London's crossings swirled with pink, silver, sequins, the kind of things you've heard about. The sign above King's Cross had a two-decade-dated look. Harrit looked at a picture of Elizabeth Hurley on a news stand. Hurley seemed to have been around for ever - that film in 1987, that gala in 1994, that scandal of 1995, they're all illusions to her now. Yet she looked - dignified, wry, experienced, yes; but angelic too, ravishing, in fact. How did she manage it? As the train pulled out of King's Cross Harrit wondered what had happened to her name. Music seemed to be playing somewhere: from the singing wires, the tracks, the embattled beige seats, the patches of grass out of the window? She tried to place it. It was - yes, it was from Powell and Pressburger's 'Black Narcissus'. Already it lent the journey a haunted air. Someone had left a book on the next table along. It was only slightly tattered (people don't seem to care for books), and entitled Zopyra. The author was W.G. Sebadoh. Idly Harrit thumbed through it. It opened at a creamy page. She read. While riding on a train going West through Central Europe I was detained at a small village station for a matter of two hours. The sky was of the kind of blue one expects in this part of the world at this hour of the day, although in all honesty I was no longer sure of the hour, or even of the part of the world, in question. Nonetheless I had some confidence that the sky was likely to be relatively appropriate to the hour of the day and the region. If not, then so be it. It was not, in truth, terribly important, for whether the prevailing weather conditions were or were not typical of the geographical and temporal situation (note how the use of the French 'temps' would help, and yet also hinder, at this point), they were such as I found them, and my stay was not, as I have already remarked, an extended one, save by comparison with sojourns and stopovers less extended than my own. The station café opened on to a paved courtyard fringed with wrought iron. The patterns reminded me of a fence I had seen in a park, or 'parc', in Paris at least sixteen years ago - possibly more, probably indeed, in fact certainly, over sixteen years previously to the incident (if such it was) in question here. The park had made an impression of sorts on me which I would like to explain further, and which I may do once I have described the matters which awaited me at the anonymous café which I mentioned, but did not name - out of necessity, though even if spared the pressure of necessity I can offer my reader no guarantee that I would go into details about the establishment's name - a few short moments ago. I sat at a table on a chair made of iron akin, if such an organic term is permissible, to the railings surrounding us. Us, yes, not 'me' only, for the other passengers of the relevant train had, of course, also been prevailed upon to disembark while matters of refuelling, remanning, or some other affair of replenishment, were seen to, or at least seen to have been done. Around me, indeed, I could see a number of other waylaid wayfarers sipping bootlegged Orangina, black coffee, or the local tipple, of which I promise to tell the reader more before the close of my narration, if such it can be legitimately, or even illegitimately, dubbed. I pulled out the paperback that I had purchased in Krakow (to give it for the nones that spelling, one only among a sometimes dizzying variety of options, not least to the multilingual, among whom I would only sometimes count myself). It was a collection of short stories by 'youthful' writers of both Eastern and Western Europe, and indeed - not to 'exclude the middle' - Central Europe too, that all-too dispensable fiction whose ending is quite unknown save that it impends, as Milan once called it while we awaited a taxi-cab on the way to the second day of a conference in Palermo. One had already captured my attention. It was by a young Scots writer and entitled 'Fold your arms, son, that'll get you the girl'. I must confess that my understanding of the fellow's text had only been partial, due to his use of local dialect and an apparent penchant for 'in-jokes' which, as Professor Levin remarked to me in 1979 apropos of the third part of Finnegans Wake, must have been more illuminating for the author than for his eager (yet anxious) readers. Yet withal I had found something in the fellow's style that had drawn me in and encouraged me to seek further enlightenment, or at least a diversion from my circumstances, in some of the other pieces in the collection. I made a note to myself to try a tale by a lad who sounded somewhere between English and French, named as he was Marc Bloomfield. Its title was 'There Are No Third Parties Involved' - a vaguely clever use, I felt, of 'legalese' or the standard patter of the legal man, or indeed woman, for that ancient profession, like so many others, has felt a new wind blowing through its oaken doors in the few decades since I myself began my itinerary. Yet before trying that tale I fancied sampling another one, perhaps because of my 'café-bound' situation at the present time, entitled 'It's Changed To "Breakfast"'. I flicked the flimsy pages to 149 and began to read. ________________________________________________________________________ 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. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+