He sits there, bold as brass, brassy bold, his legs apart, his belly folding over the waist of his trousers, and I wonder why, why me, why would Big Col accidently pick me?
It’s the week before the trial, his trial, not mine, and he’s bungled into the wrong stair and chapped the wrong door, not so much chapped as punched, raw-knuckled, and before I’ve checked, before I’ve peeped through the peep hole that monsters even the most fairy-like, I’ve let him in.
There he is, a soft damp frogspawn of a man, oozing liquid gel on my carpet and he’s asking for Laura and I’m saying there’s no Laura here, wrong door, wrong trousers (he has them on at least) and he’s walking through my flat, looking behind doors, peering into cupboards, then still brassy bold, folding himself down on the leather sofa, you know the one with the milk stain from the Spanish students back in 2011, and he’s demanding a cup of tea.
Men like him, they have a smell about them, and he’s no different. The smell of something fermenting under musk, something slithering under cologne, something dank or musty, not quite putrid but definitely on the way there, you know like the taste of blue-furred mould on a bread slice that’s slipped down behind the chopping board and been resurrected for toast with just the crust cut off.
So here we are, him and me, and when his mouth opens, the audience roars, or so I think he thinks and I mirror him. I sit with my legs apart, my shoulders slouched, my chin doubled, and I lean forward like I’m really interested, expecting something ground-breaking, something biblical, something on a colossal scale and we both lean in like that for some time until he says more sugar, honey, you’re not sweet enough, and I think I might explode.
His eyes are traveling down my legs, so my eyes travel his. His socks are not what I would have expected. One blue, the other black, and the skin of his ankles, yes, I see them, once seen never forgiven, the skin is mottled, the way lichen craves a gravestone, and it could have been scraped back that yellow foliose, the granite kept all clean and nice, but it’s never a good idea to prevent the living from colonising the dead.
His right shoe taps and I know he’s nervous. No one taps their foot when they’re confident, right, not unless there’s a fiddler in the room, and there isn’t, unless, no I can’t say it but we all think it, there’s just me and this big man, and we’re both tap tapping and you know what? Big Col’s not larger than life at all, he’s really rather small, the shine long gone from his brasses, and a small pool of pond life lapping the inside of his shoes.
SANDERLINGS 