Theo (Theodore) Watson sat on the raised
decking outside the local university cafe. To his right traffic and pedestrians
breezed by, sliding through the late morning heat. He sipped his coffee and
contemplated his smoking paraphernalia. The drink tasted bitter and slightly
burned his soft lips. He’d been using lip balm recently because he suffered
from bouts of dry skin, he manages to laugh it off in front of his more
masculine friends though.
The heat was making him tense but
it suited the setting and he didn’t think the orange squash that he really
wanted seemed fitting. Pretending to adjust his imitation Wayfarers he glanced
over at the two women having a conversation on one of the other three tables on
the platform. They were engaged in some
kind of political discussion that also seemed quite enjoyable. The one facing
him looked over 20, but not by much. She had precisely disorganised curly hair,
a small bobbled nose and angular shoulders that sunk beneath a lime cardigan. ‘She’s
pulled it off’, thought Theo, ‘lime doesn’t work for allot of people’, he
recalled from an article he had read in Cosmo
whilst on the toilet doing a crap at his cousins house. The cardigan was draped
over a loose fitting t-shirt with a band or something on it. Theo was partial
to a band or two and decided that she was his type. He thought she probably likes drinking different types of
tea and likes to sit on the floor whenever she gets the chance. His
speculations were confirmed in his mind by his spying of her two odd socks
beneath some battered trainers.
The sun was very bright. It made
Theo lament the changes in fashion. This morning he had opted for a tight
fitting t-shirt, on it was a grainy print held in a neat square of nude woman
holding a pair of headphones between her teeth as she jutted her photoshopped
arse out and stuck a ‘V’ sign up. It might have been a Churchillian ‘V’ for
victory, as some sort of layered punk comment on post-colonial Britain. More likely,
it was just a naked woman on a t-shirt. It made Theo feel uncomfortable in his
lectures about genocide and that seminar on domestic violence but it generally
served the purpose of showing his open acceptance of the female form. Despite
this, the t-shirt in question was sticking to his skin because it was a size to
small. A necessary sacrifice however, as it partially made up for all those
lonely hours in the gym lifting things in the wake of another man’s sweat. He
had desperately wanted to fish out that linen number his mum got him but he
didn’t have a choice, no one wears linen anymore except hippies and yoga-dabbling
house wives. The British ambassador to Burma probably wears linen too actually.
Moving his chair to face in a
different direction, Theo crossed his left leg over his right, it felt really
uncomfortable, but that wasn’t the point. He faced the road and the bright grey
sidewalk. He was pleased with his strategic positioning; facing the passers-by
yet suitably out of sight and raised behind a thin veil of ivy and flowers so
they couldn’t judge him for judging them.
They all looked like idiots, he
thought. In the cave at the back of his mind he separated those who passed him
by into the categories of those he could beat up and those he would have sex
with. He was genuinely troubled when the two categories overlapped
occasionally.
He decided upon a cigarette. It
complimented the coffee both toxically and stylistically. He slid one crisp
paper from a fresh pack, being careful not to crease it, inspecting its sides
and corners for erroneous folds, proceeded with the filter, flicked open the
top of the box and removed one thin sleeve, covered in a sheath of plastic. He
squeezed the one second from top and thrilled in the way the top one gradually
slipped out. ‘Cause and effect’, Theo thought to himself, yesterdays politics
lecture lingering in his head. He was enjoying himself. Filter loaded in taut
paper, he cracked open the seal of his packet of Western Indiana. He had missed a lecture as a consequence
of trying to find this particular tobacco. He remembered reading an article about
Jay Trumtar, the deaf arthritic bassist of the avant-garde jazz band Dust Apocalypse, and how he refused to
smoke anything else as all the other brands were far too ‘barky’. It was true
though, he thought, the ‘barkiness’ of modern tobacco was getting ridiculous. It
had taken the elderly shopkeeper 45 minutes to find it in the reserve stock
cupboard, and it was considerably more expensive than normal tobacco.
He finished rolling his cigarette
and drew out a match from the box, a few fell on the floor. He struck it
towards him so that he could move smoothly into a cupped position close to his
face, allowing him to make eye contact with the bobble nosed free spirited girl
and allow wisps of smoke rise around his best asset – his Burtonian brow. The
match snapped and he lit it with lighter.
‘Full English sir!?’ hailed the
stocky waitress as she slammed down a plate of food. Theo jumped and spilt his
assemblage and cigarette onto the floor. ‘Oh, thanks’, he replied, remembering
his manners.
No comments:
Post a Comment