49 292
Not Near London
49
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