Sinister: There Are No Third Parties Involved

[P F]

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.


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