Car vs inertia

It’s really very simple, I just saw a car crash. That’s one way of putting it. I could describe it in detail, go on at length about the moment the driver lost control and the car (red) slewed across the road before recounting how when it hit the lamp-post what surprised me most was that the lamp-post hardly moved at all but the car seemed to fold into it before rebounding slightly. In fact I already have. So that’s it really. Today is a sunny day, it’s very warm and the air is gentle on my arms. I think I saw a man die today but I can’t be sure because the ambulance men arrived quickly and they were very professional and efficient about it all. They had him safely stowed in the back of their wagon in a matter of moments, and then they were gone. The siren was loud, and is still audible now. The car is a mess,the left headlight has popped out like an eye and sits on the pavement, I might take it home as a souvenir. I am eating a cider-flavour ice lolly. I only mention this because I haven’t eaten an ice lolly in years.

At Handsome Fred’s Bar and Grill

The couple’s argument is of the fiercely private sort that cannot help but attract attention. Its very privacy magnetises their words so that despite their inaudibility the ear strains. Even stood in front of the burners with the roar of the extractor fans whipping away the waitresses calls and pulsing them out into the night, even with Steve on garde manger playing his fucking music I can hear them. Or, rather, feel them. I don’t look up though. No time.

Firing on three, that’s two chickens, a risotto and a sirloin, medium rare. I pull the pan out of the oven where the chickens have been bubbling gently away ever since that fucking arsehole Armand put the check on. Amazing what wine and cream can do to each other, and to chicken for that matter. I prod them, stir a little butter into the sauce (“Monter au fucking beurre you useless fucker!” as dear old Franck used to say back in the old days where I didn’t know my arse from my elbow, or demiglace from deglace for that matter. Then he’d put a hot pan on my elbow, just to make sure I was paying attention) and forget about them for a minute or two. The risotto can take care of itself for a few moments. I love risotto. Oil the steak and onto the char bars it goes, a quick spit of fat to the face and that’s another tiny little scar. Chalk them up.

Forty eight away please. That’s the new girl isn’t it? I don’t normally bother to learn their names unless they’ve been around for a while. It doesn’t do to go playing with waitresses. You always find out the hard and unpleasant way in the end. It doesn’t matter how good they look with their black skirts and white shirts. This one has a stillness about the eyes that I like though, a calm manner. Forty eight, is, uh..

One bass fillet one portugaise chef. Simon reads the check from the list in his hand and gets back to dressing the plates, staying calm, keeping order and keeping Armand out of my fucking face. Ha! A portugaise, large mussels, chorizo, onion, white wine. Lovely dish, and not my station. Just the one bass to worry about. I turn and politely enquire as to where the fucking mussels are and Phil tells me to fuck off and he’ll do them when he’s good and ready which will be two minutes chef, which is exactly what I want to hear. Good lad. The bass is fire and forget, it’s cooked in seconds, I can just crisp off the skin and send it. One less thing.

When the couple had first walked in I hadn’t in truth noticed anything exceptional about them, but I wasn't really looking. I was thinking about whether I'd ordered enough entrecotes, whether I'd be able to turn the over-ordered pig's cheeks into a sunday special, unless by some miracle I sold out tonight; it was early doors, and the board had yet to fill with a mass of fluttering checks, each one representing a few people’s evening, each one with a lot riding on it. It’s like Franck would always say, rubbing the side of his jaw – one of those tables of two could be a man proposing to his girlfriend. Do you want to send them a shit meal on this night of nights?

No Franck, I don’t.

Deglaze the pan with a dash of Madeira and then the steak’s done, resting, and then it’s on the plate and out of my way. Simon’s problem now, it’s him that’ll gently stack the sautés underneath, him that’ll smear the sauce over one side of the plate, sprinkle the chiffonade, rest the steak artfully against an aubergine tian, turn it from a hunk of meat to a restaurant meal. Shazam. I can hear him quietly explaining to the waitress what he wants and where he wants it. Never raises his voice, which is rare.

So because it was early when they walked in I was looking out, over the tables, waiting for it all and thinking about how the weekend would pan out. She was well dressed, they both were, but obviously I noticed her first. Then nothing, back into it, on come the checks on goes the evening, a few new scars and a pain in the small of your back that just won’t go away.

Check on, he says. Fucker.

The board is full now. I ask Simon how many and he says forty six. Forty six. I am cooking forty six meals at once, and each one has to be perfect because you don’t know if someone’s proposing to his girlfriend on this night of nights. Fuck you, Franck, I mean that sincerely.

I say something along the lines of anyone taking an order is dead dead dead in the cold cold ground and then the waitress with the stillness in the eyes tells me we’re firing on forty, which’ll be fun because there’s ten of them. I pull the two well done from the top of the grill where they’ve been sat for a while because these won’t know the difference. They’re out and they’re gone. The waitress is still there which is odd because last I checked she wasn’t a runner. Last I checked it was her job to glide round the floor and make businessmen regret their marriages.

Lauren would like to talk, chef, she says, and I nearly slice a finger off, I look out across the pass and realise that I can’t feel the argument any more, and the reason I can’t feel the argument is that the guy is gone, and as such there is a fatal imbalance on table five, a void, a vacuum. Lauren’s still sat there though, she’s changed her hair.

The ditch

There are only the sounds of night, the revolutions of a wheel slowing and the ineluctable matter of the stars.

What no-one has ever thought to ask me is this: Why? Though I couldn’t tell them if they did. In all honesty I am unsure myself as to why.

There is water in my ear. There is a growl from the road to Southport. Lorry. The slighter percussion of minicabs heading out. If I’m still here in four hours I’ll hear them coming back.

I think my leg is broken.

Right, think. Left past the clocktower and then it was down the slight hill towards the park, knees bent, arms wide, and then a wide sweep through it past motionless giant toys. The skeletons of toys. At this time of night merely the idea of toys, sorely lacking life. So much easier now there are the long stretches of tarmac, like arms hugging the park. Time was this was out of bounds to me, my wheels would get bogged down and I’d come to a halt, bogged down, immobile under the moon, the worst fate of all, immobility.

And now I think I have broken my leg.

Yes it was a wide and joyful circuit of the park and then out onto Southport Road to dart beneath the bright lights of the petrol station and frighten the man behind the counter. Strange pinch faced man, haunted by night and loneliness. Dispenser of fags and sweets. Someone should write a story about him. And then left, back up Aughton Street and then what? What came next?

I could tell them why I started. How when my knees went and the weight began to pile on I panicked, and took the step that has come to define me. I could tell them that. I can’t lift weights any more, I can’t run marathons any more, I can’t play football any more. My joints are shot. My hair is grey.

Maybe I haven’t broken it, it doesn’t hurt that much. I’ll try to move, but first I need to know.

A car. A car full of young men. Shouting. Shouting and music. There was a car, and now there is this water and mud. There was a car and I knew it was there from the music, the incessant muffled thud of bass getting louder and louder and as to why I continue, I don’t know, a number of reasons. Often when I’m out the town is mine and mine alone. Each paving slab laid purely as a tribute to me, each kerb designed with me in mind. The council have a committee who meet every second Thursday in a chamber in the depths of their offices, with tan carpets and whiteboards and flipcharts and sandwiches (egg mayonnaise, or tuna mayonnaise) to calibrate the streets for me, for when I skate, for reasons I don’t rightly know.

A ditch, I’m in a ditch, that’s it. Mud plus water plus cold plus awkward shape for lying in equals ditch. I’m in a ditch because for some reason each and every night I skate all over the town, from the northern woods to the wasteland estates of the west. Your guess is as good as mine.

Yes, it is broken.

There will be sirens eventually, I hope.

But for the time being there is only night, and the ineluctable matter of the stars.

Eyes across crowded room

I have seen no evidence for this phenomenon at any point in my life at all, I say, placing the glass down carefully.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, Dave replies, wagging a finger. The trouble with taking a strict phenomenological view is that you are closing yourself off from all the beauty in the world. Stop intuiting. Just see.

Is intuiting a word? I ask

Enough of the beauty in the world. I have spent the afternoon in a retail park in St Helens, fitting air conditioning to a family fun pub. I do not have a high opinion of the beauty in the world. My mouth still tastes of coolant.

Take them, for example he says. He waves the end of his cigar at two points. Point A being next the jukey, where a pale sort in a T-shirt is peering intently at the screen, searching. Point B is a gauzy sort of a girl, hunched towards the corner of a louder and more contemporary group. She’s thin. End of the night, he says. No problem. The cigar tip weaves a figure eight and already I believe him, he’s done it again. Right on cue the lanky kid by the jukey finds a song he was clearly looking for and on it goes. Bombastic guitar fills the air, and his face lights with a sort of ecstasy. She feels it too, she stops her attempts to break into the chatter and looks across.

Great. I say. U2. Just great.

Her eyes catch his. The air feels charged like after a thunderstorm. Just for a second.

And that’s the strange thing, the two are now related. The pattern on his T-shirt is the pattern on her dress, all of a sudden. It wasn’t before. A line has been drawn and each finds an echo in the other. They’ve both turned away, they can’t see each other, it was a moment and it’s gone. But their stances echo each other and suddenly it becomes impossible to see one without seeing the other superimposed. Their images flicker over one another. His t-shirt. Her dress.

I don’t know how you do it, I say.

Neither do I, to be honest, says Dave. Another?

Yeah, alright.

The arse

It was hypnotic. Absolutely hypnotic. I couldn’t take me eyes off it and neither could she.

Stop looking she said I can’t I said. She paused. Neither can I she said.

The girl in front of us was walking in a determined fashion, striding almost. She was also wearing the pinkest tracksuit bottoms I had ever seen, and was evidently not scared of a pie or two. At the strike of the heel the wave of flesh would begin, travelling up the buttock until reaching it’s apotheosis at the apex of her stride, before descending the cheek again and repeating the process.

I’m sorry I said, but I can’t stop looking.

We had already gone past our intended stop. The plan, hatched in the glory of a bright spring morning, had been to find a pub with benches outside and stay there for a decent duration. We had nothing else to do that day so the drink it was to be. Until we saw the girl.

Her companion was equally ample, and proud of it in a midriff displaying top. I said something about it being a good thing that larger girls weren’t afraid to show it off a bit, how it was healthy that they didn’t feel as though they needed to conform to etc etc, to be honest half way through my theory I was boring myself, and my companion turned to me with an elegant raise of her eyebrow which to me said something very like shut up.

But now she was as hypnotised as I was.

On we walked in the beating sun, up past the church, and past two our three pubs which met our precise specifications. But we didn’t stop, we couldn’t stop. The oscillations had us in their grip. She said I don’t think oscillations is the right word, I said no matter.