Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

Not Near London

a shout to on Facebook? There are so many people in the world, so many faces. The girl’s words keep running through her head like a tape loop, like one of those tape loops of a kid’s playground she used in her fire bucket installation for the degree show. Acoustic. Autistical. So not intelligent. It’s derivative crap, Malcolm Harmer had said, to someone else. Who’d told a friend, Steve Pinto, who’d told Suzie. Crap. But the jury disagreed. Maybe the one too old for his spiky hair, the one who declared, ‘I’m a videast.’ Like pederast. The woman behind her is saying, in a loud voice, to the person next to her, ‘It’s fine at first, then it gets a bit horrid.’ Maybe she is talking about

a book. Or sex! She can tell that to Jasper, but she knows he wouldn’t laugh. She wouldn’t tell it right. From the woman’s accent, Suzie imagines her as wearing pearls. She sounds like her old history teacher, Miss ‘Funky’ Lovelace, who had bleeding gums, out in the open whenever she smiled. Or snarled. Jasper likes to sleep in late and then have some more fun-time at about two-thirty p.m. Once, when they were at her mother’s, he left a sloppy condom on the dresser. He only remembered somewhere around Luton. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I should have done that chez Terry and Geraldine’s, not your poor old mum’s.’ Her mum wouldn’t have been fazed, though; Suzie didn’t like her being called ‘poor old’. Mum had reinvented

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