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Continued from: http://elizabethbowen.fortunecity.com/blog/entry3.html
Despite the higher than average seasonal temperature, it did snow during that everlasting winter. A slight crystal carpet that crackled underfoot accompanied by tantalising fairy crepitations in the air so unlike the earlier grumbling thunder of the Winter’s earlier stages. Adrian wandered with a lighter heart than usual, speculating on how quickly the snowy settlings of frost would become yellow slush.
The distant masts of the derelict radio ships still criss-crossed in moving patterns of fencing duels in a light breeze that brought more frost particles with it – cascades of precipitation straight into Adrian’s face like invigoratingly cool acid drops. His brother Charlie Bubbles was now a Member of Parliament, vying for the Prime Minister’s job. Charlie Bubbles, or Charles Paliser as he now called himself.
Paliser was Adrian’s family name, too, of course, but rarely used in the conflicting associations that constituted the anonymous seaside communes of drinkers, drug-pushers and simpletons. Charlie had evidently forgotten Adrian or had turned a blind eye or deaf ear whenever resistance towards Charlie’s own attempts at remembrance was visited upon him by the self-satisfied exigencies of guilt. Adrian had never even attempted to remember Charlie so it was far more difficult to forget.
*
The depth of Winter – as it had now become – was when the Winter Visitor most easily thrived, unthwarted by any propinquity of thaw. He gathered stale bread from the white-frosted dustbins and minced it with his fingers into coagulants of crumb. Then fed the ill-squawking gulls with a frenzy that matched beaks with human brain. They often swirled above him like one large haphazard construction of air, feather and bone.
One particular dustbin the Winter Visitor rifled was outside a chalet bungalow with two dormer windows set into its roof like protruding eyes. There was very little to find. No rubbish, mixed or unmixed with recyclings of better rubbish. Only items of clothing and disposable carrier-bags. He shrugged. Often returning to see if he believed his own eyes. Only reason to mention this dustbin at all.
*
Claura still worked behind the bar at the ‘Sixpenny Queen’. She was a little thicker at the waist, heavier at the bosom and longer at the hair. None of it grey. She was just as colourful as her still well-honed charms of flirtation continued to attract the similarly aging customers. The whole town aged.
“Staring into your beer again?” she said to one whose name she’d never got right. “What you see there? A face?” She laughed. Laughing off the face that often showed incipient wrinkles depending which mirror she chose to look in. And there were plenty in the lounge bar.
“It’s just that it’s not my own face,” answered the man with no name, having grown out of being called Adrian, because being forgotten by his brother had made him forget himself. He was no longer anyone’s brother. Drained even of that profile. He prayed for the return of August and its seasonal jobs on the pier.
He looked back at the surface of his beer where the specific gravity had sucked the nose wider, rounder and the eyes smaller, beadier and the cheeks into jowls or wattles or dewlaps.
“What’s the time?” he asked.
Claura looked up at the large pub clock. She did not reply.
CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/193.html
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