Empty

Poor sandy toes. Red with a chafing and a squeezing into too tight
trainers. Two tight trainers. Poor sandy toes whose nerves, seldom
active, now stab in his head on the long walk home from the railway
station. If you regret the step before it falls that's a state of
misery, it's as simple as that. Feet are gargantuan in their
unforgiving, like Libras.

How come the rotten sow of a moon chides the end of his day with sandy
toes? Is he a villain? Is he walking away from the act of a
blood-flecked mugging? No. You can't begin a poetic story with an
abhorrence, that's the rule. He's walking home from the beach, well it
wasn't a building site or a sand festival, so that's cleared up. He's
walking home from the beach where he fingered the lonely spiritualist
lady that he got talking to on the internet.

Five days they'd talked, three hours at a time. All to culminate in a
soapy-fingered shiver on the sands of a lonely little seaside town
without a proper theatre to its name. For five days there were words
and idioms, fresh catchphrases, middle-aged teasings. These weren't two
boasters out to fashion a pretence out of pretence. Between the two of
them, there wasn't a single eyelash of deceit. She was married, he was
married, they both wanted to hang out with the remnants of their
libidoes for an afternoon. Fair enough.

She'd worried him at first, those sudden bursts of needy text, dressed
sometimes in anger, sometimes in obscure astrological demarcations. He
thought she would be a lot more neurotic than the sashaying smiler that
greeted him at the railway station. She thought he was wonderful,
naturally, for he didn't give a fig for anything except looking like he
didn't give a fig about anything. He kept it hidden from her, all the
pressure on him to look his age (which he resisted, again with the
charm). She just assumed that he was a genuinely errant middle-aged
guy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and tarot cards.
But the road to profligacy was built by a man with muddy shoes and
unkempt hair. Here they were. Together.

The internet chat didn't just continue unabated when they met, it
ceased all usefulness in a single moment. How he sequenced his first
few sentences made her easy for him, how he moved from curt to
courteous in seconds, it all worked so well. Easy? Any of it? Bollocks.
He wasn't smitten, he wasn't even curious, and so he managed to evade
the crippling wollycobbles of desire. Funny how she took his diffidence
as something bravura, a kite of ardour snagged on a breeze of deadly
intentions, but no. He was just diffident.

After a tour of the town, safe from known places on the route map of
his married life, he took her to the desperately sad pub by the beach.
They sat there, across a table, and gathered daisies of each other in
ambling conversation. But ambling always leads to a dark copse or a
steep bank, and sure enough, there they were, skimming stones of
fancy-me? across the river of curiousity. And that's way too many
metaphors.

He admitted that he didn't want to sleep with her, not at all. Perhaps
it was her scrawny body, or maybe the impossibly long teeth, he wasn't
going to set out a roster of complaint. She confessed that
meat-puppetry sex bored her, preferring rituals aligned with a whole
head-shop of mythical meaning. What turned her on currently was this
ritual, this meeting people off the internet, a summoning of some new
kind.

A two-way summoning, he posited. And instantly she was away with the
fairies. And the dolphins. And the native american indians. This
iridescent menagarie followed her everywhere, and for a second it was
crammed into this empty pub overlooking the empty sea.

On the beach he let his eyes down to the stones as they walked, and
they talked some more,of nothing really. This was a time between one
panel in a comic strip and the next, filled with a simple line drawing
done in heavy ink to make the layout more attractive. The sand was
blowing up around her skeletal ankles, etching the bones that seemed to
resent her skin. She asked to sit down. He sat beside her. The sea
wasn't lapping that day, or falling, or ebbing flowing etc etc. It just
rippled, slightly.

She stopped him mid-sentence, as he was talking about the dull sea, and
she asked him to put his arm around her. He complied, being compliant.
They sat there, and he lost the will to talk. She took this as deep,
and leant into him. The sea looked on passively. Even the seagulls were
lost in reverie for a moment. On the road behind this beach a truck let
rip its engine, the basso pronouncements shaking everything loose. At
this moment she grabbed his free hand, and thrust it up her batik
skirt, where he found a welcome in the hillside.

They sat like that for thirty seconds, her face, (well mainly her
teeth), buried against his unfaithful neck. He didn't dare squirm, or
sigh, or gulp. She released him from her and smiled enigmatically,
which he translated as meaning nothing at all. He walked her back to
the railway station. Where she caught the train.

Poor sandy toes. Now stinging inside the trainers that dropped brooches
of grit on the carpet of his hallway. He calls out in a homely
fashion.

"I'm home love!"
(Voice from upstairs)
"Oh, hello love, where've you been?"
" I fingered a stranger"
"What?"
"I've been down to Graingers"
" Oh. Put the kettle on. I'm gasping "