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Frying Pan Anne, she cooks fried breakfasts quicker than a man can eat them, plays tunes with teacups, cymbals with saucepans, wipes her hands down along & under blue & white stripes, takes her time when her times her own, takes her time when her time is mine & hers alone.

We like the electric violin the street busker plays, with loops & interfaces, overdubs & all sorts of clever electronics & when it echoes & goes all hollow sounding I cry & she, perhaps a little embarrassed turns away, looks in a window sees herself reflected & I let myself go while the busker loses himself easily so easily, dreamily, loses himself so easily & takes me with him.

She’s a vibrator like that, one which plays tunes, a different sort of tune to that of the busker but musical nonetheless, not so complicated, not so difficult to play with results much the same except she cries instead of me.

When we wait by the cardboard windowpanes & graffiti enhanced small walls where glass once stood & see no bus. They say, she says, there’ll be one along in a minute, lights a cigarette & red faced, puffs. They always say that, tell the same lies to a captive audience when there is no bus or when the one they have is so late as to make it hardly worth the bother of sending it out of the depot.

But a violin won’t go that low, she says. We learned it in physics but the teacher was a letcher & we learned about more about that than the way an apple might fall. I can still hear him in my head, that busker, with his wailing arpeggios & see, behind my eyes the flash of purple when he played that Deep Purple piece. It isn’t a violin I want to tell her, it’s a device for hunting down emotions, capturing them & setting them free. I feel it easy to cry again, thinking about it, hearing, even second hand, the sounds he made & she says, its starting to rain why don’t we get a taxi?

The way things are going it will be cheaper & less likely to provoke argument. Cardboard flaps, it was a box once. Chocolate or toothpaste maybe, not much difference & still she waits, we wait, smelling the way night’s impending precipitation grows drip by drip. She’s a vibrator like that, a different one. One with a bendy end which it is supposed to have for realism or so said the words on the box. Gspot finder & I wonder why it hadn’t got a light on the end instead of a bendy bit.

A taxi is it? Can’t wait much longer, thinking the roofs cardboard as well, if not the whole damn world, all of it turning to cardboard & sagging into the wet sog of nothingness.

When the screen on her phone lights her face she looks again like she did when I first knew her. Frying Pan Anne, lighting the gas, chopping the chops & getting me two eggs bacon & a double portion of beans.

D’you come here often she asked, slopping tea, scooping margarine out of a plain & simple catering pack. Brown or white? That goes without saying but brown please anyway. Now the electronics light her, tickle her nose, run like fairies into her eyes and hair. & I see the evening dim, glimmer & die & find myself wondering, still hearing the sounds he made, if he goes & where he goes when it rains in the daytime. Under the bridges someone said but he wasn’t there when we looked, not on a broken pavement with dogshit and an empty bottle calling itself Smirnoff nor anywhere near until we heard, as if by magic the wail of him reverberate within the arcade.

He was outside her café when we looked, closed now, signed askew & I didn’t notice, didn’t see or hear anything at all except for the hypnotic sounds he made. & I think therefore I am & hear so maybe I am not as deaf as all that, tho’ sometimes I wish I didn’t hear quite as well as I do. Maybe I’d be a lot less emotional then.

Seven quid she says & the digital magic goes off with a flat snap. The bus would be more than a pound each & we’d still have a walk at the other end. Seven quid from cardboard shelter to cardboard door, albeit one painted a pretty shade of blue. Give me ten the controller said, they must be busy.

We gave him ten while I recounted & she looked at me.

Wryly she looked at me, small skirt damp at the hem which doubles as a waistband, she’d wear no cardy, no mac ‘cos that’s uncool, she’d rather get wet & die young, die young and without hearing the sounds as I can hear them, with my soul with my soul, my soul make no mistake.

Four garments then & all of them wet cotton on a wet summer evening & a small bag, nondescript but expensively fashionable to carry her most important odds & ends. She’ll sell it on Ebay next month when she tires of it, that’s Frying Pan Anne all over. I wonder if the crotch is wrinkled, if her dampness draws it in, tightening it, making it crooked where it narrows & widens & bends a double kisscurl right tight between her legs. They must be busy, that taxi company now that the darkness brings the rain when none go by.

So at the bus stop by the chipshop we gave them ten, the bus stop with the cardboard windows & cardboard roof by the looks of it, Frying Pan Anne & I & she dreams of holidays in Tenerife while I dream of, no I am haunted by, his sound, his sounds oh man his sounds.

They ring her back, the cars on its way, please pay the driver the right money if you can. Frying Pan Anne grins, she knows I have a fiver left & I know she has but two or three meagre pounds. That’ll be it ‘til payday I tell her, thinking sideways, laterally they call it, of her little bedsit on the third floor with it’s dripping tap & its creaky door. Soon be warm & dry she says as rain drips & I can’t imagine how she does it. I know girls have a layer of fat but this is ridiculous. Soon be warm & dry she repeats & there are some coins for the meter in the drawer. Impending Sunday looks more promising then, cream cake like, to share in bed from the corner shop & beans on toast for dinner which will be at three.

He’s there, unexpectedly, a pale Toyota, window half down enquiringly. Yes its us, its us, it has to be. Already damp the car smells of overuse & undercare, unidentifiable litter clothes it, concealing floor by several inches & she gives her address & gets in next to me & all is well at last.

The fiver is as limp & as soggy as I feel when I find it, tissue thin & worthless but it supports her two pound coin & that’s all that matters, that is all that matters.

The Toyota has a light out on the back & a dent in the door with a bootmark on it. Rain swallows it while she fumbles Doorkeys don’t rust usually, thankfully but their dampness calls for a fumble. Even the keyhole is damp & the key’s insertion pushes a new piece of it into the hall. I smell her on the stairs ahead of me, four garments away & one of them very small.

Now & then I think I’d be better off alone. Better off walking home to my own place & keeping my fiver safe in my pocket. Now & then I want to say to her this & that, make her see the sense in the nonsense we live from time to time. She’d be sad I know, probably burn the bacon & let the beans stick to the sides of the pan but that might be for the best, might be a way to develop a new flavour. Not campfire beans but breaking up beans, not scrambled eggs but smashed to smithereens eggs served on toast that’s been scorched & seared & stamped upon. Free screams & help yourself to the HP sauce.

Now & then I think I’d be better off alone. Better off in my own bed where the sheets don’t smell of cum & the pillows leak strange curled chopped feathers. I consider it again, knowing fear, remorse, fear again & regret smeared on a greasy windscreen by wiper blades long past their sell by date. Now & then, oh now & then until I smell her on the stairs ahead of me, four garments away & know everything is going to be alright.

We can listen to the CD if you like she says. Mrs Smith under me is away at her sons so she won’t get annoyed. There was me thinking she didn’t like the man’s music, she said nothing at the time, tut-tutted a bit when I paid my money, already cringing, crinkling away at the sight of my tear wet eyes. It isn’t the sort of music to make love to I tell myself so maybe she is trying to get out of that for some reason.

Familiarity clicks the door, scents familiar & stale, familiarity, availability cheapens, banishing manners & mannerisms alike. Four garments & all of them as good as saturated. Familiarity then, dancing in the half light, the fridge light, the hall light not paid for by us. Never thought I was half as wet she admits, shoes slipping like marshmallows, pink & white & misshapen. Never ever thought I was half as wet.

Put it on! Put it on!

Alright!

I make coffee, instant, in a different style, omitting the coffee the moment the CD starts to play, while she’s naked, sort of, then bathrobed and towel turbanned unto hair. Familiarity, oh I suppose I’d have had a shower but, but its only Frying Pan Anne, her from the café in the arcade, doing allday breakfasts for three pounds fifty including mug of tea.

God it makes me want it she tells me suddenly. That violin, what is it, what is it? Want it! I know how she feels & I want it too but in an entirely different way.

Want it! Familiarity & oh dear she says & what & you aren’t, are you, going to start crying all over again?

Trouble is I can neither see the mugs nor the kettle let alone her tits and pussy through the veil of the man’s music, the buskers music, oh man that Busker’s Music, can’t see a bloody thing, nor hardly breathe, all choked up as I am with the tears he brings.

© Aahlu 190711.

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