REMEMBER ME TO MYSELF ~ Melissa Mann

Karen was on her knees in the bus lane, peeling a dead pigeon off the concrete.  She held it in prayer book hands and studied it closely.  The feathers seemed to bleed.  She liked that and the way the eye kept on living when the rest of the bird was dead.  And it had been dead for a while, Karen could tell.  Soon it would become dry and brittle and crumble to nothing in her fingers.  She sat down on the kerb and gently laid the pigeon in her lap.  It looked at home there on her school skirt, like this was the nest it was meant to live in its whole life.  Throwing frayed plaits over each shoulder, Karen opened the canvas bag hanging round her neck.  Inside, a box Brownie.  She pulled it out and, leaning back, took a picture of the bird.  She’d been doing this for two years now, photographing dead things.  It was her hobby. While other nine-year-olds were at home watching telly or cutting their teeth on their times tables, Karen was out scouring the streets for road-kill.  She always ended up here though, at the bus station, listening for the pop of pigeons exploding under the wheels of double-deckers.

 

“Why Karen?  Why’d you do it, love?” her mother asked her once.  She was on her way out to work the night shift stacking shelves at Morrisons.  Her mother was always on her way out.  Karen had shrugged and said she just liked it, shooting stuff with her camera; it was something to do.  But really she was fascinated by the different ways a thing could be dead, that’s why she did it.  Like the rabbit she’d found turned inside out by death on the ring road near her Gran’s.  And the cow near the cattle grid that looked like it had died falling off its hooves.  She kept the pictures in a big blue album she’d bought from Woolworths with her birthday money.  A Book of the Dead, that’s what she was making, though Karen didn’t think ‘dead’ was a big enough word to describe what had happened to some of the animals in her pictures.  You’re a strange girl, her mother had said but Karen didn’t care.  Strange was fine by her; she didn’t want to be like everyone else.  She just wanted to be left alone to do her own thing.

 

A bus drove past on its way out the Interchange, the rush of air in its wake lifting the bird’s wing in Karen’s lap.  Smiling, she slid her hands carefully underneath it and got up off the kerb.  Above her head, the glass roof of the bus station holding up a swollen grey sky.  Karen looked down at the dead pigeon in her hands then bending her knees, threw it up in the air for one last death-defying flight.

 

* * * *

Karen is in a meeting with her boss, watching his mouth moving.  He is running through the list of pointless tasks he wants her to do, pointless because Karen knows the next time they meet he will have forgotten he asked her to do them.  It’s always the way.  Karen is starting to feel sleepy.  The monotony of what he’s saying, strangely hypnotic.  She has said practically nothing the entire meeting but her boss doesn’t seem to have noticed.  Her occasional head-nodding and note-taking are apparently enough.  Karen stares at his ear, at the curls of grey hair growing out of it and her mind starts to stray… oddly to thoughts of decapitation.  She imagines scooping out the contents of his head with a spoon then putting it over her own head to find out what it must be like to be so dull.  It has begun to worry Karen just how often she finds herself looking at work colleagues these days and wishing them dead. 

 

 

Karen is back at her desk making an inventory of her boredom in the language of paperclips.  It is 12.15 and according to the diary alert on her computer, she has 15 minutes before a presentation on the firm’s end-of-year results in the conference hall.  Karen cracks her knuckles.  One hour spent eating flaccid egg sandwiches from a paper plate on her knee, feigning interest in fee income and profit per partner ratios.  One hour spent wondering how not one person in the whole firm has noticed that three years ago she decided not to work here anymore.  Another hour of her life, gone forever.

 

Karen rests her head back against the chair and tries to work out exactly when it was she stopped caring about her job and started caring more about not caring.  She concludes that it was probably the moment she accepted the position.  How she’d thought being a planning manager in a law firm would do it for her, she has no idea.  Karen opens her drawer then closes it again.  Things have deteriorated to the point where coming to work feels like going to a funeral.  The same funeral every day of your life.  A funeral where you realise when you get there that it’s you who’s died.  Karen looks round her office, taking in the standard issue pin board and the two book shelves bracketed to the wall above it.  The edge of her desk has a series of notches carved into it with her nail file.  On the magnolia walls hang the two pieces of artwork she is allowed, chosen from an office supplies catalogue. She is looking round her office, trying to see the room without her in it, knowing that this room-without-her-in-it is where she should be because surely her life is happening elsewhere.  It must be.

 

Karen’s secretary, Kim, a squat young woman with starched hair ironed into stiff sheets, pops her head round the door and asks if it’s okay to go to lunch.  Karen swallows a yawn the size of a parallel universe and says yes, of course.  Her voice, she’s noticed, has started to sound like something small and frail that knows it doesn’t have long to live.  Kim smiles falsely then heads off to join the mass lunchtime exodus leaving through the main door.  The security camera above the exit turns and lowers.  Karen eyes it warily, finds herself smoothing a hand over her hair.  It is cut into a one-length bob, a style worn by countless female professionals all over the City.  Karen’s light brown version just hangs there, day in day out.  It never moves or grows for that matter.  Her hair, it seems, has given up as well.  She turns in her seat to face the monitor, her back to the door and retreats into the dreams that live behind closed eyes.

 

* * * *

Karen will look round the boardroom and realise how full the world is of people you actually hate.  On the chairs round the table, piles of dust in the shape of men and women, dust made from the thousands of men and women just like Karen, who have sat in meetings at this table for decades.  To her colleagues and superiors it will look like she is writing feverishly in her notebook.  This is not the case.  Karen will be scoring the words ‘I’m not all here’ into the table with a biro.  When the meeting eventually begins, Karen will sit back in her chair and listen to the words between the words, trying to find some reason, some justification for them all being here.  She will find none.  She will be aware of only one thing, a heavy fog of wasted breath pushing at the walls and windows trying to get out. 

 

This ritual meeting, however, will not be the same as all the others Karen has attended.  This one will be different, memorable.  In this meeting Karen will finally acknowledge that she has had only one thought in her head for the last three years, a one-word thought: leave.  And so it will be that when she is asked if she has any thoughts on agenda item 5.1.2, Karen will not look down at the notes she has prepared.  She will not offer up the one or two ideas she knows are required of her to justify her existence.  No such notes will have been made.  Instead Karen will shake her head.  The subsequent disapproval that flickers across her boss’ face, she will ignore.  Just as she has learned to ignore his collection of cartoon ties and the frequency with which he touches his fly in her presence. 

 

An hour later – an hour made up of an infinity of minutes – Karen will find herself raising her hand when the chairman asks if there is any other business.  She will watch the hand move from the table edge it’s been gripping and rise slowly through the air.  Faces will turn to look at Karen, waiting expectantly to hear her last-ditched attempt to contribute to the meeting.  And when the chairman asks, well Miss Clarke, any other business?  Karen will nod her head, hand still in the air and say, yes Mr Chairman, I’ve realised I have absolutely no business being here.  As he sits back sharply in his chair, Karen’s body will stand her up and climb her onto the boardroom table.  She will feel it shift tectonically beneath the soles of her black court shoes.  By making her climb onto the table, this is her body’s way of telling her it doesn’t want to die, not here, not like this. 

 

Looks will be exchanged, a brusque exclamation to sit down by one of the more senior members of the board.  But Karen will not heed any of this.  She will stand there on the table, the sun streaming in through the windows, feeling like a rabbit caught in the headlights… waiting.  Karen is waiting for the shout she can feel lurking in the room to come out of her mouth.  Her colleagues will shift in their seats because they can feel it too, this shout.  One of them will get up from his chair and reach out a hand to her, trying to coax her down but Karen will ignore him.  She will ignore him because she knows the last sentence she will ever speak in this boardroom is about to leave her mouth. I am a pigeon, she will shout, and pigeons don’t go to work.  We fly, that’s it, that’s what we do.  Then she will bend her knees and jump off the table for one more death-defying flight.

BIG EXIT ~ Melissa Mann

You stand in front of the class knowing that this thing you will do will happen soon.  If you had known it would come to this when you began teaching in the late nineties, you would have stopped while you still had the chance.  But that was over twenty years ago and you are where you are; now it feels like your destiny. 

You stand in front of them wearing a Bioderm bodysuit made from material that breathes like your skin.  Your body is slight, toned muscle sculpted round slim bone.  On your face is a smile, a smile sewn on your face with ugly stitches made of string.  The smile is for the three rows of women in front of you, the twelve obese women standing in the studio like farm animals waiting out the rain in a field.  You are small enough to roam around inside each one of them.  You are insignificant, a minority figure in a new age where eighty percent of women are clinically obese. 

You look up at the squares of blue silence in the ceiling and despite the subdued lighting and the Nutri-air Climate Control System, you want to be elsewhere.  It has always been this way.  The blue light and all that female flesh make you feel like everything that exists in the world is crammed in here with you in this studio.  You want to be outside breathing in real skies, vast oceans lapping your insides.

You ask the class to go to the end of their mats for the roll-down and they obey.  You watch as they gather up armfuls of themselves, hauling their bodies from where they are now to where you have asked them to go.  You cannot see their bones move inside them as they do this and it disturbs you; you can’t help despising them for it.  These women are lost inside their own meat but this thing you will do will help them find themselves.  You realise this is why they have come to you, this is the reason you are here, not to teach them Pilates but to help them start themselves again.

You lead the women through the roll-down, walking your fingers down spines you imagine must exist somewhere in the spongy folds of their backs.  The class is bent over itself now, pushing down on the sprung floor.  You watch, appalled.  How you hate the fat, the pictures you see in the fat – the ugly shapes, the grimacing faces, the buried worms.  Most of all though you hate the fat because it is alive.  You look away, the taste of lard in your mouth, your tongue caked with it then you give the instruction for them to roll up.  Eventually they are upright, staring at you, their moon faces flushed from the inversion and you ask yourself how, how the simplest of movements can excite so much sweat from their glands.  You wait for the Nutri-air System to take the smell away

A voice, firm, decisive.  It is yours.  You can hear yourself speaking to them, telling them that you don’t want to hurt them anymore than they have hurt you.  And they have hurt you, over the years.  They have hurt you by getting bigger and more immobile and less flexible despite your best efforts.  You have made a life’s work of these weekly one hour classes and yet you realise now that it means nothing; you have wasted your time.  These women have done nothing but feed off you for years; you can feel them breathing you in every time you exhale.  You press a hand to your face and suddenly you feel like you are growing old in their puckered, stretch-marked skin.  An anger that is bigger than you, takes you over.  It presses on your temples, burns your throat, pushes at your eyes trying to get out.  If these women had any respect for you, if they felt any loyalty towards you at all, they would do the decent thing and die.

Disgusted, you turn your back on them and confront the mirror.  In your left hand, the vacant gun.  On your face, a smile; you love this gun.  How beautiful it feels in your hand, like a cool glove.  And this is no ordinary gun.  No, you have designed this gun yourself.  It is a gun designed by you to kill with precision, to kill beautifully.  Your hand will speak to these women now, your hand will tell these failed bodies what they need to hear; your hand will talk to them in bullets.  You pull out the gun in your empty hand and point it at yourself in the mirror and in that moment you know, for the first time in your life you know exactly who you are.  And you are not alone in this knowledge because the woman behind you in the first row, she knows who you are too.  You can see it in her eyes, brown eyes that suddenly cannot meet yours.  She looks at the floor, pulls her shapeless black t-shirt down over the rolls of her stomach, clutches the fleshy wings of her upper arms.  Of all the women in the room this one has fed off you the most.  Questions, always asking questions, asking for help, always wanting something from you; you could never give her enough.  You turn to face the class, slowly, deliberately, casting your eyes around the room but really you have already decided; she will be the first. 

The women stare back at you like theatre-goers, expectant, waiting to be entertained and you smile because you know you are about to give them the performance of a life-time.  Adrenalin is coursing through your bloodstream like lust.  Cut you now and you would bleed excitement, anticipation.  The adrenalin is making you shake but it is a shaking that is somehow outside of you.  When you raise your gun hand it is surprisingly steady.  You are aiming straight at her, the woman you have decided will be first.  She can feel the cold barrel scorching her forehead even from ten feet away; the fear you can see in her eyes tells you this. 

The woman dies as beautifully as you imagined she would.  The bullets burn kiss-shaped holes into her forehead, her chest, her belly.  In fact there is beauty and precision in the way they all die.  You see the bullets splintering hair follicles, splitting cells as you shoot them, one after another.  And you enjoy it, seeing these women falling apart in front of you like this.  You enjoy it because it feels like you have been a part of this falling since you began teaching them all those years ago.  This is how it was meant to be.  It was inevitable.  So you keep on firing, on and on until every last one of them is lying on the floor.  But still you don’t stop.  You keep on shooting these women, shooting their fat onto the walls until eventually it feels like you are firing at ghosts.  And so you lower the gun, letting out the breath you have been holding since you brought the gun to life. 

The studio is deathly quiet now except for the gun whispering, kiss-shaped smoke rings floating in the beam from the glaucous spotlight above your head.  Curiously the gun no longer feels like it is in your hand.  It has become something other, a thing in its own right, a thing that needs no-one for it to exist, to fulfil its destiny.  You can hear a slow rapturous handclapping but you are the only one in the room left alive and when you look at your hands they are wiping themselves down the thighs of your bodysuit.

“It’s all your fault,” you say and as you look round the studio at the bodies on the floor, you realise this is something you have known about yourself your whole life.  Just as you know that you have spent your whole life preparing for this death.  You grab your things and stride across the studio, struggling to open the door.  Eventually it unseals itself and breathes you into the corridor outside.  You walk away from the studio towards the fire exit, a security camera tracing your every step but you are unaware of this.  You are looking at your hands.  You are looking for the gun, for your beautiful gun.

“Did I just do that,” you ask yourself and you answer.

~~~~

Melissa Mann is a writer and the founder/managing editor of litzine Beat the Dust.  Her stories and poems feature in lots of online and print literary publications (Laura Hird, Dogmatika, Straight from the Fridge to name a few) so it can only be a matter of time before the Bradford Telegraph & Argus finally succumbs and accepts a piece from her.  For more free radical writing from the Bradford 1, go to the holding cell of your nearest police station or failing that www.melissamann.com. 

Baby Dicks ~ Melissa Mann

Caitlin grips her fountain pen and watches the young woman wiping her husband’s face on the other side of the conservatory.  ‘More meat in your package is what you need!’ she writes in her notebook, pressing a finger between her eyebrows; she is conscious of frown lines.  Out the corner of her eye, she sees the woman put the picture back on the piano and start to clean the one of her children taken outside the family’s second home in Provence.  Caitlin can’t remember the last time she was required to clean anything; eleven years ago probably when she had her own flat, when she worked as a PA at the law firm where Lewis is still the Senior Partner.  They have always had a cleaner, Lewis insisted upon it when they got married, just as he’d insisted upon the housekeeper, gardener and live-in nanny before the children were sent away to boarding school.  Caitlin was effectively made redundant from her life the moment the wedding vows left her mouth. 

‘Your pitiful dick would be a shortcoming for any man,’ she writes, nib punching a green full-stop through the page.  Her hand is shaking.  She puts the pen down and spreads her fingers.  It is an expensive hand manicured twice a week at an exclusive salon off Sloane Square and adorned with a diamond engagement ring and gold wedding band.  It is the hand Lewis took in marriage and made his own.  Caitlin carves the words ‘your warrior of love is too miniscule to win this war!’ across the page of her notebook.

The cleaner has left the house now. Caitlin can’t remember the woman’s name, they’ve had so many; Lewis is rarely satisfied with the way they clean the place.  Caitlin can hear the woman’s scooter puttering just below the bedroom window.  She peers through the curtain, eyes waiting to see the back of her as she heads down the drive.  Caitlin watches as the electric gates swoon closed then turns and strides across the bedroom carpet.  The shag-pile flexes like a knitted muscle beneath her stocking feet.  In the dressing room, a wave of white shirts and made-to-measure suits surges along the wall.  She runs her hand along the length of them; they are barely there beneath her fingertips.  “Chicks hate getting laid by baby dicks like yours,” Caitlin says and smiles to herself.  The wooden hangers knock into each other like a xylophone. 

She is on her side of the dressing room now, confronting the pointed stare of row upon row of shoes and boots.  Lewis is constantly buying them for her.  Blood money she thinks every time she accepts a new pair, for is she not complicit in this killing of herself?  They all have heels, none less than three inches high.  When he’d bought her the first pair all those years ago, she’d thought perhaps he fantasised about seeing her in slutty stilettos, so one evening she’d greeted him home from work, naked but for a red patent pair with a spiked silver heel.  The swell of her breasts and belly glistened with baby oil in the porch light, her blonde hair set free from its clip, wild.  “I want you to fuck me,” she said, pulling out his tie and taking it in her mouth.  But Lewis had called her a dirty whore, told her to put some clothes on then pushed past her to the study. 

Caitlin learned early on in her marriage that Lewis has no time for sexual games.  He buys her heels simply because he wants her to be taller than she is, would like her to be more than she is generally in fact.  Caitlin had considered herself a catch when she first met him, Lewis being so much older than her, but after eleven years married to a man whose compliments are always on the tip of his tongue, she now understands that she will always be a disappointment to him. Caitlin holds a black court shoe in her hands, curved heel gripped in her fist.

“Elongate your short sword to fit her scabbard better,” she says then laughs.  With the shoe back on its box, she kneels down and pushes aside a row of flabby leather handbags.  The carpet peels back like the page of an ancient tome.  From beneath the floorboards, Caitlin retrieves her laptop and, clutching it to her chest, walks over to the bed.  She strokes the lid, a finger describing the engraved logo then opens it and turns it on.  The screen blinks and goes through its routine of waking up.  Caitlin bought it six months ago with the money Lewis gave her for the Prada coat he said she could have.  Within a month she’d earned enough money of her own to buy the coat before her husband could suspect a thing.

Caitlin leans back against the padded headboard, notebook open beside her and begins to type. ‘Guys with tiny pen!ses like yours truly lack manhood.’  On the bedside table, Lewis’ half-moon spectacles eye her from the book he’s reading on hedge funds.  Caitlin chews the inside of her cheek, fingers tripping over the keys in their haste to type the words that have popped in her head – ‘Shame on you!  Don’t you know your wife longs for a big schlong!!!’   A noise on the landing.  Caitlin stops, swallows, breath holding itself at the back of her throat.  Her husband’s black Labrador lumbers through the bedroom door and seeing nothing of interest to him, bumbles back out the way he came.

Reassured it wasn’t Lewis home early again, Caitlin flexes her fingers above the keys to stop them quaking.  The blank email waits patiently for her to gather herself.  From the drop-down list, she selects a name.  Today, Caitlin decides, she will be Sherman A. Santos.  In the subject heading and body of the email, she pastes some text, selects the largest email group from her address book then presses send…
FROM: Sherman A. Santos
SUBJECT: Extend your mini fuckstick & keep your wife coming!
——————————————————————————————
Searching for a sure fire way to fight your s’ex_ual failures?
Looking for more SIZE, LENGTH and WIDTH from your love shaft?
Frankly I had never observed in myself such a might and pleasure before I tried this cure for d!cklessness!
Order top grade V ia_G ra here, 100mg x 90 pills for just $$$$$$120.95!!!!

Trick ~ Melissa Mann

Satan and the Bride of Dracula are standing in Terry’s porch.  He is on tiptoes, looking at them through the spy-hole in his front door.  Terry is a small, middle-aged man who has fallen short of himself on many occasions.  The girl he can see is about twelve, ripe, in a long fitted satiny dress.  The little boy is wearing a black suit and has two red papier mache horns sprouting out of his ginger hair.  ‘Kids from the council estate,’ Terry thinks.  He rubs the five-day old stubble on his tired face, reties his wife’s dressing gown then opens the door.

“Trick or treat!” shouts the girl, clinging onto the two-foot wig towering above her head.  It is shaped like a home-made wedding cake, purple, glitter sparkling in the bright surprise of the porch light.  She nudges Satan, “’rick treat,” he says, shyly, waving hello with his fingernails.  They look like puppies in a dogs’ home clustering round the cage door.

Terry clears his throat and hawks a mouthful of phlegm behind the door.  “Fuck… like I’ve really got time for this.” He shakes his head and takes a swig from the can of lager plucked from the dressing gown pocket.  He smirks and points at them with the index finger of his can hand.  “Fuck it, you know what, trick!  Fucking trick!  Gimme your best shot, week I’ve had!”

The girl fingers the glass heart hanging between her new breasts and puts a hand on her brother’s shoulder.  The boy, wearing his sister’s hand-me-down smile, looks up at Terry, prodding his thin leg repeatedly with the fork-end of the tail sewn into the seat of his trousers. 

A car turns into the cul-de-sac, headlights scanning the bungalows like a bar-coder before pulling in front of its garage.  Now there is just a thin sliver of moon, a Halloween moon shedding its dark on the street.

“Go on then, trick.  Do your fucking worst, I deserve it,” says Terry, spilling lager down the suit trousers he’s wearing.  “Shit, now look!  Shit.”  He swipes at his leg.  “So what’s it to be then Satan and whoever the fuck you’re meant to be… Mrs Satan? Ha!”

The little boy pulls the egg out of his pocket and looks at his sister. 

“A fucking egg!  Is that it?!” says Terry, bracing himself against the door frame.  The boy looks down and starts to draw shapes in the dirt with his plimsoll.  “That the best you can do, chuck a fucking egg at the door?”

The girl flinches as Terry reaches a hand towards her.  “See this, dug my own fucking grave with that this week.”  He holds it up to his face, turning it, looking at it from every angle.  “Wife left me on Monday cos she found out I fucked a prostitute.”  He stares at the bitten fingernails, the patch of eczema near his wrist.  “S’not like I knew she was a pro, so it shouldn’t fucking count, should it?”

The Bride of Dracula has her arms folded, head cocked on one side, eyebrows up near her wig.

“What? I swear to fucking God I had no idea.  I thought she was just a Strippergram.  Well, a Strippergran if I’m honest cos she was really fucking old…”  Terry starts to laugh but it’s a laugh that sounds like crying.  “They’d booked her for someone’s leaving do and we just got talking.  S’how it always starts isn’t it, just talking.  Then the talking turned to looking… looks with fantasies inside ‘em.  Next thing I’m fucking her in the Sales Director’s office, on that big fuck-off oak desk he’s got.”  He reaches behind him, feeling the desk, stiff and heavy in the small of his back. “She’s fucking left me… fucking left me after eighteen years,” moans Terry, wiping his eyes with the dressing gown cord.  He can taste her going like old lemons in his mouth.  “‘Sick of being a one-man Band-aid,’ that’s what she said.  What the fuck’s that supposed to mean, for fuck’s sake?”  He hangs his head and fumbles for the can.

The girl takes the egg off her brother and looks at Terry, wedding cake listing dangerously to the right.  Terry shakes his head.  “I deserve a helluva lot more than a fucking egg thrown at my front door, love.”  He points at the boy’s jacket pocket.  “You got a gun in there, son? A big fucking shotgun you could blow my fucking head off with.”  Terry is shouting now, a man standing at the door of his bungalow in Tonbridge, shouting at his own mouth.  “You up for it then Satan?  Up for splattering my fucking brains all over the porch?  Think you could do it for your Uncle Terry?!”  There is only one way back from here now but to Terry, it feels like the wrong direction.  “Fucking trick and a half that’d be!”

The little boy’s bottom lip starts to quiver, tears drawing streams down the white make-up smeared on his face.  He reaches for his sister’s gloved hand.  The Bride of Dracula looks up at Terry with hate’s eyes then steps forward, smashing the egg as hard as she can into Terry’s crotch.

“That’s for you and your free range dick, you prick,” she says, then sets off down the path, trailing Satan along behind her.

new svg!!!

Welcome to our new issue of SVG! Featuring Melissa Mann and James Quinton!!! Enjoy!!!

 

COCK-EYED ~ Melissa Mann

Annie leans forward on her stick, watching the tiny tumbleweeds of afro hair cart-wheel past the bus stop from OJ’s, the barbers on Wandsworth Road.  She pushes the thick bifocals up her nose with the bunched fist of her hand then leans in closer, eyes squinting. 

“Well I never did,” she says, looking round for someone to tell in the empty bus shelter.  “Like seeing someone’s life passing before your eyes.”  She prods the hair balls with the rubber bung end of her stick.  “Not that I can trust my eyes as far as I can throw ‘em these days,” she says, taking off her specs.  “Nothing wrong with my ears though.  Got ears inside my eyes.”  She breathes a frozen pond on each lens.  “I hear things I’d rather not, private things, like the fella next door with his lady friends.”

She rests her head back against the route map.  “Lovely fella, black.   Not married of course; don’t seem to go in for it much these days.”  She looks up at the speechless grey sky pressing down on the parade of shops opposite.  “Fifty-two years me and Jack were married.  He said to me once, ‘Annie,’ he said, ‘we’ve been happily married haven’t we.’  I answered him of course, squeezed his hand and fed him the rest of his porridge.”

A 77 pulls up at the stop, engine grumbling.  She smiles at the driver and waves him on with her stick, her thin red mouth like jam bleeding out of a cheap Victoria sponge.

“Fifty-two years…,” she says, looking at the watch lashed to her wrist.  For the past four years it has forgotten what comes after three o’clock.  It was Jack’s watch before they archived him in Lambeth cemetery. 

“Yes, ears inside my eyes I’ve got.  He’s at it for hours sometimes, black fella with his lady friends,” she says, gripping her stick.  “Quite acceptable these days of course, putting yourself about a bit.  I wouldn’t’ve minded a change from Jack, I’ll be honest with you.  Wouldn’t’ve minded a black man come to that… you know, just to see.  Just to see how I’d get on…”

She plucks the hair stuck to the end of her stick.  “So dark and wiry,” she says, rubbing it between her fingers.  “Not like mine.  Mine’s all thin and fly-away now.  Used to have a good head of hair once.  Yes, a real looker I was; turned many a young man’s head in my day.”  She fluffs a cloud of pale hair.  “Face like a fairy-tale ending, Jack used to say.”  She presses a hand to her cheek.  “Not now though, not after the stroke.  Face is like someone’s pulled a tablecloth out from under it.”

“Yer say som’ink?”

Annie jumps, turning to see a girl sitting next to her.  The girl pulls out her earphones.  “Can’t ‘ear a fuckin’ thing wi’ these in, yeah.”  She pops a full stop with her gum.  “What yer say?”

“Oh, don’t mind me lovey,” says Annie, taking in the girl’s bare thighs and tight t-shirt.  “I was miles away, talking to myself.  You wanting the 77 cos it’s just gone, and the 87.”

“Shit!” says the girl in a voice burned black at the edges.  She looks down Wandsworth Road.  “Fuck!”

The girl pulls out her mobile phone and starts barking into it.  ‘How confident she is,’ thinks Annie, fiddling with the hem of her cardigan.  She looks at the swallow tattooed on the girl’s mid-riff and feels suddenly nostalgic, nostalgic for the girl she never was.  ‘Lovely to be able to grow up in your own skin like that, not caring who’s looking, who’s listening, what they might think of you.’ 

“Boyfriend’s gunna come pick me up, yeah,” says the girl, snapping her phone shut.  “Poxy buses, innit.  Never one when you need one.”

“Yes, bit like policemen,” says Annie, nodding her head at the road opposite.  “Though I did see a pair of ‘em over there by the Tennessee Fried Chicken place when I was sat here yesterday.  Looked like they were holding hands.  Yes, you see all sorts sat here…  Pretty,” she says, pointing her stick at the girl’s tattoo.  A hair ball drops off her stick and floats away.  “Did it hurt?”

“Bit,” says the girl, turning to look across the road again.  “Two coppers?  Holding hands, yeah? Fuckin’ weird is that!”

“Oh don’t mind me lovey.  Mind forgets what it thinks sometimes,” says Annie, taking off her specs and rubbing her eye with her fist.  “I envy you, you know. I do.  I envy you young girls today.  It’s like… it’s like your living my share of a freedom I wasn’t allowed.” 

A blue Golf with a suck-me spoiler pulls up at the bus shelter.  The girl climbs in the front seat, takes hold of the man’s face and kisses him violently.  “That’s it, you live your life lovey,” Annie shouts over the sound of the engine revving.  “No-one ever died of being young!”  The car speeds away towards Vauxhall, baseline pulsing out the back window like an ECG.

Annie swallows, feeling words catch in her throat, whole sentences of them buttoned up to her neck.  A gust of wind rattles the shelter.  She cocks her head – footsteps, heavy boots loping along the pavement.  Annie leans forward and looks up the road towards the Beaufoy Bar.  A man is walking towards the bus stop, a black man, skin shiny as patent leather, a woollen hat, red, gold and green nodding to the beat of his steps.  Annie struggles to her feet, squinting right at him.  Her stomach has turned to sand and is falling towards her ankles like an egg-timer.  Eventually a grin like an open wound appears in the powdered folds of her face.

“Well I never did,” she says wiping her mouth.  He is standing in front of her now, smiling down at her from his six feet of tall; smiling down at the frail old lady who is laughing so much she has to sit down. 

“Oh lovey, I nearly fell out my pants!” she says, hand pressed to her chest.  “Thought all my Christmases and birthdays had come at once.” She points at his dreadlocks, which are so long you can see them hanging between his legs.  “I thought it was your cock!”