Figures

Figures.

A couple came into the shop today.

He was tall, young, good looking; he oozed strength, a man in control of his world.

She was the one who interested me, but only, it has to be said, because she was with him.

She was ‘mutton’, old in young girls clothes. Maybe she thought that if she could just get the look right he wouldn’t notice the twenty years she had on him. Didn’t her mirror show that she accentuated it? Her style enhanced the difference between them. I believe she was terrified of being old.

Her hair was bottle-fed and styled young in an old hag’s face. Maybe she’d already tried the heavy make-up and on this occasion the mirror hadn’t lied for she wore none. The lines that gave her away trudged along her face, through her scrawny neck and appeared to trail to her navel to meet with the stretch marks of her youth. The breasts were upheld, but this too was obvious deception. She looked as though she wasn’t meant to have a half decent figure, that she laboured and sweated in leotard in front of tortuous dvd’s, attended aerobics twice weekly and played badminton on Wednesdays.

The old bird held a twelve, but if she didn’t keep tight hold it would splurge out at the edges and become fourteen. Waist was pinched; thighs were straining in the tight, tight pants. But the size label mattered more than the look. She wore bikini briefs with the waist elastic caught under the belly, loosened beyond repair by years of crisps and sitting in front of the telly. She was ashamed of her belly, you could tel by the way she stood with an arm draped across it but she’d left it too late to do anything about it. The briefs cut into her backside, the seam of her pants disappearing into the crack of her bum. Her half tight thighs bulging from beneath the legs… and when she turned, her lady lips bulged either side in an ugly camels foot, forced apart by the tight, tight pants.

She attempted ‘cool’ in a brown leather biker’s jacket. They’d have called it hip in her day. If the crinkly leather was in competition with the creases in her skin, it could never win. Her bag was trendy. Her boots were high. Her colour was grey and her stature reedy.

She was being flirtatious, teasing and flaunting her imagined sexuality. He managed not to visibly recoil. She was a limpet clinging with desperation to the wreckage of what might once have been but had long since gone.

They bought items of interest and she giggled high but at the same time crow like. He was in for the night of his life.

He made an excuse about illegal parking and sent her to check the car.

While she was gone he made his purchase hastily, sticking it into his jacket out of sight and pleading for a treaty of silence on her return.

She linked his arm on the way out, her property, her young man. She smiled smugly. He’s mine. I bagged him this magnificent creature. How good am I?

And they left, her for another disappointment and him with his secret stash of gay porn….

…figures.