Sinister: I Don't Care About The Truth

[P F]

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.


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