meat

An oppressive heat consumes the land at the end of September and, I must confess, we celebrate it somewhat as we have had very little summer warmth this year. For me it is one of those days of great emptiness of the heart... a day upon which the memories of the past infest the mind and heart and begin to devour their way back through to the skin like carrion in a corpse.  Corpselike I venture into Guildford in the hope of buying one or two items of clothing but also with a thinly disguised desire to see some human life on the planet whilst enjoying possibly the last day of sunshine and heat. Drifting along beside the river I see nothing but couples, they swarm like locusts upon the grass beside this sad river and gaze at me amazed that I am alone on a Sunday in such weather and in such a place. I escape their glare by drifting back towards the theatre and into a department store... but this offers much of the same; wives helping their husbands to choose clothing for work, husbands making excuses for their expanding waistlines, children in prams screaming for the attention they have lost to the clothing hanging like dead animals from sharpened and polished racks. I depart and head into the castle gardens in the hope that eight hundred years of history will bring some sense to this sultry day, but I am confronted by the vision of a young man moving himself into every possible position that he can conceive of to show his muscles to his girlfriend... she laughs and giggles as he does so and can’t resist running her hand along his rib cage. Most of the females in the gardens are partially naked and this attracts hoards of males like flies around a decaying carcass. I leave the castle and head for the only place capable now of saving me... the bar. I walk to Five and Lime because I know that they serve Heineken in bottles. I approach the bar and a beautiful Asian lady asks me what I would like. I order a Heineken in a voice that surprises me because it has been so long since I heard it. The drink is placed before me... I pay, then pick the bottle up and drop it. Fortunately, it lands upright and unbroken on the bar but shoots one or two globules of Heineken up into the air and onto the bar lady. I apologise and she giggles. My spirits begin to lift. I walk outside and discover that I am the only customer in the bar... not surprising as even the outside section is shaded. Everyone is elsewhere worshipping the sun. I begin to read Celine and sip at my beer in blissful peace when a group of four men come in. They sit down not too far from me, speaking loudly and without pause about women from last night and women they are meant to meet and what they would like to do to this one and what they did to that one and I thought I was listening to customers at the butcher selecting the choicest cuts of meat. Like many men, sadly, they seemed to have, if possible, more respect for meat than they had for women in general. The voices so dozy and deep. All cock and no brain. All fuck and no think. It is not intelligence that gets man ahead in life, it is a blind cocksure arrogance. I feared that a name would be mentioned... the name of a woman I might have known... and I would have been killed for throwing my bottle at them... and if I hadn’t been, I’d have died later of a broken heart.

An urgent desire to write overcame me and I fled.