Significance by Jo Mazelis Page A

recognition and confusion in his eyes. I’d smile at him, nice white teeth, looking even whiter because of the red lipstick I’m wearing, and he would smile back hesitantly at first, then pow! He’d get it.
    â€˜Lucy! Oh my God, Lucy. You look … You are…’
    He’d move closer. All the other men in the bar would pay attention, they’d be witnesses, the enthralled audience seeing this beautiful moment in the love story of Lucy and Thom.
    â€˜Lucy. You look beautiful!’
    Was that all she wanted really? Just for Thom to notice her again? So that she could feel whole again. Because, the truth be told, for some time she’d been feeling not only taken for granted, but invisible. Invisible in the way that the objects which surround us every day are. We see them and we don’t see them. Walls, kettles, pictures, the window and what’s beyond it, the bed, the bathroom sink, the tube of toothpaste, the chairs arranged at the dining table, one, two, three, four. A chair is a chair is a chair.
    Unless it’s concocted by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, in which case its regular, centuries - old, tried and tested dimensions are stretched and distorted out of all proportion.
    It is the human body which dictates the particular form a chair takes. It is the human form which governs the scale of architecture. You don’t mess with a chair unless there is a reason to – think of scaled - down chairs for children, or the high chairs that umpires at tennis matches sit on, or the ones designed for lifeguards at the beach. Or electric chairs for killing people, with straps and wires and God knows what else attached.
    Lucy sipped the last drops of brandy slowly. She savoured it and thought that if someone offered her another she’d take it only if she then struck up a conversation. Maybe.
    Or maybe she’d be good and begin her walk back to the hotel.
    Or, and this is what she would have done if she was back in London, she’d hail a passing cab. Except that this small town didn’t seem to have marked cabs, and certainly not black London cabs, cruising the streets waiting for a fare.
    So she’d walk. It wasn’t far anyway. If it was cold she’d put her cardigan on. She’d walk briskly, which would warm her up, and as a woman walking alone after midnight, the briskness was essential anyway.
    The last mouthful of brandy. Not a mouthful at all. The last dregs which seemed to dissolve on her tongue and disappear rather than be swallowed.
    She put the glass down on the table. Took her cardigan from the top of her bag and put it around her shoulders, loosely tying the arms together to keep it in place. She put her cigarettes in her bag, along with the matchbook Scott had given her. She wriggled out of the booth and stood at the end of the counter waiting to pay.
    Standing up and walking four yards to the counter had set off renewed waves of interest among the men. Some just looked at her in that interested disinterested way; the way they might take in the sleek lines of a flashy car they happened to see parked in the street. One of the younger men managed to catch her eye and he licked his lips.
    The bartender raised both of his hands in the air to show his distress.
    â€˜You are leaving us?’ he said.
    The older man at the bar, the one who had bought her a drink, said something in angry quick - fire French to the man behind the bar.
    The bartender nodded, his expression had grown serious.
    Lucy was certain that the subject of this debate was her. The two men talked back and forth. She stood nearby with a twenty euro note held aloft in a meaningful way.
    A phone rang. A mobile trill. Familiar. The Simpsons’ theme tune. Then, near her, movement. The young African, in one gesture, retrieved his phone from his pocket, flicked it open and moved past her towards the door. She heard a voice; a retreating refrain, the language animated, happy, a language that was not