustrious shoulders he will finally see over the wall of random living to enlightenment? He shivers and closes the book, wishing that tonight he could be a lover of women, not wisdom.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Lonely Heart


Billy Braithwaite tucks his scarf into his coat. Bloody parky waiting for the bus on this street corner! The wind whips round the chip shop and carries with it the snow on the moors, salt ‘n vinegar crisp packets, a sniff of something curried.

He wouldn’t normally be going to the shopping centre in this weather if he could help it, but the website says it will ‘increase his chances’ of being selected. Billy finds it hard to imagine that his image will inspire passion. He thinks of blond secretaries in London or ‘fit bits’ who frequent the local pubs and can’t believe that his unruly hair and Yorkshire wind stippled complexion will inspire love, but he’s doing it for Her - the one who will see through the black and white photos of design consultants and the heavy spectacle frames of the arty types and rest on him, an honest man, “Because I'm a warm, caring sensitive soul who will give everything to the right person.” He worked hard on that line. Surely she will see. He is willing to give his everything. No games. Surely that means something.

Life is not a dress rehearsal, he mutters, once he positions himself in the photo booth. Momentarily, he wonders if he should undo his scarf. No, he thinks, leave it as it is. This is no rehearsal, this is the take.

(Photo used with permission www.photo-zen.com)

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