count of the times I asked him to wipe the lascivious smirk off his face. He didn’t tell me much, as he knew I was altogether preoccupied with a girl I had been seeing since Christmas—fragrant, diffident, middle-class Bea, Mandy’s diametrical opposite. To Martin, his long-time customer was just mad, driven, Spanish Mandy with all the drooling suitors in the world. But to me she was suddenly an obsession; some kind of terrible erotic epicentre. I was in love, or lust, confusingly with someone I had exchanged ten sentences with.
Strange how the little details linger in the mind … Her flexed, femininely capable rod-thin upper arms. Her fresh-smelling clothes. Her caramel midriff. Her sheeny hair, reflective as a London black cab after rain. Her equivocal exuberance; actressy and assertive. The ring on her third finger: a plastic rhomboid of tacky sapphire, so different to the austere wedding band which would replace it. Or her teeth. Mandy’s immaculate teeth, lionised and loved—as I would soon find out—by half of north London simultaneously
The train is leaving the subterranean rush of the tunnel. The last of the red lights are flecking past as I observe my eyeless face in the black square of the window. The century is ending. The millennium is ending. Everywhere there is an atmosphere of temporality, of provisionality, of Nostradaman doom and silly superstitions over last things. My hangover and damaged forehead seem to have joyfully joined forces, having made some kind of pact to double my torment. My need for a cigarette suddenly appears to be life-threatening. I advance a finger around the frame—an aluminium rail, like a new bicycle wheel, set in a richly black tube of sealant. Mandy and Martin: friends for donkey’s years, or so it turned out.
First meetings, then. Always potent with the stock psychological truths: eighty per cent of communication is done by the body only twenty by conversation, or: never underestimate the sense of smell on a first encounter, or: attraction is largely pheromonal. All true, all true. But way off the mark when it comes to adumbrating the complete experience, the sensory cosmos available to us when meeting someone significant for the first time. Mandy had been too much that March morning—a telephone exchange of conflicting signals, enticements, vibrations. But there always is too much to take in on these occasions, too much for the time we’re usually allotted. One really is assimilating a whole being: eyes, body, soul, capacities—not just their cosmetic radiance. In fiction, these initial encounters are usually cack-handedly omen-heavy. The spilt glass of red wine will indicate that blood is to be shed; the clutch of lilies the heroine is arranging in the florist’s window points the way to her terminal illness; the squalling children in the playpark beyond that incipient bus stop tells us the couple’s family will be large and loquacious. But real life is never so tidily signposted. One rakes the past for signals, only to find confusion, arbitrariness. In fiction, everything is revealed in retrospect as latent; but in life there is no clear map of predestination. There are too many wild cards. You yourself are a factor in the equation too; its crucial determiner. You change the course of the other person’s life just as irrevocably as they change yours. Together you create a deadly dynamic. You are both the wild card. Character is destiny only up to a certain point. In truth, it is two people’s evolving lives that force the alchemy.
There is another crucial message that can be adduced from first meetings. It goes something like: enjoy this now, this spring-fresh fascination. This is as good as it will ever get. Because human beings have a tendency to go downhill from this point onwards.
It makes me feel no easier, no more placated, to digest all this information as the train hurtles towards maximum speed. The void of the tunnel is becoming a soot-blackened
Strange how the little details linger in the mind … Her flexed, femininely capable rod-thin upper arms. Her fresh-smelling clothes. Her caramel midriff. Her sheeny hair, reflective as a London black cab after rain. Her equivocal exuberance; actressy and assertive. The ring on her third finger: a plastic rhomboid of tacky sapphire, so different to the austere wedding band which would replace it. Or her teeth. Mandy’s immaculate teeth, lionised and loved—as I would soon find out—by half of north London simultaneously
The train is leaving the subterranean rush of the tunnel. The last of the red lights are flecking past as I observe my eyeless face in the black square of the window. The century is ending. The millennium is ending. Everywhere there is an atmosphere of temporality, of provisionality, of Nostradaman doom and silly superstitions over last things. My hangover and damaged forehead seem to have joyfully joined forces, having made some kind of pact to double my torment. My need for a cigarette suddenly appears to be life-threatening. I advance a finger around the frame—an aluminium rail, like a new bicycle wheel, set in a richly black tube of sealant. Mandy and Martin: friends for donkey’s years, or so it turned out.
First meetings, then. Always potent with the stock psychological truths: eighty per cent of communication is done by the body only twenty by conversation, or: never underestimate the sense of smell on a first encounter, or: attraction is largely pheromonal. All true, all true. But way off the mark when it comes to adumbrating the complete experience, the sensory cosmos available to us when meeting someone significant for the first time. Mandy had been too much that March morning—a telephone exchange of conflicting signals, enticements, vibrations. But there always is too much to take in on these occasions, too much for the time we’re usually allotted. One really is assimilating a whole being: eyes, body, soul, capacities—not just their cosmetic radiance. In fiction, these initial encounters are usually cack-handedly omen-heavy. The spilt glass of red wine will indicate that blood is to be shed; the clutch of lilies the heroine is arranging in the florist’s window points the way to her terminal illness; the squalling children in the playpark beyond that incipient bus stop tells us the couple’s family will be large and loquacious. But real life is never so tidily signposted. One rakes the past for signals, only to find confusion, arbitrariness. In fiction, everything is revealed in retrospect as latent; but in life there is no clear map of predestination. There are too many wild cards. You yourself are a factor in the equation too; its crucial determiner. You change the course of the other person’s life just as irrevocably as they change yours. Together you create a deadly dynamic. You are both the wild card. Character is destiny only up to a certain point. In truth, it is two people’s evolving lives that force the alchemy.
There is another crucial message that can be adduced from first meetings. It goes something like: enjoy this now, this spring-fresh fascination. This is as good as it will ever get. Because human beings have a tendency to go downhill from this point onwards.
It makes me feel no easier, no more placated, to digest all this information as the train hurtles towards maximum speed. The void of the tunnel is becoming a soot-blackened
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