The Movie-Maker
I step from a hot train. There is a platform stippled like shortbread, sanded with weak sunlight.
There is a pigeon's iced spatter, a tipexed squat, there, by the wrought corinth of that cardboard cup by the iron column. A squid of chewing-gum, beached dry, makes like the dung. Spiders pearl in metal rhetoric overhead, stitching the noon sun, one strand at a slow time. Such distractions direct my thoughts from the potential of your presence a long-shot, but then you called me 'The Movie-Maker'
• •
By the book-case I touched your hair as I would lift water from morning down, and you answered in your scented swivel to hold me tight . . .
I am past the barrier, ticket-torn, before I meet your gaze, and in that frame (frozen in my mind) two worlds fuse. I flee to Oxford Road, focussing on the slap of my boots, but pause (as they do in the films) to catch you in your green galoshes spring into the train's capsule . . .
You never did look back.
I'd shot that scene so many times! tossed out a word `Coffee?' — you nod just once, an unlipped smile and . . . CUT! . . . to you and I laughing over sugar-bowls.
Our fingers nudge inevitably, over plastic tartan, sharp foil ash-tray, heavy white pots; your lobes still smacking of 'magic Noir', your sleeve still pregnant of a handkerchief. We talk in hushed, witty whispers, trade a past year's anecdotes, sacrifice a danish.
You breath into a paper serviette, and I lean back with the rightness of it all rolled in a Woodbine and thinking 'Thank Christ for the movies'.
You never did look back.
And stepping from a world of chaos I wander through an underground of flaking plaster as your train speeds on. And since I don't smoke, I can't even light a fag, beneath the single lamp, on the.deserted platform of my desk.
Andrew Middleton
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