Friday 15 May 2015

Blancmange (some sweet story)

Claudie went to check herself in the mirror, again, making sure to look at her flat stomach and lack of creases in her body hugging top. A nice skirt soft to the touch, her arms were smooth and the bust visible. She couldn’t look up at her face not really sure why.

Amnon waited in his car and on the bus journey and then in the train, on any mode of transport, really. Whilst on the move he never had control of the thoughts that flowed in, like the scenery flitting past the window. He waited for a hint that he should chase after her, but it never came.

Playing hard to get only lasts a few days, as the weeks roll on turning in to the changing of seasons, summer had already appeared and they were going to meet again. Had it been three months? Amnon didn’t really want to think about it and was already walking to the date-spot, and he thought he had to really stop thinking of it as a date-spot.

It was just a really prominent spot. She had chosen it of course in the middle of the city equidistant from both their work places, a gigantic symbol - not of romance but of stately grandeur. A blancmange no less, St. Paul’s Cathedral. She was all about the grand gestures, that was how she left it.

It had been their first and last holiday together to mark a year’s anniversary, Roma. When the tourists had dissipated and dusk was at it’s height, and one or two bats swooshed over their heads she had turned to him and blankly state it’s finished. Over. In front of the Fountains of Triovoli. Amnon was taken aback because seriously there had been no change up to or during that point, but she said it so sweetly and left.

Each time Claudie went to leave her flat, one plimsole out the door she would recoil back in and have another last look at her self in the mirror. Was it vanity that kept her locked to mirrors or the reassurance that she needed - that she still existed and hadn’t vanished mid-sentence in the time she wasn’t looking at herself in one, she really didn’t know. 

Addicted to the Gaze as one friend jibed her. But Claudie’s world was crystalline. No fault lines, everything pristine. Nothing that occurred wasn’t pre-planned or pre-envisaged. In the big black holdall made of Italian leather that Amnon had presented to her in Rome were scripts, reams of paper jotted down with the words that real people said and that was how she lived, not spontaneously only in scenes.

Amnon spotted a small swaying figure meandering up to the St. Paul’s steps. It was her - he knew from her walk and her neat little bob that swayed only after her whole body swayed. He felt a bit sea-sick now, actually. So he started to hum a song. Most aptly his hardwired nervous brain had injected the Kinks Waterloo Sunset in to the scene, there really was a sunset and they were close enough to the river, so why not?

Claudie waves, she waves again and smiles. Actually she’s pleased to see him, now that she thinks about it she had missed him and his Rat Pack sensibilities. As she approaches and peels off her sunglasses she realises he’s a lot more real than she remembered him to be. He looks nervous and kind like a child and immediately Claudie is in love. That’s her fickleness for you.

Take me back? She suggests. He says yes. And then they try to walk and talk but can’t do both at the same time without feeling silly, so hold hands instead.






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