An afternoon in Norwich

He looked terrible as he stood there swaying. I'd not seen him standing up last time. He'd had his back to the sun. this time he was full frontal outside Ottakers bookshop in that pretty bit off the market.
I'd already depressed myself by nosing briefly into TopShop. It was so beautiful. Capes. Green things. All biba and secondhand retrorepro.
It was just the shock of catching yourself looking all dry haired in the mirrors with an irredeemable make up situation going on. With a face situation generally going on.
By the time I'd wandered past myself four times I could barely walk out the shop for shame. Why did I dare to even expose myself in public like this?
I still had half an hour to kill so I swallowed my vanity and aimed for a trendy shoe shop. Luckily the light was starting to fade. They'd put up the icerink again outside the library. It should've been a wonderful icicle in the Norwich Christmas crown but appeared to magnetically attract young Goths - black moths cutting lowryesque figures against the ice brightness.
I was starting to recover as I darted up an alleyway in an attempt to not get there early. Why was I so worried about looking cool anyway. I'd already broken the ice which had formed over the twenty year absence between us and dipped my toe into the cold water.
Suddenly there he was beside me. Tottering Ottakerly. It must have taken about four seconds for us to mutually decide that coffee wouldn't do. He grabbed my arm and led me to a divey pub. Easily led. Just like old times.
A Jack Kerouac poster on the wall and several people who were in for the afternoon, had been in for the morning.
Bloated was a word that would best describe him as he stood at the bar. I saw how fat his belly was. He was taller than I remembered as well - big. He'd been so lean and white when I first saw him - sitting in the canteen in Lowestoft Technical College. I'd approached him with crazy colour hair, plonked myself down and asked him about his writing. It must have been four minutes before we'd decided to go to the beach with a bottle of liebfraumilch. So confident. So full of Joy Division.
He'd had a number of fixations about his appearance in those days. We laughed about how he would become hysterical if I even touched his hair. He'd sliced the edges of his ears off in Borstal - talk about a short sharp shock - before taking the razor to the length of his arms. His skin was so white. DIY plastic surgery. I don't think we'd heard of compulsive disorders then.
He used to be on Mogadon. It was quite unusual then. I hardly know anyone who isn't on some sort of anti-depressant now. I enquired about his manic depression. Bloated, beery and burpy with unkind eyes that he's always complained of. I'd had to constantly reassure him about - suddenly bacame starkly visible. The bulb on the end of his nose. His too curvy lips. His too big feet and strangely immobile hair.
The voice was still there though. Sonorous and cutting as he told me my ring looked cheap and said that he thought it possible to be bored by someone you spoke to for hours.
I still had most of his books on my shelf and still he was offering to buy me another volume of poetry by a Russian - Marina translated by somebody feinstein.
No mobile, no computer, no car, no friends but still he was hooked on words and able to give me new inspiration.
And who was I? My 40-year old misery dissipated as the beer flowed.
His memory wasn't good - and I'm talking from one end of a sentence to another not good here. We discussed the first time we'd met. I remembered the beach with Liebfraumilch while he remembered a fumble in a graveyard.
I used that word later when I came back from the gig and my friend told me it sounded old-fashioned.
Graveyard not fumbled.
Said it should be cemetery. What like Pet? And it got me thinking that in my new found singledom I was not so much cultivating new friends as digging them up.
In the bakery that time we were probably stoned. It was morning. Certainly the baker looked like he wanted to stone us with the empty aluminium can he held in his white trembling hand as he muttered "and take your rubbish with you!" It hadn't even been ours.