Are You The Right Man For Me?

A story for the season's end.

She sits by the bar, and you wonder if she takes a glance into the mirrored glass behind the shelves opposite. And if she does, what she sees. The music video is playing on the TV, and she sings down low, mumbling the words that would be less tuneless were she to sing loudly, as her diaphragm has closed around the melody and strangled it into the chill of a beer glass. She sits by the bar in an endless wait. She smiles at the occasional guy who comes in, makes her time seem important by thumbing a mobile, takes another cigarette, and then shifts on her stool as someone suggests to her another beer, which she accepts with a coy shrug and a throaty thanks that comes out as a part laugh and then cough.

She sits by the bar. It could be seedy; it could be exotic. It could be non-descript and, in a less charitable moment, you might believe the same of her and that were she with some bloke, were she another tourist wandering sad-faced into a bar for a no-thought-applied beer of cold lack of comfort, you would pay little attention. Except she isn't. She waits. Some she knows. Some she waits to know. And one appears, sits at the next stool and orders a beer and another for her. So she places a jacket on the back of her stool and takes one more cigarette.

Are you the right man for me?

Her summer has moved her to a moisture-destroying pursuit of tanning that may somehow be attractive, or so she may believe, but is vanity in pursuit of the passing, the passing fancies of a midday or midnight dream; it matters little what time it is. And she clouds the invasion of the sun's rays with the fogs and mists of twenty cadged from someone she knew earlier, the twenty, forty that day that crease and wreck and wrinkle as sure as the sun has created havoc and has cratered the skin. And all, perhaps, in the expectation of a moisture-creating moment of passing fantasy if this is the right man for her, except he is another who has wrinkled, creaked and been wrecked under the sun. And he sits by the bar, and you wonder if he takes a glance into the mirrored glass behind the shelves opposite, and if he does what he sees.

Are you safe? Are you my friend?

The music channel retreats decades. She smiles, moves her shoulders. She is back in seventies time, back in a playground with a skipping-rope and pigtails that some boy tugs, and so she runs and cries and forgets about anything of the future. And somehow she came to be here. She has another beer and another cigarette, and she's not sure. He, the guy on the stool next to her, smokes and strokes a beard, discolouring his face with beer and a never-ending filter of nicotine. He says things, but she doesn't really hear. She is tumbling down a dip in a playing-field, laughing and shouting and then, suddenly, going blank. She stares at him, at the tattoos and rings on his fingers, and, for a moment, she is frightened.

Or are you toxic for me?

She composes herself, starts to sing more loudly. The tourists, pale, pierced and pissed, clap and encourage this burst of spontaneous karaoke. They seek a similar small enjoyment and solace amidst the fags of their fag-end season holiday. And at some point, she disappears out the back. Cats, alert and nervous, crouch and stare and then scurry for cover beneath cars, from where they watch and wait for her to go. And for him to go. The evening has a dampness, a mistiness; not cold but humid and dank. The outside wall feels similarly moist. She makes no noise and does not see the cats' inquisitive and startled eyes.

Will you mistreat me?

He leaves, not through the bar but down an alleyway into the night. She is back on her stool. Another beer? Why not, she croaks and half-laughs, the recent past drifting away as she thumbs the mobile for any contacts. And there is one. She smiles and nods knowingly to the barman. "A promise?" he asks. She says nothing, just grins and puffs on her cigarette. She has, she thinks, an offer out, away, to somewhere else, to something else, to another bar, to another low-sung karaoke. Is he the right man for her? At the end of the season, she doesn't think of that. Just the next bar stool, the next beer and the next moisture of a dark wall.

With acknowledgement to lyrics from "Bluebeard" by the Cocteau Twins.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.