The couple nearest me were behind me, or to one side, depending on how far I turned in their direction. I have called them a 'couple', but in truth 'pair' or 'duo' would do the job as amply and with more clarity, if also more ambiguity. That is to say, while they were most certainly a pair of individuals of quite opposite sexes, I have no evidence as such, no hard and fast proof, so to speak, that they were actually a 'couple' in the English sense, which if I'm not mistaken (and three decades in that country have not immunized me from the possibility of error) relates to the brand of 'coupling' practised by, or upon, locomotives. In any case, while their 'coupled' status may well have been, indeed was, unclear, to say the least - was indeed a good deal less than evident, indeed not strictly evident in any way at all - what seemed certain to me (though memory has its foibles - who among us can claim to know his own memory? - which mean among other things that even that which appeared clear at a first moment may turn out, not only to be unclear at a later date, but never to have been clear in the first instance itself, could we but recover that instance - a task whose impossibility is built, so to speak - one might even say, in the contemporary language, 'hard-wired' - into its very structure) was that they numbered two, and were travelling together (but this is to go too far; for they may have met at the café itself; or they may have been the gayest lovers and yet still made a point of *not* travelling in each other's company, only reuniting at moments of stasis, for reasons of their own, at which we can merely speculate - speculating, for instance, that their forced absence from each other's company was expressly designed to maximise the carnal voracity with which they would fall on one another at the moment of renewed accompaniment; a hypothesis, it must be said, unsupported, indeed flatly contradicted, by my own observation, as has already been indicated) - travelling together, I say, or at least enjoying one another's company at this moment itself, the span of the journey at large being understood to belong to another inquiry; and, I say, that they were indeed members of two sexes which we may (the scepticism of modern genetics notwithstanding) reasonably call diametrically opposed to one another. The young man was drinking a low mug of the local brew, to whose popularity I have already adverted. He was, I should estimate, about 5'4" in height, blue of eye, with a noticeable scar upon his right eyebrow. I found myself, during what ensued, wondering at intervals how the scar had been attained - perhaps in a motorcycle crash, or a freak shaving incident, or some form of bizarre boating accident. His pale-faced companion, sipping from what was perhaps an espresso, was clad in a black that matched her hair, which was indeed quite raven-like in hue. On my travels I have often stopped to observe the youths of the locale, and now as on many earlier occasions I felt a kind of pleasing aesthetic repose to observe a pair of young travellers so even of feature, so healthy of body, so fair on the eye - my tone will not, I trust, be taken by my reader as lascivious in any respect, but rather as tending towards that 'ideal stasis' described by the intellectualizing hero of a well-known bildungsroman published during the Great War; towards such a 'stasis', I repeat, rather than towards the 'kinetic' response also daringly outlined by the same young *philosophe*. And yet I could not avoid noting at the same moment some qualification of youth in our pair, some world-weariness perhaps, some toll of years which could be heard clanging distantly on closer inspection. Their skin was indeed just a little more pocked and lined, their eyes a little more wry, not to say jaded, than one finds in those in the true bloom of youth; and yet withal this only added, for this observer, to the charm of the pair, who seemed to combine in their very being the wisdom of lives already taken in both hands and lived, and the undying joy of unvanquished youth. It was to these pleasing wayfarers, in any case, that I could not prevent myself from listening, as I nursed a small, dark espresso of my own. (There is a tale to be told, by the by, concerning the geographical and historical variations of the concept, or more simply the term, espresso; a tale, however, to which I do not propose to subject the reader during this chapter, or perhaps indeed during this book itself.) He: Well, you know, the thing is, I actually applied to join them She: Who? H: Belle and Sebastian - you know, they lost their bass player to his other band or something, and I actually wrote to them and told them I could fill in if they were interested S: You're joking - would you have been able to play the songs? H: A lot of them are quite easy, aren't they? 'Dylan In The Movies', E, A, E, see-saw sort of stuff, just walking it up and down. I mean, I know a lot of the songs, yeah S: So what did you tell them - did you say who you were? H: Well, I said I'd been in a successful band in the early 90s and I felt my style would fit into theirs quite easily S: I don't think it would. I hope you didn't send a copy of 'Leave Them All Behind' H: No, I sent them some other stuff - stuff I've been practising on myself recently, plus some of the old tracks, the proper stuff S: 'Decay'? That had a wicked intro H: Yeah, that one, and 'Taste', I always liked 'Taste' S: Me too. We all did. We used to dance to it H: Did you? S: Yeah, it's a good thing we didn't say so at the time - you're not meant to dance to your rivals' songs, are you? H: No, that's your own songs - you're not meant to be seen dancing to your own records, that's the thing S: So what did they say? H: Nothing. I never heard back from them She laughed. Her laugh was like sunshine over the slightly dull Central European plain on which, as I have remarked, we were beached. One or two of our fellow café-dwellers looked round as if in envy at the source of amusement, or indeed, more probable, at the perfection of her laughter itself. S: Do you think they dance to their own stuff? H: B&S? Yeah, I would - I think it's quite danceable actually. But you have to come from the kind of discos we used to go to to think that S: It'd be nice if they played them and us back to back. Stop people forgetting H: I used to like dancing to that one you did really early on, it sort of stopped and started - 'Drowner'? S: 'Downer' H: But people dance to different kinds of things now - I mean, that's why they've done the new single. It's trying to make people dance S: I couldn't dance to it H: I could, it's fun S: Eugh, no... it's really contrived, it's got that beat that's meant to make people start going like Mike Myers, totally unlike anything they've done before. They should realize that people like dancing to Belle and Sebastian - *I* like dancing to Belle and Sebastian! - cos of the kind of thing they always did - you know, those swinging rhythms like 'She's Losing It' H: 'Get Me Away From Here' S: Yeah - but the least dancey thing is when people go all contrived and start adding dance beats that don't sound natural H: But that's what you did! On 'Lovelife'! S: Uhhh, no, that's not fair... that album was contrived in a different way - I mean, we may have been trying to catch up with what other people were doing, rather than making them try and do what were doing ourselves, but there aren't any dance rhythms on that record H: I mean the song, 'Lovelife' - on 'Split'. That was dancey. And there were remixes. I've got it at home, the 'Suga Bullit Remix' or something. S: Well that's just what I'm talking about - I never really wanted to release remixes like that, because you know they're the one thing that when they come on in a disco everyone's just going to go to the bar or sit down - because it sounds contrived, like it wasn't really our natural thing H: So why do it? S: Oh, I don't know - we were all young and foolish, weren't we? She laughed again. My veins raced a little. S: So that's the thing about the single, but it's not just that - the 60s thing, the retro - I mean, B&S didn't need to resort to that. We never did H: Yes, we did. S: Yeah, I suppose *you* did. She sang, in a voice which I fancied stilled the birds on the surrounding trees. S: I don't know where it comes from - I don't know where it comes from... Like, why does everyone have to end up revisiting the same bits of the past? H: But music is always deriving from the past, innit. I'd like it if people derived from us now S: And the way the girls sing, it's so prissy - they sound like the school choir - the head girls leading it H: That's how they've always sounded, though! Like on 'Mary Jo' the pianos and recorders and that are school instruments. S: But they sound really solemn, really tight-throated H: Like you and Miki S: And that Neil Hannon bit in the middle - oh, it's so disappointing - I really thought B&S were the best band since... H: Since we stopped S: Since *we* stopped! And they seem to be pissing it away H: No, I don't think, I think they're still - Excuse me, can we help you? I rose out of my fascinated reverie to realize that I was bring addressed. My eyes flickered with recognition, but the rest of my body was ill-equipped to respond to the request. For I had leaned over so far towards the pair in the course of their brief exchange that I was, I now realized, perched on the edge of my iron chair, with two fingers stretched in the other direction and still touching the table my only real means of support. I attempted to utter a polite word of greeting. It emerged as a sort of grunt. The pair stared at me with a mixture, I felt to my shame, of distaste and concern, as for an unending moment I sought to steady myself, leaning gradually back towards my own table. When this operation had been achieved with success, I nodded at the young man, grabbed at my collection of short fiction and flapped it open at random. I started reading, frantically, blushing and wheezing with embarrassment and effort, at page 152. ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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