pointless ladders

192. Brookside on Bangladesh on Huguenots.

Tights. You wear them once then they die.

A night on the plank and the ninja recline.

A one-finger slap is delicately sly.

Naked flitters between the rooms – a stealthy flummox will get you by.

My new home. The plank is the bed. Last night I dreamt I was camping, it is that unforgivingly hard. The recline to pillow level is executed with stealth and speed – as uncomfy as the ancient futon may be, bed itself is always blissfully welcome. My tights might as well be compostable, their micro webs unzip at such an alarming pace I wonder whether I am the only woman in London to get through five pairs a week. Please Nasa, invent a 10 denier that lasts. Next time you want to slap someone, try the one-finger slap. It’s subtle, it’s to the point, it’s pathetic. It does the trick. A stealthy flummox is nothing more than a decoy for the greater good. Useful and utterly necessary. Naked flitters are not only possible but cockle-warmingly ordinary when it comes to a landing around which it would be impossible to truly swing Hello Kitty’s runtish little brother.

no shoes

There is a strange thing that I have observed.

Perhaps a mere trifle of the confounding intricacies of time: a piffling coincidence. Nothing to think about, maybe. Not worth a ponder. Without grounding, possibly.

This thing, I am sure, is more than just random, terrifying synchronicity.

The girl who was bombed. She was pictured alone, lost, frightened, bloody, matted. Wandering, dusty, metallic taste in her mouth. Ringing ears, pink dress, utterly scared and shoeless.

The five year old who, disentangling herself from a minor wipe-out on her little skis – mistakes teaching new tricks on a daily basis – met her match. It was a man up the hill who let go. Who dropped the dead weight of wood, metal and rubber, and watched the cable drum hurtle down the hill – it had nowhere else to go, gravity will do that. Who slipped and made his small mistake into her largest ever. A tiny girl in the path of a gravity-guided missile, one minute fully dressed – overly dressed, even, it was the mountains, afterall – the next, shredded, hat and gloves torn off. Skis, poles, goggles yards away. Footwear – plastic skiboots – snatched from her still, baby feet.

The car crash. A hundred guesses. It was horrifyingly raw. Freshly crumpled metal, tears, blood and blank, almost blindingly white confusion. The people stood, not understanding and the empty pair of shoes sat neatly next to to the wreck. An audience quietly, yearningly trundled by on the silent tarmac. A thousand guesses.

The autorickshaw and the mountain track. Perhaps twenty kinks in the potholed road, hugging the dry, rocky, steep valley sides. Winding, suddenly flicking back, moving forwards and back on itself again. A bad road. The tuk-tuk careered into a corner, didn’t brake and flipped. Flew. Lunged, lurched, collided, crunched, rolled, slammed, punched, popped then exploded. Then stopped. And in a sickly silence, dust falling, glass tinkling, three pairs of bare feet, laid naked by the journey. Six lost shoes and one soul, expired.

It may be coincidence. But it seems to me that No Shoes is an eventuality of disaster.

two-and-a-half drinks down

“OMIGOD! Didn’t he sleep wiv what’s ‘er face? You know, er!”  She tuts through gloopily varnished lips, whilst her right hand lingers, poised in mid-mascara stroke, the caked black wand humming around the side of her head like a conductor desperately attempting to control a microscopic orchestra. She tuts again, the summons isn’t working and the name, it seems, just won’t come. “What’s ‘er face?!” she half-tuts, half-sighs, shocked with her slippery grip on such juicy gossip amongst such a captive audience on such a promising Friday night.

We, the passengers of the Central Line tube rumbling towards Liverpool Street, are just as interested to know who he is as her three mates are.

It’s the end of the week, the venn diagram time of the evening when two diametrically opposed forces converge on the tube. That twilight zone in the forever crepuscular life of the underground, when each carriage becomes a temporarily interlocked front line of the post-work-had-a-few-pints-and-feeling-decidedly-in-the-mood-to-rip-it-up camp and the weary, urban-tanned, work-laden, exhausted, mentally bedraggled, spreadsheeted-to-death heavyweights.

The swaying bodies either reek of offices or booze or both – the carriage wobbles, so do we and it’s a tipping point. It’s home or game on.

Hardly an argument for the poor souls on their way to the nightshift, or the beaten young father on his way back to his baby. Or the tourists, tired and lost and ripped-off. Or to the lads, nervously jiggling with pre-piss-up nerves, pints in their eyes and girls in their dreams. And earshot.

Laughter the sound of fluffy picture frames and bags of fresh chips brings me back to the tutter, who is now declaiming the virtues of make-up application on the tube. She smears a worryingly khaki coloured paste across her forehead, leaving a no-mans land between her hairline and the painted skin. The odd thing is, her skin was fine beforehand. Better, actually. But that’s not on their minds – least of all hers as she squints into a swimming, stamp-sized mirror.”‘E gets around! Omigod, didn’t he sleep wiv that other one as well? E gets around doesn’t ‘e?!” They all shriek with alcopop-fuelled excitement and more lipgloss – the single most powerful tool in the urban girl’s arsenal – is passed around with cooing reverence and a round of bubblegum-scented appreciation.