The Cheek Perforation Dance. Sean Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ By bearded blokes in bad Hawaiian shirts, by hairy-legged women with Marxism For The Twenty-First Century laminate badges. Walking past a parade of temporary bookstalls set out in the sun with an array of yellowing Workers Power titles, Murphy finally stops, wrinkles her nose, blurts:

      — God, they ming

      Rebecca:

      — Murf, please

      — But they do. They smell. Yuk

      — Murphy

      — But why? Why do they have to pong? Does it say that in Das Kapital?

      The two college friends push through one particularly gamey cell of would-be Irish Republicans from Guildford as Rebecca explains:

      — It’s a Marxist Weekend, they take over the Union every spring for a weekend and have … I don’t know … conferences … I suppose …

      Evidently unsatisfied by this Murphy stops short on a pavement and starts loudly reading out the signs installed everywhere: the Luton Comrades For A United Ireland poster, the Kidderminster Spartacists Meet In The Marlborough Arms flyer. Then:

      — Correct me if I’m wrong, Becs, but didn’t, like, these people lose? Weren’t they like … totally wrong?

      — I’m going to Waterstone’s

      — Yeah? Try that poetry collection, you might like it …

      Rebecca nods. The two of them are on the corner of Malet Place. In the sun Murphy smiles and reaches over and holds Rebecca’s face and kisses her on the cheek.

      — And take care, ducks

      With that done Murphy twists on a heel, and walks away down the road.

      Still stood still, Rebecca watches her friend depart. From this vantage, the slight overfatness of Murphy’s bottom is obvious, despite the pink cardigan tied around. The sight of this tugs at Rebecca. Flushed by something, Rebecca realises that it is actually this, the pathos of Murphy’s self-consciousness, the pathos of Murphy’s awareness of her own physical imperfections, that constitutes a large part of why Rebecca loves Murphy. Considering this, this odd fact, Rebecca gazes, half in reverie, as Murphy suddenly turns, brightly smiles, and does a sarcastically soppy wave back at Rebecca.

      Observing her friend’s cheery wave, Rebecca feels overwhelmed. From nowhere, she now feels an engulfing sadness, as if something soon, something looming and near, something awful is about to happen to her dearest friend that should forever change …

      Dismissing it from her thoughts Rebecca goes over to Waterstone’s the Bookshop. Pressing glass she enters. Immediately inside she pauses in the welcome cool downdraught from the doorway aircon. Where to? Travel, Cookery, or Magazines? Or Medieval History, as is proper and right? By her self-imposed schedule Rebecca is all too aware that at this moment she shouldn’t even be here: she should be back at the London Uni library reading up Frankish chronicles. Disregarding her postgraduate conscience Rebecca instead makes her way slowly round Fiction, Crime and New Titles, before climbing the black metal stairs, and the second flight of stairs, at the top of which she turns and makes that guilty but familiar, wicked but much loved right turn: into Literature, and Drama, and Poetry, and Art. Her trueloves …

      Hours pass, maybe minutes. Rebecca moves from Braque to Brancusi, from Hockney to Biedermeier. Finally she finds a book about French eighteenth-century court portraiture. The engrossing book makes Rebecca wonder how she can relate the sensuality of rococo portraiture to her thesis; she knows she can’t, but hey.

      Then Rebecca starts. Something has made her pull her head from the book: some subconscious foreshadowing, some creak in the floorboards. Some noise. Turning, Rebecca sees: him. It is him. The thug. The puppy drowner. The very real subject of her very recent lunchtime daydreams is standing in the doorway pretending to look at the book he is holding. The book is an anthology of love poetry, Rebecca notes: but the way he is not truly reading it makes Rebecca realise, with a surge, that quite possibly his real intention is to talk to her; it seems as if he really wants to be talking to her, to be looking at her.

      So this is it; my pounding heart surcease, Rebecca thinks. For the moment he, the thug, does nothing. He appears to be about to say something, he is surely struggling for the right words, but nothing yet. Closing her eyes Rebecca starts on wondering what he will eventually enunciate when he works up the courage; with a pole vault in her heart she considers what cliché’d but lovely line of poetry he’ll choose, how he’ll opt to mark this wonderful, enchanted, never-to-be-forgotten moment in their now forever twinned and linked-together lives by saying thou unravished bride of quietness, or maybe carentan o carentan or just possibly I have desired to go, Where springs not fail, to fields where flies no sharp and sided hail, and a few lilies blow.

      — Great arse!

      He says.

3

      Fleeing the sunshine and the sight of Rebecca, Patrick steps inside a low metal doorway into a tiny badly carpeted lobby, where he is scrutinised by three policemen standing half visible behind big panes of scratched, thickened glass. Patrick leans and explains, through the grille at the bottom of one pane of glass, that he is up for trial. The policeman looks blank, then mutters, then reads from a big book to his side; with a final, diffident glance at Patrick the policeman nods and buzzes a button which slides open the door of a cylindrical plastic airlock to Patrick’s right. Unsure, Patrick turns and steps inside the vertical clear plastic coffin. The circular door behind slides shut; Patrick wonders why the Old Bailey gets its furniture from cheap Seventies BBC space dramas; the arc of transparent plastic that is the door in front jerks open.

      Clear of the door Patrick is beckoned through a metal detector arch by the same policeman who gave him the funny look. The policeman then directs him up some steps and turns away as if he does not want to look at Patrick any more.

      Patrick approaches some more steps. These are big steps, bigger steps. This is more like it, thinks Patrick. His shoes tap-dancing on the large marble steps Patrick feels a tiny frisson of aesthetic pleasure as he is guided by the dead architect’s unseen hand up and out into the cool marble spaces of the Central Criminal Court proper.

      — Patrick

      It is his lawyer; and his lawyer’s junior.

      — Hello Mister Stefan

      — About time!

      — Yes er sorry

      — You do remember your bail conditions?

      Patrick grimaces inwardly, then outwardly. He does not feel like being ticked off, not now, not here. His lawyer seems to notice this. With a lofty chuckle Stefan places a squeezing hand on Patrick’s shoulder. At the same time, Charlie Juson, his lawyer’s junior, slaps Patrick’s other shoulder. Patrick smiles weakly at this display of slightly awkward mateyness, and stares wonderingly ahead. The last time Patrick saw his brief Robert Stefan QC, Robert Stefan QC was in an open-necked shirt leaning back in a relaxed leather chair in his panelled chambers in the blossomy, vernal, High Middle Ages loveliness of a Maytime Inner Temple, discoursing whisky-in-hand-ishly on his wide knowledge of various sex crimes. Here Stefan is in black with a white horsehair wig on his head: looking very СКАЧАТЬ